Queer White Woman as Spectator

Abstract

This article suggests that there are spectatorial contexts in which queer white women must actively resist queer desire, at least as that desire is too often understood in queer film theory. In this essay, I ask racially specific questions of feminist and queer film theories toward developing anti-racist spectatorial positionings for queer white women. That is, I propose a framework through which the spectatorial practices of queer white women might continue to search out, or simply to 'out', the queer in hegemonic representations, but refuse to celebrate that queer/ed image as a sister in - or icon of- the struggle until her mobility as a subject in representation no longer signifies the traversing of a person of colour as a narrative, cultural, or performative space of alterity. Focusing on Fried Green Tomatoes and Alien 3 this paper looks at the relations between queer white women spectators and performances of 'autonomous' white femininity.