Lesbian Representation Research Articles

Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in Mulholland Drive

This essay considers the lesbian as a modern tragic figure through a reading of David Lynch's 2001 film Mulholland Drive. While many have identified Lynch's representation of female same-sex desire in the film as a textbook example of male fantasy, the film offers a subtle treatment of intimate relations between cultural plots of lesbian fantasy and lesbian tragedy. In this sense, Mulholland Drive insists on the importance of clich�s and stereotypes in structuring reality at the same time that if offers several images of the reworking of such clich�s in dream and fantasy. The paper considers lesbian representation in the film in the context of a longer tradition of cultural stereotypes, arguing that the tragic of failed lesbian should not be dismissed a mere specter of ideology. Rather, engaging with twentieth-century theorists of tragedy, Love argues that this pathetic figure is better understood as actually tragic, marked as she is by the exclusionary regimes of the modern.

Dismantling Assumptions: Interrogating “Lesbian” Struggles for Identity and Survival in India and South Africa

These accounts from India and South Africa demonstrate that contemporary politics of intimacy and survival cannot be approached through frameworks that create a simple binary between the proverbial First and Third Worlds. At the same time they foreground the limitations of feminist theories emerging from Northern academic institutions. Can our existing frameworks adequately represent the struggles of women in same-sex relationships who are located in the most socioeconomically peripheralized areas of the world? Can we analyze the politics of sexuality and intimacy in their lives without diminishing the centrality of neocolonial histories and geographies and their everyday struggles over access to material resources? How if at all can we integrate insights from critical development studies and lesbian studies to address these contradictions and questions? (excerpt)

Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century

Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century

Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture (review)

The relationship between feminism and the mass media has long been a tenuous one. Many have documented the problematic representations in film, television, press coverage, advertising, and popular music. The literature is wide in scope and discusses everything from the possible "real world" effects of representations of gender, sexuality, race, and class (e.g., body image, rape, etc.) to the ways in which particular mediums such as film and television represent sites for theoretical investigation. Judith Mayne, professor of French and Women's Studies at Ohio State University, offers her new book, Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture, to this growing area of feminist scholarship. Framed is a sophisticated examination of various mass-mediated texts, which focuses less on developing theory and more on using theory to analyze particular texts. With a focus on particular representations of feminists and lesbians, Mayne engages each site with theoretical rigor.

Tortilleras on the Prairie

ABSTRACT This article argues that there is a considerable, distinctive Latina lesbian cultural presence in the Midwest that cannot be sufficiently accounted for using prevalent East or West Coast models of Latina lesbian artistic representation. By examining the literary productions of Latina lesbians in and/or from the Great Plains, we can arrive at a new concept of the border and of what it means to be a Chicana or Latina lesbian.

On the Margins: Representations of Sexual Minorities in Lithuanian Press (2000-01)

This article analyzes the images of sexual minorities in the Lithuanian press during the period of January, 2000 - June, 2001. Arguing that the mass media plays a critical role in the construction of representations of the sexual minorities, the author attempts to determine whether Lithuanian press makes the issues of homosexuality and homosexual people a part of public agenda. The analysis demonstrates that sexual minorities remain a difficult topic and an extremelly sensitive issue in Lithuania. Homosexuality is frequently described as a scandal, and homosexuals are still portrayed as an underworld unfamiliar to mass population.
 At the end of the article, the author concludes that to correct the prejudices and misrepresentations offered by the mainstream Lithuanian press, one needs to develop alternative interpretations of homosexuality. However, to move towards non-phobic representations of lesbians and gays, it is necessary to struggle for legitimate, affirming, non-phobic inclusion of lesbians and gay men in the public sphere.

Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century. By Alan Sinfield. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000; 407. $29.95 hardcover; Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. Edited by Calvin Thomas. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000; pp. 290. $49.95 hardback, $18.95 paperback.

Playwright Tony Kushner has called the remarkable generation of gay and lesbian playwrights examined in these two books a “weird little golden age” of dramatists, filmmakers, and theorists. Each book deals with aspects of this twentieth-century gay – lesbian renaissance and, for scholars, opens the field of sexuality and gender to an emphasis on theatre history, culture, and literary theory. Of these two works, Alan Sinfield's Out on Stage stands out as an essential critical history of homosexuality in modern drama, while Straight with a Twist, edited by Calvin Thomas, is an interesting collection of a dozen essays on aspects of Queer Theory (embracing variant definitions of the term from Rimbaud to Foucault) viewed through the prism of the heterosexual gaze and its complex relation to the gay – lesbian “other.”

II. Lesbian Visibility in Slovenia

The article surveys lesbian culture and movement in Slovenia. Both are coinciding with media representations of lesbianism and lesbian visual arts, the latter beginning with the shocking exhibition ‘Obscene Women’ by Austrian photographer Krista Beinstein in 1986. The international lesbian exhibition ‘Lesbian Conne Xions’, which visited the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana in October 2000, represented images of lesbians in a very broad and realistic spectrum, in contrast with the asexual lesbian photographs by unknown authors in the Slovenian main-stream press and in accordance with the depictions of lesbians in Slovenian lesbian press. The photographs from ‘Lesbian Conne Xions’ were, like Beinstein's exhibition, not very well accepted; even some lesbians argued that some of the photos, especially those of gender-benders, did not represent real and everyday lesbian life but rarities and odd exceptions. But lesbian life in general, far from being an ‘ordinary’ Slovenian lifestyle, may easily become unrecognizable to lesbians themselves and obscured by the dominant culture.

"I Made Up My Mind to Get It": The American Trial of The Well of Loneliness, New York City, 1928-29

FROM DECEMBER 1928 TO APRIL 1929, New York City attorneys, courts, and the public pondered “sex matters,” “a delicate social problem,” and “one woman’s fight for social adjustment despite abnormality.”1 When writers for the New York Times used these descriptions to convey the lesbian theme of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness, they were participating in a scandal in which normative values about “sexual explicitness” and the causes of sexual identity and gender were being contested. The scandal forced publishing houses, vice societies, attorneys, and the courts to articulate the manner in which a lesbian novel could—and could not—corrupt. The debate surrounding The Well of Loneliness stands in stark contrast to the debate over lesbian representation in the play The Captive. During the furor over The Captive between 1926 and 1927, New York courts ruled that lesbian and deviant female heterosexual representation onstage was unacceptable. The New York legislature capitalized on judicial opinion and amended the obscenity statute to prohibit plays with “sex degeneracy” and “sex perversion.” Although the scandal over The Captive had quieted after April 1927, the publication of The Well in December 1928 reignited the debate over lesbian representation. The trial of The Well resulted in a verdict

Lesbian Representations and the Unspeakable

Lesbian Representations and the Unspeakable

Making Her (In)Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990s

Making Her (In)Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990s

Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century by Alan Sinfield (review)

Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century by Alan Sinfield (review)

Virtuous vice: homoeroticism and the public sphere

In this daring study of queer life and the public sphere, Eric O. Clarke examines the effects of inclusion within public culture. Departing from studies that emphasize homophobia and its mechanisms of exclusion, Virtuous Vice details how mainstream efforts to represent queers affirmatively continually fall short of full democratic enfranchisement. Clarke draws on contemporary writings along with late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and European cultural history to investigate how concepts of value, representation, and homoeroticism have interacted and circulated in the West since the Enlightenment. Examining the role of eroticism in citizenship and why only normalizing constructions of homosexuality enable inclusion, Clarke reconsiders the work of Habermas and Foucault in relation to contemporary visibility politics, Kant’s moral and political theory, Marx’s analysis of value, and the sexualized dynamics of the Victorian cultural public sphere. The juxtaposition of Habermas with Foucault reveals the surprising value of reading the former in the context of queer politics and the usefulness of the theory of the public sphere for understanding contemporary identity politics and the visibility politics of the 1990s. Examining how a host of nonsexual factors impinge historically upon the constitution of sexual identities and practices, Clarke negotiates the relation between questions of publicity and categories of value. Discussions of television sitcoms (such as Ellen ), marketing techniques, authenticity, and literary culture add to this daring analysis of visibility politics. As a critique of the claim that equal representation of gays and lesbians necessarily constitutes progress, this significant intervention into social theory will find enthusiastic readers in the fields of Victorian, cultural, literary, and gay and lesbian studies, as well as other fields engaged with categories of identity.

Out on stage: lesbian and gay theatre in the twentieth century

Sinfeld tracks stage representations of lesbians and gays from Oscar Wilde to the present day, arguing that despite and because of censorship and discretion, 20th century theatre has been viewed as gay space. He concludes with provocative questions about the direction of new theatre writing, challenging notions of our sexual potential.

The Rewards of Lesbian History

So states The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, a 1995 reference work notable for its thorough and scholarly treatment of a vast range of topics.' Unthinkable, silent, invisible: notwithstanding a significant body of work that has demonstrated the contrary, judgments such as these continue to deny the presence of lesbianism in Western European history.2 Authorized by the greater visibility of male sexuality as well as the presentist bias of much gay and inquiry, many responsible scholars have been content to treat the invisibility of lesbians prior to the Enlightenment as an unexamined commonplace. This critical cliche has held, despite the fact that in the 1980s Lillian Faderman briefly treated Renaissance images of lesbians in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women, from the Renaissance to the Present, Judith Brown published a history of the ecclesiastical trial of an Italian lesbian nun, and Harriette Andreadis offered a cautious appraisal of the sapphicplatonics of the seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips.3 In the decade since this groundbreaking work, historical analysis of lesbianism and representations of lesbians, particularly in English Feminist Studies 25, no. 2 (summer 1999). @ 1999 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 363

Freedom to differ: the shaping of the gay and lesbian struggle for civil rights

Many of us have grown up with the language of civil rights, yet rarely consider how the construction of civil rights claims affects those who are trying to attain them. Diane Miller examines arguments lesbians and gay men make for civil rights, revealing the ways these arguments are both progressive-in terms of helping to win court cases seeking basic human rights-and limiting-in terms of framing representations of gay men and lesbians. Miller incorporates case studies of lesbians in the military and in politics into her argument. She discusses in detail the experiences of Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer, who was dishonorably discharged from the National Guard after 27 years of service when she revealed that she was a lesbian, and Roberta Achtenberg, who was nominated by Clinton for the job of Assistant Director of Housing and Urban Development and became the first gay or lesbian to face the confirmation process. Drawing on these cases and their outcomes, Miller evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of privileging civil rights strategies in the struggle for gay and lesbian rights.

Reading and Writing "Immunity": Children and the Anti-Body

Reading and Writing "Immunity":Children and the Anti-Body Robert McRuer (bio) "Whatever else it may be," Paula Treichler writes, "AIDS is a story, or multiple stories, read to a surprising extent from a text that does not exist: the body of the male homosexual. It is a text people so want—need—to read that they have gone so far as to write it themselves" ("AIDS" 42). Treichler's analysis of the construction of AIDS in its first decade provides a thorough account of the strategies used by science, the media, and the "general public" in their panicked attempts to locate and control the story of AIDS. In 1987, when Treichler's article was first published, the mysterious, exoticized gay male body had indeed become the site on which fears and fantasies about AIDS were inscribed. And yet, in the second decade of the epidemic, the cultural mandate to write the text of AIDS on the gay male body has been forestalled. People continue to write the story of AIDS, but that story has now moved into arenas traditionally off limits to gay and lesbian bodies. In children's literature about AIDS, particularly, the paradox plays itself out: the story of AIDS may demand the text of the gay male body, but that body is an "anti-body" as far as children's literature is concerned. In the mid-1980s Jan Goodman noted, "As far as young children know, there's no such thing as a gay person. Lesbian and gay characters are as good as invisible in books for preschool and early elementary-age children" (15). In the late 1980s, the establishment by Alyson Publications of the Alyson Wonderland series for children remedied the situation somewhat, and yet, that a series of gay and lesbian books for children had to be produced by a lesbian and gay publishing house suggests that the exclusion of gay men and lesbians from mainstream children's literature is still an unspoken imperative. In fact, even the most domesticated representations of lesbians and gay men are heavily policed: according to the American Library Association, throughout the 1990s Daddy's Roommate and Heather Has Two Mommies, two books that do little more than depict children with gay and lesbian parents, have been among the most censored books in school and public libraries (Gallagher 44-45). In New York City alone, five communities banned portions of a multicultural curriculum called "Children of the Rainbow" simply because the curriculum included these texts ("Alternative-Lifestyle Lessons" 64). In Oregon, children's literature containing representations of gay and lesbian people was used in 1992 to rally support for initiatives designed to abolish legal protection for lesbians and gay men (Egan 1; Gleason 8). Apparently, to supporters of the Oregon initiative, representations of gay men and lesbians in children's books were self-evidently inappropriate. Lesbians and gay men had overstepped a boundary, and the books in question provided both evidence of the transgression and justification for measures designed to contain gay and lesbian people. But the exclusion of gay male bodies from children's literature about AIDS in particular results from an additional, very different, paradox that emerges from shifts in AIDS discourse in the 1990s. The liberal reinscription of AIDS, from the late 1980s on, as "everyone's disease" ironically functions within the text of children's literature—as it has elsewhere—to make gay men living with AIDS invisible. This liberal discourse may no longer deny the gay man with AIDS his own voice by objectifying him as the quintessential, and stigmatized, "AIDS victim," but it silences him nonetheless. In fact, the discursive shift to understanding AIDS as everyone's disease justifies, or rationalizes, the proscription of gay male representation in children's literature. The exclusion of gay male bodies from children's literature is thus redoubled, this time under the liberal guise of not reinforcing stereotypical equations of gay men and AIDS. Ironically, the idea that AIDS is everyone's disease emerged in the late 1980s as a result of AIDS activist successes. At that time activists, objecting to the portrayal of AIDS as only a gay disease or to the implication that AIDS and...

"Unshelter Me": The Emerging Fictional Adolescent Lesbian

"Unshelter Me":The Emerging Fictional Adolescent Lesbian Vanessa Wayne Lee (bio) Terry Castle opens the fourth chapter of The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture with a discussion of how fictional representations of lesbianism have progressed from inconceivability to undertheorized reality (67). The point of contention for theorists, according to Castle, is determining what "lesbian fiction" is: who or what is represented and by whom? (67). Castle's theory of lesbian counterplotting offers a means for recognizing and evaluating adolescent lesbian fiction. This counterplot is an inversion of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sees as a triangle of male homosocial desire that connects male-female-male: "the bonding 'between' two men through, around, or over the body and soul of a woman" (68). According to Castle, the lesbian counterplot successfully subverts this triangle to depict "a female-male-female triangle, in which one of the male terms from the original triangle now occupies the in between or subjugated position of the mediator" (72, 74). The state of the counterplotting at the end of a novel determines whether it can be categorized as euphoric or dysphoric. If the female subversion maintains dominance through the end of a novel, Castle describes the counterplot as euphoric, but if the traditional male plot takes over, the novel is dysphoric. The lesbian novel of adolescence is part of Castle's dichotomy of probable lesbian plots, the other category being "novels of postmarital experience" (85). She claims that "the lesbian novel of adolescence is almost always dysphoric in tendency" (85). The texts that she specifies are texts written for and read primarily by adults: Dorothy Strachey's Olivia (1949), Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Antonia White's Frost in May (1933), and Christa Winsloe's The Child Manuela (1933). But while a close look at texts on lesbian themes written both about and for adolescents reveals plenty of dysphoric counterplots—such as Rosa Guy's Ruby (1976), which "depicts female homosexual desire as a finite phenomenon . . . a temporary phase in a larger pattern of heterosexual Bildung" (Castle 85)—it also reveals several euphoric counterplots that defy Castle's classification of the lesbian novel of adolescence.1 My analysis makes use of Castle's theories but requires a change in focus from viewing the "lesbian novel of adolescence" to viewing the adolescent novel of lesbianism. Of critical importance is how adolescent lesbian sexuality is articulated by adults for adolescents in popular literature and culture, because whether the adolescent reads for truth, experience, identification, or pleasure, she reads what the dominant culture deems publishable.2 I propose here a critical account of how authors have textually constructed specifically adolescent lesbian sexual identities. Although Castle sees two types of counterplots in adult lesbian fiction, when the focus is shifted to adolescent lesbian fiction I find three provisional groups, in which both dysphoric and euphoric plots surface. First are texts that position lesbianism as a threat or problem. As such, they do not attend to the formation of a lesbian identity but are designed to educate audiences unfamiliar or uncomfortable with lesbianism and/or to eroticize the lesbian as a facet of male heterosexual pleasure. Texts of this sort include Deborah Hautzig's teen novel Hey, Dollface (1978), Elizabeth Levy's pre-teen novel Come Out Smiling (1981), and Juan Jose Campanula's made-for-cable family special More Than Friends: The Coming Out of Heidi Lieter (1995). The second type of text focuses on the formation of lesbian identities.3 The lesbian identities represented in each text vary in depth, endurance, and scope. The texts best representing this category are Sandra Scoppettone's Happy Endings Are All Alike (1978), Nancy Garden's Annie On My Mind (1982) and Good Moon Rising (1996), and Maria Maggenti's film The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995). Texts in the third category interrogate received wisdom about lesbianism and lesbian identity. Whereas texts in the first and second categories isolate and magnify the issue of lesbianism in their plots, the texts in the final category represent lesbianism with less clarity. Stacey Donovan's book Dive (1996) portrays adolescence as complicated and does not presume that...

Multimedia Possibilities for Live and Lesbian Performance

Our sequence of features on the use of the new technology in the creation as well as the re-creation of live performance continues with a consideration of the implications of interactive CD-ROM – with special reference to its potential for liberating multimedia lesbian representation, and for other kinds of live performance which designedly subvert the norm. This article was sparked by Lois Weaver's solo performance of her own Faith and Dancing, which the author, Jan Goulden, saw at Jackson's Lane Theatre, London, on 9 August 1996: and extracts from Goulden's subsequent interview with Weaver intersperse her analysis of the nature and potential of multimedia in performance. Jan Goulden is a writer and teacher who lives in Wales and has taught with the Workers' Educational Association. She is currently writing a postgraduate thesis on ‘Myth and Variation: Lesbian Representation in American Fiction and Film’ with the Open University. Performing under the name Split Britches, Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw and Deborah Margolin have for the past fifteen years been at the vanguard of lesbian feminist theatre both in the US and in Britain. Their work, which addresses radical issues through its exploration of gender roles and desire in performance, is highly regarded in both theatrical and academic circles.

From Stage to Screen and Back

This paper explores the differences in lesbian representation between theatre and film by focusing on Tash Fairbanks's television play Nocturne, which exemplifies the crossover from stage to television screen. The paper identifies the changes that have come about in lesbian theatre and the implications these changes have had for both the writer and the audience. A significant part of this change is the impact of Queer Politics and the political and social implications this has had on lesbian representation. The most radical area of Queer Politics is the ‘mainstreaming’ of lesbian performance and this paper explores the issues arising from Queering the performance space; the arguments for and against ‘mainstreaming’ lesbian performance and its implications for the future.