Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory

Headline: A study of spectatorship, desire, identification and identityBlurb: Lesbianism has received unprecedented screen time in the first decades of the twenty-first century, departing from a prior invisibility which historically was interrupted only by invocations of pathologisation, isolation and tragedy. The lesbian’s delayed and uneasy path towards visibility has coincided with queer theory’s disruption of sexual identity categories, resulting in a comparable invisibility in the critical discourse that might have accounted for such significant representational transformations. In this paradoxical context, Troubling Visibility: The Queerness of Lesbian Cinema theorises the kinds of cinematic language through which desire can be given visual form.
Scrutinising the conflations and obscurations induced by legitimacy when sexuality is made visible through sex, the book proposes a feminist framework for understanding the queerness of lesbianism that unsettles the “visibility imperative”. Rather than charting a narrative of representational progress, shoring up the lesbian’s categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible, the book reads contemporary cinema through the theories of sexuality that problematise lesbian legibility itself.
Key Features: Analyses contemporary films in the context of long-standing theoretical debates and representational paradigmsIntervenes in questions of visibility, progress and identity politics. Explores lesbian cinema in the context of political, social and cultural transformations in LGBTQ+ civil rights in the twenty-first century. Proposes the mutual, rather than synonymous, use of “queer” and “lesbian” to describe sexuality on screenBrings together psychoanalysis, affect theory and theories of space and time to explore the range of ways in which contemporary cinema makes desire legible.