Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory

by Clara Bradbury-Rance

The unprecedented increase in lesbian representation over the past two decades has, paradoxically, coincided with queer theory's radical transformation of the study of sexuality. In Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, Clara Bradbury-Rance argues that this contradictory context has yielded new kinds of cinematic language through which to give desire visual form. By offering close readings of key contemporary films such as Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Water Lilies and Carol alongside a broader filmography encompassing over 300 other films released between 1927 and 2018, the book provokes new ways of understanding a changing field of representation.

Bradbury-Rance resists charting a narrative of representational progress or shoring up the lesbian's categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible. Instead, she argues for a feminist framework that can understand lesbianism's queerness. Drawing on a provocative theoretical and visual corpus, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory reveals the conditions of lesbian legibility in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Queer, Film, Lesbian, Gender and Sexuality, Nonfiction, LGBT

208 pages, Hardcover

Published February 12, 2019

Reviews

[marnie ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

once again logging books i am using for masters research <3

[elena de troya · Rating 4 out of 5]

ojalá me importase cualquier otro tema una cuarta parte de lo que me importan las lesbianas 💔💐‼️🤭

[Sarah Fonseca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend picking up for the film pairings — art house with new queer cinema, French coming-of-age with mainstream fare — and using as a reference book as you revisit your favorites, be it Pariah or Water Lilies. An excellent tool for negotiating Portrait of a Lady on Fire with winter and probably the best queer text to tackle lesbianism since Emma Heaney’s The New Woman.

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

exactly what i needed for my dis! so glad this exists

[Nelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

“While lesbian representation has ostensibly emerged from the insufficiency of the marginalised figurations of the past, it is this marginality that continues to provoke and seduce. This is an era in which positive representations of the lesbian have figured her in ways that have historically been impossible.”


In a series of articles (on Mulholland Drive, Chloe, Nathalie…, Circumstance, She Monkeys, Water Lilies, Blue is the Warmest Colour, and Carol), Clara Bradbury-Rance questions visibility, desire, and the representation of the lesbian. They show how lesbian figures in film are often doubled, pathologised, or stereotyped, trapped between absence and the threat of over-presence. 

From Mulholland Drive’s spectral lovers to Blue is the Warmest Colour’s sensory overload, these films often don’t represent desire so much as reveal its various disorganised expressions. Desire flickers in mirrored glances, withheld touches, narrative gaps. Sex can be spectacle (Blue is the Warmest Colour), absence (Nathalie…), or promise (Carol). Bradbury-Rance notes in their analysis of Blue is the Warmest Colour that explicit sex scenes are rarely legible without distortion.

The queer gaze is messy, melancholic, voyeuristic, and often displaced, filtered through screens, windows, water, and mirrors. The lesbian often emerges not as a subject but as an anxious figure, too unstable to be fixed, too charged to be named. In Carol, identification is only partially fulfilled and the movie yields to Barthes’s intractability of drifting pleasure, deferring gratification of any fixed identity.

In my opinion, the strongest essays were those on Mulholland Drive and Carol, where Bradbury-Rance seemed to find the exact words for the informal thoughts I’ve carried with me. The weakest, I felt, was the one on Blue is the Warmest Colour. I disagreed with the starting argument and hoped to be convinced. This moment never came, which is why I’m not giving the book five stars.

Ultimately, I would highly recommend this collection of articles, and  I agree with one of Bradbury-Rance’s final lines:

“We cannot but see Carol as a dream of what a lesbian film could be.”


Their analysis is a lovely love letter to the film and I was delighted to learn that Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (which I have recently read and adored) was given to everyone on set to read. Here, I could comprehend my own love for Carol in words.