Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory
Headline: A study of spectatorship, desire, identification and identity
Blurb: 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 politicsExplores lesbian cinema in the context of political, social and cultural transformations in LGBTQ+ civil rights in the twenty-first centuryProposes 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

Keywords: queer theory; feminist film theory; lesbian sexuality; film and gender; film and affect; identity politics
Subject: Film Studies

1130683426
Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory
Headline: A study of spectatorship, desire, identification and identity
Blurb: 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 politicsExplores lesbian cinema in the context of political, social and cultural transformations in LGBTQ+ civil rights in the twenty-first centuryProposes 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

Keywords: queer theory; feminist film theory; lesbian sexuality; film and gender; film and affect; identity politics
Subject: Film Studies

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Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory

Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory

by Clara Bradbury-Rance
Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory

Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory

by Clara Bradbury-Rance

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Overview

Headline: A study of spectatorship, desire, identification and identity
Blurb: 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 politicsExplores lesbian cinema in the context of political, social and cultural transformations in LGBTQ+ civil rights in the twenty-first centuryProposes 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

Keywords: queer theory; feminist film theory; lesbian sexuality; film and gender; film and affect; identity politics
Subject: Film Studies


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781474435369
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication date: 02/12/2019
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Clara Bradbury-Rance is an Early Career Fellow in Liberal Arts at King's College London. Her research interests largely focus on the intersectional study of sexuality and gender in film and popular culture, with an increasing focus on new media and politics. She teaches on queer and feminist theory, popular culture and digital culture. Clara has published several book chapters and articles, and presented in academic and non-academic settings, on queer and lesbian cinema, postfeminism and adolescence.

Table of Contents

Preface

Table of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Looking after Lesbian Cinema

1. The Woman (Doubled): Mulholland Drive and the Figure of the Lesbian

2. Merely Queer: Translating Desire in Nathalie... and Chloe

3. Anywhere in the World: Circumstance, Space and the Desire for Outness

4. In-Between Touch: Queer Potential in Water Lilies and She Monkeys

5. The Politics of the Image: Sex as Sexuality in Blue is the Warmest Colour

6. Looking at Carol: The Drift of New Queer Pleasures

Conclusion: The Queerness of Lesbian Cinema

Notes

Bibliography

Filmography

What People are Saying About This

Twenty-first century cinema has so far yielded an extraordinarily rich array of works—by directors male and female, queer and straight, arthouse and independent—that feature lesbian figures, desires, and dilemmas. Bradbury-Rance’s book is the definitive study of these films. Showing how cinema stages key dramas of gender, sex, and visibility for the digital age, Bradbury-Rance convincingly restores the lesbian to debates in queer theory

Professor Patricia White

Twenty-first century cinema has so far yielded an extraordinarily rich array of works—by directors male and female, queer and straight, arthouse and independent—that feature lesbian figures, desires, and dilemmas. Bradbury-Rance’s book is the definitive study of these films. Showing how cinema stages key dramas of gender, sex, and visibility for the digital age, Bradbury-Rance convincingly restores the lesbian to debates in queer theory

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