-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Yvonne Tasker, Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity and Hollywood Cinema, Screen, Volume 53, Issue 2, Summer 2012, Pages 195–197, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjs009
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Film theorists and queer scholars alike have understood the lesbian in cinema – and in culture more broadly – as a ghostly presence, excluded almost by definition from the medium's construction of femininity as spectacularly submissive. The limits of lesbian visibility, the extent to which she appears legibly as a desiring figure when she appears at all, have been a particular preoccupation for investigations of classical Hollywood cinema – an era defined by both cultural conservatism and the Production Code, with its strictures against ‘sex perversion’. Patricia White's influential study unInvited explored this terrain of lesbian representation in the classical period.1 As Amy Villarejo writes in Lesbian Rule, ‘it is on the terrain of the visible that gender binarism is most strictly enforced’. Enforced perhaps, but as Villarejo also notes, these very codes have allowed readers ‘to extrapolate sexual difference from gender presentation, so that one can read Hepburn or Garbo in trousers as lesbians’.2 Villarejo's work emphasizes subcultural reading formations and their attention to markers of gender nonconformity; here is where the lesbian becomes visible, notwithstanding the fact that within Hollywood cinema the signs of female masculinity – routinely used to signal lesbian identity – typically accrue to characters coded as marginal, villainous or perverse.
