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Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory
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Book Presentation:
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.
In-depth case studies include:
• Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
• Nathalie… (Anne Fontaine, 2003)
• Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009)
• Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011)
• Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, 2006)
• She Monkeys (Lisa Aschan, 2011)
• Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
• Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)Key features:
• Analyses contemporary films in the context of long-standing theoretical debates and representational paradigms
• Intervenes in questions of visibility, progress and identity politics
• Explores lesbian cinema in the context of political, social and cultural transformations in LGBTQ+ civil rights while challenging the assumed relationship between visibility and progress
• Explores the gendered invisibility instituted in critical discourses of sexuality by queer theory’s departure from identity politics
• Proposes the mutual, rather than synonymous, use of “queer” and “lesbian” to describe sexuality on screen
• Brings together psychoanalysis, affect theory and theories of space and time to explore the range of ways in which contemporary cinema makes desire legible
About the Author:
Clara Bradbury-Rance is a Lecturer in the Department of Liberal Arts at King’s College London.
Press Reviews:
Bradbury-Rance’s investment in the specific representation of the lesbian in the age of digital cinema seems very precious. With the figure of the lesbian becoming increasingly visible, greater understanding of this changing field of representation is urgently required.– Davina Quinlivan, Times Higher Education
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, Swarthmore College
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
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