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This chapter forms a hermeneutic of francophone films in which lesbian desire is a borderline case, situated on the edges of intelligibility. Before turning to Clare Whatling's ‘thrill of the forbidden’ (and questioning its political implications), it examines certain less exhilarating permutations on the liminally lesbian model. The chapter analyses these permutations in the following order: location of lesbian desire in an outsider figure; disavowal of lesbian identification despite obvious lesbian desire; the frequent influence of men or of the masculine, including the role of men when visibly present – typically, in triangular structures; women's defection from a lesbian relationship into the arms of a man through bad faith/internalised lesbophobia; machismo in butch lesbian characters; the lesbian figure and/or couple as eroticised object of the voyeuristic male gaze within the diegesis; and, finally, the role of men through their absence, giving rise to the possibility of an all-female space. In the case of triangulations, the liminality is merely a function of that set structure, and does not by any means always lend itself to particularly lesbo-appropriative readings.

This book investigates the traces and spaces of lesbian desire in a large corpus of films directed by both male and female directors, mainly from France. Spanning the period 1936–2002, the corpus numbers eighty-nine texts. A fair number of these are mainstream films that have achieved high critical acclaim and/or high viewing figures. As such, they have contributed to hegemonic constructions of (female) homosexuality in an episteme wherein sexed and gendered identity, including sexual orientation, has become a pre-eminent factor in the constitution of subjectivity. First, the book explores what is meant by ‘lesbian spectatorship’. Second, it considers why visual pleasure should be based on voyeurism or fetishism. Third, the book examines the two most predominant lesbian paradigms immanent in the corpus: criminality and pathology. Fourth, it considers borderline inscriptions of lesbianism: lesbian liminality. Fifth, the book discusses more apparently lesbo-affirmative mises en scènes of lesbian desire, but not without problematising them where necessary. Finally, it looks at shifts in French-language cinematic mediations of lesbianism over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This chapter is concerned with the legal aspects in the depiction of lesbians in motion pictures. It explains that lesbians are often portrayed as violent aggressors and anti-social in films and suggests that such portrayals do contribute to a culture of anti-lesbian discrimination and violence. It analyses three narratives of transgressive lesbian desire and argues that each of them offers a challenge to a hetero-normative representational codes.

This chapter examines instances in French and francophone films where lesbian desire is laminated to – and, in most cases, assimilated with – one or more of the categories that all coalesce under the broad sign of ‘criminality’: sin (breaching of religious prohibitions), vice (affronts to religious and/or social – usually bourgeois – morality), aggression, violence and bestiality. The danger represented by the lesbian figure may be physical or, though less commonly, merely a violation of the Symbolic (gendered) Order in which straight male supremacy inheres. Lesbian desire as contiguous with vice in the sense of an affront to bourgeois morality that is uncontaminated by violence or aggression is rare in the corpus: the only obvious instance is Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967). The concatenation of lesbian desire and criminal violence is consummate in Nico Papatakis's Les Abysses (1963). Claude Chabrol's Les Biches (1968) blends lesbian love with narcissism/fusion (and, symbolically, with animality).

This chapter focuses on certain filmic moments that may provide less limiting perspectives on inter-female desire – or may, indeed, herald a new ‘science’ of lesbianism – what is termed sapphology. First, it discusses scenarios that emphasise the problem not of lesbian desire, but of the socio-discursive barriers its subjects face, and usually surmount (including, prominently, the challenge of coming out to family members). Second, the chapter describes scenes of erotic arousal and jouissance (albeit not always problem free) between women. Third, moving from the inveterate, whether homo- or heteroinstantiated, ephemera of desire, it turns to love between women and its possible issue, such as creation and procreation, focusing on art as mediator of (lesboerotic) desire in the first case. Self-evidently, a lesbian couple cannot jointly conceive a child biologically, but one of the two (or indeed, both, following separate medical procedures) may now have recourse to artificial insemination within a joint commitment to lesbian parenting, with the non-biological mother assuming the role of the ‘social parent’.

Love and desire are prominent themes in Marguerite Duras's work and have been interpreted by critics from a largely heterosexual perspective. Drawing on contemporary lesbian theory, however, a lesbian subtext underlies the overt heterosexuality in the texts. This subtext constantly features female couples and the figure of the female double in texts such as L'amant, Moderato cantabile, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. While lesbian desire figures in some of these texts in explicitly sexual terms, female homoeroticism in Duras's work generally seems to be more diffuse and fluid. This chapter examines the lesbian aspects of three texts by Duras: Détruire dit-elle, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. It considers the representations of love between women in these texts and the presence of certain textual patterns that reflect lesbian textuality in Duras.

This concluding chapter locates broad shifts in French/francophone cinematic mediations of lesbian desire from 1936 to 2002, considering the extent to which national specificities have emerged: that is, differences between films from metropolitan France and from francophone Belgium, Canada, Switzerland and Africa. It also teases out the implications of the predominance of femme as opposed to butch lesbian configurations within the corpus as a whole. The book covers the work of forty-eight male and forty-one female film directors. From 1936 to 1979 inclusive, male-directed vastly outnumbered female-directed French-language films representing lesbian desire. Jacqueline Audry, Nelly Kaplan and Chantal Akerman were the only women to explore sapphism on screen prior to 1980; none, it should be stressed, ventured into this marginalised territory before having positioned herself more or less in the cinematic centre. Of course, male directors outnumbered female directors generally in French and francophone cinema until the 1980s, so in itself this gender imbalance is probably unremarkable. What is of interest is the growing domination of female over male directors treating lesbian desire from the 1980s.

This chapter examines lesbianism through a schizoanalytic framework. It explains the schizoanalytic thinking that conceives of lesbianism as becoming-lesbian, a schizophrenic process which constitutes a rupture and break-through that shatters the continuity of personality and takes it on a kind of trip through ‘more reality’. The chapter argues for a schizophrenic lesbian desire that violates strict definitions and exceeds linguistic meaning and signifiers, and discusses the views of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari concerning schizophrenia and the relation between science and philosophy.

This chapter considers the benefits of filtering medieval ideas of unnatural sex through the postmodern category transgender. It begins by engaging with conceptions of transgender time in recent historiography. This is followed by a detailed analysis of passages on cross-gendered performance and illicit sex in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, which demonstrate the inextricability of concepts of gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the Ovidian myth of Iphis and Ianthe, a sex change narrative mediated in the Middle Ages via a number of moralized retellings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These retellings, which include a translation of the prose Ovide moralisé by William Caxton, variously confront and suppress the Iphis story’s “lesbian” implications. In conclusion, the chapter explores other, alternative responses to the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, including retellings by the fifteenth-century poet and intellectual Christine de Pizan and by the contemporary British novelist Ali Smith.

This chapter examines whether there has ever been a lesbian William Faulkner by analyzing his novel Absalom, Absalom!, and by highlighting textual similarities between it and Southern lesbian literature. It argues that the novel is a “foremother” to contemporary lesbian writing in the South and places Faulkner into a trajectory of lesbian writing beginning with Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. The chapter also considers how characterization and space are mapped out in Absalom, Absalom! to correspond with novels that articulate lesbian desire such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. Drawing on scholarship by Frann Michel, who first posited “William Faulkner as a Lesbian Author” in 1989, it looks at the transformation of Supten’s Hundred into Judith’s Hundred, a “queer contact zone,” one both within and outside of Southern patriarchal structures.

This chapter considers early cinema’s sexuality effects through a case study of the representation of sexual inversion and lesbian desire in the sex-change comedy A Florida Enchantment (dir. Sydney Drew, Vitagraph, 1914). The chapter argues that a female figure tangential to the main narrative, and whose erotic desires or orientations remain puzzlingly opaque, demonstrates how the reliance on even rudimentary forms of character motivation to sustain narrative clarity is also productive of novel, albeit nascent, forms of sexual legibility. This effect cannot be considered in isolation from a second, in which the coding of heterosexual desire as transparently legible depends paradoxically on forms of both knowledge and ignorance pertaining to the sexual import of homoerotic forms of intimacy.

This chapter studies the texts that served as guidelines for monastic life at Karlburg and Kitzingen during the eighth century, before the rise of prescriptive rules (such as the Rule of Benedict) in the ninth century and after. These included Isidore of Seville’s Synonyms (in the case of Karlburg, combined with narratives concerning the transvestite saint Eugenia and the boy martyr Potitus), the florilegium known as the Liber Scintillarum, a handful of sermons (primarily by Caesarius of Arles), and an abbreviated cento of Jerome’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes. For the most part, these texts were universalizing in terms of gender, and thus equally appropriate for (and ultimately equally popular with) male, female or mixed monastic communities who could, for instance, engage in devotional penance as an unmediated experience with God, using the script provided by Isidore’s Synonyms, or follow Isidore’s strategies for avoiding fornication through vanquishing libido. However, the chapter also uncovers some gender-specific aspects to the texts, including feminist re-writings of particular passages and anxiety over lesbian desire at Karlburg. The chapter also discusses the illuminations in the Kitzingen Isidore, a series of meaning-enhancing images produced by the theologian-artist who created the Kitzingen crucifixion miniature.

An understudied Hitchcock film, Spellbound (1945) is a crucial work. This chapter argues that the psychoanalyst heroine, long seen as frigid and repressed, is a positive Hitchcockian portrait of female sexuality. I reconsider Freud’s theories of female sexuality in terms of their influence on Hitchcock’s publically denied but important investments in the woman’s film genre. The film exemplifies the director’s characteristic decentering of the male protagonist’s rule, which allows the feminine/queer conflict to emerge. The heroine’s battle with a mentor-turned-villain, her superior at the psychiatric institution Green Manors, typifies the Hitchcockian pattern of love’s transformation into hate. Spellbound foregrounds “male suspenseful mystery,” presenting male beauty as a visual object that diegetically facilitates female sexual agency and opens up queer possibilities.

The titular creatures that menace the heroine in The Birds provide the most unusual basis for the feminine/queer conflict in Hitchcock’s work. This crucial film allows us to consider Hitchcock’s deconstructive attitudes toward the ideal of female beauty that he himself constructed. By examining the responses that other characters have to the beautiful but aloof heroine Melanie Daniels, I make the case that the Hitchcock blonde’s beauty is a problematic and alienating phenomenon that registers heterosexual ambivalence. The powerful exchanges of looks between women in the film connote lesbian desire. At the same time, it is also significant when women do not look at one another, as I argue in my discussion of Melanie’s relationship to the tweedy, lesbian-coded amateur ornithologist Mrs. Bundy.