Opengender

Specifically lesbian significances to the crossdressed figure (rather than the significance of crossdressing for gay men or for heterosexual women) has been elided in the field of queer discourse as well as in heterosexual feminism. Queer discourse shows a tendency towards a homogenising analysis of the crossdressed figure which does not take account of gender as a field of discursive power in which 'male' is the dominant, or substantive, category. Instead, an undifferentiated construct of 'normalisation' is treated as the

The overriding assumptions of feminist criticism in the 1970s were mimetic. Since those who controlled capital and the means of cinematic production were principally male then popular cinema could only represent women in male terms — negatively. The IMR was generally seen as irreclaimable to feminist goals.

The question of how black lesbians might rework gendered representation in mainstream culture has, as yet, barely been addressed. It is only more recently that the question of black spectatorship of popular film has been critically addressed at all. Initial theorisations of black spectatorship (male, female, straight and gay) appear also to depend on reference to identifications external to the cinematic text. Text-based theorisations of female and lesbian spectatorship generally refer to the controlling position of the male

The very strategy of breaking down the smoothness of cinematic illusion often made avant garde films difficult to read, since decoding non- or anti-narrative techniques relied on a working knowledge of 'high' cultural codes which are, by definition, restricted to a privileged class. In any case, even within privileged cultural contexts, these codes are not longer widely disseminated. Many, on the other hand, found the prioritisation of politics over pleasure merely boring.

It was in the discursive context of radical feminism that tropes of female bonding and of 'the gaze' could be mobilised to effect feminist and lesbian readings of popular cinema. Whilst I am aware that most radical feminists rejected man-made popular culture altogether, radical feminism nevertheless informed a lesbian counter-cinema; as well as being productive in the practices of many lesbians who did not adopt a specifically lesbian-feminist identification. Obviously, I will not attempt an exhaustive account of feminist film theory through the 1970s

The radical feminist trope of 'female bonding' was crucial to lesbian-feminism. This trope becomes most intelligible when seen as effecting a resignification of conceptualisations of male bonding as fundamental to the organisation of patriarchal language, culture and economy which originated in structural-anthropology and psychoanalysis. These posited an originary symbolic exchange of women between men which founds transpersonal (social) male relationships and by which 'the woman' becomes merely the symbolic object of an exclusively male cultural

Many would regard (lesbian) radical feminism as absolutely distinct from Marxist- or Socialist-feminist perspectives. Of course, the aims and strategies of diverse feminisms are not merely distinctive but often conflict. An 'orthodox' Marxist-feminist discourse was articulated "without challenging the primacy of production implied by the orthodox model ..." (Benhabib and Cornell, 1987: 2). The influential French radical feminists, on the other hand, articulated their critiques not through an orthodox (linear-determinist and empiricist) Marxist framework but in terms of

Mitchell (1971) argued that all forms of second-wave feminism can be traced to the same radicalising context:

In this chapter, I will explore the productivity of discourses of lesbian feminism in both popular and counter-cinemas of the 1970s and 1980s. I shall not attempt any comprehensive overview of feminist theory and politics or to address the broad range of feminist engagements with Marxism. I intend only to demonstrate the importance of tropes of 'female bonding' and of 'the gaze' to lesbian-feminist theory and practice in order to establish a historicised discursive context for lesbian readings of popular film.

Mulvey's formulation left the heterosexual feminist "restless," and the lesbian inarticulable except as identification with an institutionally masculine position offered in the relay. Desubjectivising models such Case's (1988/9) and de Lauretis' (1991) theorised a deconstructive lesbian refusal of any stable gender-position and a dissemination of subjectivity in a lesbian performative and exhibition context — but this obviously cannot be applied to lesbian reading of mainstream film. Furthermore, the quotidian importance of female pro-activity to the