Opengender

I have referred my own assumptions and conceptualisations of lesbian reading strategies to the context of a more general body of American, European, and British lesbian political debates, histories, literatures, and media through which key struggles over lesbian identity, sexuality, and representation have been articulated. In dealing with the relevance of specific film-texts to lesbian sub-cultures, I have referred to lesbian and gay overviews of popular cinema in which particular popular films are mentioned again and again

Without some kind of extra-textual or inter-textual contextualisation it is difficult to avoid not only the negative positioning of the lesbian spectator by heterosexualising feminist accounts of the scopic relay; but also the occlusion of the specificities of lesbian oppositional reading practices themselves. Black feminists working within a film-studies paradigm (who had also been marginalised by the dualistic construct of gender in film-theory) seemed to be moving in similar directions. Bobo (1988), for example, cited black women's

The project of articulating a lesbian position within a feminist critique of film theory has been dominated by Mulvey's (1975) dualistic account of the gendered organisation of cinematic space:

Preface

open |ˈōpən| — adjective