Lesbian feminist film practice

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.

[F]ilm has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret. (Mulvey, 1975: 68)

Black identity, history and culture had also been excluded or misrepresented by mainstream cinema (Mercer, 1988). Many black critics and filmmakers during the 1960s and 1970s rejected not only Hollywood cinema, however, but also white avant-garde film practice:

The challenge facing this [1960s and 1970s] generation of independent Black filmmakers was to find a film form unique to their historical situation and cultural experience, a form that could not be appropriated by Hollywood. (Masilela, 1993: 108)

The initial wave of 1970s feminist and black filmmaking in this context was predominantly documentary in form and positive in approach (Gever, 1987: 58; Florence, 1993: 133; Mercer, 1988). Feminist documentary "described the social conditions experienced by women, as well as collective programmes intended to enlarge the social opportunities available to them [...] Realist documentary scenes and testimony [...] were enlisted as factual proof of women's oppression" (Gever, 1987: 58).

For film-makers, is the way forward to create images for the viewer/spectator to aspire to, or do we document out lives by taking up and confronting everyday realities? Need the two be separated? (Attille, in Attille and Blackwood, 1984: 206).

The form of feminist documentary was seen as the expression of the specific political ethos of radical (lesbian) feminism:

Feminist documentary film-making is a cinematic genre congruent with a political movement, the contemporary women's movement. One of that movement's key forms of organisation is the affinity group. In the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, women's consciousness-raising groups, reading groups, and task-oriented groups were emerging from and often superseded the organisations of the antiwar New Left. Women who had learned film-making in the antiwar movement and previously 'uncommitted' women film-makers began to make self-consciously feminist films [...] The films these people made came out of the same ethos as the consciousness-raising groups and had the same goals. (Lesage, 1986: 14)

Gay male filmmaking, on the contrary, had taken in European high-art, avant-garde traditions and then mixed them with the pop iconography of homosexual eroticism and a "generous dose of irony" (Dyer, 1990: 101-104). Through the 1960s, an underground circuit grew up to distribute and show avant-garde films to an expanding 'counter-cultural' audience. Feminist films were, originally, somewhat dependent on this infrastructure. Feminist and lesbian films were particularly difficult to fund and distribute, however. The counter-cultural avant-garde, paradoxically, depended heavily on government art subsidies whose mode of allocation discriminated against women. Marginalisation, or male-centred redefinition, of feminist films by 'art-house' distribution and exhibition networks emphasised a need for control over distribution as well as production if a really women-centred cinema was to be possible.

Feminist distribution collectives were set up to distribute films by women which did not fit into male categories of film art. Lesbian and feminist organisational networks provided a circuit in which lesbian and feminist films could be screened to specifically feminist, or lesbian, rather than general art-film audiences. In a separatist ethos, it was also important that films by-and-for women could be viewed in the same feminist contexts which had produced them. This also fostered discussion among women which would ensure that feminist filmmaking remained a part of a feminist political nexus rather than becoming dominated by institutionalised cinematic practice (Merz and Pratibha, 1987; Root, 1985).

Films are required to reclaim history, offer self-definition and create alternative visions [...] Lesbian films cannot be considered outside the context of the lesbian community. (Becker et al, 1985: 306-7)

Black lesbian critics articulated a similar agenda:

Black lesbians need to not only challenge the misrepresentations but, if we believe that film can change things constructively, also form a discourse of our own making and produce, direct, edit, cast in role and distribute films about our lives, by ourselves, for ourselves. (Sulter, 1985: 29)

Sulter (1985) took a negative view of the possibilities for representing black lesbians through dominant institutions, or through white feminist or lesbian film practice, since white lesbian filmmaking showed a tendency towards "reinforcing the power of middleclass [sic] silence and marginalising the Blackwoman's [sic] life and experience" (29). Black filmmakers' collectives such as Black Audio, Sankofa and Albany Video "were rather more successful than white ones in producing films that both break silence over and contextualise gay and lesbian experience" (Florence, 1993: 134).

The deployment of semiotic techniques in film studies during the 1970s and the associated debate on realism increased feminist awareness of the complex productivity of discourse in the reproduction of feminine subordination (Mayne, 1993: 13-22).

The analysis of the workings of classical cinema [...] demanded that feminists make films which, if they did not invent a whole new film language, at least interrogated and refused the old conventions. (Brunsdon, 1986: 53)

The documentary form incorporated the experimental techniques of avant-garde forms such as cinéma vérité but, crucially, the experimental forms of feminist film were perceived as a product of its politicised ethos:

If one looks closely at the relation of this politicised genre to the movement it is most intimately related to, we can see how both the exigencies and forms of organisation of an ongoing political movement can affect the aesthetics of documentary form. (Lesage, 1986: 22)

This highly politicised form of documentary practice was not the only strand of lesbian filmmaking, however. Dyer (1990) traced a connection between gay male underground cinema and 'cultural feminist' lesbian work (1990: 180). Even in this ethos, with its very different aesthetic modes, a discourse of 'female-bonding' still remains the primary referent:

Even when there are no such specific links, there are general similarities between the two. Yet their different contexts give such similarities radically different significance[...] The gay films are individualistic, using psychoanalytic and mythic imagery as a means to express, explore and heal the self. The lesbian films are no less personal, but much less individualistic: the personal becomes the intimacy and inwardness shared by women [...] (Dyer, 1990: 176)

In looking for a way to differentiate a lesbian project, some lesbians looked to sexual as well as, or even rather than, formal deconstruction. Kaplan (1983) argued that lesbians might expressly wish to represent lesbian sexuality as that which defines lesbians, but this would also propel lesbians towards experimental forms:

If several lesbian filmmakers have used the experimental form [...] it may be in an effort to avoid the co-optation of their images by male spectators reared to view lesbian love-making as pornographic. (Kaplan, 1983: 89)

Hammer expressly used experimental forms to avoid reproducing the phallic-voyeuristic gaze (Dyer, 1990: 174-210). In confrontation with lesbian-feminist attitudes towards the representation of lesbianism, Weiss asserted that to imagine "lesbian desire outside of the pornographic parameters of the dominant cinema [...] is a primary [goal] [...] for lesbian independent film, and one of its defining characteristics" (Weiss, 1992: 139). But this would seem to superimpose a more contemporary queer assumption that sexuality is the primary defining characteristic of lesbianism onto 1970s independent lesbian filmmaking. Weiss did acknowledge that Oxenberg and Hammer's earlier work "is not solely a personal, sexual matter, but is a form of social or political liberation:"

Those and other lesbian films from this period had in common their conscious attempts to address a specifically lesbian audience, by relying on the audience's familiarity with the cultural assumptions, symbolism, humor, and radical politics characteristic of the American lesbian-feminist community at that time. (Weiss, 1992: 139)

But to radical feminist filmmakers, sex was not merely a personal matter:

There are women in the movement who engage in sexual relations with other women, but who are married to men; these women are not lesbians in the political sense. These women claim a right to private lives; they are collaborators. (Sheldon, 1984: 7; citing T-Grace Atkinson, "Lesbianism and Feminism" in Phyllis Birkby et al (Eds) Amazon Expedition, NY, Times Change Press)

Many lesbian feminists at that time sought to emphasise that lesbian identity was forged in a symbolic as well as a practical 'woman-identification' and was certainly not reducible to sexual practice. Labyris Rising (1980) intertextually invokes the discursive context of lesbian feminism.

In the [lesbian avant-garde] films [...] lesbianism does entail sexuality, but within the wider sense of woman identification, as is made explicit in Labyris Rising, where one woman has 'woman Identified Woman' sewn on her jeans and another reads the radical feminist magazine Off Our Backs. (Dyer, 1990: 178)

Radical feminist filmmakers put the case still more strongly:

In describing lesbianism as woman-identification, I have given myself a wider brief in my discussion than simply to analyse films from the point of view of women sexual oriented towards women. The power structure that restricts all women's roles in the cinema is one that delimits the roles of lesbians, making it hard to see lesbianism in any other terms than sexual. (Sheldon, 1984: 23)

In 17 Rooms (Or What Do Lesbians Do in Bed?) (1985) Sheldon ironised sexualising patriarchal definitions of lesbianism in a deadpan titillation and frustration of the voyeuristic pleasures promised by the title and inherent to the heterosexual relay. Her film shows lesbians sitting in bed reading to their kids, nursing colds, playing scrabble, and so forth — finally denying the spectator's expectation of seeing any explicit lesbian sex at all.

It seems important to note, however, that Sheldon, writing in 1984, did not articulate any objection to representations of lesbian sexuality by other experimental lesbian filmmakers. Her slightly dismissive tone towards Hammer's highly sexually explicit work seems to have been provoked more by its style in the 'lyrical vein' of what Dyer (1990: 179) called 'cultural feminism' than by its sexual explicitness. A lesbian-feminist negative focus on power-inequalities in representations of lesbian sexuality (rather than this attitude being confined to representations of heterosexuality) reflects an order of feminist concerns more characteristic of the 1980s.

During the second phase in the early 1970s, feminists emphasized women's right to sexual pleasure with women (lesbian feminism). It is only in the third phase of the movement, when the goals of sexual pleasure have become culturally legitimated to a greater extent, that many feminists have begun to emphasize the violence and danger of heterosexual institutions [...] (Ferguson et al, 1984: footnote to p.106)

Furthermore, the withholding of visual representations of lesbian eroticism could be seen as tending to erase the representation of lesbian specificity within feminism. Noting that many heterosexual feminist filmmakers avoided representations of heterosexuality because of the "inherent power relations" of the visual relay, Becker et al invoked a lesbian 'domain' in which such power-relations are always-already disrupted:

The visualization of non-voyeuristic, authentic lesbian lovemaking should be attempted [...] The all-woman environment on the screen and in the audience defines sexuality within a lesbian context and therefore should pose no problem to the representation of lesbian lovemaking. (Becker et al, 1985: 308).

Nevertheless, Becker et al considered the representation of sex to be secondary (308). Whether lesbian eroticism should, or should not, be represented, most lesbian filmmakers and theorists seemed to agree that lesbian identity should not be represented as 'sex.' How, then, was a feminist-deconstructive style to be distinguished from the deconstructive practices of the white, male, middle-class, avant-garde tradition or from heterosexual feminist filmmaking?

Whilst it may be possible to observe characteristic patterns of production, form and content, it is notoriously difficult to define women's or lesbian cinema discursively. Mayne (1990) argued that attempting to define women's cinema as a cinema by women, or by lesbians, is even less practicable for cinema than for literature given the collaborative nature of film and the institutionalisation of its practices. To look for a coherent repetition of formal, stylistic or thematic markers would simply reproduce male-defined criteria of 'art.' In any case, "women's cinema refers to and includes not just a set of films or practices of cinema, but also a number of film-critical discourses" (de Lauretis, 1990: 9). Any attempt to define 'feminist' or 'lesbian' cinema in any case once again re-refers the theorist to the problem of defining the relevant categories of identification. The most practicable and acceptable way to differentiate a lesbian project therefore was by reference to an alternative (lesbian) order of discourse. Although they disagreed as to whether the form of popular cinema can be re-appropriated to a lesbian order of meaning, de Lauretis (1990: 14) and Florence (1993: 143) did agree that subversion of the heterosexual gendering of 'desire' depends crucially on addressing the spectator as female.

With regard to feminist filmmaking more generally, de Lauretis (1988b) suggested that in order to avoid a masculinised perspective, women's social reality needed to be shown in a way which drew the spectator away from unquestioning involvement with the story and into a feminist collaboration with both the female characters and the feminist filmmaker. The most notorious example of lesbian filmmaking representing the 'hidden language" of women and informed by a construct of female-homosociality was A Question of Silence (1982). Three female characters who have never previously met, an isolated housewife, a secretary, and a pub landlady, collectively beat to death the male proprietor of a shop in which one of them has been caught shop-lifting. The Dutch title (De Stilte rond Christine M), which literally translates as The Silence Surrounding Christiane M, links the silence to a specific character, the isolated housewife, who never speaks throughout the entire film. As the narrative unfolds revealing the details of her life it becomes clear that she has ceased to speak as symbolic of her experience that her voice is irrelevant to her environment. She lives in an emotional vacuum; isolated and incomprehensible in the world around her. A female lawyer takes on the women's case and becomes increasingly personally identified with the women's rage against patriarchal society. The lesbian/feminist spectator thus is drawn into collusion with the feminist filmmaker as well as with female characters, forming an exclusively feminist discursive space.

Root noted a marked divergence between male and female interpretations of the film:

There was a marked difference in critical treatment of the film between male and female critics, but also between male and female audience members:

Some women stood up and cheered, while other (often male) viewers left enraged. Female viewers frequently described it as a celebration of gut-level female solidarity and an allegorical tragi-comedy about male society: men, meanwhile, tended to see it as a serious 'social problem' picture or a shocking and disturbing attack on them as individuals. (Root, 1986: 213)

Why should male spectators have 'misread' the text or responded so negatively? It would seem that the problem arises because some competence in the discourses of feminism is required in order to decode the narrative of A Question of Silence. This inverts the discursive exclusion which constitutes the culture of male homosociality. It is probably this deprioritisation of access for the male spectator which was experienced by males as female 'aggression.'

Whilst (socialist) feminist film-studies had developed an account of textual 'subversion,' much lesbian praxis seems also to have referred itself to an assumed feminist 'order of signifiers' or a 'lesbian imaginary' (Hammer, 1993: 70). Feminist reversals of the trope of 'homosociality,' with its metonymic relation to constructs of 'the gaze,' fed into discursive constructs of specifically lesbian forms of counter-cinema. That is, the cinematic gaze would no longer be exchanged along a relay of males, but could be disseminated, instead, among a collectivity of women. Despite its limitations and fragmentations, radical feminism's model of the intra-female bond as symbolic guarantor of feminist meanings was crucial to the formation of lesbian cultural praxis.

Feminist and pro-feminist film practice, as well as lesbian re-coding practices brought to the popular film-text, during the 1970 and 1980s, need to be understood in terms of this radical feminist model of the symbolic or transcendental bond between 'woman-identified women.' This effectively functioned as reverse-discourse capable of guaranteeing the meaning of lesbian cultural production without reference to the phallus as transcendental signifier. That is, constituting an outlaw culture which positively celebrated its unintelligibility to the male spectator.

Lesbian criticism and popular film

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.

But one problem with such anti-cinematic strategies is that they can also deny pleasure. (This way, according to Mulvey, was an aim of radical feminist cinema.) They may result in the denial of all desire, including the female. (Florence, 1993: 141)

De Lauretis (1990) and Florence (1993) argued that, as the 1980s progressed, the distinction between 'alternative' or avant-garde film-practice and the mainstream was, in any case, breaking down. Increasingly, lesbian film was seen as marginal, rather than oppositional or alternative (de Lauretis, 1990: 10; Florence, 1993: 134).

The terms of this debate were set up about 15 years ago, and they are closely linked with the kind of theorising that followed Laura Mulvey's article (1975) [...] The practices (lesbian, feminist, and cinematic) from which they are inseparable are no longer so clear, and while this has entailed losses, it need not be read as the appropriation of the alternative by the mainstream, or not only. Rather it can be seen as the kind of breakdown of oppositional structures that is consistent with a feminist dispersal of binary thinking, and from a lesbian viewpoint there are powerful reasons for ceasing to prioritise one over the other. (Florence, 1993: 134-5)

By the 1980s, re-appropriative attitudes towards popular cinema among lesbians were beginning to be explored. It was often through analysis of the lesbian-romance genre that the specificity of lesbian spectatorship of popular film began to be theorised, and it was this same genre which spawned a mini-wave of mainstream lesbian features in the 1980s. The lesbian romance takes its narrative form from the popular lesbian literary genre which had already generated a body of theoretical definitions of the specificity of lesbian texts or readers. In terms of feminist film-theory, however, the lesbian romance was a form which, it was frequently argued, could only signify lesbian desire in heterosexualising terms.

In mainstream films such as Personal Best (1982), women "do not define for themselves the challenge their relationship poses to patriarchy. This allows the film to recuperate their (unnamed) sensual pleasure into its own regime of voyeurism" (Williams, 1986: 153). DiCaprio (1984) also saw Lianna (1983) as written very much from the outsider's viewpoint, "presenting lesbian relationships in such a way as to preclude a radical presentation of the issues" (DiCaprio, 1984: 45). But if subversion of the processes of spectatorship was possible in feminist film form, could similar techniques not be brought to bear on popular film?

Attitudes began to shift with the deployment of anecdotal and crudely quantitative approaches. The anecdotal approach initially owed much to pioneers of gay male film criticism such as Russo (1981) and Babuscio (1984) and articulated in a different register from that of feminist film theory. Becker et al (1985) called for the development of a specifically lesbian film criticism, applicable also to popular film, which feminism at that time more characteristically dismissed as entirely male-centred and negative towards women. Becker et al nevertheless argued that a specifically lesbian approach to popular film was crucial to combating the negative stereotyping of lesbians in the dominant culture as well as for the benefit and consumption of an increasingly visible lesbian subculture:

The intellectual and political groundwork has been established, within the lesbian movement, and we can now draw upon this for its application to film [...] The creation of a lesbian film criticism is particularly urgent, given the intensified use of the lesbian as a negative sign in Hollywood movies [...] (Becker et al, 1985: 296)

Rather than focusing solely on representation of lesbians within the dominant, or feminist, film text, this article began to acknowledge and define a lesbian film spectator:

The notion of lesbian subtext depends on the knowledge, suspicion or hope that some participants in the film [...] were themselves lesbians, and that their perspective can be discerned in the film even though disguised. Subtexting, then, depends for its cues on gossip [...] not to know details of lesbian participation in film production is a problem in constructing any solid lesbian history. (Becker et al, 1985: 301)

In order for a sub-textual reading to be possible in the terms outlined, lesbians had to be materially present (or at least to be hoped or suspected to be!) in the production of the text. That is, the text must embody lesbian authority in some way. In the absence of such authorisation, "the burden of proof for a lesbian analysis frequently depends upon the interpretation of style" (301). A lesbian analysis thus still needed to be 'authorised' by the inference of the actual presence of a lesbian in the film's production through examining the text for aesthetic clues to a lesbian sensibility at work in it.

This of course begs the question of delineating a lesbian aesthetic in the first place. Becker et al defined it (following Babuscio, 1984) as a practice of reading subtext, providing a means by which lesbians can re-appropriate dominant representations to their own ends:

While gossip transpires at the private level of conversation, subtexting is the route by which dominant cultural products can be used to serve subcultural needs, by annexing a mass product (movies) alien to lesbian identity. (Becker et al, 1985: 302)

But this practice is here limited to an identificatory mode because it is tied to the presence of lesbian authors or stars. Once gain, the theorist is referred to the problem of defining lesbian identity. Becker et al do not wish, however, to authorise just any old lesbian reading. Some lesbian subtextual readings are repositioned as "fantasy projections," but there is no discussion of what actually does anchor 'realistic' lesbian meanings.

Straayer's (1984) broadly quantitative evaluation of lesbian reception of Personal Best revealed a less textually engaged lesbian response than that of Williams or DiCaprio, challenging the Mulveyan conceptualisation of spectators carried along remorselessly by the structuration of the text. At the same time, it moved beyond the mimetic approach of Becker et al. About 70% of her lesbian, bisexual, and feminist respondents "loved" or "liked" the film (Straayer, 1984: 41). But when asked whether they thought the film was "about lesbians," only 10% thought that it was. 93% liked the image of the female athletes' "strength, beauty, naturalness and internal determination" (41). Whilst respondents indicated discomfort with the presence of males in the audience who might read the film in a 'sexist" way, they indicated that they could watch in a way which was "psychologically disengaged" from the presence of males (41). "Viewing pleasure coexisted with displeasure" mobilising simultaneously "both a lesbian/feminist reading and a lesbian/feminist critique." Effectively, "similar images can be used for grossly different purposes both by the image makers and the viewers" (41). Straayer noted, for example, that heterosexist humour was used to foster a sense of inclusion in the diegesis for heterosexual audiences. It might be indicative of lesbian ability to 'bracket off" unwelcome narrative codings that, whilst many lesbians reported disliking the humour, 48% answered that they did not "'remember' any jokes at all" (44).

Lesbians thus may not necessarily rely solely, or even mainly, on evidence of lesbian involvement in the production of a text. In order to 'read as a lesbian,' lesbians might deploy a knowledge of the competing discursive 'fields" which reveal a lesbian discursive formation. Ellsworth (1986) also argued for a more lesbian-centred and contextualised reading approach, but used a more discursive method which recognised the importance of intertextuality. Lesbian spectators of the realist film may use a technique of reading a 'lesbian verisimilitude' into certain texts, ignoring heterosexualising endings or the insertion of a heterosexual romance. Lesbian reading always takes place as a negotiation of conflicting discourses of lesbianism. Lesbian readings of Personal Best were linked to conflicts surrounding "issues of lesbianism, representation of women's bodies and feminist sexualities" (Ellsworth, 1986: 48).

After an initial euphoria of mass demonstrations against pornography in 1979 that reaffirmed solidarity reminiscent of the early Seventies, alternative interpretations of pornography emerged and gained legitimacy within some communities (primarily academic communities) [...] The dissent around pornography contributed to a continuing controversy over feminist sexualities that added to the interpretative strategies available to feminist reviewers [...] Feminist reviewers actively gave it the status of event by using it in ongoing debates within feminist communities themselves. (Ellsworth, 1986: 48-9 – emphasis hers).

Ellsworth further suggested that:

[Personal Best] gave feminist communities the chance to apply their already constructed interpretative strategies to Hollywood mainstream films and a new instance of filmic representation of women and women's issues like lesbianism. (Ellsworth, 1986: 49)

In other words, (these) lesbians appeared to be able to re-deploy the same discursive framework to this male-authored text as they had applied to lesbian-authored films exhibited in a feminist context. In a mixed exhibition space, they had managed to 'bracket off' the male presence and simply re-refer a lesbian mode of spectatorship to a woman-identified discursive context external to the film-text. Furthermore, the film itself became an 'event' in the politicised struggles over meaning which are constitutive of lesbian discourse itself.

Diversifying lesbian spectatorship

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 in the relay. Diawara (1993) argued that Hollywood cinema is organised not only for male spectators, but for white male spectators. For Jones (1993) the visual regime of popular cinema negates even black heterosexual male subjectivity:

Although Black male heterosexuality is generally treated as the dominating context in which Black feminist and Black gay and lesbian critical theories are situated, I submit that Black male heterosexuality itself is also a repressed discourse currently characterised by powerlessness and reaction in the mainstream cinema. (Jones, 1993: 247-8)

Hooks repositioned such arguments as gender-specific:

When most Black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media as a system of knowledge and power was reproducing and maintaining White supremacy . . . [The Black man] could "look" at White womanhood without a structure of domination overseeing the gaze, interpreting, punishing [...] Black men could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation. This gendered relation to looking made the experience of the Black male spectator radically different from that of the Black female spectator [...] The prolonged silence of Black women as spectators and critics was a response to absence, to cinematic negation. (hooks, 1993: 289-291)

Those black women who did engage with the popular text experienced a deep ambivalence towards the pleasures offered to, and the pain experienced by, black female spectators.

Black feminists critics have nevertheless chosen to problematise the discourses of popular cinema through critical engagement in its processes rather than by a strategy of total refusal. As in white lesbian analysis of (white) lesbian spectatorship, Wallace brought the diversity of viewing subjects into play with dualistic theorisations of film as text:

[T]here was a way in which these [Hollywood] films were possessed by Black female viewers. The process may have been about problematising and expanding one's racial identity instead of abandoning it. It seems crucial here to view spectatorship not only as potentially bisexual but also multiracial and multiethnic. Even as the 'Law of the Father' may impose its premature closure on the filmic gaze in the co-ordination of suture and classic narrative, disparate factions in the audience, not all equally well indoctrinated in the dominant discourse, may have their way, now and then, with interpretation. (Wallace, 1993: 264)

Young (1996) also argued that a move beyond the limiting terms of a theoretical discourse of desire is needed. If a figural black spectator is abstracted from the cinematic text, the exclusionary tendencies of the dominant text are reproduced (although it seems strange that sexual orientation is omitted from her list of diversities):

As regards audiences, how the desires of black viewers may or may not differ in absolute terms from those of white audiences, or how this concept of black spectatorship might be fractured or differentiated along class, gender and generational lines, is just beginning to be investigated (Young, 1996: 191).

Florence (1993) suggested that, as for white lesbians, a woman-only context is an important element in black lesbian reading of popular film:

Being part of an all-female audience is a further element relevant to lesbian spectatorship [...] The Asian woman in We've Been Framed [...] described her response to an Indian film Razia Sultan (1983) [...] although the direct address of the film is to straight men, the spectator was able to subvert the structuring gaze, her pleasure being increased by the knowledge of the heterosexual tradition (man singing to woman) and by being part of a female audience [...] The interviewee was adjusting the look of the film to her own gaze in response to a perceived need of her multiple subjectivity as an Asian lesbian in Britain. The same is true of the Black woman in the programme who found in Whoopi Goldberg's screen presence in Ghosts [sic] (1990) an image of Black lesbianhood otherwise unavailable to her. Too often the assumed identity of the camera does not take sufficient account of this form of resistance and appropriation. (Florence, 1993: 137)

Nataf's (1995) account again seems to indicate an ability to 'bracket-off' the unwelcome aspects of popular film — regardless of exhibition context:

The black lesbian spectator has a schizophrenic response to mainstream, popular film. That is because her experience with the mass media is that it has rarely reflected or represented anything that resembles her life, doing so only in ways which are stereotypical or marginal [...] So when there is a moment which reflects black lesbian lives — however inadequately — the black lesbian spectator's desire and need for it to be there is often so strong that the negative part of the experience is ignored and what is of use is engaged with and received. (Nataf, 1995: 58)

In Ghost, Nataf (1995) argued that the "possession" of Oda Mae's black, female, body by the white, male character, Sam, effects "the 'splitting of the subject in the construction of white identity, entailed in the affirmation and denial of racial difference' for part of the audience" (Nataf, 1995: 71; quoting Mercer, 1991: 187).

For the black lesbian spectator, this simulates the struggle she usually has trying to get her desire to fit the shape of the white or male hero in mainstream cinema. The pleasure in this instance comes from the fact that, through the static, the struggle of presence and absence, she can make out her image and her desire from time to time in the weaving. (Nataf, 1995: 71)

Thus "the circulation of lesbian desire runs riot" in this scene (71).

A lesbian appropriation of the text is also enabled by the activity of the black lesbian spectator herself, who may make intertextual connections, via Goldberg's star persona, between her role in The Color Purple and a subtextual lesbian eroticism in the substitution scene in Ghost. Whilst Nataf did not interrogate the constitution of the black lesbian spectator, it would seem clear enough that, in order to locate herself in the popular cinematic text — or at least to 'make out' her own image (71), the spectator draws not only on the familiarity of the struggle to 'fit' into the spectatorial process itself, but also to discursive formations which exceed the cinematic processes.

In spite of the historical and cultural diversity of Hollywood's 'others,' it may be that they hold in common certain modes of resistance to the discursive dominance effected by popular cinema. These resistances cannot be articulated wholly within the terms of classical feminist film theory which is based in a binaristic account of gender. The deployment of extra-textual identifications furnishes an enabling point of transmission between dominant discursive formations (which are, of course, perfectly well understood by its 'others') and those oppositional formations which mainstream cinema has traditionally been unable or unwilling to represent. At the same time as lesbians redeploy popular film text to the transformation of lesbian discourses, mainstream cinema is also transformed in these processes of contestation. In my next two chapters, I will be looking at the re-circulation of the trope of homosociality through mainstream and independent productive contexts in the 1970s and 1980s.