Overview

Headline: A study of spectatorship, desire, identification and identity Blurb: Lesbianism has received unprecedented screen time in the first decades of the twenty-first century, departing from a prior invisibility which historically was interrupted only by invocations of pathologisation, isolation and tragedy. The lesbian's delayed and uneasy path towards visibility has coincided with queer theory's disruption of sexual identity categories, resulting in a comparable invisibility in the critical discourse that might have accounted for such significant representational transformations. In this paradoxical context, Troubling Visibility: The Queerness of Lesbian Cinema theorises the kinds of cinematic language through which desire can be given visual form. Scrutinising the conflations and obscurations induced by legitimacy when sexuality is made visible through sex, the book proposes a feminist framework for understanding the queerness of lesbianism that unsettles the ""visibility imperative"". Rather than charting a narrative of representational progress, shoring up the lesbian's categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible, the book reads contemporary cinema through the theories of sexuality that problematise lesbian legibility itself. Key Features: Analyses contemporary films in the context of long-standing theoretical debates and representational paradigmsIntervenes in questions of visibility, progress and identity politicsExplores lesbian cinema in the context of political, social and cultural transformations in LGBTQ+ civil rights in the twenty-first centuryProposes the mutual, rather than synonymous, use of ""queer"" and ""lesbian"" to describe sexuality on screenBrings together psychoanalysis, affect theory and theories of space and time to explore the range of ways in which contemporary cinema makes desire legible Keywords: queer theory; feminist film theory; lesbian sexuality; film and gender; film and affect; identity politics Subject: Film Studies

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9781474435390

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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

"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"

Author Information

Clara Bradbury-Rance is a Lecturer in the Department of Liberal Arts at King’s College London.

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