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"""The Girls in the Back Room is an original and engaging piece of film scholarship. The book is full of provocative insights and original research on the visual representation of lesbian bar space.""—Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity ""Hankin’s enormously readable book provides patient, detailed analysis of the spatial trope of the lesbian bar as it has developed since the 1960s, primarily in American commercial and independent cinema. She provides a sensitive look at how representations of the lesbian bar serve to colonize lesbian space for heterocentric pleasures and powers, and how lesbian filmmakers themselves project, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, their own utopian vision onto the bar scene.""—Judith Mayne, author of Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture   ""In The Girls in the Back Room, Kelly Hankin searches the celluloid closet of Hollywood’s representations of the dyke watering hole. Populated by barflies wearing hetero-fantasy garb, these scenes, Hankin argues, have been more the stuff of heterosexual imagination than of lesbian congregation. For example, Hankin shows how, in The Killing of Sister George, the camera behaves like a police agent, penetrating queer spaces in order to identify and contain its inhabitants. From Garbo’s Anna Christie to Last Call at Maud’s, The Girls in the Back Room examines the nostalgia, mystery, and curiosity surrounding the lesbian bar in popular and alternative film.""—Girlfriends   ""Hankin argues that mainstream representations of the lesbian bar work to contain rather than expand lesbian spatial and sexual liberation. Through her eyes we become much more sophisticated viewers of mainstream films that assimilate the space of lesbian bars into yet another story about heterosexuality.""—Women’s Review of Books   ""Hankin persuasively argues that filmic lesbian space usually ends up underscoring heterosexuality’s domination.""—Bitch   ""With its combination of political commitment, thoughtful analysis, and readable style, The Girls in the Back Room makes an important contribution to our understanding of the historically grounded but ever-shifting cultural meanings of sexuality and space in western screen media today.""—Screening the Past    "

""The Girls in the Back Room is an original and engaging piece of film scholarship. The book is full of provocative insights and original research on the visual representation of lesbian bar space.""-Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity ""Hankin’s enormously readable book provides patient, detailed analysis of the spatial trope of the lesbian bar as it has developed since the 1960s, primarily in American commercial and independent cinema. She provides a sensitive look at how representations of the lesbian bar serve to colonize lesbian space for heterocentric pleasures and powers, and how lesbian filmmakers themselves project, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, their own utopian vision onto the bar scene.""-Judith Mayne, author of Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture   ""In The Girls in the Back Room, Kelly Hankin searches the celluloid closet of Hollywood’s representations of the dyke watering hole. Populated by barflies wearing hetero-fantasy garb, these scenes, Hankin argues, have been more the stuff of heterosexual imagination than of lesbian congregation. For example, Hankin shows how, in The Killing of Sister George, the camera behaves like a police agent, penetrating queer spaces in order to identify and contain its inhabitants. From Garbo’s Anna Christie to Last Call at Maud’s, The Girls in the Back Room examines the nostalgia, mystery, and curiosity surrounding the lesbian bar in popular and alternative film.""-Girlfriends   ""Hankin argues that mainstream representations of the lesbian bar work to contain rather than expand lesbian spatial and sexual liberation. Through her eyes we become much more sophisticated viewers of mainstream films that assimilate the space of lesbian bars into yet another story about heterosexuality.""-Women’s Review of Books   ""Hankin persuasively argues that filmic lesbian space usually ends up underscoring heterosexuality’s domination.""-Bitch   ""With its combination of political commitment, thoughtful analysis, and readable style, The Girls in the Back Room makes an important contribution to our understanding of the historically grounded but ever-shifting cultural meanings of sexuality and space in western screen media today.""-Screening the Past    

Author Information

Kelly Hankin is assistant professor of English at Old Dominion University.

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