Cynthia Calvalcanti: Cynthia Cavalcanti is a Ph.D. student in Religion and Social Ethics at the University of Southern California. Her general area of interest is the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and religion. Currently her focus is upon the religious/spiritual experience of lesbians, particularly in Buddhism.
In the last three decades lesbian culture has evolved at an astonishing rate with the United States and Britain. In Daring to Dissent: Lesbian Culture from Margin to Mainstream, editor Liz Gibbs and her essayists investigate the portrayal of lesbians and our culture in literature, poetry, theater, film, television, and radio. Gibbs introduces the idea of lesbian genre and explores its salience in contemporary media. While a singular lesbian style cannot be pinpointed, there are identifiable attributes that can be found across creative categories. This volume seeks to mirror the depth of lesbian culture and examine how its creative boundaries are delineated.
In the first essay, “Rebecca Redux: Tears on a Lesbian Pillow,” Mary Wings deconstructs Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and provides biographical insight into the novelist's private life. Wings reveals details of du Maurier's struggle with her own sexual identity and how she expressed the torment in her many famous works, infusing each one with a delicious lesbian tension. That tension could not, of course, be overtly expressed, owing to the film standards of the day.
Playwright Nina Rapi discusses the diverse nature of lesbians in theater in her essay entitled, “That's Why You Are So Queer: The Repression of Lesbian Sexuality in the Theatre.” The quote contained in the title, written more than a century ago, succinctly expresses the manner in which lesbians/lesbianism were/was portrayed on the stage. According to Rapi, this is still true, for the most part. She does see changes vis-à-vis the evolution of a corpus of lesbian work that confronts “preconceived notion of lesbianism [and] the presumed naturalness of heterosexuality” (38). Unfortunately, this critique is not likely to reach the masses, as lesbian theater remains tangential to the mainstream.
Like Rapi, Liz Yorke examines lesbian forays outside traditional structures in chapter three, “Primary Intensities: Lesbian Poetry and the Reading of Difference.” She shows how lesbian muses use the language of poetry to transcend the socially constructed conceptualization of the female body. Yorke asks, “How does the lesbian poet put her relation to other women into words and inscribe the specificity of her desire within the symbolic?” (69). She addresses this challenge using Adrienne Rich's poem “Origins and History of Consciousness” to illustrate a number intriguing points. First, Rich's conception and birth metaphors speak to the mother-daughter relationship which is so devalued in society and absent in much of psychoanalytic theory (for feminists, Freud and Lacan are painfully inadequate).
French feminist Luce Irigaray maintains that as such, a woman's identity is purloined in early girlhood, and in that sense she “is always exiled from herself” (68). The two women in Rich's poem reclaim themselves and their mothers in one another. In addition, as if by agreement, the claiming does no fit the patriarchal subject-object division but instead is a mutual valuing/revaluing. Other powerful illustrations employed by Yorke include the poetic works of Audre Lorde, Susan Griffin, and Olga Broumas.
A political challenge lesbians face in any medium is preserving autonomy while working within the confines of an industry controlled by men. Journalist Veronica Groolock, addresses this challenge within her own field in chapter four, “Lesbian Journalism: Mainstream and Alternative Press.” She looks at small, community-based publications and compares those to larger, mainstream works, particularly in their treatment of the recent trend toward “lesbian chic.” The phenomenon itself is not recent. In fact, Lillian Faderman identified just such a trend in 1920s&Mac226; U.S. publications. Back then, it was part of an effort in print media to rid society of any traces of Victorian influence on morality.
Rose Collis's essay, “Screened Out: Lesbians and Television,” takes up the same dilemma examined by Groocock. Collis states that “until a wealthy, powerful, out dyke takes over a channel or network television will play its part in keeping lesbians out of the mainstream” (120). Lesbians seem to be portrayed as angry, deviant, depressed, or overly aggressive. Fortunately, as the independent sector emerges more fully, we can look forward to more positive lesbian images on television in the future. The importance of such images in a visually oriented world such as we live in cannot be overemphasized.
In “Lesbian Desire on the Screen: in The Hunger,” Shameen Kabir declares that lesbians must exploit mainstream media for purposes of positive representation as much as possible. Kabir calls a blending of avant-garde strategies with a feminist aesthetic. Such a synthesis is important for political endeavors because it can create an “altered perception of the filmic text” (172). To illustrate, she treats the reader to voluptuous recounting of The Hunger, a 1983 Hollywood film that employs avant-garde technique. Like Liz Yorke in the essay on lesbian poetry, Kabir refers to the Lacanian notion that we wish to be the sole object of desire of the mother and traces that notion through the film's representation of lesbian desire. She briefly examines the concepts of fetishism, voyeurism (pleasure in watching), and scopophilia (pleasure in seeing) in film in general, and in The Hunger, specifically.
Well-known queer theorist Cherry Smyth dismisses with the margin/mainstream polarities in “Beyond Queer Cinema: It's In Her Kiss.” Her sometimes humorous critique drives home the reality of the need for real lesbian representation in media beyond the young, caucasian femmes of lesbian chic and the female-on-female “prelude to the prick in straight pornography” (195). The aim of queer film and video, according to Smyth, is to bring “homo” from the fringes to the center and to claim equality while preserving difference.
I highly recommend this anthology for GLBT studies. Daring to Dissent provides a critique of the past, and of the status quo, while it offers glimpses of where lesbian representation in popular culture needs to go and will be going.
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