Date of Award

Summer 1994

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

English

Committee Director

Dana A. Heller

Committee Member

Nancy Topping Bazin

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E64C36

Abstract

Within much of feminist theory, the lesbian has become much more than a woman-who-loves-other-women-sexually: the lesbian has become a metaphor for female creativity and a female autonomy freed from heterosexual aesthetics, gender model constraints, indeed, anything deemed patriarchal, i.e., misogyny, racism, capitalism, etc. Throughout my analysis of four films, I will argue that lesbian, when used as a metaphor, is a Romantic metaphor; in other words, feminist strategies that employ lesbian-as-metaphor are subscribing to a Romantic vision of lesbian sexuality. Although this is not saying anything new--feminists since the early seventies have questioned the romanticization of femaleness and lesbianism--I hope to call attention to the pervasiveness of the ideas of 1970s cultural feminism in recent American film. Additionally, I will try to counter traditional feminist views of the cinematic gaze and argue that the filmic lesbian gaze is one that arrests the tenets of Romance--which is not to say I will be attempting to romanticize the lesbian gaze in cinema; instead, I hope to show that there is a good side, as it were, to female objectification in film.

Thus, my aim for this paper is three-fold: 1) to expose cultural feminist ideas that operate within the film Claire of the Moon (1992) and to evaluate lesbian criticism of the film; 2) to explore the lesbian gaze in cinema and how it relates to female objectification through an analysis of Virgin Machine (1988) and Maecheden In Uniform (1931); and, 3) to explore the various ways that "lesbian" is defined in Romantic metaphorical terms in lesbian-feminist theory and in the film Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

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DOI

10.25777/sf46-xg76

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