The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage
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THE BUSINESS AND PLEASURE OF FILMIC LESBIANS PERFORMING ONSTAGE Jamie Stuart A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2006 Committee: Cynthia Baron, Advisor Janet Ballweg Graduate Faculty Representative Lisa Wylam Ron Shields ii ABSTRACT Cynthia Baron, Advisor This dissertation examined five films with queer female characters who perform on stage: When Night is Falling, Better than Chocolate, Tipping the Velvet, Slaves to the Underground, and Prey for Rock and Roll. These films were divided into “glossy” and “gritty” categories. “Glossy” films, like When Night is Falling, Better than Chocolate, and Tipping the Velvet, follow formats similar to Classical Hollywood Cinema—they include beautiful lighting, falling in love, and happy endings. In contrast, the “gritty” films, like Slaves to the Underground and Prey for Rock and Roll, more closely follow formats found in New Queer Cinema—the lighting is harsh, conflicts are not smoothly resolved, and the endings are not necessarily happy. The objective of this project was to speculate on the extent of performativity in queer identity. Jill Dolan’s theory of the utopian performative provided a framework to talk about how cultural productions can function as venues for change. Richard Dyer’s work on queer film provided a lens through which the form and content of the case study films were scrutinized. Judith Halberstam’s theory of queer time and space and Terry Goldie’s comparison between queerness and national identity provided a way to talk about how queer-themed cultural productions are unique and vital to many queers’ sense of identity. The five case study films were thoroughly analyzed through these and other theories of cinema, performance, and sexuality. In addition to this textual analysis, a survey was administered through several queer- and lesbian-themed websites and magazines, asking women to answer questions about their experiences with these films. The survey yielded seventy-four responses over four months. They revealed that queer women recognize the ways in iii which they perform queerness in everyday life, and they recognize the same signifiers in others. The surveys also suggested that queer women enjoy “glossy” films more than “gritty” films. I conclude that for some queer women, everyday life is still full of discrimination, and “glossy” films, with their escapist pleasures, may offer a more satisfying experience than the realism of the “gritty” films that resemble New Queer Cinema. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank the chair of my committee, Cynthia Baron, for everything she’s done to improve this project. Her input has been invaluable. Through her suggestions and demands, I have become a more disciplined and mature scholar. I would like to thank my committee, Lisa Wylam, Janet Ballweg, and Ron Shields, for their time, input and feedback. I would also like to thank Vivian Patraka for her help in the early stages of this project. And, of course, I need to thank Marnie Pratt. Without her constant encouragement and support, this dissertation would have been considerably more difficult to complete. And without her love and company, my life would be considerably less exciting. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION. BUSINESS AND PLEASURE............................................................. 1 CHAPTER I. A HISTORY OF LESBIANS IN THE UNITED STATES AND AS REPRESENTED IN FILM.................................................................................................... 43 CHAPTER II. CLICK HERE TO BELONG: QUEER COMMUNITY THROUGH MAGAZINES AND WEBSITES.......................................................................................... 76 CHAPTER III. REFINING THE CONCEPT OF QUEER FEMALE PERFORMATIVITY……………………………………………………………………….. 101 CHAPTER IV. GETTING THE COUPLE TOGETHER: THE TROPES OF GLOSSY CILMS IN WHEN NIGHT IS FALLING .......................................................................................... 125 CHAPTER V. SEX AND VIOLENCE IN THE QUEER FEMALE SPACE OF BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE ........................................................................................................... 153 CHAPTER VI. QUEER SPACE AND QUEER COSTUME IN TIPPING THE VELVET……………………………................................................................................… 191 CHAPTER VII. FORMAL EXPERIMENTATION AND POLITICAL EXPLORATION IN SLAVES TO THE UNDERGROUND…………………………………………………… . 212 CHAPTER VIII. DANGER, STRENGTH, AND PREY FOR ROCK AND ROLL……… 236 CONCLUSION. QUEER CINEMA AND THE PLEASURES OF COMMUNITY.......... 269 WORKS CONSULTED……………………………………………………………………. 280 APPENDIX A. SURVEY..................................................................................................... 306 APPENDIX B. CONSENT FORM ...................................................................................... 307 APPENDIX C. SURVEY RESPONSES…………………………………………………... 309 1 INTRODUCTION: BUSINESS AND PLEASURE The female character has existed in film as a spectacle, as the object of the gaze, as a performer, since before 1946, when Gilda sang “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda. We have grown used to seeing her there, singing or dancing, in nightclubs and on musical stages in our movies. A tuxedoed Marlene Dietrich performed for an audience in Morocco in 1930. Mae West made a career of standing before an audience in her films of the 1930s. The image of a woman onstage, onscreen, performing for the diegetic, fictional audience as well as the film viewing audience, has become commonplace. In her performing, the woman is made a spectacle. She is gazed upon by both the filmic and the film audiences. “Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked- at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself,” Laura Mulvey suggested in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (847). While this is true for essentially mainstream, Classical Hollywood films in which male characters gaze at female characters, the gaze’s impact as commodifying is further legitimized by the presence of a stage. The woman is there to be looked at, and the men look at her. While women perform within the narratives of cinema, they also perform on a much less formal basis in their daily lives. The performance of femininity is one that requires effort and labor to maintain. Jennifer Reid Maxcy Myhre argues that “femininity isn’t inherent, natural or biological. It takes work to look like a ‘woman’” (85). In addition, women feel as though they are on display in everyday life. Myhre, writing on being a woman with a crew cut, states that “daily I face stares, questions and rude comments, and harassment by those who believe that they have the right to pass judgment on my appearance and thus on my person” (84). It shouldn’t be a surprise that, being so on display in their daily lives, when women show up in film, their capacity is 2 sometimes or often one of entertainment and spectacle. Queer women perform on yet another level. In addition to performing their gender for the world, they also perform their sexuality for either a general or an “insider” audience, and sometimes for both. They sometimes perform queerness in ways that can be read by other queer women, to establish a sense of community or visibility, or to show romantic or erotic interest. They sometimes perform queerness in ways that anyone can decode, to establish a queer visibility, to show folks, queer and nonqueer alike, that they exist, that they move through the same worlds. This is not to suggest that nonqueer women (or queer or nonqueer men) do not perform their sexualities. On the contrary, studying the ways in which queer women perform their queerness makes one notice how pervasive performance of individual identity is in everyone’s life. All sexual identity is performative to some extent, as we each costume ourselves and behave in ways that might send sexual messages. However, in most societies, heterosexuality is considered a “default” performance, and to express queerness as a specific identity often requires a particular set of signifiers to distinguish oneself against this default. Additionally, if someone is not specifically trying to perform queerness and is read as heterosexual, a statement of queerness is sometimes necessary (as when one is being hit on or getting set up with a person of a gender one is not interested in). When a queer identity is something that is performed, it can sometimes feel natural to extend performativity to other aspects of identity, so that a performer is what one is. A queer woman may find her daily life so performative, in her gendered and sexual expressions, that she might feel like she is perpetually playing a part. For example, she may deliberately choose markers that will signify her queerness to any 3 queers she may meet, but that are subtle enough for her heterosexual coworkers won’t guess her identity. Or she may choose signifiers that are overt enough that everyone can read her queerness. Eventually, she may ask herself whether she is dressing and behaving in ways that please her or in ways she feels best express her identity. In addition, queer women perform their gender in different ways than queer men, so the particular intersection of queer female performativity is unique. Of course, not all queer women perform queerness overtly, either to other queers or to nonqueers, just as not all nonqueer women choose to compulsively perform conventional femininity.