By Katrin Horn

Excerpt: “Clara Bradbury-Rance’s book Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory addresses a deceptively simple question with broad implications: can there be a lesbian cinema after queer theory’s critique of politics that are built around stable gender and sexual identities? The question is made more urgent by the crucial changes our media landscape has undergone simultaneous with the rise of queer theory over the past two decades. Just as they have become theoretically suspicious, lesbians have also seemingly become representationally ubiquitous. Like my own writing on lesbian cinema after 2000 (which spurred my interest in this book (Horn 2017)), Bradbury-Rance’s work must, therefore, contend with the transformation of the lesbian’s cinematic status from invisibility to hypervisibility. Against this backdrop, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory offers a provocative argument against both the ‘visibility imperative’ (xiii) and the representational hegemony of climactic sex scenes as the litmus test of ‘authentic’ lesbian representation within contemporary cinema.” Read the full review here