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Kara Keeling - Joining the Lesbians
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Movies Cont'd
Kara Keeling - Joining the Lesbians
The Watermelon Woman
"Typically invisible bodies of black lesbians are rendered visible in a number of ways." (221)
- 1st black lesbian film
- Critiques how people view lesbians, blacks
and women separately
- Marketed as "interracial film" rather than
"black lesbian film"
Kara Keeling - History
- Professor of Cinematic Arts at USC
- Serves on editorial boards of journals: Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies & American Quarterly
- Used to teach at UNC, Duke and Williams College
- Research focus: third cinema, feminist films
- representations of race, gender & sexuality in cinema
- Book: The Witch's Flight, looks at construction/maintenance of hegemonic conceptions in the world, relationship between cinematic visibility & minority politics
Movies
Discussion Questions
By Noelle Erskine
Tongues Untied by Marlon Riggs
"Expressions of blackness that are inconsistent
...macho, masculine, heterosexual." (216)
- Questions official conceptions of "blackness"
- Breaks stereotypes of interracial relationships
- Separation of "black lesbian and gay" to
"black" and "lesbian or gay"
Joining the Lesbians
- Why does there need to be a genre of "black lesbian" films?
- In films you've seen that fit the "black lesbian and gay" genre how are "blackness" and "homosexuality" portrayed? (compare Forbidden Fruit/The Watermelon Woman)
- Do you think the media is more helpful or hurtful when it comes to accepting the LGBTQ community?
Essays
Main points
- Reviews 2 essays and 2 movies that helped create the category of "black lesbian and gay film" in the cinematic world
- Visibility through cinema
- Quest for reflection
- Finding an identity that you and
others accept - she does this through
cinema
New Ethnicities by Stuart Hall
- Explores the shift from relations of representation to politics of representation
"Black subject cannot be represented w/out reference to the dimensions of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity" (214)
Birth of a Notion by Michelle Parkerson
- New generation of gay and lesbian filmmakers of color and how they break existing stereotypes/images
"Begun to produce imagery countering...and gay men" (215)