With movies like Love Lies Bleeding and Drive Away Dolls breaking into the mainstream in recent months, it’s a good time to be a film-loving lesbian . While women-loving-women (WLW) have previously had to scrounge for scraps of representation in their media consumption – clinging to minor gay subplots, suffering through bad films just to see that one gloriously sapphic moment, and generally deeming any female character who wears a white tank top without a bra as ‘probably queer’ – things have been looking up lately. For those of us who have rewatched Carol (2015) so many times that we’re always one bad day away from buying a mink coat at a chari t y shop, it’s a relief to finally live in a time when stories centered around gay women are making bigger and bigger waves at the box office.
But more representation doesn’t always mean better representation. As cinema struggles to cast off the sexism that has haunted it since its inception, is the increase of WLW characters actually positive representation, or just fetishisation? Take the classic lesbian film Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), for example. A seven-minute-long sex scene between the two female leads is one of the movie’s claims to fame, but instead of being used as a narrative tool to further the story or reveal the inner lives of the characters, it’s decidedly gratuitous.
It’s shot with close-up angles reminiscent of a porn film. The characters are emotionally distant from each other and the audi.
