Butch in Progress

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[K] Can we take a second to appreciate that Cameron "Why is there another series about cis lesbians" Esposito opened her latest recap of Gentleman Jack by enumerating her three favorite romantic moments and ALL ARE ABOUT CIS LESBIANS, a majority of them white, all (upper) middle class, ablebodied etc.

LOL

Anne Lister might have invented lesbianism, but Cameron Esposito surely invented hypocrisy.

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[K] Petition to replace "Big Dick Energy" with "Magic Hands Energy" when gushing about Gentleman Jack.

(She didn’t flirt with her future wife like THIS for no reason...)

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[K] Randomly came across this while doing actual work-related research, but ... hot damn ... that might be the most sinister "celebrity feud" illustration I have ever seen

[timetravelhouse]

My fellow useless lesbians, can we take a moment to appreciate Raquel Cassidy’s stunning performance as Hecate Hardbroom? The fact that we’re all here for HB attests to the rich queer coding of this character, and moreover, to the continuing vitality of lesbian decoding practices. I can’t stop thinking about how Cassidy masterfully deploys tropes with a deep history of queer connotation, so I wanted to situate Hecate in this genealogy. I’m proposing three longstanding lesbian motifs that resonate with Cassidy’s interpretation of Miss Hardbroom, hopefully helping to illuminate why everyone is reading it as hella gay. This is written in the style of a grumpy old teacher, so each section includes an example from film history with a corresponding academic citation (Tumblr blocks posts with outside links; I recommend searching Google Books). :D?

1. lesbian gothic Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

It may be counterintuitive to link this cotton candy show to the gothic, but try shifting your point of view from the students to the teachers. The adults are dealing with family secrets, spectral paintings, authoritarian patriarchs, and of course, magical peril. Gothic references coalesce in Hecate Harbroom, the literally and figuratively dark presence with an uncanny ability to materialize at the moment of peak disobedience (she usually says “Mildred Hubble” but she might as well be saying “boo”).

Patricia White, “Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter” from UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press, 1999)

A genealogy of The Haunting–and of the haunting of classical cinema by lesbianism–leads us to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), a key example of the female gothic, a genre that as a whole is concerned with heterosexuality as an institution of terror for women (64)… [In this film,] the heroine’s desire is channeled toward Rebecca as a powerful presence-in-absence by [Mrs. Danvers], who enjoys a peculiar and intense relation to her former mistress and who functions as a sort of regent of Rebecca’s reign at Manderly (65)… In the gothic narrative, the heroine’s look is central yet unreliable, precisely because the female object sought by her gaze is withheld. This narrative can be seen to encode the dramas of desire and identification at stake in female spectatorship and the lesbian excess that haunts them, to remind us that we can’t always believe our eyes (72).

The severe domestics and governesses of gothic mysteries harbor the story’s secrets under their grim austerity, and these secrets always seem to have the flavor of sexual deviance. Hecate Hardbroom’s reserved and gloomy vibe – and indeed, her “goth” style – evoke characters like Mrs. Danvers (a little too obsessed with an inappropriate crush from her past). This resonance “haunts” The Worst Witch with “lesbian excess” that can only be seen obliquely, and may even suggest “heterosexuality… as terror” (see s2e11 “Love at First Sight”). Thus the heritage of genre cues us to suspect that whatever repressed feelings animate Hecate’s stern control must be tinged with forbidden desire, a queer allusion that is irresistibly seductive.

2. lesbian witch Margaret Hamilton as The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

I’m sure I don’t have to convince you that witches are the most obvious gay element in The Worst Witch. We’re offered a spectrum of witchy genders (headcanon: Mr. Rowan-Webb is trans), and I ask you to bear with me through a theory. I would never call Hecate butch in today’s terms – she’s so glamorous with her sensuous fabrics and heavy eyeliner – but think 1930s notions of butch. Standing imperiously in head-to-toe black next to the brightly colored and approachable looks of other magical adults, Hecate inhabits the classic witch stereotype. This quintessential witch is threatening in her otherness because she has power that refuses and exceeds the standards of femininity.

Alexander Doty, “‘My Beautiful Wickedness’: The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy” from Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2002)

It was probably during gay director George Cukor’s stint as production consultant on Oz that the Wicked Witch got her final look: a sharp nose and jawline, green face and body makeup, a scraggly broom, clawlike fingernails, and a tailored black gown and cape. This is the witch as creature, as alien, as monster, and as what straight, and sometimes gay, culture has often equated with these—butch dyke (58)… And let’s not forget that while Glinda may look like a fairy godmother, she is a witch, and is therefore connected to the Wicked Witch and to centuries-long Western cultural associations between witchcraft and lesbianism. So what we have set before us in The Wizard of Oz is the division of lesbianism into the good femme-inine and the bad butch, or the model potentially 'invisible’ femme and the threateningly obvious butch (59)… The butch witch is both the potential source of fulfilled desires as well as the potential source of physical danger (68).

Hecate Hardbroom’s “obvious” witchyness is frightening in a way that’s delectable, because it whispers to us of a land “over the rainbow” where normative rules of gender and sexuality might be unbound. HB both threatens the kids with exposure through the potency of her magic and encourages them into the sisterhood of this forceful female energy. She links the forbidding/forbidden with the desire to adore and become it. When high femme Pippa Pentangle stands alongside Hecate, they echo Glinda’s contrast with the Wicked Witch of the West as the light and dark sides of a queer paradigm: the coming-of-age fantasy of escaping from “Kansas” to “Oz” (or Cackle’s Academy for girls only).

3. lesbian camp Emilia Unda as Fräulein von Nordeck in Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, Germany, 1931)

Camp is probably my #1 axis of delight in Raquel Cassidy’s approach to Hecate. In Susan Sontag’s formative 1964 essay “Notes on 'Camp’” (easily Googled), she defines camp as “the love of the exaggerated” and “the spirit of extravagance”; as “a mode of seduction–one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation”; as “a new, more complex relation to 'the serious’” that “identifies with what it is enjoying… a tender feeling.” I can think of no better way to capture the superb balance of excessively theatrical gestures and glimpses of genuine emotion that I see in this character. Historically, camp is primarily associated with gay and effeminate men, but there has always been a place for women in camp’s gender play. Katrin Horn locates the emergence of a visible lesbian camp in the New Queer Cinema moment of the 1990s, with films that took up a referential dialogue with the subtextual queer language of an earlier era.

Katrin Horn, “The Great Dyke Rewrite: Lesbian Camp on the Big Screen” from Women, Camp, and Serious Excess (Springer, 2017)

As a cinematic trope the boarding school setting dates back to at least 1931, when a nearly all-female crew produced Mädchen in Uniform… the associated story – emotional turmoil at all-girls boarding schools resulting in female bonding, homoerotic moments, and declarations of love between women – and its symbolism have been carried from Hollywood’s classical era… But I’m a Cheerleader points to the heavily censored history of female-female desire onscreen [and] mocks the absurd and dark one-dimensionality of the boarding school trope (35-36)… [B]y consciously engaging with the cinematic history of lesbian representation, [camp films] reinscribe (pleasurable) lesbian presences into themes and tropes that had hitherto been connected to doomed and/or subtextual lesbian desire… Furthermore, they represent new forms of cinematic pleasure, as they infuse stereotypes which have historically as well as more recently been used mainly to disavow lesbian identity and sexuality with a sincerity of affect that recodes them as objects of identification and desire (37).

Mädchen in Uniform and related films (including the 1958 remake and 2006 reinterpretation Loving Annabelle) are lesbian tragedies, stories where forbidden desire between a teacher and student (or, in the case of 1961’s The Children’s Hour, two teachers) leads to heartbreak and ruin. The strict headmistress subjects the more romantic teacher to an all-knowing and judgmental gaze – but her relentless pursuit of perversion can always reverberate back to camp up this dour figure. Like the satirical lesbian comedy But I’m a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 1999), The Worst Witch returns to the queer scene of the girls’ boarding school in a more playful mode. As a camp performance, Cassidy’s Hardbroom is a homage to Fräulein von Nordeck and her ilk, but one that transposes this archetype’s threatening quality into a celebration of the deviance she originally stood against. Precisely by being over-the-top, Hecate’s expressiveness embraces the stern teachers of yore with tenderness and a “sincerity of affect” that invites possibilities for pleasure and identification into this stereotype. By revisiting and reconfiguring the terms of queer representation, camp can effectively rewrite history – we may take more glee in earlier portrayals of the tragic lesbian or repressed disciplinarian today because she has been retroactively camped. Camp is reappropriation – its affection for extremes is simultaneously ridiculous and erotic (boosted here by liberal use of dramatic low-angle shots to frame Hecate as deliciously imposing). Children’s television has always been a welcoming field for camp, which revels in its capacity to signal queerness through the seeming innocence of zany shenanigans. Cassidy described The Worst Witch as “a massive invitation to play” – her total commitment to this opportunity with a joyous camp sensibility enables a really dazzling modulation of lesbian cultural touchstones.

It would be worthwhile to read Hecate Hardbroom intertexually in relation to Raquel Cassidy’s previous queer comedic roles… but that’s a story for another day. I just wanted to explain why I think what she’s given us in The Worst Witch is quite remarkable (and justify why I am utter trash right now). It’s meaningful to me to connect the soup of digital ephemera and intemperate feels we’re all swimming in now to a lineage of lesbian representation and spectatorship. Maybe this lofty outpouring is totally inappropriate to Tumblr [EDIT: so pleased it is appropriate <3], but I don’t seem to be able to help myself – thank you truly for reading if you made it this far. Grumpy gay teacher signing off!

GIFs Hecate: all-we-must-be | dismantledrose | andforgotten Mrs. Danvers: Old Hollywood Films on giphy Wicked Witch: gifswithkriz Fräulein von Nordeck: mine

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Thanks for the excellent summary of lesbian cinematic history and extra thanks for reading my book! 💕

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[K} To apply a new meme to an old cartoon: 

There is no heterosexual explanation for this!

Nice try, though, Harper’s Bazar of 1891.

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[K] A little gem from the archives: how did she love her? BETTER THAN HER HUSBAND ... The Washington Post delivering the really relevant news since 1892. 

Weirdly enough, there seems to have been a happy end? 

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One thing #OITNB Season 6 got right: lesbian are chivalrous as f*ck

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Here’s a thought: Maybe don’t remind the armed lesbian whose clit you cut off of cunnilingus

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CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: A Tumblr Book

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: A Tumblr Book co-editors: Allison McCracken, American Studies, DePaul University; Louisa Stein, Department of Film and Media Culture, Middlebury College; Alexander Cho,...

[K] Finally, the book / multimedia project the world has been waiting for! :-) No, seriously, my publication schedule is already at least 2 articles behind (yay, academia), so I won’t be able to contribute, but if any of you smart people have something to say about your favorite (?!) social media plattform: go for it. (Abstracts are due in September. Don’t procrastinate ... that’s how you end up 2 publications behind schedule :-/)

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[K] No words …

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[K] Not to gloat, but ... the best thing to have resulted from the whole "bury your guys. #2016"'-debacle, might have been the long overdue calling out of the lacking journalistic standards of a certain major lesbian online publication. Just saying ...

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Traumatized, but non-dead lesbian with more than a romantic happy ending: AHS Season 2 (aka: everybody wants to be Sarah Paulson’s best queer friend, even if we can’t be Carol)

[K] Ok, so amidst the fury over dead lesbians (I don’t think anyone on Tumblr still needs a link for that) and then the fitting response of people making lists with some happy lesbians to

a) show how f**** unbalanced the dead/happy lesbian scale is and

b) keep us all from having rage fits to last until the premiere of OITNB (when we’ll all either be distracted by Poussey and Alex or adding Piper-induced rage fits)

I kept thinking back to a show that I really don’t want to give too much credit to (Ryan Murphy already gets credit for Brittanna, and that is more than he deserves in terms of ‘being good to queer female audiences. Plus: the show I’ll be talking about also made the “lesbians with violent deaths”-list. And let’s not forget about the non-making-any-sense-aliens-storyline, so I am not necessarily recommendng you should watch it)).

But, guys, American Horror Story Season 2 offered the kind of happy ending few other shows (maybe only The L Word?) dared/cared to show: a lesbian who is not only happily sleeping with another lesbian, but one who also had best queer friends who stood by her while she endured the most horrible season fo TV any lesbian was ever forced to live through, one whose primarily emotional support came from other queer women.

I’l admit that the most immediately satisfying moment of Asylum was during the finale, when Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson) finally shot her rapist’s child / grown-up-deranged-serial-killer-son without so much as blinking.

And then there was the added happiness over her being famous and in love with a gorgous opera singer (that makes two happy lesbians over the age of 60. Imagine that!)

But two epsiodes earlier there was also this:

Barb and Lois don’t get much screentime and they are last seen two epsiodes before the finale (”Spilt Milk”), because Lana Winters is by then so officially and publicaly know as gay that just by association they both would lose their job (it is stil the 60s, after all). And Lana has lost and endured too much to also take responsibility for this. But for now, here they are. Standing by Lana as she buries they remains of the woman she loved, Wendy (Clea DuVall) – giving closure to a relationship only they had witnessed. (And making me optimistic that later-in-ife-Lana gave fabulous dinners for sophisticated lady-lovers in NY. Yeah for Vintage Lesbians!)

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someone will remember us / I say / even in another time

Sappho (translation by Anne Carson, from If Not, Winter)

[K] In acknowledgement of my current (who am I kidding: perpetual) obsession with vintage lesbians:

A quote/prophecy by the vintage lesbian about vintage lesbians everywhere.

(Inspired by my semi-professional morning read: Terry Castle’s critique of the degaying of Sappho in her review of Victorian Sappho)

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The 30 Best LGBT Films of All Time

BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival is 30. Over 100 programmers, critics and filmmakers voted for the 30 greatest LGBT films of all time.

[K] Carol is officially the best LGBT movie ever made* –  which makes this equally officially my favorite moment of “told you so” ever.

If only my pre-ordered DVD had arrived already, I could celebrate accordingly ...

_______________

* Additional things that are awesome: The list also includes Mädchen in Uniform. Clearly, these people know what they are talking about.

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[K] Call the Midwife is truly groundbreaking television: someone died, but it wasn’t the lesbian. What a time to be alive!

Also: “She is coming to Paris. With me” - even for a coming out, that was pretty damn gay. Dear Patsy, I bow to your superior queerness.

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[K] So ... it’s a good thing then that I put off watching The 100?

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Carol (Dir. Todd Haynes)

[K] Anybody else feeling the sudden urge to be seduced by an older woman after watching Carol?*

*Other urges include: buying the soundtrack and listen to it on repeat, watch the movie a second time and then a third time, praying to a diverse range of deities to speed up the DVD release, watch the movie again, pray to more deities / bribe someone for the release of a special edition with deleted scenes (incl. more Abby / Sarah Paulson), write one to ten essays on the beauty of the costume and set design, watch again and repeat process