on the messiness: goals of this project and lesbian seriality

In December, 2020, I wrote an essay entitled “Queerbaiting: Finding Pleasure in Violating Representations” (available here). In this essay, I essentially argued that there can be a lot of pleasure in non-explicit queerness, and even in supposedly “harmful” representations of queerness. The irony of doing a project that is essentially opposite of that, a focus on explicit queerness, is not lost on me. However, I think these ideas do not have to contradict, even though that contradiction between these ideas is something I have wrestled with throughout this project. Grouping these films together, with the only linkage being the vague category of “lesbian film,” was, at points, unsatisfying. Many of these films are bad, whether in terms of “queer representation” (an even vaguer term), problematic creators, or just plain, taste-wise, not my thing bad. However, the linkage of these films together creates an intentional grouping of lesbian films that recognizes the concrete representations of lesbians on screen from the 90s until now, even despite creators not identifying films in this way (see more about that here).

To borrow from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Iris Marion Young’s interpretations of Sartre from her 1994 article “Gender as Seriality”, this archive illustrates how the idea of sexuality exists through seriality, and the idea of “lesbian” in particular can exist as a group. In Young’s article, she works through the problem of identifying women as a group without minimizing diversity of experience and without essentializing, both of which prove difficult. Her method out of this dilemma is to understand gender as seriality, a different category than groups. She discusses some of the benefits of understanding gender as seriality in that “it provides a way of thinking about women as a social collective without requiring that all women have common attributes or a common situation….moreover, [it] does not rely on identity or self identity for understanding the social production and meaning of membership in collectives” (723). This framework can also be applied to other structures, and Young directly describes how race and class fit into this paradigm, writing that these structures “do not primarily name attributes of individuals or aspects of their identity but practico-inert necessities that condition their lives and with which they must deal. Individuals may take up varying attitudes towards these structures, including forming a sense of class or racial identity and forming groups with others they identify with” (732). While Young does not explicitly discuss sexuality, it works very well within this model, as sexuality can be identity used to form groups but can also be simply a condition of one’s life.

For this archive, I have chosen to make lesbianism not an aspect of seriality, but rather an intentional grouping. While in general, sexuality may be a series, “lesbian” is a group, because the term is a choice, an identity. Many people may choose to identify as queer and gay as opposed to lesbian, because of the seeming exclusivity of the idea of “lesbian” (as well as queer women who do not identify as lesbians). Much like Young’s worries about the idea of woman becoming essentialized, I did not want to include a definition of “lesbian” because to me, the idea of lesbian is expansive and broad, not exclusive. However, for this archive I think it is important to be clear on the focus on lesbians as opposed to just queerness, because “lesbian” communicates something specific, a group. In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre is clear that seriality must be transcended in order to form groups to promote shared interests. Although Young’s repurposing of seriality is effective, in this case, this archive is attempting to transcend the seriality of sexuality to actualize and continue lesbian history.