Twilight and shadows: The lesbian presence in film noir.

摘要

This dissertation examines lesbian representation in film noir during its classical period in American cinema from 1941 to 1958. Using feminist and lesbian theories of representation, the study explores how lesbianism is configured as an absent presence in film noir. In spite of film noir's preoccupation with anxiety, paranoia, instability, and obsession, which often centers on the femme fatale, the evocations of the lesbian presence in these films have been as spectral in critical studies as they have in the films themselves. Indeed, these characteristics as well as the influences on film noir (World War II, the Cold War, the Bomb, a changing urban landscape, changing gender roles, etc.), with few exceptions, have been examined only from a white, heteronormative viewpoint.;Focusing on Mildred Pierce (1945), Double Indemnity (1944), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), and In a Lonely Place (1950), this study delineates three signifying strategies of film noir in its depiction of female homoeroticism: the representation of the femme fatale, within whom butchness seems to coexist with, and oftentimes contradict, stereotypical femininity; the existence of female homoerotic triangles; and the presence of non-femme fatale supporting players, whose representation, with varying degrees of explicitness, is suggestive of lesbianism. Additionally, notions of the "apparitional" and "spectral" can be seen to inflect all of these strategies. A reading of these films through their various anxieties and displacements about female homoeroticism allows us to see lesbian desire--a re-appearing, through the interplay of the text, the reading of the text, and the star image, which challenges both the presumed erasure of lesbian desire within Hollywood films, as well as the presumed masculine contours of film noir.