INVERTED IMAGES

An investigation of the lesbian identity through visual and cultural representation

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her own fantasies, as well as asking her lesbian friends about which female stars had most attracted them in their childhood and adolescence. She acquired a list very similar to the one identified by Caroline Sheldon at the beginning of this chapter and created a series of montages called Dream Girls, because ‘I felt hobbled by various (and competing) tendencies among feminist film and photo theorists whose demands for analytical rigour on questions of gender and power I shared, yet in whose writings (and works) I found little that evoked my own experience as a lesbian’ (Bright, 1991, p.151). By inserting her own image into a scene between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (fig. 14, above), Bright felt she was ‘undermin[ing] the function of the love triangle in the heterosexual narrative’ (ibid, p. 152). Tracy and Hepburn are sharing a kiss, an indication of a romantic link between them. The addition of the lesbian figure in the front seat upsets the balance of the scene as it now suggests that the two women are the couple and Tracy is merely a father figure saying goodbye to his daughter.

No longer forced to fantasise over female stars who may or may not be lesbian, or endure the image of the mannish lesbian as seen through masculine eyes, women were beginning to take control of their own visual representation and applying a measure of subversion to accepted heterosexual images was just one of the ways they did it.