Lesbian subjectivities in contemporary cinema

Abstract

The objective of the article is to analyse two films centred on the history of lesbian women in different historical, economic, and social contexts: the Kenyan Rafiki (2018) and the American the world to come (2020). Both movies are viewed from the perspective of gender theory and have as background the documentary Celluloid Closet (1995), in order to analyse possible aesthetic and narrative changes in the subjectivity of women in contemporary cinema. We aim to make reflections from the changes perceived in the treatment of characters who historically were conceived as sexual perverts or framed through sexist-patriarchal stereotypes. We seek to understand the different ways in which the prominence of women directors, producers, writers, and spectators, by vocalizing new subjectivities in contemporary audiovisual, act to model new scenarios of representativity and representation. The issue is no longer about to break with ideals centred on male ideals, but the effort to create narratives that manage to speak from and through the most different views of the world, creating conditions for the representation of other social subjects to materialize narratives.