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‘I’m Straight, but I Kissed a Girl’: The Trouble with American Media Representations of Female-Female Sexuality

‘I’m Straight, but I Kissed a Girl’: The Trouble with American Media Representations of... II ‘I’m Straight, but I Kissed a Girl’: The Trouble with American Media Representations of Female–Female Sexuality Lisa M. DIAMOND Nearly 20 years ago, Kitzinger (1987) argued that the shift in psychological research in the 1970s and 1980s toward a liberal-humanistic view of lesbians and gay men as ‘just like’ heterosexuals (rather than intrinsically deviant and patho- logical) was not, in fact, as positive and progressive as it might have seemed. Rather, she noted that this conceptualization actually reinforced the dominant social order by presenting same-sex sexuality as a matter of private lifestyle, thereby neutralizing its political challenge to heterosexuality. This was, of course, an insidiously effective way of maintaining the social institution of heterosexual- ity, given that outright condemnation of homosexuals had gradually become less socially acceptable. An analogous critique can and should be made regarding the ‘positive’ and ‘accepting’ portrayals of female same-sex sexuality that have increasingly pro- liferated in American entertainment media. Over the past 5–10 years, there has been an upsurge of openly lesbian (and less often, bisexual) characters and rela- tionships on American films and television shows (recent films include The Hours, Chasing Amy, But I’m a Cheerleader; Gigli, Lost and Delirious, Everything Relative; http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Feminism & Psychology: An International Journal SAGE

‘I’m Straight, but I Kissed a Girl’: The Trouble with American Media Representations of Female-Female Sexuality

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Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
Copyright © by SAGE Publications
ISSN
0959-3535
eISSN
1461-7161
DOI
10.1177/0959353505049712
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Abstract

II ‘I’m Straight, but I Kissed a Girl’: The Trouble with American Media Representations of Female–Female Sexuality Lisa M. DIAMOND Nearly 20 years ago, Kitzinger (1987) argued that the shift in psychological research in the 1970s and 1980s toward a liberal-humanistic view of lesbians and gay men as ‘just like’ heterosexuals (rather than intrinsically deviant and patho- logical) was not, in fact, as positive and progressive as it might have seemed. Rather, she noted that this conceptualization actually reinforced the dominant social order by presenting same-sex sexuality as a matter of private lifestyle, thereby neutralizing its political challenge to heterosexuality. This was, of course, an insidiously effective way of maintaining the social institution of heterosexual- ity, given that outright condemnation of homosexuals had gradually become less socially acceptable. An analogous critique can and should be made regarding the ‘positive’ and ‘accepting’ portrayals of female same-sex sexuality that have increasingly pro- liferated in American entertainment media. Over the past 5–10 years, there has been an upsurge of openly lesbian (and less often, bisexual) characters and rela- tionships on American films and television shows (recent films include The Hours, Chasing Amy, But I’m a Cheerleader; Gigli, Lost and Delirious, Everything Relative;

Journal

Feminism & Psychology: An International Journal – SAGE

Published: Feb 1, 2005

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