now available in paperback

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A study of spectatorship, desire, identification and identity

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Twenty-first century cinema has so far yielded an extraordinarily rich array of works – by directors male and female, queer and straight, arthouse and independent – that feature lesbian figures, desires, and dilemmas. Bradbury Rance's book is the definitive study of these films. Showing how cinema stages key dramas of gender, sex, and visibility for the digital age, Bradbury Rance convincingly restores the lesbian to debates in queer theory.

– Patricia White, author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability

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Bradbury Rance does not simply offer up a critical overview of contemporary lesbian cinema. Rather, she draws close attention to each film’s industrial, aesthetic and cultural contexts, which invariably shape their representation of a range of lesbian experience, even in the most celebrated examples such as Todd Haynes’ Carol. Most striking here are Bradbury Rance’s timely and lucid reflections on the history of the lesbian’s cinematic image in order to explore, as she puts it, “her constitution as figure in the present”.

– Davina Quinlivan, Times Higher Education

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A new cinema text of note, Bradbury Rance’s Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory seeks to take an overdue dive into the long-standing conversation about visibility and representation in film. Grounding her research to an octet of films – Mulholland Drive, Nathalie, Chloe, Water Lilies, She Monkeys, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Circumstance, and Carol – she offers new ways of thinking about the queer moving image.

– Sarah Fonseca, Lambda Literary