[”Ellen’s predecessors were the two lesbians on the cover of Newsweek from 1993 heralding “LESBIANS” (fig. 1). The women pictures are young, white, and conventionally attractive. Presumably they are partners, as one sits behind the other, hugging her girlfriend around the waist. Both women have dark, styled hair, dark eyes, and attractive faces. The “hugger” has soft, curly hair and a slightly smiling, slightly made-up (and thus feminine) face. We see her from the waist up only; she wears a long-sleeved denim shirt— not particularly feminine attire, but it is balanced by some standard markers of both femininity and affluence: peal earrings, pearl necklace, and a shiny ring on her finger. The other woman, leaning back in her girlfriend’s arms, also is conventionally attractive, though her short, pageboy haircut isn’t quite as feminine as her girlfriend’s hairdo. What she does have going for her, however, is her body: lean and tanned, she wears a brown, long-sleeved button-up top with a deep scoop neck. Her neck and collarbone are thus accentuated and “marked” clearly as petite, feminine, and pretty. The photo, coupled with the Ellen cover, seems to assure mainstream audiences that there is nothing “different” about lesbians, except that they might hug one another more than straight women might. Indeed, these images— images of clean-cut, well-dressed, economically secure, feminine lesbians— promise readers that Ellen and the Newsweek women are, simply put, all-American girls.”’
(…) Aside from lang, there is a certain homogeneity to the lesbian bodies we see in mainstream media. Take the much talked-about 1995 lesbian wedding on Friends, for example. The sophisticated brides “had their hair in ringlets and wore dresses out of a Merchant Ivory film”, in other words, they looked nothing like the stereotypical lesbian. On the one hand, this representation might have been effective at dispelling some preconceptions that the public holds regarding lesbians, convincing audiences that even “straight-looking” women could be gay and that even lesbians could have such impeccable taste in clothing. Such disruption is important. At the same time, doesn’t this “corrective” seem too correct? As an article in Entertainment Weekly suggests, “[television] writers may have gotten a bit too conscientious in avoiding stereotypes. Out comic Lea DeLaria, who had a cameo in the lesbian wedding on Friends, complains, “They needed at least 30 or 40 more fat dykes in tuxedos. All those thin, perfectly coiffed girls in Laura Ashley prints- what kind of lesbian wedding is that? And no one played softball afterwards?” Although DeLaria is being humorous about this instance of lesbian representation, she nonetheless raises an important point: the “thin, perfectly coiffed girls” might well be lesbians, but where were the others ones, the “dykes” to use her words?
(…) I have spent some time now pointing to the various ways that lesbian bodies are coded in mainstream culture— coded materially, spatially, discursively, and racially. What I hope to have pointed to is the excess of such coding. What, then are these representations effecting in culture at large? The answer to this question is by no means simple; certainly any image can have different and varying effects on different people. By way of response, however, I want to point out some other cultural ideas that belong to the mainstream imagination, using them to suggest why the femme is so overrepresented. Our starting point with this is with the obvious: within mainstream culture, the femme is not really considered a lesbian. A hundred years ago, Havelock Ellis declared that “the principle character of sexually inverted woman is a certain degree of masculinity”; femme or feminine lesbians he deemed “pseudohomosexuals.” Diane Hamer elaborated on this preconception: “Always, it has been the butch woman who is constructed as the authentic lesbian; rarely is the femme seen as such. Traditionally, the femme as been constructed as essentially feminine and heterosexual; her lesbianism is at most a passing phase, resulting from seduction by a predatory butch or a temporary retreat from men after some damaging experience.” The femme, in other words, is representable not only because she is desirable but also because she is perceived as “inauthentic." We might also note that the feminine (or feminized) lesbian bodies we see are usually shown alone (e.g. Ellen’s Time cover), coupled with another conventionally feminine lesbian (e.g. Melissa and Julie, the Friends brides), or— tellingly, perhaps?— with a man (e.g. Chasing Amy). Virtually none of the mainstream representations pairs a femme or feminine lesbian with a butch or masculine lesbian. Perhaps the configurations of single and coupled femmes work to undo the "lesbian” signifier and to de-lesbianize the subject for mainstream audiences.“]
Making Her (In)Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990’s, by Ann M. Ciasullo
