ABSTRACT
The summer of 1994 saw the release of the independent feature film Go Fish, a charming, episodic, and much awaited lesbian romantic comedy. Written and produced by Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner (Turner also stars), directed by Troche, and executive produced by Christine Vachon and Tom Kalin, Go Fish was picked up for distribution by the Samuel Goldwyn Company following several seasons on the festival circuit as a work in progress. After years of sitting through films whose lesbian leads ended up dead, straight, or suffering, or of creatively reclaiming (from opportunists like Michael Douglas and Paul Verhoeven) the bad-girl possibilities of characters such as Sharon Stone’s in Basic Instinct (1992), lesbian audiences found deliverance in Go Fish, in its soothing rhythms, its fond typifications of a foibled and venturesome group of lesbians, and its quirky laugh lines. As on so many other occasions on and off the record of lesbian history and culture, survival meets humor in Go Fish and both are the better for it. It is against this ground-of the felt survival value of whimsy, self-irony, and representations of group culture-that I read Go Fish’s narrative and stylistic gestures. How do they animate utopic thoughts of community and a life within it? This query invokes larger questions about popular representation, about the work of images in constructing and reconstructing social subjects, and is perhaps best addressed by looking into the reception and circulation of cultural forms among both loosely connected and tightly knit groups. Although precisely how subjectivity takes shape in the time and space beyond the text is a complicated question, people do come together in their engagement with popular materials. They assemble in movie theaters and concert arenas, show up at readings and demonstrations by authors and artists, and gather in public spaces (such as bars and dorms) to watch and discuss their favorite television programs. Such gatherings make concrete both the presumption and possibility of common repertoires, of cultural practices that link people across a maze of different and competing social positions. But are these groups really communities? Not necessarily. Indeed, in the practical language of social theory and cultural criticism, such links
constitute “taste formations.” However, they also signify communal potential and even produce (at least fleetingly) the symbolic bonds they appear only to represent. In their stories and characters, their deployment of subcultural tropes and sensibilities, and their enactment of the lived possibility of connectedness, popular texts and performances offer a point of entry into what Benedict Anderson has famously called imagined communities.
