ABSTRACT
Feminism has shaped contemporary film studies in a fundamental fashion. Nevertheless it has become increasingly apparent that discussions of critical issues such as desire, identification, and visual and narrative pleasure do not automatically encompass the lesbian subject. The dominance of the heterosexual concept of “sexual difference” as term and telos of feminist inquiry has impoverished not only the study of specific film texts, but also the very theorization of female subjectivity. In this essay I attempt to trace the ghostly presence of lesbianism in classical Hollywood cinema on the one hand, and in feminist film theory on the other, through the reading of two texts in which a defense against homosexuality can be detected.
