ABSTRACT
In a Buzzfeed article published on December 12, 2015, entitled “What It’s like to be a Lesbian Couple with a 20-Year-Plus Age Difference,” LGBT Editor Shannon Keating discusses social media’s reaction to the decision by actresses Holland Taylor (72) and Sarah Paulson (40) to make their lesbian relationship public (Keating 2015). While lesbian fans’ response to the news of Taylor and Paulson’s relationship has been overwhelmingly positive, many social media commentators have expressed discomfort with the idea of an intergenerational lesbian relationship. One of the “most-liked” comments on Facebook, for example, reads: “This is really gross. Not because they are gay, but because Sarah Paulson is dating the crypt keeper” (ibid.). While age differences in heterosexual relationshipsespecially those between older men and younger women-often go unquestioned within the mainstream media, heteronormative audiences are decidedly less comfortable with the possibility of intergenerational same-sex relationships between women. In the context of lesbian sexuality, intergenerational desire is frequently cast as a form of arrested psychosocial development, the product of repressed maternal and/or childlike longings that are inherently asexual. These heteronormative stereotypes have the effect of rendering lesbian desire invisible by discrediting the possibility of women’s sexual agency outside the context of compulsory heterosexuality. The subject of intergenerational desire has become a pervasive trope within represen-
tations of lesbian women in contemporary film and television. For example, three mainstream feature-length narrative films from 2015-Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, Paul Weitz’s Grandma and Todd Haynes’ Carol-center on the challenges faced by queer women in intergenerational lesbian relationships. In Season 2 of the award-winning Amazon television show Transparent (Jill Soloway, 2014-15), an older lesbian-feminist poet and gender studies professor played by Cherry Jones (ironically, the ex-lover of Sarah Paulson) is depicted dating a series of much younger women. Despite the fact that all three mainstream lesbian films released during 2015 revolve around the subject of intergenerational desire, however, there have been very few studies to date that examine the relationship between age and sexuality in contemporary queer film and media (see, for example, Krainitzki 2015). Given the growing number of portrayals of intergenerational lesbian relationships, it is important to consider how age factors into the politics of lesbian representation in contemporary film and visual culture. Do current representations of intergenerational
lesbian relationships merely constitute the reinscription of heteronormative stereotypes of lesbian monstrosity and/or asexuality in new guises, or do they offer up more complex, more subversive portrayals of female same-sex desire? In the first part of this essay, I examine representations of intergenerational lesbian
relationships in mainstream and independent narrative films produced during the past five years. Focusing particular attention on the recent filmsGrandma and Carol, I explore how intergenerational lesbian desire is incorporated into the current landscape of postfeminist media culture. By “postfeminism,” I am referring to the kinds of media representations of feminism in which certain second wave feminist critiques of gender inequality are taken into account in order to be dismissed as no longer relevant or necessary (McRobbie 2008). As I argue, within the realm of postfeminist media culture, ageist configurations of female sexuality intersect with postfeminist articulations of lesbian identity as hypersexual and chic, divested of all feminist associations. In the second part, I consider representations of intergenerational lesbian relationships in independent, experimental queer films, such as Cheryl Dunye’s mockumentary The Owls (2010) and Jan Dunn’s Dogme 95 film Gypo (2005). Both of these films offer important critiques of postfeminism through the invocation of intersectional and transnational perspectives on female same-sex desire. In doing so, these films challenge normative postfeminist temporalities grounded in the idea of reproductive time in a way that allows for more diverse representations of age and sexuality in contemporary queer film and media.
