ABSTRACT
One of the advantages the apartment chronotope offers anyone interested in the cultural history of lesbianism is the capacity to confi gure sexuality and space as two interlinked representational systems. Many sociological interrogations of gay and lesbian sexual space continue to think of the encounter between homosexuality and space in a fairly one-dimensional way insofar as homosexuality is assumed to precede social space, which it then encounters to either positive or negative effect.1 Film theory’s account of sexual identity as the product of the representational system of gender, even when it presumes a heterosexual framework, nonetheless promotes a far less literal understanding of the relation between sexuality and space, just as it has always understood that space includes aesthetic, temporal, and narrative aspects. Analyzing the lesbian cinematic chronotope allows us to interrogate the relation between these two representational systems, the system of sexuality and the system of space, in ways that will ultimately extend the sociological account of cultural space and the variant sexualities it enables.
