ABSTRACT
The mid- to late 1980s produced conflicting accounts of the impact of the previous two decades of feminism: mainstream commentators pronounced the women’s movement dead, while some feminist academics, dismayed by the prominence of discussions of masculinity in women’s studies, feared that women’s issues would once again be eclipsed, this time by a ‘feminism without women’. While each account contains a partial truth, something even more complicated was occurring, at least in mass-consumption popular culture. Apparently radically affected by feminism’s critique of gender roles and of gendered representational regimes, popular culture partially exhausted the tired misogynist tropes of the sexual terror of woman (in, for example, Fatal Attraction and its many clones) and moved instead to examine the pathology which lurked within men. Tentative efforts to move away from sexist and heterosexist images made clear the extent to which traditional genres had been premised on the very psychologies which underwrote those stereotypes. Ironically, purging a familiar genre such as the cop film of its misogyny and homophobia opened the door to incorporating not so much ‘positive’ counter images of lesbians, but a space in which lesbian knowledge could organize a film. Granted, her screen time is limited, and she in no way fits the call for ‘lesbian visibility’, but the lesbo cop of Internal Affairs (1988) enters the historical scene to announce the demise of a particular heteromasculine logic which may yet be recuperated, but can no longer proceed as if misogyny and homophobia are the presumptive frame of reference for the audience.
