ABSTRACT
CHERYL DUNYE’S 1996 FILM, The Watermelon Woman, is a groundbreaking, and rulebreaking, film. The first feature film made by a Black lesbian filmmaker (McAlister), the film employs both deconstructive and realist techniques to examine the way that identity in contemporary U.S. culture is shaped by multiple forces, primarily race, gender, and sexual orientation. Encouraging viewers to consider the unstable, complex, and often contradictory nature of identity, the film is humorous yet politically engaging. In this paper, I consider the ways that the film works simultaneously to represent and to decenter the identity and history of a figure most invisible in the textual production of the dominant culture-the Black lesbian.
