Transnational lesbian cinema in the women's and gender studies classroom

In her 2000 essay “Queer and Present Danger,” queer film critic B. Ruby Rich argues that contemporary independent gay and lesbian cinema has become “just another niche market, another product line pitched at one particular type of discerning consumer.” ¹ A cursory examination of current lesbian and gay independent films in North America would seem to support Rich’s assertion that queer cinema has forsaken the radical political consciousness of the 1990s in favor of a universal, depoliticized gay liberalism. Recent popular lesbian feature films such as The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Chodolenko, 2010), Concussion (Stacie Passon, 2013), and Tru Love (Shauna MacDonald and Kate Johnston, 2014) all situate lesbian sexuality in relation to homonormative family structures grounded primarily in domesticity and consumption. ² In Lisa Chodolenko’s The Kids Are All Right, for example, the film’s central characters, Nic and Jules, far from contesting dominant ideals of the heterosexual nuclear family unit, actually uphold and reinforce them. As the director of The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Chodolenko, comments:

Our intention wasn’t overtly political. The subversion, as we saw it, was to be nonpolitical, and just to make this human story that was about a family that people could relate to, no matter what your identity or your sexual preferences were. ³

In Shauna MacDonald and Kate Johnston’s Tru Love, meanwhile, a beautiful older woman, Alice, is introduced to the film’s main character, Tru, in order to teach the latter about the virtues of lesbian monogamy and romantic love. The potentially radical implications of an intergenerational lesbian relationship are undermined by the film’s rather ageist conclusion, however, when Alice mysteriously dies at the end of the film, leaving Tru free to resume a monogamous (read: homonormative) relationship with her ex-girlfriend.