The film "Brokeback Mountain" was released in December of 2005 into mainstream theaters and to general audiences. Director Ang Lee, screenwriters Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, and actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal made this film in which the storyline revolves around two men falling in love and how this forbidden love would affect the rest of their lives. The shock of having a film with two men kissing and having sex in the theaters seemed to have struck a nerve with many viewers. Some were very positive, hailing the film as a new step in mainstream films to show a queer relationship, others were negative, criticizing the film even at times condemning what was shown on the screen. The impact of the film made debate and conversations about queer content available to a public forum, in this case newspapers from around the country.

Lesbianism has received unprecedented screen time in the cinema in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. This marks a significant shift away from a prior invisibility, historically interrupted only by invocations of pathologisation, isolation and tragedy. At the same time, critical discourses have increasingly replaced identity categories such as “the lesbian” with the more fluid notions of “queer” sexuality. In this paradoxical context, this thesis identifies and theorises the kinds of cinematic language through which the figure of “the lesbian” has continued to be made legible on the screen. If the cultural invisibility of lesbianism is arguably a thing of the past, the invisibility of lesbianism in academic scholarship is an increasingly notable feature of the current critical landscape. The majority of anthologies on “queer” or “gay” cinema exclude lesbians both as contributors and as objects of study, rendering insecure the equation of political progress with screen visibility. Identifying a shift away from defining lesbian cinema as “about lesbians”, this project offers a series of close readings of narrative feature films released between 2001 and 2013 that put lesbianism in motion. The thesis discusses a range of recent films to consider how the cinematic language of lesbianism has moved beyond the twin burdens the term has historically carried, as deplorably singular and threateningly doubled. In dialogue with debates in psychoanalytic feminist film criticism about the woman in cinema, the first two chapters consider the relationship between lesbianism, narrative and genre in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001), Nathalie (Fontaine, 2003) and Chloe (Egoyan, 2009). My argument explores how these films expose the contradictory relationship between absence and presence in cinema’s production of lesbianism, troubling the ease with which sex can be read as the visual evidence of sexuality. The subsequent two chapters move from psychoanalytically informed studies of the cinematic coding of lesbian fantasy to an investigation of the affective, spatial and temporal registers of desire and eroticism that have provoked recent debates in feminist theory. These chapters consider the ways in which the in-between and expectant modes of subjectivity and sensation that characterise adolescent sexuality coincide with, and accent, lesbian desires in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007), She Monkeys (Aschan, 2011) and Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011). Moving from transactions of power to those of pleasure, the final chapter offers a close reading of Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013) and of the discursive constructions of explicit lesbian sex surrounding it. My reading of the film argues that it formally queers desire in a way that unsettles the over-privileging of sex in the characterisation of lesbian sexuality. Across these five chapters, this thesis explores the relationship between the figuration of the singular lesbian and the multiple registers of her desire and sexuality. In conclusion, the thesis argues that a new field of figurations, emerging from the influences of queer theory, has pushed at the limits of lesbian legibility and generated nuanced and sensitive renderings of debates about sexuality on the screen.

Submitted by Haroudo Xavier Filho (haroudo.xavierfo@ufpe.br) on 2016-03-08T17:57:25Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Cinema gay brasileiro (PPGCOM, 2015).pdf: 4154701 bytes, checksum: 6e7df1d3c00e3dc42fbccaae4a6246bc (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-08T17:57:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Cinema gay brasileiro (PPGCOM, 2015).pdf: 4154701 bytes, checksum: 6e7df1d3c00e3dc42fbccaae4a6246bc (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-06-30 / CAPES / Grande parte dos estudos a respeito do homoerotismo no cinema brasileiro teve como norte, até então, as políticas de representação e sua análise do potencial dos filmes de conservação ou transgressão dos discursos heteronormativos hegemônicos. Não perdendo de vista essa questão, mas ampliando o leque de abordagens, esta tese passa em revista a história do cinema brasileiro e seu tratamento do homoerotismo masculino, buscando analisar, por meio de um formato panorâmico, diferentes questões em torno do tema. Assim, as chanchadas das décadas de 1930, 40 e 50 são investigadas a partir de dois elementos: seu uso cômico de estereótipos e sua relação com a cultura homoerótica da época através do conceito de espectatorialidade queer. Já os primeiros filmes que abordaram o tema de forma direta, na década de 60, são analisados a partir de sua relação com a homofobia enquanto elemento constitutivo da masculinidade nacional. As pornochanchadas e o cinema da Retomada, por sua vez, são examinados a partir de sua relação com as identidades homoeróticas vigentes em cada período, sejam a bicha, o bofe e o entendido do primeiro caso, seja o gay do segundo. Os curtas-­‐metragens das décadas de 1990 e 2000 e os festivais de cinema LGBT são descritos à luz da emergência da concepção de um cinema gay brasileiro. Por fim, o cinema contemporâneo é interpelado tanto a partir de sua relação com duas diferentes tendências do ativismo LGBT – o assimilacionismo e o liberacionismo – quanto por sua aproximação da sensibilidade camp e dos fundamentos dos estudos queer. / So far, most of the research on Brazilian queer cinema was based on the politics of representation, i.e., on the potential (or lack thereof) of movies in disrupting the hegemonic heteronormative discourses. Keeping an eye on this issue, but also trying to broaden the range of approaches, this thesis reviews the history of Brazilian cinema and its representation of male homoeroticism, trying to analyze a diverse array of issues surrounding the topic. In this sense, the chanchadas of the 1930s, 40s and 50s are analyzed from two different perspectives: its comical usage of homoerotic stereotypes and its relation to the homoerotic culture of its time. The first movies that dealt directly with male homoeroticism, in the 60s, are scrutinized on their relation to homophobic discourses that are constitutive of the national masculinity. The pornochanchadas and the Retomada cinema are examined in relation to the male homoerotic identities particular to each period, such as the bicha, the bofe and the entendido of the former, and the gay of the later. The short films of the 90s and 2000s and the LGBT film festivals are considered in the light of the emergence of the concept of a Brazilian gay cinema. Finally, Brazilian contemporary cinema is analyzed from its relation to two different trends of LGBT activism -­‐ assimilationism and liberationism -­‐ and also from its use of both the camp sensibility and the assumptions of queer theory.