Bernsmeier, Jordan
(2021)
Aluminum Lesbians: Recycling Lesbian Legacy in Classical Hollywood.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
This dissertation asserts that the American cinema is and has always been a lesbian cinema—a claim substantiated through dismantling outmoded but prevailing methods of finding hidden or erased lesbians in Hollywood films and through offering a fresh perspective on film history for appreciating lesbian presence onscreen. Drawing on existing film theory and cultural studies scholarship on screen representation and reception, I revise prior methods of defining and distinguishing lesbian presence, to create the conditions for the lesbian acknowledgement.
The first chapter entails a review of earlier theorists’ approaches to conceptualizing non-normative sexualities and to discerning lesbians in film—particularly with respect to classical Hollywood cinema before the Second World War. I critique staid and ill-fitting concepts such as the closet, in favor of the more apt notion of the veil, a luminous covering that moves and obfuscates without occluding.
The second chapter looks to auteurist film history to intuit lesbian-ness in a seemingly unlikely place: Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre. To show that there is more to lesbian Hitchcock than just Rebecca (1940), I consider how the sexual permissiveness of Weimar culture deeply marked Hitchcock’s first film, The Pleasure Garden (1925). I trace how this lesbianized legacy recurs in his most canonical and seemingly hetero-affirming works, such as Vertigo (1958), The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964).
My third chapter considers the influence that the cosmopolitan milieux of Weimar Berlin and interwar Paris had on the development of a culturally pervasive coalescence of lesbian identity, one that made its way from these European metropoles into the American cultural fabric by passing through celluloid to form the basis of a lesbian legacy that still influences us today.
Finally, in my fourth chapter I move from a consideration of the creation and transmission of a cosmopolitan lesbian heritage to a discussion of how this legacy has been recycled and continued to be influential in films during the 70s, 80s, and 90s, as well as in more contemporary works that exhibit their debts to Weimar cabaret society and queer Paris between the wars, and others that draw on the Hollywood traditions of glittering lesbian glamour.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
|
| Date: |
18 December 2021 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
9 December 2021 |
| Approval Date: |
13 September 2024 |
| Submission Date: |
30 December 2021 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
143 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Film Studies |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
LGBT, Stardom, Weimar |
| Date Deposited: |
13 Sep 2024 18:56 |
| Last Modified: |
13 Sep 2024 19:08 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/42146 |
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