Kelly Hankin,
The Girls in the Back Room: Looking at the Lesbian Bar.
University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
ISBN: 0 8166 3298 0; US$56.95 (hb)
ISBN 0 8166 3929 9: $18.95 (pb)
248 pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

As Kelly Hankin reminds us in the introduction to The Girls in the Back Room, the lesbian bar has often been represented in popular film as a paradigmatically peripheral place: one inhabited by a sexual and social minority against whose supposed deviance the “normal” triumphantly defines itself. Yet in defiance of the standard constuction of the lesbian bar as a merely marginal place, Hankin’s engaging study of the lesbian bar’s screen life makes the bar’s visual representation into an effective optic for scrutinising broader ideological relationships between sexuality, gender, and space: relationships that are anything but peripheral to contemporary north American public culture. Surprisingly, Hankin’s is the first book-length study of the lesbian bar’s visual representation in North American film, video and television, despite the fact that this densely symbolic locale has now been with us in cinematic form for three and a half decades. As such, The Girls in the Back Room is a very welcome – not to say overdue – contribution to queer and feminist film studies.

Using a refreshingly wide range of approaches including narrative analysis, production history, queer spectatorship theory, close formal analysis, and subcultural histories, Hankin discusses the cultural function of the lesbian bar’s portrayal in popular commercial film and television (chapters one and two) before moving on to consider the bar’s resistant reinscription in independent lesbian film and video (chapters three and four). Chapter one serves both as a historical overview and to introduce Hankin’s key argument on mainstream representations of the lesbian bar: that such representations ideologically appropriate the lesbian and her imagined subcultural habitat for straight consumption, thereby symbolically “heterosexing space.” This chapter offers a survey of depictions of lesbian bars in western commercial cinema from 1968 (when the first lesbian bar apeared as such in an American film, in Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George) up to a 1990s spate of lesbian bar scenes in films including The First Wives’ Club (USA, 1996) Chasing Amy (USA, 1997) Bound(USA, 1996), French Twist (France, 1995) and Boys on the Side (USA/France, 1995), and in TV shows like Ellen (USA, 1994-1998), Roseanne (USA, 1988-1997) and Sex and the City(USA, 1998-2004). Through a mix of narrative analysis and adapted gaze theory, Hankin contends that these representations enable the fulfillment of two key heterosexual aims with respect to the mythic space of the lesbian bar: disciplinary surveillance and voyeuristic pleasure. Hankin argues that mainstream visual representations of the lesbian bar conform to a set of until-now untheorised conventions of locale. These include the portrayal of heterosexual tourism in lesbian bars; the narrative centrality of heterosexual stories; the criminalization of the lesbian bar; and the use of ethnographic “authentication” devices (as in the famous – though surely not entirely earnest – crediting of Susie Sexpert as “lesbian technical advisor” on Bound). As a result of such conventions, Hankin proposes, in all of these films and TV programmes, ideologically as well as literally, “more often than not, it is the heterosexual, not the lesbian, who is at the center of the imagined lesbian bar.” (53)

Chapter two is based on Hankin’s analysis of the production history of the notorious lesbian bar scene in The Killing of Sister George. As well as being the first lesbian bar scene ever to appear on American celluloid, this scene became famous at the time of the film’s production and remains so for contemporary lesbian viewers by virtue of the fact it was filmed in situ, in a “real” lesbian bar – London’s Gateways pub – and the bar’s actual patrons appeared in Aldrich’s film as extras. Hankin makes a critical reading of an intriguing array of inter-office memoranda, production notes, and consent forms allowing the “reproduction of physical likeness” signed by some cast members – though, ominously, unsigned by others. Through this reading, Hankin continues the ideological critique begun in Chapter one by arguing that Aldrich’s use of the Gateways location was probably unethical on at least two levels. This is the case first, she proposes, in the film’s commercially-driven, sensationalist exploitation of the titillation factor inherent in filming in an “authentic” lesbian bar; and second and more gravely, in the film’s exploitation of the labour of the bar’s lesbian patrons, who never signed consent forms, whose names are omitted from the film’s credits, and at least one of whom lost her job as a result of being outed by Aldrich’s film (74). In all this, Hankin proposes, Sister George works, like the media texts discussed in Chapter one, to shore up heterosexual spatial supremacy at the expense of lesbian claims on both geographic and symbolic space.

Chapters three and four are framed explicitly as rejoinders to the first two chapters’ critique of heterosexual hegemony in popular film and television. They focus on independent lesbian-produced film and video; African American lesbian director Itang Inyang’s 1996 video Badass Supermama, and a series of 1990s documentaries about American and Canadian lesbian bars: Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (Canada, 1992), The Riverview: A Lesbian Place (USA), The Boy Mechanic (USA) and Last call at Maud’s(USA, 1993). But Hankin’s argument is not simply that these films refuse or reverse the ideological implications of the popular entertainment films and television programs discussed in chapters one and two. The claim in these chapters is more complex, and in some ways, more sophisticated than the earlier ideological analyses. Badass Supermama is an exercise in “celluloid surgery” on the blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown (USA, 1974), and Hankin offers a good discussion of the intersection of racial and sexual representation as theorised visually in Inyang’s self-consciously revisionist video – indeed, Hankin is attentive throughout the book to the politics of race in relation to the lesbian bar. As well, Hankin’s focus on Inyang’s manipulation of Foxy Brown‘s lesbian bar scene allows her to take into account, for the first time in the book, the polysemy of filmic texts and the potential for queer appropriations of mainstream cinema. Yet in Inyang’s insertion of her own image into Foxy Brown‘s ostensibly homophobic lesbian bar scene, Hankin finds not simply evidence of the by-now commonplace observation that queer film viewers queer the films they view. The scene, where Inyang fades into and out of view and in which she appears, overall, an uneasy inhabitant, is instead interpreted as highlighting precisely the tension between the resistant appropriation of Foxy‘s text for lesbian pleasure, and the structural overdetermination of mainstream “lesbian” images by heterosexist meanings. Through her analysis of Inyang’s film, Hankin engages in a thoughtful reflection on queer spectatorship theory, seeking – productively, I think – to rein in its occasional penchant for heady celebrations of queer spectatorial agency at the expense of attention to the continuing ideological force of obtrusively homophobic images.

Chapter four’s discussion of 1990s independent lesbian bar documentaries is similarly complex, and in the subtlety of its formal and ideological analysis is perhaps the book’s most impressive section. As Hankin observes at the outset, this spate of bar documentaries is born in large part out of the “historiographic impulse” in lesbian studies and cultural production since the 1980s: the inherently utopian idea that by uncovering the cultural archaeology of the lesbian past, the silences created by the lesbian’s wilful excision from official history can be remedied in the present (115). Each of the four documentaries approaches its bar as a repository of lesbian subcultural history: a place that once provided and enabled lesbian community, support, and identity formation. And yet, even in the midst of what in some of the documentaries is a quite explicitly celebratory project of bringing to light the lesbian past, Hankin discerns an ominous undercurrent of anxiety over lesbians’ access to public space in the present. Perhaps recalling, in one sense, Ackbar Abbas’ notion of the deja disparu – the “already disappeared” – Hankin’s discussion reveals that time and again, no matter how overtly celebratory the tone of these documentaries, on closer analysis the lesbian bar is revealed as the space of an anxious impossibility, absence, or disappearance. [1] This is literally the case for most of the films: Forbidden Love focuses on the history of lesbian subcultural experience in pre-Stonewall Canada; the bar at the centre of The Riverview, in Rochester, New York, has already closed down; and as its title suggests, Last Call at Maud’s is about the closing down of yet another long-standing lesbian bar, this time in San Francisco. Much of The Boy Mechanic, too, is taken up with a seemingly endless and often fruitless search for the sites where lesbian bars used to be, in San Diego, and each found site appears in the film, powerfully, as a set of firmly closed doors, reproduced in the book as a series of eloquent stills. Although this film differs from the other three in including a section on two San Diego bars that currently remain open for business, Hankin’s careful analysis reveals that in its representation of these bars, the film betrays the ominous implication that they, too, are on the verge of disappearance. The broader argument here is that the underlying, anxious nostalgia of the lesbian bar documentary reveals a genuine cultural need in the present, a time when, Hankin argues, lesbian claims on public space are just as tenuous as ever they were:

For a lesbian subculture consistently plagued by violence in the public realm, troubled by internal dissension over race, class, and the politics of gender and sexual expression, and perpetually marked by its own inability to maintain social space, visions of safe, racially harmonious, and durable spaces offered in the lesbian bar documentary function as a fantasy, certainly, but a fantasy that articulates a necessity still. (117)

Coupled with Hankin’s strong, complex readings of the filmic texts of the bar documentaries in this chapter, the theory of critical nostalgia that she elaborates here is compelling. This final chapter articulates not only a subtle and convincing reading of these films as instances of popular lesbian historiography, but also a politically engaged theorisation of lesbian nostalgia that contests the common assumption that nostalgia can only serve ideologically conservative functions.

The overall impression on reading The Girls in the Back Room sequentially is that in the force of its arguments, the appropriateness of its methodologies, and the complexity of its conclusions, the book gains in strength as it progresses from its first section to its second. Early on, Hankin encapsulates the ambivalence and contradiction at her project’s core: “The visual lesbian bar is deployed not only to articulate and confirm lesbian visions of public life and identity but to confirm heterosexist visions as well.” (xxv) And yet, especially in relation to chapters one and two, one cannot help questioning whether these two operations are always as separate as Hankin proposes. Chapters three and four are admirable in their articulation of the messy and complex ideological character of independent lesbian film and video: on the one hand, these productions rebelliously overturn the conventions of mainstream heterosexist representation; on the other, they are themselves everywhere marked by the debilitating effects of those very conventions. Yet Hankin does not accord the popular entertainment productions she discusses in the first part of the book the same degree of complexity: the only ideological function of these films’ representations of lesbian bars, it appears, is the symbolic “heterosexing” of cultural space. This implication largely results from the lack of specific discussion, in the book’s first section, of the potential for queer appropriations of commercial cinema. Hankin does address this very issue in detail in chapter three in relation to Badass Supermama, but the discussion, for example, of The Killing of Sister George might also have been enriched by consideration of this film’s (abundantly realised) potential for queer appropriation. Despite Hankin’s generally persuasive argument on the possibly unethical and certainly – if unremarkably – financially motivated use of the Gateways locale, a quick flick through Alison Darren’s Lesbian Film Guide (London: Cassell, 2000) reveals that, for that author at least, Sister George is “one of the all-time greats as far as lesbian films go.” (122) [2] Darren also proposes that:

These days, […] now that the pressure is off to see George and her friends as definitive lesbian images, it is time to reclaim her. George really is one of the great screen lesbians whom straight society defeats but doesn’t quite destroy. Her bolshiness, temperamental stroppiness, contrasted with her devlish wit and deeply felt vulnerability, make her unexpectedly frail and sympathetic. (123)

(And dare I also confess that, after re-watching Sister George recently – before reading Hankin’s book – this author’s own household was imaginatively seized, for more than a few days, by the strangely compelling personae of not just George but moreover the spookily infantile Childie, and of course, that arch, smooth-talking, pearl-earring’d seductress from the BBC, Mrs Croft?). Explicit acknowledgement of the polysemic potential of Sister George, as well as the array of films discussed in chapter one, would have productively complicated Hankin’s argument in this section, and mitigated against the occasional repetitiveness of the claims about these film’s contribution to the heterosexing of space.

Relatedly, there are points in these initial chapters at which Hankin’s argument gets snared on examples whose hermeneutic complexity seems to exceed the interpretative framework used to discuss them. For example Bound is framed, alongside Basic Instinct (USA, 1992) as yet another film destructively depicting “a criminalized lesbian couple” (29). This is true, of course – for much of the film Violet and her ex-con lover Corky are running from the mob after stealing two million dollars from Violet’s gangster boyfriend – but the generic conventions of the neo-noir thriller should probably be accorded at least as much weight here as any putative ideolgical concern with demonizing lesbianism. Again, the somewhat earnest approach to Bound in chapter one stands in contrast to the sophisticated discussions of cinematic irony and nostalgia in chapter four. Hankin’s critique of the episode of Sex and the City where Charlotte visits a lesbian bar (39) leaves itself open to similar criticism. On one hand, it’s refreshing to read such an engaged critique of the recent ubiquity of lesbian bars in ostensibly “straight” film and television narratives, and Hankin’s proposal that the lesbian bar tends to appear in these texts as a resource for strengthening and healing a wounded heterosexual femininity is overall persuasive. On the other hand, Sex and the City may be a more savvy text than Hankin is prepared to give it credit for. For when Charlotte suffers her attack of ’70s-style lesbian utopianism, waxing lyrical about “a very powerful part of [her] that connects to the female spirit,” one of her new lesbian friends retorts sharply that “Sweetheart, that’s all very nice, but if you’re not going to eat pussy, you’re not a dyke.” Hankin deals with this by pointing out that the friend’s comeback stops short of criticising Charlotte’s supposedly selfish pleasure in the “female spirit” in the lesbian bar the night before, but I wonder whether something a little more complex is going on here than Hankin is able to account for. Exactly what is going on in popular representations like this it’s as yet hard to say. (Is this simply a lamentable appropriation of lesbian cultural space by straight culture – or then again, might such narratives signify the tentative emergence of a transformative “interzone,” symbolically queering straight femininity itself – a possibility Hankin discounts without really addressing? [45] Are all representations of heterosexual pleasure in homosexual space always and necessarily destructive?). Either way, when popular “women’s television” comes with a built-in critique of popular heterosexist appropriations of lesbian subculture, it’s probably time to begin working toward a critical queer media theory that’s at least as complex and knowing as the media texts it wants to explain.

These minor limitations notwithstanding, The Girls in the Back Room is an important addition to contemporary queer film and media studies. Like Hankin herself, as she confesses in her conclusion, I suspect that many of us maintain strong personal investments in the mythic and lived topos of the lesbian bar, investments that are both affective and theoretical, and that are always formed in interaction with the ambivalent representation of this space in visual media. With its combination of political commitment, thoughtful analysis, and readable style, The Girls in the Back Room makes an important contribution to our understanding of the historically grounded but ever-shifting cultural meanings of sexuality and space in western screen media today.

Fran Martin
Melbourne University, Australia.

Endnotes
(To return to your place in the text, simply click on the endnote number)
[1] Abbas, Ackbar, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
[2] Darren, Alison, Lesbian Film Guide. London: Cassell, 2000.
Created on: Sunday, 2 May 2004 | Last Updated: 2-May-04