now available in paperback

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A study of spectatorship, desire, identification and identity

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Twenty-first century cinema has so far yielded an extraordinarily rich array of works – by directors male and female, queer and straight, arthouse and independent – that feature lesbian figures, desires, and dilemmas. Bradbury-Rance's book is the definitive study of these films. Showing how cinema stages key dramas of gender, sex, and visibility for the digital age, Bradbury-Rance convincingly restores the lesbian to debates in queer theory.

– Patricia White, author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability

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Bradbury-Rance does not simply offer up a critical overview of contemporary lesbian cinema. Rather, she draws close attention to each film’s industrial, aesthetic and cultural contexts, which invariably shape their representation of a range of lesbian experience, even in the most celebrated examples such as Todd Haynes’ Carol. Most striking here are Bradbury-Rance’s timely and lucid reflections on the history of the lesbian’s cinematic image in order to explore, as she puts it, “her constitution as figure in the present”

– Davina Quinlivan, Times Higher Education

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A new cinema text of note, Clara Bradbury-Rance’s Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory seeks to take an overdue dive into the long-standing conversation about visibility and representation in film. Grounding her research to an octet of films – Mulholland Drive, Nathalie, Chloe, Water Lilies, She Monkeys, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Circumstance, and Carol – she offers new ways of thinking about the queer moving image.

– Sarah Fonseca, Lambda Literary