Paige’s Reviews > Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film > Status Update

“While it may be possible for lesbian viewers to derive some pleasure from the vampires’ sexual escapades, these scenes invariably cater to male heterosexual fantasy. One particularly explicit scene from the Vampire Lovers is a perfect example of male voyeurism and, ultimately, male sadistic impulses” pg 92…. HARD disagree

“According to Jackson Lears, through this process, ‘Newer values, which sometimes seem potentially subversive at first, are frequently sanitized and incorporated into the mainstream of enlightened opinion.’ By assimilating these values, the dominant culture co-opts and disempowers them while it also legitimizes itself as flexible, liberal, and enlightened.”

“But the prevalent representation of lesbianism which emerged in the 70’s and 80’s incorporated ideas and values of the gay and women’s movements into a safe, non-threatening framework… whereby the dominant culture, rather than relying on direct repression, is able to absorb into its ideological framework the political or cultural definitions of less powerful groups.”

“…threatened to proceed with the film without approval from the Hays Office, and suggested that if the Code regulations could not allow the film to be showed, the regulations, and not the film, should be changed. His threat payed off, and the Code, on October 3 1961, was revised so that ‘tasteful’ treatments of homosexual themes were now permissible. Presumably suicide was what they meant by tasteful.”

'Christina, to all those who see Garbo's film, will always be the lovely girl who fell in love with the Spanish ambassador in the snow, & no amount of professional research will ever change her.' For lesbian spectators who saw Garbo's film in the early 1930s, however, Queen Christina will always be the lovely girl who dressed in male attire and refused to marry, and no amount of heterosexual cover up will change her.