Desire and deviate nymphos: performing inversion(s) as a lesbian consumer

This paper uses a personalist methodology to discuss my experience of being a lesbian consumer of pop-culture representations of lesbianism. It details, through cultural and feminist/lesbian theory, film theory, and performance criticism, my confusing and contradictory postmodern-feminist-lesbian-theorist response to and desire for what I read as lesbophobia inscribed all over a postcard photo of the cover of a lesbian 1950s pulp novel. I discuss my position as a lesbian looking at a lesbian looking and note the obvious elements of lesbo/homophobia present in this cultural artefact: the trivialization of lesbian desire; the stereotyping of lesbian women; the censorship or erasure of the possibilities of healthy same-sex desire; the prefiguration of the male voyeuristic gaze turning lesbian sex into a spectacle for male pleasure. The paper aims to underline the critical strategies of lesbian experience, the required negotiations in a hostile culture, and the ways that cultural criticism in the academy shape and prefigure my responses to lesbophobic performances in mass media. I question the nature of my pleasure in lesbophobic fictions and detail the process of reversing discourse in the Foucauldian sense. As I identify with the representations, however inaccurate, however fictional, I must invert or queer the lesbophobic message, finding pleasure in the very discourses that oppress me, stereotype me, tolerate me, target me.