Lesbianism Cinema Space : The Sexual Life of Apartments

This book opens with a brief spatial history of lesbian culture in the twentieth century and concludes with an argument about the importance of the lesbian apartment for rethinking the relation of female homosexuality and lesbian sex cultures to private and public space. The apartment appears as the privileged setting in a number of post-Production Code films that tell the lesbian story. Through formal analyses of five lesbian apartment films Wallace demonstrates how the standard Hollywood repertoire of visual techniques and spatial devices are used to scaffold female sexual visibility and a lesbian diegesis.