The Documentaries of Barbara Hammer: Lesbian Creativity, Kinship, and Erotic Pleasure in the Historical Margins

Lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer turned from experimental filmmaking to feature-length documentaries in the early 1990s. These late documentaries illustrate her distinct perspective on queer history and affect, which was influenced by 1970s lesbian feminism and queer scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. Her structure and style in these films draw on the tools of both conventional historical documentaries and experimental film. Offering an astonishing range of evidence, Hammer creatively presents queer plenty from the margins of the archive. Through this evidence, Hammer affirms past queer lives, celebrating and highlighting rebelliousness, agency, creativity, queer kinship, and passion. Additionally, Hammer attempts to communicate with and embody the past, physically and emotionally seeking out and feeling the interior and exterior lives of her biographical subjects, who are predominantly creative women, including the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the Dada artist Hannah Höch, the surreal photographer Claude Cahun, and the painter Nicole Eisenman.

The Politics of Gender Culture

Queer: The Problematic of Sexuality and (Sexual) IdentityQueer Theory that has turned a derogatory and abusive term homosexuality into a respectable one does not come in a single mode. Though queer theory comes through different forms, the theory developed out of gay and lesbian feminism is more prominent and has become an umbrella term for a coalition of culturally marginal sexual self-identifications. Historically, lesbian feminism split from the mainstream feminism accusing it of representing white, middle class, and heterosexual women and ignoring the existence of black and women with ‘perverse’ sexuality” (Rivikin and Ryan 676). Implicit in its agenda was the assumption of a core lesbian identity that was either biological given or conditioned by psychosocial factors. Lesbian feminism as such then was an attempt of establishing an essential Lesbian identity with an unchanging self (Berten 226). However, a number of lesbian critics, deeply informed by Michael Foucault’s multi-volume History of Sexuality and Derridian critique of coherent self and binary opposition, began rejecting the notion of essential and fixed identity and coherent self and started seeing all forms of sexual identities including lesbian and gay as social constructs and not a biological given.

No Kin: Between the Reproductive Paradigm and Ideals of Community

This article positions the sinthomosexual in relation to kinship, climate crisis, and vulnerability. By placing Lee Edelman’s version of queer in the modern family, the sinthomosexual – here presented in the form of the childfree woman – is positioned not only as against reproduction, but also against certain versions of community and kinship. The article investigate what this position is dependent on and gets subjected to in the wake of the dismantling of the welfare state and the privatisation of economies, communities and identities. This is done by a close reading of the so-called anti-social turn in relation to different feminist versions of kinship and community – from radical lesbian feminism to posthumanism. The article also gives a historical and cultural background to the position of the childfree woman.