In/Visible Women: Transtemporal Black Lesbian Bodies in The Watermelon Woman (1996) and The Mark of Lilith (1986)

Abstract

This essay explores black lesbian visibility and transtemporality through The Watermelon Woman (1996) and The Mark of Lilith (1986). Both films are self-reflexive meta-commentaries that centre black lesbian subjectivities, while also attempting to locate black lesbians in history (The Watermelon Woman) or in myth (The Mark of Lilith). I argue that the filmmakers resist the colonial gaze by employing self-reflexivity to represent themselves, engaging audiences intersubjectively in a radical act of witnessing. Further, they enter their physical bodies into myth, history, narrative present and among future audiences, rendering the black lesbian body radically visible across time. Addressing visibility from socio-political othering to the act of seeing in film phenomenology, I assert that the prevailing Eurocentric patriarchal culture constituted itself against the other by exorcising the other from visibility. As explored in spectatorship film theory, being made invisible created a critical separation between the black lesbian spectator and film narrative. That separation is also a space of radical possibility. Employing the deviant gaze theory, I argue that black lesbian spectators subvert dominant film narratives by inscribing themselves into film worlds via misreadings of film texts. This informs black lesbian filmmakers, who further radical representation through self-reflexivity and self-insertion. Close examination of the films highlights how self-reflexivity enables black lesbian film authorship. Finally, I trace how self-reflexivity engages audiences intersubjectively with the filmmakers through witnessing and testimony. The physical presence of the filmmakers fills the lacunas created by an erased queer history. Audiences bear witness to the embodied black lesbian experience.