For Shame!

Chapter 5 engages with the reclaimed “bad objects” or “guilty pleasures” of the queer canon that, once reviled by lesbian and gay liberationists, have acquired cult fandom and signal ways to liberate “contaminated” forms of enjoyment. Frameline film festival series on women-in-prison films (1990) and lesbian vampire films (1987), as well as MoMA’s program on Russ Meyers’s sexploitation films provide fascinating examples of lesbian feminists’ concerns with women’s representations in queer films that shift by the late 1980s. To this end, the chapter connects the critical efforts of queer feminist thinkers such as B. Ruby Rich, Judith Mayne, and Andrea Weiss to reparative thinking in queer-of-color critique. Ultimately, this criticism correlated with diachronic programming techniques, which loosened the traumatic grips of individual texts, and thereby transmuted forced viewer identification with clichés into spectators’ risible recognition of the tropes.