In her book UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representation (1999), Patricia White offers sharp re-readings of films from Hollywood’s classical period (1930s to the 1960s). Unlike other film scholars who cover the same time span, White concentrates specifically on those films that lend themselves to lesbian re-interpretation by nature of their ‘queer-able’ female stars, like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Ethel Waters, as well as their subtexts, original adaptation sources, or ancillary texts that hint at the films’ queer meanings, including correspondence, film reviews, and audience reaction in that time period.

Written primarily for academics, UnInvited doesn't make for light reading--but if you're willing to work through the theoretical language, you'll find an illuminating take on lesbians, movies, text and subtext that is just as applicable to many films and TV shows today as the films of the 1930s.

White uses a wide variety of source materials outside of the films themselves to make cases for her “against the grain” readings. In particular, she examines how Hollywood produced female characters and stars desirable by women as well as men during the studios’ implementation of a self-regulation code enforced by the governing Production Code Administration that strictly prohibited “[s]ex perversion or any inference to it.”

The Production Code Administration (PCA) left the exact definition of “sex perversion” unnamed and therefore ambiguous. This ambiguity was deliberate, White asserts, citing a memo issued when the U.S. halted the re-release of the 1931 film Maedchen in Uniform (which was accused of having lesbian undertones), in which Code administrator Joseph Breen states “[t]he spirit of the Code precludes the development of any theme whatever possessing the flavor of sexual irregularity or perversion."

White points to this memo as an illustration of the fact that “not naming sometimes enhances a meaning," because "it is the 'spirit' of the text that prevails.”

It is the lesbian “spirit,” or the “ghost in the machine” that White, throughout UnInvited, tries to make palpable in an array of classics: femme star vehicles, maternal melodramas, gothic and horror films (specifically those with haunted house tropes), and films that feature female companions (read: lesbians), school teachers, or spinster characters.

White’s intricate re-readings of early films such as These Three, The Uninvited, The Haunting, and The Old Maid and her analysis of the star/character personas of actresses such as Katherine Hepburn, Ethel Waters, Mercedes McCambridge, and Agnes Moorehead are enjoyable, surprising at times, and smartly written. But it is her general theorizing of lesbian spectatorship that is the most compelling and useful for furthering queer media studies.

White puts emphasis on the viewer’s agency to fantasize beyond the content of the film, and the relevance of these negotiations between public discourse and the production of private meanings. She attacks feminist film theory’s lack of consideration for how sexual orientation affects identification and desire in viewing. By offering up the possibility of fantasy as agency for the queer viewer and insisting that “[the] project of lesbian and gay readings of “dominant” films is not simply a decoding process," but "a textual re-vision with the reader-critic as subject of its fantasy,” White seeks to empower the viewer to read lesbian subtext into these films.

The films of Classical Hollywood, White contends, are available to multiple retrospective readings through fantasy—including (begging for, actually) queer readings.

The larger point White makes in UnInvited is that what leaks through is as important as what is suppressed. The book’s title simultaneously references the tomboy Frankie’s sense of uninvitedness to the wedding party in 1952’s The Member of the Wedding, the ghostly parable of 1944’s The Uninvited, and the very uninvitedness of the lesbian gaze.

It's a gaze that White--crashing the party, exposing the hauntings in the house--invites back.

Get UnInvited from Amazon.com