Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium

Taking up such issues as mainstreaming, the male gaze, and female masculinity, this book puts forward provocative readings of little explored texts and offers new insights into the contemporary representation of lesbians.

"This book constitutes a significant contribution to three critically related disciplines: lesbian and gay studies, cultural studies, and media studies. There is still a great need for work of this sort, which looks at changing representations of lesbians and lesbian sexuality at a time when media culture has come to embrace male homosexuality as the sine qua non of legible and tolerable gay culture. Lesbians continue to get short shrift, not only in terms of media representation, but in terms of scholarly focus and debate as well. Beirne challenges that tendency and writes with sophistication, confidence, and intelligence about the ways in which past and current discourses of gay rights, queer theory, lesbian-feminism, homophobia, misogyny and sex radicalism continue to contradictorily inform and perform the postures of allegedly new gay women." - Dana Heller, Professor and Director of the Humanities Institute and Graduate Program, Old Dominion University

"This is a very important work, in that it gives concrete evidence that the alleged schism between old and new guard sexualities is neither definitive nor insurmountable." - Sara E. Cooper, Associate Professor of Spanish, Multicultural, and Gender Studies, California Sate University, Chico

Rebecca Beirne is Lecturer in Film, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium (2008), co-editor (with James Bennett) of Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand (2011), and has published multiple essays discussing queer representation in popular culture.