‘I’m Straight, but I Kissed a Girl’: The Trouble with American Media Representations of Female-Female Sexuality

Nearly 20 years ago, Kitzinger (1987) argued that the shift in psychological research in the 1970s and 1980s toward a liberal-humanistic view of lesbians and gay men as ‘just like’ heterosexuals (rather than intrinsically deviant and pathological) was not, in fact, as positive and progressive as it might have seemed. Rather, she noted that this conceptualization actually reinforced the dominant social order by presenting same-sex sexuality as a matter of private lifestyle, thereby neutralizing its political challenge to heterosexuality. This was, of course, an insidiously effective way of maintaining the social institution of heterosexuality, given that outright condemnation of homosexuals had gradually become less socially acceptable. An analogous critique can and should be made regarding the ‘positive’ and ‘accepting’ portrayals of female same-sex sexuality that have increasingly proliferated in American entertainment media. Over the past 5–10 years, there has been an upsurge of openly lesbian (and less often, bisexual) characters and relationships on American films and television shows (recent films include The Hours, Chasing Amy, But I’m a Cheerleader; Gigli, Lost and Delirious, Everything Relative; television shows include Ellen, ER, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NYPD Blue, All My Children, Friends, JAG, Melrose Place, Popular, Once and Again, Nip/Tuck, K Street, Coupling, Queer as Folk). More interestingly, however, there have also been numerous depictions of presumably heterosexual women hinting at or experimenting with same-sex sexuality, a phenomenon that has been called ‘heteroflexibility’ (Essig, 2000) (films include Kissing Jessica Stein; 8 Women, Laurel Canyon; Heavenly Creatures, television shows include Ally McBeal, Friends, Will & Grace, Party of Five, Sex and the City – see also the recent Madonna/Britney Spears and Madonna/Christina Aguilera kisses on the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards: ‘Madonna smooches with Britney and Christina’ MTV, 2003). On the one hand, feminist psychologists might hopefully surmise that these mass