Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen
Sarah E. Maier and Rachel M. Friars
Anthem Press, 2025, 226 pages
$110.00

Reviewed by Atlanta Tsiaoukkas

Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen begins with a discussion of the 2021 SNL skit “Lesbian Period Drama.” This introduction documents the notorious rise across popular culture of visual media tropes depicting frail Victorian women engaged in tense romantic affairs. Accepting the display of satire as confirmation, Sarah E. Maier and Rachel M. Friars study neo-Victorian cinema and television in the past twenty-five years that center lesbianism, asking why filmmakers are drawn to the long nineteenth century when narrating queer female-centered stories.

Beginning with the early 2000s adaptations of Sarah Waters’ novels—Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith—which triggered an enthusiasm for indulgent narratives of queer Victorian romance, Maier and Friars guide the reader through a broad range of material. Focusing on British and North American productions, with the notable exception of Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, it is undoubtable that this monograph represents the most complete assessment thus far of the lesbian period drama as a subgenre of historical cinema. Their forays into the American West with Godless (Frank) and The World to Come (Fastvold) were particularly insightful in their expansion of the geographic landscape of what is considered neo-Victorian cinema, examining how the conventionally masculine genre of the Western is queered by the inclusion of lesbian stories.

At times, Maier and Friars’ survey would have benefitted from a tighter focus, particularly in those chapters on biofictions like Lizzie (Macneil) and Ammonite (Lee), where the details of the cinematic narrative and historical accuracy meander far from the text’s central focus on lesbians on screen. Overall, Maier and Friars tell a contemporary nuanced story about declining spectacle in the depiction of neo-Victorian lesbian performances while emphasizing the emotional dimensions of these romantic relationships.

Despite frequently turning to the perspectives of directors in their analysis of neo-Victorian cinema, I was surprised to find that Maier and Friars spent little time considering the lack of lesbian professionals involved in the production of these films and television series. Across their selected corpus, only two leading actors publicly identify as queer: Kristen Stewart of Lizzie and Adéle Haenel of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Similarly, only one director of the included films identifies as a lesbian, Sciamma, also of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. For a monograph that generously turns to the authority of the director on many occasions, this absence will be apparent to any lesbian reader wondering why period dramas rarely include lesbians in the creation of lesbian stories.

A similar limitation may be noted in the decision to use the term ‘lesbian’ over more inclusive terminology. Lesbian is not a term that is used frequently in neo-Victorian period dramas, since it is an identifier that only came to popular usage in the twentieth century. Its modern use in describing both real historical people and fictional portrayals of neo-Victorians on screen risks rendering some women characters’ sexualities less visible. Not all the women depicted in Maier’s and Friars’ corpus are shown as exclusively interested in relationships with other women—in The Confessions of Frannie Langton (Harkin), for example, Marguerite also has relationships with men. Whilst the last quarter century of neo-Victorian representation has affirmed that lesbians did exist in the past, the existing scholarship has not made sufficient room for the possibility of bi- and pansexualities, which continue to be historical and cinematic impossibilities.

Maier and Friars’ Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen offers a valuable retrospective of the rich neo-Victorian lesbian narratives in the first decades of the twenty-first century that I hope will ignite enthusiasm for further investigations. Their multifaceted analysis, encompassing feminist, queer, and decolonial insights, is a significant contribution to the field.

Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a UK-based writer and researcher currently working towards a PhD on queer Victorian schoolgirls and their homoerotic friendships. Find her on Instagram @aatlanta_aa and Substack girlishh.substack.com.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics
Rupert Kinnard
Stacked Deck Press, 2025, 278 pages
$34.95

Reviewed by Julia M. Allen

Allow me to introduce to you Professor I. B. Gittendowne, otherwise known as Rupert Kinnard, the creator of the first Black gay and lesbian comic strip. The strip ran for over twenty years in a variety of alternative and queer periodicals, and now, Kinnard has collected these pointedly hilarious gems into a beautifully designed and produced 11 ¾” by 9 ¼” hardcover volume: Ooops…I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics. Beginning with his first cartoon character, the Brown Bomber, Professor I. B. Gittendowne deploys the most effective and universally available persuasive tool—humor—to topple racist, sexist, and homophobic absurdities. The four-panel strip grew to feature two inimitable main characters: the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé. Perpetually nineteen years old, the Brown Bomber (named after boxing champ Joe Louis) is an endearingly innocent, buff, single-gloved, non-violent gay superhero; his side-kick, Diva, is a Ph.D.-holding lesbian educator—honoring, Kinnard tells us, the many strong, intelligent women in his life. Together, the two create a depth of social analysis and action that could not have been achieved by a single character.

In 278 lavishly-illustrated pages, Kinnard tells the story of how he developed the strip over the years. A native of Chicago, Kinnard began his artistic career as a student at Cornell College, a small liberal arts school in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. At first, the strip’s only regular character was the Brown Bomber (B.B.), who appeared in the weekly student newspaper, addressing various institutional problems. B.B. was joined at times by the Vanilla Cremepuff, a barely disguised college president, viewed askance for clueless inaction on racial issues. After three and a half years—and wildly-successful campus Brown Bomber T-shirt sales—the Brown Bomber came out as gay.

After graduating in 1979 and moving to Portland, Oregon, Kinnard began publishing Brown Bomber strips in a short-lived local gay and lesbian newspaper, the NW Fountain. A few years later, the Brown Bomber began gracing the pages of a new queer publication, Just Out, where he was soon joined by Diva Touché Flambé, who offered transformative visions and actions to assuage the Brown Bomber’s dismay at the irrationality he often encountered. In addition to occasionally displaying certain mystical powers when nothing else would suffice—e.g., turning an unrepentant LA police officer into a pig—Diva introduces a therapeutic device called slapthology, promoting clear thinking in the recalcitrant with a slap upside the head. “Wow!” says a character, post-slap, “My mind feels as fresh as a breath mint! I guess most written history has centered around the accomplishments of white people!” Kinnard reflects, “I saw myself as being part Diva and part Bomber.”

A job loss in Portland led Kinnard to move to the Bay Area, where Cathartic Comics flourished in the SF Weekly, an alternative paper, for seven years. During this time, Kinnard reinvented his author persona as Prof. I. B. Gittendowne. When the SF Weekly changed hands, ending that paper’s run of Cathartic Comics, Kinnard returned to Portland. Kinnard’s involvement in a life-changing car accident brought the weekly strip to a close, but did not alter the enthusiasm of his fan base or change Kinnard’s dedication to the persuasive use of art and humor as an avenue to social justice. We can only be grateful that he has spent his recent years compiling and designing this celebration of B.B. and the Diva.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! features hundreds of Cathartic Comics strips which otherwise would have vanished along with the newsprint on which they appeared. The artistry is superb, every panel full of energy as characters interact with each other and react to their world’s latest outrages. The Brown Bomber almost always looks the same—wearing the same tennis shoes and over-sized athletic socks, the same shorts, same cape, same boxing glove on his right hand, same scarf tied on his head. The elegant Diva, however, rarely wears the same outfit twice.

In the text accompanying the strips and other illustrations, Kinnard describes both his choices of drawing tools and his artistic and graphic design education. He narrates the development of Cathartic Comics from his childhood to 2025, providing explanatory detail for strips that comment on events with which some readers may not be familiar, such as Ronald Reagan’s gaffe during the 1988 Republican National Convention when he tried to say, “facts are stubborn things,” but actually said, “facts are stupid things.”

Occasionally, I found myself losing the thread of the narrative text as I immersed myself in strip after strip from a given era. Later, I discovered two compact chronologies near the end of the book. I’d suggest that readers look at these first for an overview, then read from the beginning. I should also add that some typos, misspellings, and punctuation errors have crept into the text, but, while unfortunate, they do not lead to misreadings.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! offers hours of joyful reading, just when we need it.

Julia M. Allen is Professor Emerita, English, Sonoma State University. She is the author of Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, SUNY Press, 2013 and co-author with Jocelyn H. Cohen of Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press, Lever Press, 2023.

Encounters for the Living and the Dead
Jameela F. Dallis
River River Books, 2025, 106 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Encounters for the Living and the Dead is a first collection of poetry by Jameela F. Dallis. She opens this rich and fecund poetic exploration with an epigraph quoted from bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions: “No matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love we can live as if born again, not forgetting the past but seeing it in a new way, letting it live inside us in a new way” (hooks, 129). With this epigraph, the poet introduces us to the organic function of memory and the connection to our past as she both mourns and celebrates our ancestors, grandmothers, cousins, and friends. She continues: “Altarworks are poems for people who’ve passed on—some I’ve known and loved. I imagine the poems being a part of an altar thick with candles and melted wax like my own” (85).

The presence of death in life, appearing like a pearl inside an oyster, forms a recurrent theme in her work, as in her poem titled “Three of Swords”:

I remember smelling the sweat, the turpentine— / that scent that was always always reminding me that you would die. / That scent the shape of something rotten, maybe fecund, / but still something I wish I could walk into again— / its memory is something that resurrects / my worry for you and then dissolves (11).

An oyster appears in many of her poems as a symbol of the poet’s eternal love for the sea. For example, in her poem “See Me Now,” the poet describes the fortune she had to cross the ocean four times, to travel throughout Europe, and to dine on gourmet food in many countries. She relishes seafood as she feeds her imagery: “Himalayan black salt / and pink rare salmon swim into / the silver threads of memory” in “I, Origin” (19). Jameela writes of her insistent love for the food and memories of the sea: “Holding onto my oyster dreams / nowhere to be / released from weighty history I gather my dreams / sup at your banquet” in “Oyster Dreams” (38).

Ekphrastic verse pervades this lush collection. Jameela writes poems to celebrate the paintings of artists like Henri Matisse and Robert Motherwell. She devotes the entire section three to “Ekphrastic Encounters”—poems in tribute to the work of other artists from David Bowie to Helen Frankenthaler. In the Notes, she records:

Henri Matisse’s ‘Les Betes De La Mer (1950)’ inspires not only the eponymous poem but resonates throughout the entire second part. In what feels like kismet, in high school, I completed a master copy of Matisse’s work when I thought I’d become a professional visual artist one day. . . Thus, passionate love, heartbreak, cheekiness, and more research into marine life than I ever imagined imbue this. . . book (86).

This fine debut collection is presented with the blessing of poets—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Jaki Shelton Green, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Emilia Phillips, and Jameela’s “mentors, teachers, professors, advisors, family members, and benevolent ancestors. . .” (90). Gabrielle Calvocoressi has written about Dallis: “So few of us are willing to experience life fully if it means being confronted with our deepest hungers and the deep harms we have been forced to live through. So few of us can sit with the living and the dead with the kind of generosity that Dallis does, the deep curiosity, the love” (Praise).

The poet Jameela F. Dallis is a resident of Durham, North Carolina. Her publications include poetry, interviews, art criticism, and literary scholarship. Her work has appeared in prestigious journals such as Feminist Studies, Honey Literary, and The Fight and the Fiddle under the auspices of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Jameela holds a B.A. in English from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals.

Where Shadows Meet
Patrice Caldwell
Wednesday Books, 2025, 320 pages
$20.00

Reviewed by Mandee Loney

Where Shadows Meet by Patrice Caldwell is a young adult novel perfect for lovers of vampires and those looking for a Black lesbian romantasy. Though the book falls into the YA category, it deals with some adult themes, as described by the author:

“Please know that this story contains depictions of blood (including the drinking of blood), death (including that of multiple family members), kidnapping, psychological abuse, murder, systems of oppression (pulling from my family’s history in the American South and the use of enslaved Black people as disposable labor but of course unfortunately relating to many different people across the world), and violence of all sorts. There’s also a character who has self-harmed and the showing of, and reference to, those scars. The actual self-harm occurred years prior and is not depicted.”

While these themes can be heavy, each develops both characters and plot. One character, Najja, experiences multiple deeply traumatic events that spur her into action, and Caldwell handles each instance with care and makes sure to not glorify them. Caldwell’s family history adds another layer to the text, as this history informs the world Caldwell creates.

The story follows the point of view of three main characters: Favre, Leyla, and Najja. A fourth character, Thana, appears in many of Favre’s chapters, but does not have any written from her perspective. Caldwell hooks readers immediately with a captivating fairytale-esque narrative of two young goddesses meeting in an enchanted forest. Favre, who is a touch naive, encounters Thana, who seemingly has ulterior motives.

The narrative then skips to over a thousand years later, when we are introduced to Najja, a girl born with the gift of prophecy, and Leyla, soon to be Queen of the Mnaran vampires. In the first half of the novel, Caldwell’s focus is the careful development of each character with nuanced personalities.

The plot can be somewhat difficult to follow at times, as there are frequent shifts between both time and characters’ points of view. However, readers who untangle the timeline will be rewarded with rich parallels between the pair of characters in each time period. Caldwell juxtaposes the somewhat toxic relationship between Thana and Favre with the blossoming relationship between Najja and Leyla, prompting readers to question—what should someone sacrifice in the name of love?

While the pacing of Where Shadows Meet feels a little off-kilter at times, Caldwell has crafted a compelling premise with room to build on the foundation of this mythical world. This sapphic take on the vampire origin story plays the incredibly important role of centering Black lesbian characters in a genre that often excludes them.

Mandee Loney interned with Sinister Wisdom and is continuing her pursuit of a career in editing and publishing.

The Lamb
Lucy Rose
Harper, 2025, 336 pages
$22.39

Reviewed by Sydney Minor

Lucy Rose’s debut novel, The Lamb, blends elements of folktale, horror, and coming-of-age genres to craft a deeply original story about cannibalism and what it can metaphorically represent. The use of cannibalism as a metaphor in art and literature dates back to Greek mythology and early modern literature, but it has experienced a resurgence in recent years with works like Yellowjackets, Bones and All, Fresh, A Certain Hunger, and Tender Is the Flesh.

I approached the novel with some skepticism, concerned it might be derivative or capitalizing on a trend. Instead, I found it to be one of the most allegorically rich interpretations of this trope.
The story follows Margot, a young girl living on a homestead near the wilderness, raised in a household where cannibalism is the norm. Her mother, Mama, takes in strays—lost and wandering travelers—makes them comfortable, then kills them to use as food. When another woman, Eden, stumbles upon the homestead and embeds herself into the family, the dynamic Margot is used to begins to shift. As the story unfolds, tension builds toward an inevitable conclusion.

Both Margot and Mama grapple with inner conflicts that linger throughout the novel. Margot begins to question the morality of Mama’s actions, while also confronting her own emerging sexuality. Mama, on the other hand, struggles with her identity as a mother and the tension between that role and her personal autonomy. These internal battles are reflected in their relationships with consumption. Margot, for instance, eats a strand of her crush’s hair, hoping it will keep her close, while Mama’s relentless hunger mirrors her desire for independence and selfhood.

The novel also offers a compelling exploration of the theoretical concept of abjection. Coined by philosopher Julia Kristeva and often used in horror analysis, abjection refers to the human response of horror or disgust when faced with a breakdown in meaning—typically when social order collapses or the boundary between self and other disintegrates. These boundaries form the foundation of identity, morality, and stability, so their dissolution provokes deep psychological discomfort.

Cannibalism is perhaps the most taboo, and therefore abject, subject in horror. To make it more palatable or comprehensible, narratives often depict the cannibal as animalistic or the victim as less than human. The Lamb employs both: Mama sees her victims—the strays—as subhuman, while Margot increasingly views Mama as monstrous for her actions.

The most powerful aspect of the novel is the atmosphere and setting that Rose constructs through deliberate ambiguity. Much like a fairytale, The Lamb takes place in an unspecified time and location—an ambiguous part of England. The homestead feels otherworldly in its descriptions, yet occasional references to televisions or telephones snap the reader back to a recognizable reality. About a quarter of the book occurs at Margot’s school or during her bus rides, further grounding the story and amplifying its tragedy through contrast with the everyday world.

The novel is also highly readable. With around seventy chapters, each only three to five pages long, it’s easy to move through quickly—I finished it in about two days. While this structure may reflect a broader cultural shift toward shorter attention spans, it also builds a strong sense of momentum and looming dread as the story progresses.

The Lamb is a dark, genre-defying, and thought-provoking novel that will keep you on edge from beginning to end.

Sydney Minor (she/her) is a New York-born, London-based writer and musician currently interning with Sinister Wisdom. She recently completed her undergraduate studies at the Royal College of Music and will begin a master’s in musicology at Cambridge University this autumn, with a focus on the intersection of queer studies and twentieth-century opera. You can find more of her ramblings regarding music, art, and culture on her Substack, Salome’s Veil.

In Thrall
Jane DeLynn
Semiotext(e), 2024, 272 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Lindsey Blaser

“Of course not, my dear, every quiver of your feverish sensibility holds me in thrall (143).”

Jane DeLynn’s In Thrall is a delicious read charting the affair between a budding lesbain and her English teacher in 1960s New York. While the inappropriate dynamic of the pair’s relationship is the hook, it’s far from the purpose of this novel.

Our hopelessly tragic protagonist, Lynn, is a timeless representation of many queer women’s experiences. Dismaying moments of forgetting to breathe, not being able to eat her Milky Way breakfasts anymore, and inexplicably being drawn to someone no one else understands—are niche experiences that broadly hold familiarity for the vast majority of queer youth.

The novel avoids delving into the intricacies of the couple’s relationship, especially their sexual encounters, and focuses instead on transferrable moments of Lynn’s queer adolescence. Lynn speaks only of unsavory experiences with her clumsy boyfriend, Wolf, so that all we read is of jamming fingers and coercion. When Lynn and Miss Maxfield enter the bedroom, it feels like a curtain closes, and the reader is left with a privacy which feels respectful, non-sexualized, and tender.

Miss Maxfield, having multiple student affairs in the past, is most objectively a predator. But it doesn’t feel that way as you read it. DeLynn wrote a novel in which bits of their interactions feel special and Miss Maxfield seems nurturing, which is conflicting as a reader. One is left to wrestle with the question of whether or not any part of their relationship is endorsable. And of course, it isn’t. Why the women are even attracted to one another is a mystery, feeling underdeveloped and vague, as if some otherworldly force is drawing the two together. What is it Lynn even likes about her? What do we, as readers, even like about Lynn?

Quippy remarks with her friends, an unbreachable wall up with her parents, and new vocabulary flaunted as soon as she learns it, are features that make Lynn relatable. The reader regresses to feeling like a teenage girl, especially one unraveling her sexuality. Lynn jumps to tragic extremes, finds her boyfriend disgusting (yet keeps him on the side), and panics when she reads fear-mongering homophobic texts. Basking in a tragic hero state, she believes a life of loneliness, crew cuts, and wearing green on Mondays is all that awaits her as lesbian. It’s almost healing to read this in 2025 and say, “My dear. . . ” alongside Miss Maxfield. How good things will become for us all!

Therein lies the draw to Miss Maxfield, someone who can offer assurance that Lynn’s identity isn’t life-ruining. She is someone who we, as twenty-first-century readers, view as a lifeline, while Lynn toys with the idea of throwing herself off a roof. Miss Maxfield is a voice of queer reason, giving Lynn grounds to believe it is more than okay to be gay. I just wish she was 16, too.

Lindsey Blaser holds a bachelor’s degree in Critical Diversity Studies from the University of San Francisco, and is a Sinister Wisdom intern based in New Jersey.

I Hope This Helps
Samiya Bashir
Nightboat Books, 2025, 144 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Seven years after Field Theories—Samiya Bashir’s third poetry collection which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award for Poetry—comes her recent work in I Hope This Helps. Bashir’s work, both individual and collective, has been published, printed, and performed across America and abroad. Samiya Bashir is a poet, librettist, performer, and multimedia artist. Her honors include a Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, and two Michigan Hopwood Poetry Awards. She currently serves as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University.

Bashir has edited magazines and anthologies of literature and visual arts. In 2002, she cofounded Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBTQ+ writers of African descent. Also, she served as an executive director of Lambda Literary from 2022 to 2023 where her mission was to elevate the work of LGBTQ+ writers, affirm the value of their stories, and advocate for queer and trans writers.

I Hope This Helps explores the metamorphosis of the artist despite the despair brought on by isolation and the limits of our social realities: time, money, work, and widespread global crises. Her poems raise the question: “What can it mean to thrive in the world as it is?” Both within and extending beyond traditional academic settings, Bashir’s work creates, employs, and teaches a restorative poetics, turning her moments of painful experience into triumphs of witness, healing, and change. Her meditation reveals her vulnerable inner life and how she has evolved into an artist.

Bashir knew at the age of eight that she wanted to become a writer. She taught herself how to read early and started keeping a journal. Both of her parents were public school teachers. She was encouraged by her grandfather’s nephew, who was a journalist, to begin writing. Other early influences on her work were hearing June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” in 1991 and 1992, and the murder of Rodney King.

Subsequently, Bashir learned the importance of community among writers. She has said about the writer’s life: “If there's any utility to being a poet. . . it’s our job. To help people articulate what’s happening. And know they're not alone in the articulating of it.”

To Bashir, “The poem itself is something alive—not just existing on the page.” Bashir has invested time in the theater and her operas and installations have traveled throughout the country. “Awareness,” she says, “is the chief motivation to art. You can be distracted and miss it. We’re taught to be distracted.” We have been distracted from attention to the fates of certain populations. “When you’re talking to people of color you must have to acknowledge trauma.”

In I Hope This Helps, Bashir’s work benefits from her well-rounded artistic perspective. Her poems thrive in the form of typographies, cartographies, musical scores, and photographs (e.g. the poems “Negro Being” and “Freakish Beauty,” (102-103). Other poems in the collection draw on Bashir’s lifelong practice of journaling. The poem “Letter from Exile” highlights her sojourn in Rome after winning a coveted prize:

“I am still, in theory, one of two 2019-20 Rome Prize Fellows in Literature. The year marked the 125th anniversary of the American Academy in Rome: a rare two-poet year. Bold and brilliant Nicole Sealey holds the second prize.”

“We are, together, the Academy’s first Black women Literature Fellows. Ever. Being a Negro First™ just feels so last century” (50).

This prose poem startles the reader with its insistence that the poet’s stay in Rome under the auspices of the prize, during the pandemic, was a form of exile, an expatriate experience both physical and intellectual.

Of the Italian language she writes in the poem/journal:

“The Venetian etymology of ciao is one of enslavement. Whether coming or going one said schiavo: I am your slave. This was, I guess, in case someone forgot” (53).

And of her return to the States she writes:

“Most days America screams to anyone who’ll listen how it hates me so much it would rather kill us all than let me live” (55).

The poet Erica Hunt has written of this new collection: “What do we do to live and thrive—as Black people, joyous and queer, new neighbors and strangers, our full humanity—dwarfed in the shadows by towers of power, distraction, and fear? Bashir’s poetry leans into these questions using her superpower—pausing to listen—over-hearing and hearing over—‘hearing’ under and rewriting, reinscribing her Journey—through the ‘twinkle textured disco ball Jenga set’—and shows the reader how creative power fuels us to begin again. And again.”

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals.

Lesbian Styles in Cinema
Vicki Karaminas and Judith Beyer
Edinburgh University Press, 2025, 192 pages
$120.00

Reviewed by Atlanta Tsiaoukkas

Looking at the countless publications on queer cinema and costume, it is surprising that until this year a comprehensive survey of the lesbian aesthetic in cinema had not manifested, and, as such, Vicki Karaminas’ and Judith Beyer’s Lesbian Styles in Cinema offers a timely investigation of lesbian cinema and queer fashion history. Working across a vast array of films from the 1929 German silent Pandora’s Box (Pabst) to last year’s Love Lies Bleeding (Glass), Karaminas and Beyer examine style on screen as a gateway through which to explore expressions of ‘lesbian subjectivity,’ ultimately concluding that contemporary cinema, with its loosened grip on gender binaries, increasingly troubles the established conventions of lesbian style.

Moving through lesbian film history, the sheer number of films included in this relatively short volume is both impressive and perhaps overambitious—some films receive a level of passing attention that may disappoint, and few receive the extensive critical analysis that, when executed, offers the work’s most exciting insights. Lesbian Styles in Cinema begins with coming-of-age narratives, particularly examining masculinity and femininity in lesbian cinema. Chapter two moves on to stories of seduction, continuing the theme of masculinity as a distinctly visible expression of lesbian style. Chapters three and four turn to biopics and period dramas, though the line between these is a fine one that is not drawn out sufficiently to justify separating the chapters into two. The subsequent chapter on crime thrillers is undoubtedly the most expansive, especially where the styling of queer femme fatales speaks to a lesbian visual pleasure. Chapter six focuses on the central implication of Karaminas’ and Beyer’s argument, that contemporary lesbian cinema, such as Bottoms (Seligman) and Drive-Away Dolls (Coen), disintegrates the butch-femme dichotomy in favour of androgyny.

The generic approach taken in Lesbian Styles in Cinema limits the efficaciousness of Karaminas’ and Beyer’s narratives, obscuring their most stimulating observations. The sporadic discussions of colour, for example, across films such as Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche), Blue Jean (Oakley) and Vita & Virginia (Button), suggest a pattern that would have benefited from extended thematic analysis rather than passing references across various chapters. The same could be said of discussions on school uniform, where the analysis of Collete’s uniform in both reality and the biopic would have made most sense alongside the first chapter’s exploration of Olivia (Audry) and Mädchen in Uniform (Sagan)—a missed opportunity to compare and contrast the uniform as a lesbian style symbol. My hope is that scholars notice the patterns laid out by Karaminas and Beyer and take the initiative to explore them further.

The ostensible aim of Lesbian Styles in Cinema is to demonstrate how “film uses lesbian style to construct characters that appeal to lesbian, queer and mainstream audiences in studio films and independent cinema” (5). Such a distinction would have benefited from greater extrapolation, as would Karaminas’ and Beyer’s preference for lesbian over other more inclusive terms such as sapphic or queer, in light of the fact that many of the characters featured in the text’s ‘lesbian cinema’ do not explicitly identify as such. Similarly, the project of lesbian style in cinema would have been bolstered by a more comprehensive understanding of the oft-repeated descriptor, androgynous, which is applied broadly and unevenly throughout the analysis. Whilst definitional disputes and gender spectrum discourse may be tedious at times in academic literature, a greater level of specificity when discussing concepts such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘androgynous’ may have brought more nuance into the discussion of lesbian cinema and style.

While Lesbian Styles in Cinema would have benefited from a narrower focus that attended more closely to the theoretical issues of gender expression and lesbian identities, this timely intervention is undoubtedly a boon for the study of lesbian and sapphic identity and style in cinema. Karaminas and Beyer have effectively demonstrated the richness of lesbian cinema and its scope ripe for further investigation of the nebulous yet distinctive lesbian style.

Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a UK-based writer and researcher currently working towards a PhD on queer Victorian schoolgirls and their homoerotic friendships. Find her on Instagram @aatlanta_aa

Living at Night
Mariana Romo-Carmona
Spinsters Ink, 1997, 257 pages
$8.00 (used)

Reviewed by Mel Oliver

Living at Night brings us into the intimate and brutal world of Erica García, a young, working-class Puerto Rican lesbian navigating life in a white, suburban Connecticut institution. Through clear, honest prose, the novel exposes the violence of care systems, where patients are heavily sedated—their bodies regulated and recorded with cold precision—yet remain defiantly human. Erica’s role as a worker within this system reveals not just the cruelty of institutional control but also the ways women of color survive, adapt, and quietly resist within oppressive structures. Though Erica cannot save everyone, she comes to a pivotal understanding: she can reclaim her own life.

This story deeply resonated with me, as two of my aunties spent decades working in hospice and state-run institutions similar to the one described in the novel. Their labor—quiet, often invisible, and profoundly gendered—carries emotional weight and historical silence. Reading about Erica felt like reading about them, and I couldn’t help but wonder what liberation they might have imagined for themselves had they encountered this book, not just in terms of sexuality, but in terms of self-worth, bodily autonomy, and the possibility of a life beyond survival. One of my aunts, a Christian lesbian, has endured abuse in both heterosexual and same-gender relationships. I see now how she may have clung to her work not just out of duty, but in search of the care she herself was denied, perhaps imagining that love and tenderness might be found in the act of caregiving. My other aunt, who left an abusive marriage and retired from institutional work, may have found a rare form of agency and control in that setting, something the rest of her life never offered.

I grieve the silence between them, the solitude they endured. If only they had known their shared pain could be a bridge, not a wall. This novel is more than fiction—it is a mirror for the generations of women who have labored, loved, and lost in silence. It invites us to imagine what liberation might look like for the caregivers, not just the cared-for. And it insists that working-class women, especially queer women of color, deserve stories that reflect their complexity, their courage, and their right to be seen.

Mel Oliver is a Black Indian (Choctaw heritage with Munsee roots), environmental educator, poet, researcher, and lover of crafts, dogs/dingos, and music! https://melsorbit.carrd.co/

Lowest Common Denominator
Pirkko Saisio, translated by Mia Spangenberg
Two Lines Press, 2024, 312 pages
$23.00

Reviewed by Jules Gellert

Lowest Common Denominator is a fictionalized memoir from the well-known Finnish lesbian author and actor, Pirkko Saisio. As part of her Helsinki trilogy, Saisio tells the story of her early childhood as the only child of communist parents in the years following World War II, as well as the Winter and Continuation Wars between Finland and the Soviet Union. Through the eyes of the young narrator, readers see her confusion in trying to understand the adults around her and concepts such as religion, gender, and class. The story also jumps to the narrator in the present day, which follows her as she copes with her father’s death. This book functions like a stream of memories, bouncing between the past and present and different views of the self. Saisio explores her self-image through her character in the novel, playing with the first- and third-person points of view, almost as a voyeur to her own thoughts and memories.

Translated by Mia Spangenberg, Lowest Common Denominator is written beautifully and fluidly. Though the pace is slow and sometimes contains anecdotes that I did not find particularly useful or interesting, the book overall uniquely captures the narrator’s childhood and its connections to her adult life. The original title of the book, Pienin yhteinen jaettava, literally translated as “smallest common factor,” might better represent the young narrator’s experiences as a foundation for her adult self, depicted as a more conventional—though lesbian—woman and mother. Saisio discusses gender and sexuality through her childhood gaze, from her learning about Jesus, who “isn’t a man or a woman” (p. 200), to her devotion to Miss Lunova, an announcer at the amusement park. Despite the lack of a more explicit exploration and focus on gender and sexuality, for readers interested in a very personal book about childhood amid political crises and a slowly changing culture—especially regarding the status of women—it is definitely worth the read. Though the book is approachable, I recommend doing a quick read on the political climate of this time period in Finland to better understand the driving forces behind the story.

Jules Gellert is currently a master’s student in Helsinki and a Sinister Wisdom intern for the summer of 2025. She spends her time reading, studying, and making art.