Notes 1. However, while the film breaks with convention in highlighting an interracial lesbian romance, its ultimate commentary on such relationships--especially between African-American and white women--is that they are unlikely to overcome the difficulties related to social dynamics that often plague such relationships. Class differences, including Diana's racist fetishization of the "Other," come between Cheryl and Diana in the end, and the film encourages us to speculate that racist social norms of the mid-century came between Fae Richards and Martha Page.
2. Scenes such as this only "work" in this film because they are exaggeratedly humorous and because they also ring true as well. It is likely that viewers are familiar with white women who fetishize people of color, and who date them in the spirit of this fetishization.
3. Here Walker invokes a phrase used throughout the film, "the family," slang for "homosexual," or, more specifically, "lesbian." In this passage, the character of June Walker makes it clear that "family" for her includes race and is limited to lesbians who are also women of color.
Works Cited Bobo, Jacqueline. Black Women as Cultural Readers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Dash, Julie, and bell hooks. "Dialogue Between bell hooks and Julie Dash." Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman's Film. New York: The New Press, 1992. 27-67.
Desert Hearts. Dir. Donna Deitch. Samuel Goldwyn, 1985.
Dolan, Jill. "'Lesbian' Subjectivity in Realism: Dragging at the Margins of Structure and Ideology." Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. 40-53.
Go Fish. Dir. Rose Troche. Samuel Goldwyn, 1994.
Gomez, Jewelle. "A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women." Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Ed. Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983. 110-23.
Gone with the Wind. Dir. Victor Fleming. MGM, 1939.
