Queer female producers of cultural texts must wrestle with the nature of lesbian subjectivity. In the wake of the complete destabilizing of subject formation that has resulted from the theoretical insights provided by a postmodern perspective, such artists face the challenge of "reconstruct[ing] lesbian subject positions without reinstating essentialisms" (Dolan 42). Dunye has risen to this challenge, as the characters in The Watermelon Woman do not present a monolithic view of any featured group. As Dolan argues, "Lesbians disappear under the liberal humanist insistence that they are just like everyone else. Difference is effectively elided by readability" (44). In this film, there is no unified lesbian subject position, either black or white. Cheryl, Tamara, their white video store coworker Annie, Tamara's black girlfriend Stacy, and Diana are all very different types of lesbians. They have different styles of fashion, different race and gender politics, and distinctive personalities. For example, Cheryl and Tamara have short, close-shaven haircuts, while Diana has long hair and wears lipstick. Stacy is a student finishing her MBA degree at Wharton; Tamara is obsessed with sex; Cheryl is passionate about filmmaking; and Diana wants to "figure out her life."
However, the film moves beyond merely presenting the wide variety of lesbian subject positions. The film addresses what is required "to reconstruct a tenable lesbian subject position . . . somewhere between deconstruction and essentialism" (Dolan 53). Dolan specifies what this new representation of lesbian subjectivity will entail:
Reconstructing a variable lesbian subject position that will not rise like a phoenix in a blaze of essentialism from the ashes of deconstruction requires emptying lesbian references of imposed truths, whether those of the dominant culture or those of lesbian radical feminist communities [End Page 451] which hold their own versions of truth. The remaining, complex, different referent, without truth, remains dependent on the materiality of actual lesbians who move in and out of dominant discourse in very different ways because of their positions within race, class, and variant expressions of their sexuality--dragging at the margins of structure and ideology. (53)
The Watermelon Woman answers Dolan's call, by refusing to accept the heritage of racist and heterosexist Hollywood cinema, by interweaving questions of sexuality and race, and by presenting lesbians who have conflicted relationships to dominant ideology. Additionally, the binary oppositions of "good" and "bad" identities are similarly deconstructed, as the film avoids simply reversing the dominant characterizations that attribute positive connotations to straight and/or white people and negative ones to gay and/or black people.
Although black lesbians, real and imagined, present and historical, are the focus in this text, the film presents a more complex view of lesbian subjectivity. The contrast between Cheryl and Tamara, for example, not only reflects the variety of subject positions of black lesbians; it also reveals the way that oppressions and their internalizations are layered and intertwined. Tamara advocates black lesbian solidarity, yet she reveals her own sexism throughout the film. Tamara frequently encourages the single Cheryl to "cruise" for "cute girls" and declares that she hopes to "get some" from her girlfriend Stacy on an upcoming date. When Tamara criticizes Cheryl at the video store, telling her "All you do since you don't have a girlfriend is watch those boring old films," Cheryl retorts, "I'd rather watch films than black porn like you." In this way, the internalized sexism of some lesbian women is presented through the character of Tamara, who views women as sexual objects. As always, this portrayal is presented with humor. For instance, one of the films Tamara orders from the video store is called Bad Black Ballbusters; Tamara justifies her film choice to Cheryl: "I was curious to see what they look like without hair."
Cheryl is caught in the crossfire of the various vectors that pressure her identity. She is not a typical lesbian in Tamara's eyes because she is not obsessed with finding a girlfriend and because she does not visually objectify women. Tamara sees an inevitable connection between a lesbian identity and chasing women: "We're lesbians--remember, Cheryl? We're into female-to-female attraction. Anyway, you're the one who's supposed to be clocking all the girls--how long has it been since you've been with one, anyway?" Cheryl's lack of preoccupation with women is evidence to Tamara that Cheryl is not behaving authentically as a lesbian. Cheryl has other struggles as a lesbian. She feels "set up" by Diana, who invites her to dinner and then seduces her. After she sleeps with Diana, Cheryl tells us in a voiceover, "I'm still in shock over the whole having-sex-with-Diana thing. I've never done anything else like that before, let me assure you. The hip, swinging lesbian style isn't my forte. . . . I'm just an old-fashioned girl trying to keep up with the times." For many viewers, the idea that all lesbians are alike will be shattered by these depictions.
The film also reveals the instability of racial subjectivity. Bob, the owner of the video store, is a black man who oozes sexism--and heterosexism--in his mistreatment of the women who work for him, black and white. Lee Edwards, the black gay race film expert, knows nothing about the watermelon woman or Martha Page. He excuses his ignorance of these two women, telling Cheryl and Tamara, "Women are not my specialty." And black feminist essentialism is [End Page 452] likewise critiqued in this film. Tamara, Cheryl, and Annie film a poetry reading by "Sistah Sound" at the local women's community center. With African drumming for background rhythm, a black woman performs a poem that repeats "I am black woman, black woman, yes," in a scene that both celebrates and pokes fun at such gatherings.
Racial politics also influence the relationship between Tamara and Cheryl, which becomes increasingly conflicted as the film's narrative progresses. Tamara's opinion of Diana is predicated on her wariness of white women. Tamara sees Diana as trying to usurp the black lesbian's place in the world, calling her Cheryl's "wannabe black girlfriend." Tamara questions Cheryl's alliance to black women once she begins dating Diana, telling Cheryl, "I see that once again you're going out with a white girl acting like she wants to be black, and you're being a black girl acting like she wants to be white. What's up with you, Cheryl? Don't you like the color of your skin?" While Cheryl defends herself to Tamara--defensively asking, "Who's to say that dating somebody white doesn't make me black?"--she is clearly uncomfortable when Diana reveals that she was born in Jamaica, and even more disturbed by Diana's revelations that she has had black boyfriends in the past and that her "father's sister's first husband was an ex-Panther" whose name was "Tyrone Washington." 2 Moreover, both the white lesbian archivist as well as the white sister of Martha Page, with whom Diana has arranged an interview, treat Cheryl condescendingly. When Diana does not stand up to Mrs. Page-Fletcher when she refers to "all those coloreds" that Martha Page employed and when she denies her sister's lesbianism, Cheryl has had enough. Thus, while Cheryl rejects Tamara's essentialist view of black lesbian identity, she struggles with race dynamics in her relationship nonetheless.
Likewise, Cheryl argues against June Walker's call for Cheryl to eliminate Martha Page from her film. In a letter to Cheryl, the woman who was Fae Richards' lover for the last twenty years of her life says,
I was so mad that you mentioned the name of Martha Page. Why do you even want to include a white woman in a movie on Fae's life? Don't you know she had nothing to do with how people should remember Fae? I think it troubled her soul for the world to see her in those mammy pictures. . . . If you really are in "the family," you better understand that our family will only have each other. 3
Cheryl responds to June's letter in her last monologue, insisting that there is no one black lesbian subject position, and declaring that she might make different choices about the meaning of this black actress's legacy. Cheryl tells June, "I know she meant the world to you, but she also meant the world to me, and those worlds are different." She refuses to erase the history of Fae's romance with the white woman director from her film: "The moments she shared with you--the life she had with Martha, on and off the screen--those are precious moments, and nobody can change that." She then points to the generational differences in operation in this debate, "But what she means to me--a twenty-five-year-old black woman, means something else," explaining how this figure inspires her as a black, lesbian filmmaker.
This film calls into question the idea of "difference" itself. The character Annie, the young, white lesbian who works with Cheryl and Tamara in the video store, has blond streaks in her black hair and wears a dog collar. Cheryl and Annie get along well, but Tamara bristles at the girl's street style and sense of self-confidence. When Cheryl asks her why she so dislikes Annie, [End Page 453] Tamara retorts, "She gets on my last black lesbian nerve with all that piercing and hair dye business." When Cheryl reminds her that they also share a marginalized status--"Tamara, you know we're different, too"--Tamara reverts to segregationist and classist arguments to justify her denigration of Annie: "Yeah, but see we're not different amongst a group of ritzy black folk. I mean, we were there to get their business and to be professional. We weren't there to look like a bunch of hip-hop multicultural mess." She says that she is disgusted by Annie's way of dressing and by her dog collar. Later in the video store back room, Tamara tells Annie, "You're so helpful--you probably know a place to get a good clit piercing, don't you?" Annie responds, "Look Tamara, just because you and I are different doesn't mean you have to treat me like shit all the time." The conflict between these two women highlights the fragmentation and multiplicity in lesbian subject positions, as well as the way that different aspects of identity are sometimes at cross purposes with one another. This film undercuts the essentialist assumptions of both oppressive and liberatory positions, undermining a heterosexist view that lumps together all gay people, as well as an anti-racist view that would promote an essentialist view of all white people. In this way, the film moves beyond what hooks calls the "de-center[ing] of the white patriarchal gaze" (Dash and hooks 40) to question the racist heterosexist gaze, including the potentially homophobic gaze of non-white straight viewers, as well as the potentially racist gaze of white lesbian viewers. The film enacts this decentering both visually, as interracial lesbian romances are prominently pictured, and diegetically, through the conflicts of its characters. Revealing their racist and heterosexist agenda, the American Family Association labeled the film's depictions of lesbian sex "smut" (McAlister). However, the film forces even those viewers who are not on the "right wing" end of the political spectrum to confront their own prejudices.
The film also contains a complex presentation of class identity. The video store owner, Bob, wields power over his three female employees, incessantly berating them for not being familiar enough with what he calls "the Bob system," although they clearly know how to perform their jobs well. While Tamara and Cheryl barely make ends meet, and while Cheryl must work hard at two jobs in order to finance her film project, Diana is well-off financially, as indicated by the credit cards she flashes at the video store, by the spacious apartment she rents while she takes time off from school, and by the fact that she does not work during the time of the film, but volunteers with homeless children of color (a race dynamic that does not go unremarked upon by Tamara). In contrast to Diana's life of leisure, Cheryl and Tamara have had to resort to a "tape scam" at work in order to secure videos for themselves, films for Cheryl's research and porn movies for Tamara's enjoyment. They rent tapes under customers' names, review them, and return them, as Cheryl explains to Diana. Finally, we learn that Annie is a Bryn Mawr college graduate, yet she needs the job at the video store, pointing to the way that college degrees no longer guarantee security in the work force. Even the parodied lesbian archives (in the film called C.L.I.T.--the Center for Lesbian Information and Technology) struggle financially, relying on volunteer help and not having a catalogued organization yet in place. The documentary portions similarly present class dimensions of the characters' experiences. Fae Richards, we learn, was a maid before she became an actress. Black cast films eventually became passé in part because even black audiences wanted to see Hollywood films instead, as Lee Edwards explains to Cheryl and Tamara. Although Tamara points to the real connection between race, power, and wealth when she refers to "the white folks at the bank" at the film's outset, in this film, there are no clear correlations between race, gender, sexual orientation, and [End Page 454] class status. The film does not undertake an explicit class critique, but it does convey the oppressive elements of class and the way that class position meshes with and influences other types of identity formation.
