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