Popular cinema and lesbian interpretive strategies

In its examination of the relationship between popular film and lesbian vie wing practices, this study attempts to more fully elucidate current ideas a round audience engagement and forms of cultural reception. Drawing on 15 in -depth interviews conducted in Western Canada in 1996, the results clearly demonstrate the existence of active lesbian viewers, whose interpretations of popular film are intimately informed by lesbian-specific life experience s and cultural competencies. Although the social conditions which create th e need for resistant viewing are themselves oppressive, subversion of mains tream film holds out some possibility of empowerment fur lesbian viewers.