Expanding the film's generic antecedents to consider the flapper as a discursive figure of 1920s American culture, I situate The Wild Party within developing modern female kinaesthetics and spectatorships, during a period in which Hollywood was also systematizing its commodification of femininity and the production of heterosexual romance narratives. But have you heard about how to avoid it—how to keep the bedroom hot and sexy, no matter how long you and your partner have been together?

Lise Weil : The most obvious affinity between our books is that they’re centered in the same culture/movement but in different countries. But honestly, it’s something all of us need to connect to now, because it’s not just women’s lives or lesbian lives—it’s all life on earth that’s being held hostage. Renate Stendhal sweeps out the old myths about bed death, the notion that lesbian couples tend to be too close to maintain sexual desire. To describe just one way that lesbian Desire operates in literary texts entails teasing (a) theory directly from the texts themselves, and I do seek to connect—at least in theory—the often divergent realities of (lesbian) words and deeds, coincidentally suggesting some ways we lesbians enact our Desire(s) in the world.I came to envision and experience my body as a boy-girl’s, as androgynous–which was everyone’s ideal in Paris at that time.

This is a lot unlike the male guests who hid their perverted and pernicious desires underneath their formal attire. Renate Stendhal: I had been looking for years for a book that would recapture that first discovery of women’s condition as the “second sex” (Beauvoir) and as “colonized people” (as French feminists put it). Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. Stendhal shows that sex is the natural and continuous outcome of a closeness generated by bold honesty and the capacity to speak and hear intimate secrets. Whilst placing the sapphic gaze at the centre of the narrative, the following two foreign-language films are historical period dramas that subvert genre conventions by portraying a queer feminist love story and a female saviour trope rescuing upper class heroines from their patriarchal shackles.Weil : Well yes, because one of the things we began to understand was that our bodies needed to enter thought; Adrienne Rich at the end of Of Woman Born wrote about “learning to think through the body. Stendhal’s memoir Kiss Me Again, Parisevokes the same women’s culture at its height in Paris, when the entire city was suffused with lesbian eros. I have already argued that I perceive lesbian Desire as an inter/active mode which mediates two synonymous but operatively distinct, performative terms of relation, the lesbian Subject and the lesbian Other/Self. Stendhal: On the other hand, the culture of seduction, as you put it, seemed a necessary part of liberating our repressed women’s sexuality. Like Orange is the New Black – although in a very different setting – the series begins with a heterosexual hook, the arrival of Jenny (Mia Kirshner) to live with her boyfriend Tim (Eric Mabius).

Another case in point is the assumed agency by Sook-hee, where she shatters male narratives and images about the female sexuality in the outright destruction of the library that is full of Japanese pornography that Lady Hideko is forced to recite publicly to audiences of men. The L Word made it cool to be a lesbian for the first time – and the effect on the generations who watched it cannot be underestimated. It was loving women and being in bed with women that gave rise to the vision, but then the vision went out—to, well, everything that is looming over us with such menace now, the poisoning of the earth, militarism, racism, nuclearism, hatred of and violence against women, separation from nature.

Yet, while some of these criticisms are valid, The L Word provided many pleasures to lesbians, it did create – to my mind at least – sympathetic black and Latina characters and contributed to increased media diversity that others have built on, to a degree. I was frankly shocked to see the sexual liberation of my generation become the next generation’s raunch culture, Girls Gone Wild.