A study of spectatorship, desire, identification and identity : Lesbianism has received unprecedented screen time in the first decades of the twenty-first century, departing from a prior invisibility which historically was interrupted only by invocations of pathologisation, isolation and tragedy. The lesbian’s delayed and uneasy path towards visibility has coincided with queer theory’s disruption of sexual identity categories, resulting in a comparable invisibility in the critical discourse that might have accounted for such significant representational transformations. In this paradoxical context, theorises the kinds of cinematic language through which desire can be given visual form. Scrutinising the conflations and obscurations induced by legitimacy when sexuality is made visible through sex, the book proposes a feminist framework for understanding the queerness of lesbianism that unsettles the "visibility imperative". Rather than charting a narrative of representational progress, shoring up the lesbian’s categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible, the book reads contemporary cinema through the theories of sexuality that problematise lesbian legibility itself. Analyses contemporary films in the context of long-standing theoretical debates and representational paradigmsIntervenes in questions of visibility, progress and identity politicsExplores lesbian cinema in the context of political, social and cultural transformations in civil rights in the twenty-first centuryProposes the mutual, rather than synonymous, use of "queer" and "lesbian" to describe sexuality on screenBrings together psychoanalysis, affect theory and theories of space and time to explore the range of ways in which contemporary cinema makes desire legible queer theory; feminist film theory; lesbian sexuality; film and gender; film and affect; identity politics Film Studies