Ambiguous intimacy as queer potential: touch,desire and adolescence in She Monkeys

Bodies in motion

The sports film often thrives on the closeted eroticism of the changing room, and this functions in different ways for team and individual sports environments: the pleasures for lesbian viewers of A League of Their Own (Marshall, 1992), Bend It Like Beckham (Chadha, 2002) and Whip It (Barrymore, 2009) are induced by vicarious modes of spectatorship (see: Whatling, 1997; Lindner, 2011a). The competitiveness that characterises these films about team sports does not just dilute, but rather has the potential to augment, the homoeroticism that is also a feature of those spaces. The quintessential lesbian sports film Personal Best (Towne, 1982), on the other hand, is structured around the inevitability of competition between two female lovers competing against one another as sprinters. The romance between Tori (Patrice Donnelly) and Chris (Mariel Hemingway) begins with an arm wrestle in a now famous scene of foreplay whose sweaty, erotic potential seems to predominate, in critical recollection, over later sex scenes (see: Straayer, 1984; Williams, 1986; Ellsworth, 1988). In some ways, this coheres with heteronormative wishful thinking. Personal Best’s trailer makes no reference to the romance at the heart of the film. Yet, reading such a marketing strategy against the grain, we can see that what the film’s trailer foregrounds is the competition between the two women, which, as suggested by this arm wrestling scene, is what in turn provides the eroticism that does not need to be accounted for by sex.

She Monkeys merges these competitive tropes of the sports film with the gendered performance of balletic movement (see: Lindner, 2011b). In the voyeuristic opening scene, we watch the vaulting team rehearse. The heavy breaths of the balancing young gymnasts are synchronised with the pounding hooves of the horse as it circles the barn. Two girls, with identical postures in uniforms of grey and red, hold on to one another so that their bodies become entangled and seem to create a single shifting figure. Emma stares from the sidelines as Cassandra stands atop the horse with her partner’s hand on her waist and her own arms outstretched. Janet Wolff writes of classical ballet that it has emphasised ‘in its commitment to line, weightlessness, lift and extension an ethereal presence rather than a real corporeality’ (1997: 95). Cassandra’s figure in the opening scene captures this same weightlessness – literally lifted by the moving horse, and by the camera, which disengages the performer from the ground below her. This ethereality – the body made so light and delicate as to be lifted into the air – codes the movements in this film as feminine, just like those of synchronised swimming, the only Olympic sport to be restricted to one gender in competition. Moreover, dance mirrors the controversial ‘phasing’ of lesbian desire. The dancers are never rooted to the floor, just as the film can never be grounded in the reliable physicality of sexual consummation (see also: Lindner, 2017).

Negotiating the interplay between the ethereal and the corporeal, She Monkeys meditates on the ambivalence that is produced through the unattainability underpinning the fascination with the star. In another early scene, shortly after the girls have met, we witness their first proper exchange. Cassandra pushes Emma’s thighs into the splits: ‘Focus!’ she shouts. In the next frame, as they proceed with their exercises, Emma is the other girl’s slightly belated mirror, her body moving only in accordance with Cassandra’s command. This silent regime will continue throughout the film. From the start, Emma and Cassandra’s friendship is forged through instruction and discipline, first physical and then emotional. The narrative proceeds tentatively from scenes of competition and aggression to those of suspended affection – and then back again. The anticipation of touch is just as tentative; the bodily control associated with gymnastic feats requires a hold that is given then withdrawn.

Seriousness

The cultural and social projects of gay and lesbian liberation movements could be articulated as the desire for desires to be taken seriously. Like Water Lilies, its most obvious filmic companion, She Monkeys diverts this call for seriousness, refusing to offer a discernible movement from the closet to outness, a coming-of-age narrative to cling to with the optimism of romantic satisfaction or identity formation. ³ In the face of the legal, social and cultural invisibility that has historically defined her (non-)representation, the precariousness and unpredictability of She Monkeys’ homoerotic drive threatens to re-figure the lesbian in terms of the ‘immaturity’ or ‘incompleteness’ that have so frequently been used to reduce her to the discourse of the passing phase (Roof, 1991: 5). Yet, as this section will claim, these same terms might, in another context, be read queerly, as unfixed desires that refuse to endorse normative ideologies of development.

The significant tension that defines my interest in this film is brought about through this almost simultaneous generation and control of potential, be it sexual or sporting. While Personal Best presents an almost constant spectacle of physical prowess, She Monkeys, like Water Lilies, puts its isolated scenes of athletic performance into tension with everyday activities. Demonstrations of muscular physicality find space alongside interludes of mundane adolescent summer play. Indeed, in She Monkeys, any pleasure in touch is aligned with childishness. Seeking to champion the failure that ‘allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behaviour and manage human development’, Jack Halberstam argues that success is tied up in the regime of growth towards a ‘serious’ adulthood (2011: 3). ⁴ In She Monkeys’ dusty, brawling mise en scène, figuratively colourful interludes come from Emma’s little sister Sara (Isabella Lindquist). Sara is clownish and endearing. She is dismissed from her swimming class for wearing just bikini bottoms and for leaving her undeveloped chest bare; the necessity for concealment secures the body as a staging of inappropriateness (indicating that there is something to conceal). She is subsequently intent on wearing clothes for older girls, insists on wearing a fake tattoo on her arm and misunderstands the affection of her babysitter. Such encounters unsettle not just the biological imperative towards reproductive maturity but also the social imperative to grow into maturity as seriousness. Sara stands for childish, undisciplined discoveries of tactile pleasure.

Emma and Cassandra’s relationship, meanwhile, is infused with the ‘punishing norms’ that deliver us in Halberstam’s words ‘from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods’ (2011: 3). ⁵ Yet, unpredictability lurks even in their highly-disciplined interactions. Speech is often entirely abandoned in favour of other sensory expressions; desires remain unspoken. Like Attenberg (Tsangari, 2010), in which two friends’ devotion to nature programmes instils in them a bizarre tendency to use their bodies to create animalistic shapes and noises, the tactile but pre- or anti-verbal is a way of surmounting desire’s excess, of writing it on the body. In She Monkeys, the family dog subjected to Emma’s formidable training whistle demonstrates yet another domain of control. The metaphorical monkeys of the film’s peculiar title are, on the other hand, routinely classed as erratic; playful smiles guard misread signs of anxiety and fear and precursors to violence. ⁶ They share Halberstam’s ‘wondrous anarchy of childhood’ (2011: 3), a space and time the film opens up to tease and resist the disciplining and reining in of desire by the narrative’s central premise.

Juxtaposing the animal, the child and the adolescent, She Monkeys removes us from everyday cycles of obedience and hierarchy; rejecting the classroom as the primary space of adolescence, the film’s summertime setting extends instead a temporal and spatial dreaminess. Here, the cinematic conditions of adolescent life are reduced to an irrational, emotionally realist but socially fantastical ‘sensorium’ (Wilson, 2014: 212): desires are in high definition whilst everything else fades into irrelevance. A contemporary cinematic bildungsroman like Boyhood (Linklater, 2014) reliably includes at least one scene from every annual cycle of its measured twelve-year scope. In that film, we witness the protagonist’s early childhood, adolescence and approach to adulthood; the promise of the narrative’s endpoint is confirmed by the regularity and linearity of progress towards it. What makes She Monkeys remarkable is a refusal to allow the resolution to structure the film’s narrative journey. In her essay ‘Lesbian Minor Cinema’, Patricia White reads two films, Flat is Beautiful (Benning, 1998) and Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels (Akerman, 1994), that allow for ‘representations of the juvenile that mark the marginalization of lesbian in relation to a series of terms including gay, women, feminist, queer’ (2008: 415). White reads as full of potential what could otherwise be read as failure: lesbians have ‘deployed the minor in a range of culturally successful ways’ (2008: 425), she writes. Like ‘minor’, ‘queer’ is another term that, for White, ‘inflects rather than opposes the dominant’ (2008: 411–412). Through the usage of these two terms in alignment, White does not pit the lesbian against queer (and ‘gay, women, feminist’), but rather gestures at lesbianism’s queer potential. Thus, she lays out the grounds for a mutual, rather than merely substitutive, relationship between the two terms. Queerness here rejects both the ‘phase’ and the coming out narrative, refusing ‘predictive narratives in favour of an unrealized potential’ (White, 2008: 411). Not ‘predictable’, but ‘predictive’. White’s choice of term here is critical. Not only do we see a refusal of the singular moment of identity enunciation, but also a refusal to predict it. Unruliness and unpredictability: these are the terms that, for Halberstam and White respectively, unite queerness and childishness. These are also the terms that I think most befit the queer characterisation of She Monkeys. The film finishes in the lingering uncertainty of either romantic or sporting triumph. Where adolescence meets competition, a space emerges that holds off potential, resists heteronormativity, heightens the ‘phasing’ of desire as a provocative risk.

Nothing but a mirage

Lifted above the ground and the rest of the team, Cassandra is set up, from the voyeuristic opening scene, as Emma’s singular object of desire. Ethereal and seemingly weightless as a dancer, her body is lifted into air not only by the requisites of the sport in which she participates but by the film’s framing of her. Created partly by desire, moreover, she is a ‘mirage, a shaky anchor’ (Berlant, 2012b: 6). The illusion referenced here by Berlant’s metaphor for desire’s form becomes, on the screen, optical. It is only Emma’s voyeurism that constructs Cassandra as a desired object. Produced by the cinematic sequencing of Emma’s gaze, Cassandra does not exist outside of Emma’s desire for her. This object of desire is established through a spectacle of physical prowess, but also through the star’s isolation within the team and her unattainability: she is an object of voyeurism but not of touch.

Insistently playing with the (shaky) anchoring of desire in the body and in the gaze, the film explores the tensions that arise when the voyeuristic idealisations are not satisfied corporeally or, when they are, are infused with painful affects. If we must all discover that our object of desire is really nothing but a mirage, She Monkeys explores precisely the frustration that is thus produced. Berlant writes of desire that it:

describes a state of attachment to something or someone, and the cloud of possibility that is generated by the gap between an object’s specificity and the needs and promises projected onto it. This gap produces a number of further convolutions. Desire visits you as an impact from the outside, and yet, inducing an encounter with your affects, makes you feel as though it comes from within you; this means that your objects are not objective, but things and scenes that you have converted into propping up your world, and so what seems objective and autonomous in them is partly what your desire has created and therefore is a mirage, a shaky anchor. Your style of addressing those objects gives shape to the drama with which they allow you to reencounter yourself. By contrast, love is the embracing dream in which desire is reciprocated: rather than being isolating, love provides an image of an expanded self, the normative version of which is the two-as-one intimacy of the couple form. (2012b: 6)

She Monkeys affectively occupies the space of what Berlant calls that ‘cloud of possibility’. The film presents as contradictory, frustrating and painful those needs that accompany desire and its ‘promises’. Emma’s entry into the vaulting team is the entry into a world of desire. Yet, this is a ‘sensorium’ – to re-quote Wilson’s (2014: 212) term – not just of desire, but of frustration and ambivalence. Cassandra and Emma by turns tease, trick and physically hurt each other. Their interactions are abundantly physical from the start, and yet outbursts of feeling fall flat, as if muted by what Catherine Wheatley observes in the film’s ‘pale half-light that makes everything spectral’ (2012: 76). A sole utterance of the words ‘I love you’ remains unanswered, taking place in the shallow water of a beach at dusk. The barn in which they train, and thus its world of discipline, is evoked by this sandy beachscape. The importance of space in the representation of desire and sexuality not only means the coding of particular spaces, but also the cinematic rendering of those spaces as erotic through the structuring of the mise en scène. The sand of the barn, for instance, is not inherently erotic, but evokes a motif of colour and texture whose repetition across space and time generates an affective charge. Like our suspense in a Hitchcockian thriller even after the main denouement, our immersion in desire’s spatialisation lingers beyond the unfolding of what are presumed to be the necessary narrative details. The mystical half-light shrouds this scene in a disorienting dreaminess. The fairytale ambience of the Swedish coast meets what Fiona Handyside calls the beach’s potential for ‘radical and transformative encounters’ (2014: 5). But this particular beach scene provides, rather than the pleasure of encounter, the pain of it: the verbal promise of romance (‘I love you’) is met with the induction of physical repulsion, as Cassandra pulls away from the vulnerability of her words to place a slimy jellyfish in Emma’s hands. The animalistic unpredictability discussed in the last section permeates even a prospectively romantic scene such as this. The desire for, and fear of, intimacy is countered by the pain that always threatens to have been held within it.

Cassandra’s touch has strictly been one of discipline until the arrival on the beach of Jens (Adam Lundgren), one of two boys invited for a double date that is provoked by Emma’s playful banter and derailed first by Cassandra’s indifference and then by her sabotage. When Emma’s liaison with Jens promises – or threatens – to become sexual, Cassandra instructs Emma to humiliate the boy, stealing his clothes and abandoning him. His brief appearance serves only to reveal the potential for jealousy to provide the evidence of desire. Running from the beach to a roadside bus shelter, the girls sit side by side and hold hands, the frenzied aftermath of Jens’ humiliation inducing more proximity. It is the first time the girls’ hands have touched on-screen outside of the regimes of sport. As if to announce the inappropriateness of this moment of undisciplined contact, the scene quickly departs from the potential of intimacy to the bluntness of transaction, as Cassandra hands over half of the cash that she has retrieved from Jens’s wallet. The potential for Emma’s heterosexual liaison has been both enabled by Cassandra and curtailed by her. To paraphrase Berlant (2012b: 6), Cassandra has become the prop for Emma’s world.

Yet, Cassandra cannot maintain the affirming role that makes this world a pleasurable one in which to reside; her professions of love turn all too quickly to punishment. She Monkeys makes desire precarious. Toying with its protagonist’s potential defences, it asks – do we have the capability not only to generate but to sustain desire? The film depicts first Emma’s excessive idealisation of Cassandra, who is exalted as a singular figure of excellence in the frame. Emma will thus defend against the possibility of envy through a voyeuristic enhancement of Cassandra’s position: how could she be compared with one so radiant? ⁷ Even a desiring gaze signals a painful gap between voyeur and spectacle, between subject and object of desire. And yet, of course, idealisation all too easily tips over into envy. Cassandra becomes in Melanie Klein’s terms a ‘“persecutor”, and onto her is projected the subject’s envious and critical attitude’ (1987: 217–218). Finally, Emma’s voyeuristic desire transitions into the sense that Cassandra has something she wants; she thus finds the ‘envious impulse’ to ‘take away’ or ‘spoil’ (Klein, 1987: 212) what Cassandra has – her success, her role in the team. Envy becomes a ward against excessive feeling. This is the attitude that puts the violent phantasies of Kleinian theories of child development onto the screen in the form of painful affects of competition. ⁸

Such a relationship seems surely impossible to retain. Just as Berlant warns, the drama of desire is performed as a mutual encounter but revealed to be an isolating dream which has preoccupied many on-screen narratives of adolescence (2012b: 6). In Heavenly Creatures (Jackson, 1994), the jealous and competitive relationship between teenage girls is given shape in a dream world through which Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet (Kate Winslet) share their erotic and violent fantasies. Highly Strung (Laloy, 2009) turns the school arena into a stage of obsessive competition and artistic sabotage, whilst Breathe (Laurent, 2014) is about the unsustainability of competitive friendship without violence. For Sedgwick, the ‘Kleinian infant experiences a greed whose aggressive and envious component is already perceived as posing a terrible threat both to her desired objects and to herself’ (2007: 633). This infantile experience gets played out again and again in adult relationships and, as Sedgwick tells us, through affect; in She Monkeys, as I argue, this affect is what creates the foundation of the film. But if, also for Sedgwick, ‘the resulting primary anxiety is an affect so toxic that it probably ought to be called, not anxiety, but dread’ (2007: 633), how does the film weather the storm of this affective toxicity and still leave room for desire?

Disappointing evidence

The critical task here is to avoid submitting to either the promise, or disappointment, of sex as the evidence of desire. Even as She Monkeys increasingly rests on the intensification of touch, we are always left just out of reach of the consummation that we cling to as narrative convention is resisted. The film eschews altogether the necessity for narrative climax in the form of sexual climax. Midway through the film, and in a transitional point of the narrative, we witness an embrace that we might habitually presume will lead to sex. Spending the evening together, without parents, at Emma’s house, the girls lean into each other’s arms. The scene’s prelude combines the humour of Sara’s childishness with the tension of Emma and Cassandra’s competitiveness; the force of discipline and the seeking of tactility; the flippancy of giggles and the anticipation of arousal. A precarious moment with a shot-gun is a false alarm but hints at violent potential. Sport, dance, play and threat all take their place. The girls’ embrace in an unexpected slow dance is but a temporary tender punctuation in a scene of childish play; swiftly, they leave each other’s romantic hold to wrestle in a fit of giggles so feverish that Emma wets herself. Desire in this moment is made grotesque just as it is made explicit. Following this first breakdown of bodily control, Emma must then endure another: as if on demand, she throws up at the precise moment that Cassandra asks her if she feels sick. Just as in training she was the belated mirror of Cassandra’s poise, here her physical breakdown is instructed by Cassandra. In the slow movements that follow, there is something ritualistic about the way in which Cassandra takes Emma’s clothes from her, silently preparing her for sleep; the dark and brown chiaroscuro lighting evokes the religious solemnity of a Caravaggio painting. With equal gravity, the anticipation of touch, gaze and speech is followed by withdrawal rather than relief. When Emma’s breathing quickens, her stomach stirs with Cassandra’s touch in close-up before the camera pulls out to reveal the whole of her body. She is presided over by Cassandra as if in the replication of another renaissance motif: the pietà. When they kiss, their faces are obscured. They move together and, as they kiss, the shadows they cast immerse them. Then, Emma suddenly and wordlessly stops responding to Cassandra’s touch. The affective relief of tenderness is thwarted as she tortures Cassandra with a flattening of erotic affect through stillness and silence. As Berlant writes, ‘[a]n object gives you optimism, then it rains on your parade’ (2012b: 13). Desire provides both pleasure and pain in its possibility and immediate disappointment (brought together here into the same frame). Yet, as Berlant continues, ‘that is never the end of the story’ (2012b: 13). ‘Never the end of the story’: this is precisely the affective register within which She Monkeys’ narrative lingers.

Emma and Cassandra have initiated a friendship that combines the mutual competitiveness of teammates with the desire for physical prowess. Cassandra has helped to train Emma’s physical flexibility. She has used the negotiations of bodily discipline to exert power over Emma, as well as to engineer physical proximity. Choreographing and then dismantling the meeting with the boys on the beach, she has also inaugurated Emma’s sexualisation. Emma now yearns to reverse the imperative transformation initiated by desire. Her shattering of erotic potential in this scene is payback for Cassandra’s control over the friendship, and for her introduction to desire’s disorienting world. Emma’s withdrawal of touch and of voice here (still and silent as she is held and nurtured) is as powerful as Cassandra’s initial insistence of it (to do the splits, to ‘Focus!’). To consummate the visual and aural pairing of desire and control, the immediately succeeding scene returns to the training room, with the sound of the crack of the whip alongside the interpolations ‘Cassandra’ and then ‘Emma’. Intimacy and control become intertwined through editing, through the aural interruption of physical potential. The sound of the whip, which occurs at infrequent but clearly defined moments in the film, also brings us back into the realm of the gymnastic performance. Once again, She Monkeys negotiates this tension between the ethereal and the corporeal. Stagings of desirability as spectacle and to-be-looked-at-ness become insubstantial, while moments in which the characters are brought into the corporeal presence of the other are infused either with extreme discipline and control, as in the first training scene, or abjection, as in the scene above in which it is only losing control of one’s bladder and then one’s stomach that creates a space for desire as care.

Desire and attachment

Desire itself is, in Berlant’s words, a ‘state of attachment’ (2012b). As Cassandra incarnates for Emma both the rebuke and reward of the friend who must also be tutor, parent, child and lover, she thus becomes invested with the potential – and then disappointment – of Emma’s demands for attachment. The film thus manifests the pushes and pulls, the strategies that compensate for overwhelming need. The ‘excessive submissiveness’ of the ambivalent subject described by John Bowlby is a way of avoiding having to process painful affect, having ‘to feel and resolve the pain of separation and loss’ (Holmes, 1993: 79). As an object of desire, Cassandra becomes over-determined as the potential caregiver and role model. Knowing she might fail Emma, might always be unreachable, Emma clings to her image – and then rejects it – in order to control the way in which she produces her care. Simultaneously, Emma makes herself unreachable for her little sister Sara, who wears her desire for intimacy on her frequently bare skin and in her literal reaching for physical comfort. In contrast, touch is intertwined for the older girls with a power relationship in which intimacy is offered, but always taken away again. Here we see the film’s presentation of the relationship between eroticism and the potential for physical intimacy. The latter does not disappear when the former is withdrawn; indeed, rivalry and dissatisfaction are actually productive of erotic potential (even if clung to in the form of what Berlant calls our ‘cruel optimism’ (2012a)).

The dreaminess of the pace of She Monkeys gestures at violent climaxes but pulls back before they reach the generic demands of a thriller. In a late scene of violent revenge against unwanted desire, Emma strikes Cassandra in the knee, incapacitating her. Yet, the film ends with a shot largely reminiscent of the one with which it begins, once again muting the erotic register of the relationship between Emma and Cassandra. At the film’s conclusion, which returns to the training room as site of competition and desire, Cassandra now looks on alone, bandaged and with crutches. Isolated in her voyeurism, she takes Emma’s place as sideliner, whilst Emma is uniformly figured as part of the team from which Cassandra has been ousted. However, rather than the tension and satisfaction of the duel and its victory, this final scene provides instead a discomfitingly unremarkable substitution. Such a star-reversal brings to mind the ‘intra-feminine fascinations’ in All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950) and Desperately Seeking Susan (Seidelman, 1985) as theorised by Stacey (1987: 57). Emma is framed exactly as Cassandra was in the original scene, in close-up from waist to head with arms outstretched and the appearance of detachment from the horse, the ground and the other girls who make up the joint effort of the team.

Queer potential must reside here in the in-between: forced – or we might say allowed – to remain as potential by the film’s unhurried narrative tempo. In Berlant’s terms, identity ‘teaches you to renounce your desire’s excess and ambivalence so that you can be intelligible under the discipline of norms that make hierarchies of social value seem natural by rooting them in the pseudo-natural structure of hetero-sexualized sexual difference’ (2012b: 52). What comes first: the renunciation of excess, or of ambivalence? Or do they always come together: one (excess) producing not overwhelming pleasure, but rather the other (ambivalence)? It is precisely desire’s ‘excess and ambivalence’ from which conventional teen films such as Bring It On (Reed, 2000) and Mean Girls (Waters, 2004) ultimately seek to protect their protagonists in the name of that naturalisation of social hierarchies. In such films, envy and idealisation come into tension at points of narrative climax but are swept aside for the sake of closure. The ‘phase’ – as the antithesis of the kind of identity formation that Berlant writes is triumphantly promised by heterosexuality – is inherent to the cultural positioning of lesbianism, in which in Judith Roof’s words it is ‘unfixed, mediated, and … impossible to sustain’ (1991: 26). We might argue that desire’s excess is precisely what makes it unsustainable in these heterosexist terms.

She Monkeys provokes the frustration and even banality of closure’s refusal. The queer affects that take the place of articulated desires are unfulfilled moments in long summers of childish unproductivity. Within the film’s running time (which, of course, is all we know) the girls do not live happily ever after, nor do they consummate their relationship with the sexual act we are trained to read as inevitable. Beginning as a literalised mirage of the spectacle of the gymnastic performer suspended and made weightless by the camera, Emma’s desire for Cassandra’s star to become substantialised is frustrated and ultimately leads to banal conclusions (despite violent gestures). She Monkeys actively compresses the feelings of seriousness and pleasure that we might want to have guaranteed under the new terms of a sanctioned lesbian visibility. Despite hints of sex and violence, the film’s mood is typically as flat, muted and unremarkable as its beige colour palette. Emma is left in her final scene fully occupying the affective female space of competition, aspiration and desire but separated from her object of desire/love. Such spatial negotiations provide on the one hand frustration and, on the other, enduring potential.

I have argued that the arena of competition – literalised in a quasi-sporting film like She Monkeys but evident across many cultural narratives of girlhood – amplifies the intensity of interactions whilst making intimacy painfully precarious. Intense physicality might yield sex, or violence – or a reconciled flatness. Unable to depend on the consistency of either playfulness or seriousness, we are forced to reckon with the body’s simultaneous sexuality and violence, attachment and ambivalence. Where jealousy provides the provocation for flirtation, where desire is demonstrated through disciplinary transaction, where control is confused with care, the terms of sexual visibility become unpredictable and even unruly. Yet, on screen, surface affects might still characterise a queer spatialisation of lesbian desire. To name these as queer is to enable, rather than to flatten out, the paradoxes inherent in the representation of sexuality, unsettling rather than bolstering its coherence in the visible image. Queer affects are defined here not only by cinema’s traditionally erotic structures of gaze and spectacle, but also by their disruption. Mise en scène might privilege the interrelationships between friendship and desire, even where no lesbian figure is discernible. Queer affect is enabled and made apparent by the opening up of the senses, by the excessive physicality of sporting worlds; it is induced by desire’s state of attachment but not confined to it.