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Women I Love
The decade after Stonewall was [the time] when the project of constructing positive images of lesbians was particularly urgent, as those immediately available representations of lesbian desire so thoroughly pathologised it. If [Barbara] Hammer’s films in the 1970s defy the medicalisation and pathological categorisation of the lesbian, it is not simply because they are films and experimental films to boot, but also very directly, in ways they take up the subject of classification itself.
Women I Love, which uses a series of images of vegetables and flowers as highly suggestive manifestations of what may be the series of vaginas of the women of the film’s title, is a lovely, funny, and sexy tribute to those women, but can also be read as a mockery of classification. The countless classificatory schemes—from sexology, through psychoanalysis, to the medical sciences—that attempted to “frame” the lesbian, to bring her into view by pathologising her desire, are mocked with the relentlessly paratactic manifestations of that lesbian core imagery.
Of course, the film is also a (half-joking) tribute to Georgia O’Keeffe and the subtle suggestiveness of some of the lesbian poetic manifestations of flower imagery. (A striking difference in Hammer’s treatment of flora in Women I Love is that they are not only flowers to be looked at, but vegetables—to be eaten!)
Bio Barbara Hammer
Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) was an American feminist filmmaker, visual artist, and lesbian activist with a career spanning over fifty years—constructing revelations on gender and sexuality, and later illness and mortality. She produced over ninety films, ranging from experimental shorts to essays and full-length documentaries, as well as performances, installations, and photographs that illuminate the representation of lesbian lives. In her work, Hammer explodes traditional notions of female sexuality by showing it for what it is: complex, messy, human.