Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time (review)
Both films suggest, then, that the murders may well have been a desperate response to threats to separate Christine and Léa. Coffman is careful to describe the limited success of writers and filmmakers who deploy psychoanalytic theory's conventional linking of female same-sex desire to psychosis to create the possibility of a new social order. And I appreciate her caution. After all, deployments of the figure of the lesbian psycho killer may resist the idea that same sex desire marks the difference between sanity and insanity. Writers and filmmakers might also deploy this figure for its destructive potential. But, however they're deployed, we are still left with a large population of psycho killers as the archive of lesbian representation. Coffman manages to acknowledge this limitation and still succeed in elaborating some ways in which psychoanalysis can be put to progressive use notwithstanding its convention of linking madness to female homosexuality.