New Queer Cinema and Cheryl Dunye's "The Watermelon Woman"

When I first heard the term "New Queer Cinema", I thought we’d be talking about something, er, new, which in my mind means something within the past 5 years or so. But after reading Ruby Rich’s piece on the BFI website, I realized we’d be going back at least three decades to the 90’s when discussing new queer cinema. And although Rich didn’t coin the term until 1992 in response the voluminous queer content at film festivals that year, I had been aware of and seeing queer independent film for several years already at that point. Due in large part no doubt to my living in SF, I remember seeing films such as “Buddies” (1985), “Desert Hearts” (1985), “Parting Glances” (1986), and plenty of other queer films when they came out during the 80’s, but by 1992 we’d reached such a critical mass that Rich was able to identify and declare a “new wave” of film-making. 

Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman exemplifies this genre with its low-budget, independent production values, its rejection of heteronormativity, and its depiction of queer lives on the fringe of society. I don’t think “heteronormativity” or “Intersectionality” had been coined yet as academic concepts/terms when Dunye’s film came out, but the film is relevant to today’s audiences and queer studies students in the deft ways it portrays how sexual orientation intersects with race, gender, and class affecting the lives of the characters in the film.

I pegged the film as a “mockumentary” very early on. It was clearly actors reading from a script, though I was kept guessing for a while whether or not “The Watermelon Woman” was a real person. The appearance by Camille Paglia was a good move at throwing us off the scent as well. I wonder if she was in on the joke? But at some point the coincidences and fortuitous events were just too good to be true, like when Cheryl meets her mother's friend Shirley, who is a wealth of information about Fae Richards a.k.a. “The Watermelon Woman.” One of my favorite parts of the film was when the white archivist woman at the CLIT Center dumped out the contents of the box on the table. Hilarious, but a dead giveaway that what we were watching was staged. Nevertheless, the film was very entertaining and cleverly produced, even after you figured out the gimmick.

Dunye’s skillful blending of actual archival footage with creatively-produced “historical” footage and photographs did initially reel me in, but I was left wondering why Dunye needed to invent a character. She states at the end of her film, “Sometimes you have to create your own history” but I’m sure there must be other REAL black actresses from this era that Dunye could have researched. To my knowledge, there has yet to be a good documentary about Hattie McDaniel or Butterfly McQueen, and those are just two of the more well-known such actresses that I can name off the top of my head. I just had to Google her name, but I’ll never forget Juanita Moore’s powerhouse performance in “Imitation of Life.” And yet I know NOTHING about her! 

Works Cited 

Dunye, Cheryl, director. The Watermelon Woman. Dancing Girl, 1997, lumiere.berkeley.edu/students/items/35243.

Rich, B. Ruby. “New Queer Cinema: Sight & Sound.” British Film Institute, 25 June 2017, www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/new-queer-cinema-b-ruby-rich.