Cinesisters, Others and Otherness in the New Catalan Lesbian Cinema

DIY lesbian cinema has long been concerned with its own status as ‘other’ in relation to mainstream film culture, delegated to the margins, but also with the more fundamental question of the relationship between self and other, as explored through relationships between women. This article proposes a reading of recent Catalan lesbian cinema through an analysis of three recent films: Ver a una mujer (To See a Woman, Mònica Rovira, 2017), La Amiga de mi amiga (Girlfriends and Girlfriends, Zaida Carmona, 2022) and Alteritats (Otherness, Nora Haddad and Alba Cros, 2023). Interrogating the exploration of relationships in these films – those on screen as well as the films’ own relationships to the material on which they draw – this article adopts a Wittigian framework, arguing for the importance of Monique Wittig’s thought and practice for the development of Catalan-based lesbian culture. I suggest that Wittig’s emphasis on the de-centred, minoritarian subject as a point of departure for developing a new universal (which never fully replaces, but radically disrupts the centred universal subject of the straight mind), as well as her commitment to forging lived lesbian utopias, had a marked influence on lesbian thought in Spain, developing primarily in the Catalan context, not least through the theorisation of radical lesbianism in the work of Catalan-based activist and writer Gretel Ammann. Tracing Wittig through Ammann, and later through the more recent writing of Sara Torres, this article argues that the ‘others’ and ‘othernesses’ at work in these three films create powerful and inclusive lesbian feminist imaginaries that undermine the universal norm of heterosexuality (Adrienne Rich’s ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, or Wittig’s ‘straight mind’) whilst pointing towards the possibility of real lived utopias.