![]() ![]() In The Handmaiden, there are two significant instances of erotic touch and gaze prior to central characters Lady Hideko and her handmaiden Sook-hee fucking by conventional standards. There were so many ways girls could touch each other without it being deemed deviant or wrong. All those backrubs that lingered a little too long, all those sleepover games that required close mouths and tickle-pricked skin. (In truth, a lot of the sex I’d had with women I thought “didn’t count” actually did meet these markers of certified normative straight sex, and yet, I still dismissed the encounters as somehow unreal.)Īfter coming to better understand these previous sexual experiences, I queered my own memories even further, coming to understand all the ways gaze and touch allowed me to access my latent desires without even realizing it. I unlearned the rules of before: that sex required penetration, that sex required orgasm. I learned new definitions of sex, created new definitions of sex. ![]() It didn’t take long into these dual processes for me to realize this self-erasure had been rooted in an internalized rigid and heteronormative understanding of what sex is. What I mean is I started fucking a lot and reading queer theory. When I came out, I turned my queer self-discovery into a simultaneous anthropological exploration in the field and academic exploration at the desk. I thought myself staunchly heterosexual, these sexual experiences with other women self-erased, downplayed as somehow not real. I had sex with women before I had sex with men, but I still considered myself straight. Push us to the margins, and we’ll find ways to fuck in those margins. And to merely call them moments of sexual tension or erotic foreplay is to not only subscribe to a narrow view of sex but also to deny how queerness historically and continually blooms right under the watchful eye of the heteropatriarchy. The horniest parts of The Handmaiden wouldn’t really be called sex scenes by the average viewer and certainly not by the vast majority of straight viewers. The horniest parts of The Handmaiden aren’t the film’s climactic sex scene - a moment we see twice, context and perspective bending our experience of it - or its final sex scene set to melodious bells. Today Kayla writes about The Handmaiden, Park Chan-Wook’s film adaptation of the iconic lesbian novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. Welcome to Anatomy of a Queer Sex Scene, a series by Drew Burnett Gregory and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya about queer sex scenes in film. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now. ![]()
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