Stereotypes In Forbidden Love

In Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives by Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie created this documentary that was produced by NFB. This feature - length film offers a deeply personal look into ten women’s lives by combining one on one interviews of women reflecting on their lives and times as lesbians during the period between 1940 to 1970. This documentary follows up with a pulp romance set in the 50s between two women Meg and Laura. Both women have a great night dancing and having sex. The remainder of the film consists of lesbian women across Canada telling their stories; they discuss a range of topics which include the pulp novels they read (or avoided) their first romances, lesbophobia among other

As a form of popular fiction, pulp novels often reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the society in which they were written, even as they attempt to sensationalize and exploit taboo topics like lesbianism. In "Forbidden Love," the filmmakers use pulp novels as a secondary source to provide context for the social and cultural forces that contributed to the stigmatization of homosexuality. In the film, pulp novels are used to contrast these stereotypes with the lived experiences of lesbian women, highlighting the ways in which these stereotypes distort and erase the complexity of lesbian life. The film uses excerpts from pulp novels to illustrate the ways in which these novels portrayed lesbian relationships as taboo and deviant. These portrayals often emphasized the illicit and transgressive nature of lesbian relationships and depicted them as inherently unstable and destructive. Through this contrast, the film highlights the importance of personal testimony and oral history in providing a more accurate and nuanced portrayal of lesbian life. In the film, Ann Bannon states that “each novel never had a happy ending and always ended in some type of calamity” (Aerlyn Weissman, Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (1992; Canada.), 7:08. And this reinforced the idea that lesbian life was based on these social narratives that fell in line with

While the pulp novels offer a glimpse into the attitudes and beliefs of marginalized lesbian women, the oral histories provide a much more nuanced and empathetic understanding of their lives and struggles. Through these different types of storytelling, we can see how historical and cultural narratives are shaped by both dominant and marginalized voices, and how these narratives continue to evolve over time. In addition to oral histories and pulp novels, "Forbidden Love" also uses archival footage, photographs, and music to further contextualize the stories of the lesbian women featured in the film. These visual and sonic elements provide a visceral and emotional connection to the past, and help to create a sense of continuity between the past and present. For example, in chapter two of Forbidden Love used as “emotional authenticity” Fernie examples how archival material can help personalize a rather subjective or selective experience when recounting past memories (Bruce and Cammaer 2015, 28). This not only highlights the person's individual experience this also allows this part in history to be told through a personal narrative uniquely to that person. Near the end of the film one of the women retells her story when she broke off her marriage and she told the difference between female and male relationships.