Unseen Lesbianism: How Jodie Foster Navigated and Embodied Her Contradictions in Cinema

By Pau Brunet-Fuertes, Edited by Ella Kilbourne

For many celebrities, the only way to publicly live as they are is by becoming a spokesperson for the entire community. Movie stars are figures who transcend their individual personas to become something larger and more complex, often embodying a variety of social meanings that, in most cases, are tied to a dominant ideology. Given their relationship with power, stars outside of the dominant group – typically, white heterosexual men – are pushed to negotiate contradictions, and lesbian and gay actors face the choice of living openly as queer and, consequently,  become a "spokesperson" for their community. The coming-out narratives are still considered brave and significant in the mainstream context, despite the fact that this expectation can be harmful to queer individuals, especially in the case of queer celebrities (Johnson et al. 201). These narratives often cater exclusively to mainstream heteronormative audiences and systems, such as general viewers and industrial interests, while rarely acknowledging or supporting the existence of queer individuals. One example of these conflicts and contradictions behind the queer experience as a celebrity is Jodie Foster, who was forced to grapple with this dilemma. During the  1990s, she was one of Hollywood's most beloved film stars. She won two Oscars, one for The Accused (Kaplan 1989), the first film that addressed the unprotective judicial system for sexual assault victims, and the other for The Silence of the Lambs (Demme 1991), a suspense classic that dealt with some controversy around its depictions of genderqueer individuals.  Foster was a bankable celebrity who starred in several successful movies such as  Maverick (Donner, 1994), Nell (Apted 1994), and Contact (Zemeckis 1995), and developed a filmmaking career with remarkable independent films like Little Man Tate (Foster  1991) and Home for the Holidays (Foster 1995). However, like many other queer folks in the film industry, she was a lesbian under the radar. As a movie star, Jodie Foster incorporated and reshaped contradictions around female gender and sexuality, challenging those through ambiguity and independence both inside and outside the screen. 

Individuals in all societies navigate all kinds of conflicts and exclusions, and stars become an exaggeration of these dichotomies, with the pressure that they need to solve them to maintain or gain their status. Movie stars become popular through images on the screen and in publicity, which means that their image is in all ways fabricated and controlled. In his book  Stars, Richard Dyer writes that "star images function crucially in relation to contradictions within and between ideologies, which they seek variously to 'manage' or resolve" (34). Societies are formed with different ideologies that clash and discuss different forms of life, mainly linked to different ways of understanding gender, class, and race. Film celebrities are at the center of that societal clash as they visually and popularly represent types of behavior that empower different ideologies. In that line, Dyer asserts that "in exceptional cases, it has been argued that certain stars, far from managing contradictions, either expose them or embody an alternative position (itself usually contradictory) to dominant ideology" (34). Some celebrities who resist conforming to dominant ideals draw attention to gaps, double standards, and contradictions within mainstream values. Because of this, some stars do not just accept or work around societal contradictions but actively reveal and complicate them. To solve those contradictions, they need to become symbols that diffuse or exaggerate those contradictions using their "symbolic persona through media," which creates a relationship between the star and an “unseen audience” that inhabits the media (Harris 40). This audience refers to the often overlooked individuals who engage with media content, absorbing the messages, information, or narratives it conveys in relation to their own personal lives. Film stars who propose divergent behaviors become imaginary forms of rebellion against the ideologically dominant culture. As symbolic meanings, they change through time, with or without the active work of the individual behind the persona. Consequently, it is essential to understand that the celebrity does not exclusively form this imaginary form of rebellion but also needs the audience's action to engage and validate it. 

Jodie Foster's relationship with contradictions evolves as she navigates issues of age,  gender, and sexualization. Since the beginning of her career, when she played the role of a 13- year-old prostitute in Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976) and a mod-girlfriend in Bugsy Malone (Parker  1976), Foster recreated two essential characteristics of her persona in and out of the screen:  independence and ambiguity. In addition to her iconic role in Taxi Driver, Foster's role in Freaky  Friday (Nelson 1976) will cement the idea of her as an adult trapped in a child's body. In the spirit of the late 1970s, Foster embodied that early sexualized girl, clever enough to navigate the adult world during the 1980s economic depression. Films such as Foxes (Lyne 1980), Carny (Kaylor 1980), The Hotel New Hampshire (Richardson 1983), Mesmerized (Laughlin 1986), and  Five Corners (Bill 1988) created a film persona that reflected a symbolic image of the middle-low and working class, in contrast to actors such as Molly Ringwald or Mia Sara,  who personify the middle-upper class American girl. Foster was the opposite of the female in distress; generally, her characters were not in search of the perfect match but embodied the empowerment of being sentimentally independent. 

Jodie Foster crafted a rebellious and cynical character, portraying an ambiguous way to see her feminine persona. Her early success as a teen film star allowed her to occupy a space within independent cinema, both inside and outside of the studios, enabling her to grow as a recognizable actress and character. As Thomas Harris states, "The star system is based on the  premise that a star is accepted by the public in terms of a certain set of personality traits" (40).  Foster's unique traits and significance became mainstream when she portrayed Sarah Tobias in the film The Accused (Kaplan 1988). The film's economic, social, and critical success catapulted her to stardom and earned her first Academy Award. Like in her previous characters, Sarah Tobias is a young girl who is living life on her own terms, far from parental figures, making a living with minimum-wage work, and owning herself sexually. While the hegemonic patriarchal symbolic order pushes audiences to read Foster's characters as heterosexual, there are fissures in those characters that belong to non-normative ways of understanding female gender and sexuality. It is in these fissures where Jodie Foster's film persona signals contradictions that need to be read from a queer and feminist perspective to explore the ambiguous and intellectualized spaces that do not belong to the dominant ideology.  

The access to celebrities' private lives influences how audiences perceive them and their roles in movies and TV shows. The most significant contradiction in Jodie Foster's stardom before being publicly recognized as a lesbian was the lack of sentimental partnerships. In contrast to other queer folks in Hollywood, she has never participated in the charades of playing heterosexuals on tabloids or falsely appeared with a potential heterosexual romantic interest on the red carpet (Goltz 182). Through this lack of a publicly sexually or romantically active life,  Foster avoided a relevant part of the lifestyle that celebrities sell. Dyer defines movie stars as "a phenomenon of consumption" in which their expected heterosexual romantic life is conflated with ideological notions. Moviegoers expect movie stars to be "committed to a presumed heterosexuality" because they see them as "extensions of the characters they play on the screen"  (Gudelunas 164). However, Foster's strategy to craft her film career shows special care for characters that allowed her to avoid the conversation around her sexuality, with just a few exceptions, which signals her embodiment and challenge to patriarchal powers. Maria Laplace explores the consumption and significance that female stars encompass in movies in her article  "Producing and Consuming the Woman's Film" (Laplace). Laplace affirms in her article that female stars have an essential function to "articulate patriarchal dichotomies of public/private and domestic/social," and they become "institutions which solicit the psychic mechanism of identification" (Laplace 145). Consequently, Foster's work obligates scholars to question what she is articulating through her strategy to avoid becoming that potentially domesticated woman.  

The feminist agenda in the late 1980s and early 1990s allowed Foster to live in a glass closet during the peak of her career. The glass closet notion refers to "the person whom  'everyone' knows is gay, but never acknowledges her or his sexuality, despite ample evidence to suggest that this person is indeed living an openly gay life" (Usher 193). The concept opened a conversation about celebrities' contradictions and conflicts around their sexuality, especially in times when the LGBTQ movement was seeking public figures to support their political agenda during the AIDS crisis. Jodie Foster faced the situation during the success of The Silence of the  Lambs. In the States, after the movie premiered, members of the LGBT movement rallied outside some of the theaters where the movie premiered, protesting the negative depiction of queer characters; Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill are explicitly queer but are also serial killers. Foster never publicly addressed the discussions surrounding the film's villains, which generated significant criticism against her, with many queer outlets speculating about her homosexuality. However, Foster's stardom kept growing in a direction that constantly outlined her independence as an adult woman without a man around. Because of that particular symbolization of her persona, queerness was permitted but not exposed; instead, her independence and success as a professional actor and filmmaker were admired. 

During the 1990s and 2000s, she became a filmmaker and a producer, and her most celebrated roles reinforced her image of independence and ambiguity, resisting being marked by any sexuality. As a filmmaker, Foster debuted with Little Man Tate, a film about a single mother and her genius kid, Tate, in which she plays the mother's character. The movie already outlines some of the traits observed in Foster's career, such as the lack of defined sexuality in the mother character, the prodigy kid struggling in an adult world (Foster started her career when she was five), and a dominant world that needs to place them in boxes. The film premiered the same year as The Silence of the Lambs (Demme 1991), and, with her most celebrated performance, Clarice, who is not sexually defined. Following this landmark, Foster's most successful characters are from Nell (Apted 1993), Maverick (Donner 1994),  Contact (Zemeckis 1996), Panic Room (Fincher 2002), Flight Plan (Schwentke 2005), Inside Man (Lee 2006),  and more recently, The Brave (Jordan 2011), all of which feature her as a widow, divorcee, or victim of rape–or, in the case of Nell, a wild woman who discovers sexual desire after a whole life isolated from human contact. Like in the 1980s, Foster was embodying her contradictions with the dominant ideology, but the public opinion around her glass closet started to crack in the late 2000s when she was being judged as either afraid or having internalized homophobia.

When Foster took the stage in the 2013 Golden Globes Ceremony, her speech became a reminder that queerness comes in different sizes and forms. Foster's words never engaged with the coming-out idea, which hinted at the fact that "coming-out" notions exist, in many cases, to conform to hegemonic ideologies. Dustin Bradley Goltz affirms in his article about Foster's speech, "[Her] speech performs queer work to assist us in dismantling the increasingly prominent conventions of gay and lesbian coming-out practices, exposing the audience's pleasures and comforts they work to produce" (Goltz 183). Foster's character inside and outside of the screen has pointed to dissident and even rebellious ways to portray youth and gender–a challenge that today can be seen in actors such as Elliot Page or Bella Ramsey, who also engage with unique ways to perform gender in storytelling. As with these names, Foster's Golden Globe speech is not only consistent with her star persona but also addresses the contradictions around her lesbian identity in the mainstream, dismantling the idea that they need to be justified and explained.

Jodie Foster's career navigated and embodied contradictions around gender and sexuality,  questioning if the LGBT closet exists simply because the mainstream does not understand queer sexuality. Foster has been very protective of her personal life and did not participate in the tabloid charades in order to feed her stardom. Instead, she developed a career that fit her persona, pointing out that some notions of "coming-out" and "the gay closet" exist because patriarchal and hegemonic powers are unable to read queerness. Foster's career has grown around independent female characters who have been able to represent heroic forms of female power from the early 1980s to today. Her stardom happens because the audience is able to engage with the force that she imparts to the characters and her image of an independent and powerful film star. As Dyer points out, "Stars matter because they act out aspects of life that matter to us; and performers get to be stars when what they act out matters to enough people" (Dyer 17). When Foster did her not-coming-out speech, she was talking to the people who were not able to understand she was already living her life as a lesbian, never hiding that aspect of her personal life. The way the media still portrays queer people–often as “closeted” or “afraid” individuals– is based on prejudices, stereotypes, and stigmatizations. The social and mediatic inability to empathize with queer life without seeing a political statement obligates gays,  lesbians, and anyone else in the queer community to publicly address their identity in order to fulfill a public duty about their persona. 

Works Cited 

Dyer, Richard. Stars. British Film Institute, 1979 

Harris, Thomas. “The Building of Popular Images: Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe.” Stardom.  Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill. Routledge, 1991. 

Goltz, Dustin Bradley. “Weighted Expectations upon Jodie Foster’s ‘[I’m Not] Coming Out [to  You] Speech.’” QED (East Lansing, Mich.), vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 180–87,  https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.1.1.0180.  

Gudelunas, David. “Jodie Foster at the 2013 Golden Globe Awards: What She Said (and Didn’t)  about Coming Out, Celebrity, and Queer Activism.” QED (East Lansing, Mich.), vol. 1,  no. 1, 2014, pp. 162–65, https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.1.1.0162. 

Johnson, Julia, and Kimberlee Pérez. “Queerness May Have Dodged a Bullet: Jodie Foster’s Neo liberal ‘Coming-Out’ Rhetoric and the Politics of Visibility.” QED (East Lansing, Mich.),  vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 199–208, https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.1.1.0199. 

Laplace, Maria. “Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film.” Home is Where the  Heart Is, ed. Christine Gledhill. British Film Institute, 1987. 

Usher, Nikki. “Anderson Cooper and Jodie Foster: The Glass Closet and Gay Visibility in the  Media.” QED (East Lansing, Mich.), vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 193–98,  

https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.1.1.0193.