Nor is Perry dying to clear the air regarding what some consider to be her “lezploitation” of the homosexual community through songs like “I Kissed a Girl” and the less-recent kiss-off, “Ur So Gay.”
Is Lady Gaga scoring a victory for gay visibility by featuring butch lesbians in a pop video? Or is this "lezploitation", playing up to heterosexual fantasies about gay women?
Her big hit, I Kissed a Girl, was a piece of marketing genius: every bloke's fantasy, delivered by a blatantly heterosexual female. It attracted charges of "lezploitation" from the gay community […]
2012, Simon Doonan, Gay Men Don't Get Fat, Blue Rider Press (2012), →ISBN, unnumbered page:
This 1968 lezploitation movie, though chock-full of unintentional laughs, is not exactly heartwarming in its depiction of lesbian life.
2014, Lucy O'Brien, "Not a Piece of Meat: Lady Gaga and that Dress. Has Radical Feminism Survived the Journey?", in Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture (eds. Martin Iddon & Melanie L. Marshall), Routledge (2014), →ISBN, page 40:
This was taken a step further with the lurid 'lezploitation' video 'Telephone', where she and Beyoncé starred in a Thelma & Louise style scenario of escape and revenge.
2014, "Scream Queens: Gay Boys And The Horror Film", BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival programme, March 2014, page 18:
Looking at the horror films as Aids metaphor, interrogating the unsettling demonisation of the transgendered body in the genre, and, of course, taking in a spot of vampiric lezploitation along the way, we’ll see how this often reviled genre has allowed filmmakers to explore radical ideas and taboos, and revel in the queerest of polymorphous desires and perversions.
2015, Eric D. Snider, "Sex and Butterflies", The Portland Mercury, 4 March 2015:
These ladies do indeed have sex, with each other, but don't mistake writer/director Peter Strickland's surreal, mischievous love story for mere lezploitation.
2004, "Introduction", in That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (ed. Matt Bernstein Sycamore), Soft Skull Press (2004), →ISBN, page 2:
It was about time for straight actresses, several of whom are neighbors (in L.A.!) to tell us how great it feels to play a lesbian. Moving from Blaxploitation to Lesploitation (les is more!), Pam Grier gets the best line, "The L Word is about living the life you love...and loving the life you live."
2008, Patrick Mahoney, Tibet: Lamplight Unto a Darkened World: The American Delusion, a Parody of Life, Booksurge.com (2008), →ISBN, page 831:
To highlight their cluelessness, lesploitation was becoming the single man's obsession, and people like Jillian thought that two gay men would find a three-way with a straight woman as entertaining.
Kissed A Girl chart topper Perry is tipped to continue her own bout of controversy using her ‘lesploitation pop’ and image to keep in the limelight.
2010, "Listings", The Brighton Source, Volume 2, Issue 25, August 2010, page 54:
Lesbian Mud Wrestling Shameless lesploitation... hang on, it's for charity. That's okay then
2011, Katrin Horn, "Follow the Glitter Way: Lady Gag and Camp", in The Performance Identities of Lady Gaga: Critical Essays (ed. Richard J. Gray II), McFarland & Company (2012), →ISBN, page 98:
Thus “Telephone” inverts the power dynamics of media reception, where the empowering or queer reading of such products as lesploitation films are relegated as “readings against the grain” or appropriations.