This dissertation theorizes a transnational discursive formation, the North American lesbian romance film genre, thus addressing unresolved issues in cinema studies. Previous scholarship asserts that the genre merely inserts two women into the oppressive Hollywood romance narrative, leaving both that narrative and the patriarchal order it regenerates unchallenged. Combining Rick Altman's Film/Genre methodology, queer theory, and romance narrative theorizations, I argue that the genre subtly and subversively appropriates and restructures the conventional Hollywood romance. While Hollywood romance film endings conventionally depict an opposite-sex coupling that regenerates patriarchal values, the lesbian romance film depicts a sustainable, though tenuous and tentative, erotic union between women that engenders lesbian cultural values and never restores patriarchal values. Extending Altman's ideas about genre viewers, I theorize that the genre acts as a "generative fictional territory," producing two specific "genre pleasures" for its viewers. The genre allows viewers to maintain a pleasurable imagined contact with, and thus feel part of, a North American lesbian community, and also solicits viewers' equally fictional yet pleasurable transnational lesbian "identities." In chapters 3, 5, and 7, I delineate the genre through extensive textual analyses of its three foundational films, Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts (1986), Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), and Rose Troche's Go Fish (1994). With a feminist approach to issues of production/auteur and reception/audiences, I illustrate how the filmmakers, motivated by feminist principles and enabled by permeable cultural borders, produce a public discourse that evidences resistant transnational identity politics. In chapter 4, I examine Deitch's politicized origination of the genre. In chapter 6, I redress Teresa de Lauretis' accusations that formed the foundation of the Mermaids' scholarship, and reveal, through examinations of archival material and director interviews, Rozema's feminist and queer strategies. In chapter 8, I examine Troche's statement that Go Fish is "by, for, and about lesbians," and suggest that by positioning the film as authenticating "lesbian lives," Troche indirectly draws on a universalizing "lesbian chic" mystique. In sum, I reveal the ways in which these filmmakers and their films strategically "came out" to confront and influence North American cultural consciousness.