For the first time in its 10-year history, Women's Film Festival in Seoul has created a separate section where transgenders and lesbians are the stars. The section, entitled "Queer Rainbow," features long-established directors in the queer film scene including Rose Troche, Jamie Babbit, Monica Treut, and Cheryl Dunye. By situating these lesbian directors within the genealogy of women's films, this section aims to expand the category of "women's films." These directors not only question gender roles and gender-segregated spaces, they also address sexuality from an uncharted perspective, using a hybrid cinematic form. In raising issues from a feminist point-of-view and in using transgenders to reject a biologically-determined notion of gender, the term "queer" in "Queer Rainbow" can be said to encompass all sexual identities which problematize heteronormative constructs.

Queer cinema underwent a radical transformation – both socially and aesthetically – in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it converged with postmodernism to produce what Ruby Rich has termed "homo pomo." Prior to this new wave of queer cinema, "dyke dramas" depicting the tragic fates of butch lesbians were the usual fare within Hollywood dramas. However, from the early 1990s, when lesbian and gay directors started making their own films, things changed dramatically. Going beyond issues of "coming out," they began to question how sexual minorities such as gays and lesbians experienced the vicissitudes of heteronormative institutions such as marriage, family, nation etc. No longer did they define themselves in stark terms of victim/victimizer or oppressed/oppressor but as social subjects.