Feminism and Film

This book brings together carefully selected essays on feminism and film with a view to tracing major developments in theory, criticism, and practices of women and cinema from 1973 to the present day. It illuminates the powerful, if controversial, role feminist research has played in the emergence of Film Studies as a discipline during these years; reprinting influential 1970s pioneering essays tracing the ensuing debates and challenges to key theories that shaped this field in the next two decades. Kaplan details the Euro-American contexts within which feminist film theories and practices emerged and traces the changing influences of French, German, and American intellectual movements on feminist film research. As well as a wide-ranging introduction which sets the selection of essays in context, readers will find examples of social-role, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, gay and lesbian, postmodern and postcolonial feminist film criticism, prefaced by introductory notes and including further readings.

Notes on Contributors; Introduction; Phase One: Pioneers and Classics: The Modernist Mode; Introductory Notes; Claire Johnston: Woman's Cinema as Counter-Cinema; Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema; Elizabeth Cowie: Woman as Sign; Christine Gledhill: Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism; Mary Ann Doane: Woman's Stake: Filming the Female Body; Kaja Silverman: Male Subjectivity and Celestial Satire: It's a Wonderful Life; E. Ann Kaplan: Is the Gaze Male?; Claire Johnston: Dorothy Arzner: Critical Strategies; Phase Two: Critiques of Phase One Theories: New Methods; Introductory Notes; Judith Mayne: Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship; David N. Rodowick: The Difficulty of Difference; Gaylyn Studlar: Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema; Miriam Hansen: Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship; Steve Neale: Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema; Teresa de Lauretis: Strategies of Coherence: Narrative, Cinema, Feminist Poetics, Yvonne Rainer; Joan Copjec: The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan; Phase Three: Race, Sexuality, and Postmodernism in Feminist Theory; Introductory Notes; Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nancy N. Chen: Speaking Nearby; Jane Gaines: White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory; Claire Pajaczkowska, and Lola Young: Racism, Representation, and Psychoanalysis; Pratibha Parmar: That Moment of Emergence; Teresa de Lauretis: Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation; Phase Four: Spectatorship, Ethnicity, and Melodrama; Introductory Notes; Mary Ann Doane: Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator; Annette Kuhn: Women's Genres; Jackie Stacey: Desperately Seeking Difference; E. Ann Kaplan: The Case of the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor's Stella Dallas; Linda Williams: 'Something Else Besides a Mother': Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama; Ana M. Lopez: Tears and Desire: Women and Melodrama in the 'Old' Mexican Cinema; Tania Modleski: Three Men and Baby M; Laura Mulvey: The Carapace that Failed: Ousame Sembene's Xala; Further Reading; Index

E. Ann Kaplan is Professor of English and the first Director of the Humanities Institute, State University of New York, Stony Brook. She is also a widely published author.