Covering a wide range of topics, including oppressive images, "woman" as fetishized object of desire, female spectatorship, and the cinematic pleasures of black women and lesbian women, Feminist Film Theory is an indispensable reference for scholars and students in the field.
Contributors include Judith Butler, Carol J. Clover, Barbara Creed, Michelle Citron, Mary Ann Doane, Teresa De Lauretis, Jane Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Molly Haskell, bell hooks, Claire Johnston, Annette Kuhn, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, B. Ruby Rich, Kaja Silverman, Sharon Smith, Jackie Stacey, Janet Staiger, Anna Marie Taylor, Valerie Walkerdine, and Linda Williams.
"Feminist Film Theory . . .collects many of the most important contributions to feminist debates about film on both sides of the Atlantic into a well-organized anthology . . ."
-Resources for Feminist Research,
| Introduction | 1 | |
| Pt. I | Taking up the Struggle | 7 |
| 1 | The Image of Women in Film: Some Suggestions for Future Research | 14 |
| 2 | The Woman's Film | 20 |
| 3 | Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema | 31 |
| 4 | The Crisis of Naming in Feminist Film Criticism | 41 |
| Pt. II | The Language of Theory | 51 |
| 5 | Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema | 58 |
| 6 | Caught and Rebecca: The Inscription of Femininity as Absence | 70 |
| 7 | Oedipus Interruptus | 83 |
| 8 | Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects | 97 |
| Pt. III | The Female Spectator | 109 |
| 9 | Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aesthetics | 115 |
| 10 | Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946) | 122 |
| 11 | Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator | 131 |
| 12 | Women's Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory | 146 |
| Pt. IV | Textual Negotiations | 159 |
| 13 | Pleasurable Negotiations | 166 |
| 14 | Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy | 180 |
| 15 | Feminine Fascinations: Forms of Identification in Star-Audience Relations | 196 |
| 16 | Taboos and Totems: Cultural Meanings of The Silence of the Lambs | 210 |
| Pt. V | Fantasy, Horror and the Body | 227 |
| 17 | Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film | 234 |
| 18 | Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection | 251 |
| 19 | Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess | 267 |
| Pt. VI | Re-thinking Differences | 285 |
| 20 | White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory | 293 |
| 21 | The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators | 307 |
| 22 | Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film | 321 |
| 23 | Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion | 336 |
| Copyright Acknowledgements | 353 | |
| Index | 355 |
Overview