Feminist Film Theory

Abstract

Feminist film theory criticizes classical cinema for its stereotyped representation of women. Its aim is to adequately represent female subjectivity and female desire on the silver screen. During its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s a poststructuralist perspective domineered the approach to cinema, claiming that cinema is more than just a reflection of social relations in that it actively constructs meanings of sexual difference and sexuality. The semiotic study of woman as image and the psychoanalytic study of the male gaze had a lasting impact not only in film studies, but also within the wider fields of visual culture and cultural studies. In the 1990s feminist film theory moved away from a binary understanding of sexual difference to multiple perspectives, hybrid identities, and possible spectatorships, which resulted in an increasing concern with questions of “race” and ethnicity, masculinity and queer sexualities.

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