The Big Seduction: Feminist Film Criticism and the Femme Fatale

Abstract

The questions that motivate this essay are ones that arose at the beginning of this project: what has the femme fatale been as a cultural figure or formation? How is this figure mobilized and modified in different media, at distinct historical moments and in diverse national and transnational contexts? And what does this mobilization and modification tell us about those issues of gender in these contexts? A key strategy of the project at its inception was to try to broaden the critical landscape in which ‘the’ femme fatale figure was set, namely to move away from a critical conception of the femme fatale as solely originating out of American film noir . However, it is back to American film noir that I want to turn in this essay. It is a ‘turn back’ in that I want to trace the currency of the femme fatale figure of American cinema in the 1940s for and within feminist criticism since the 1970s. How this figure came to have currency for a foundational moment in feminist film criticism prompts an awareness of how two distinctly different moments interact, what Jane Gaines has called the ‘two presents’ of feminist film theory (2004: 113). I want to consider whether and how the femme fatale figure continues to have currency and relevance in the era of ‘post-feminism’, and in doing so I want to reflect on the processes of feminist conceptions of the past and the femme fatale’s historicization. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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