Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory (review)

Figures of Resistance is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on feminist film theory and lesbian representations by pioneering feminist scholar Teresa de Lauretis. The book is introduced and edited by Swarthmore College professor Patricia White, who contextualizes both de Lauretis’s essays and her theoretical frameworks within the larger body of feminist thought. The essays are organized in such a fashion as to highlight the breadth both in time and in theoretical understandings of Teresa de Lauretis’s arguments. By examining not only the scholarly work of de Lauretis but also her life as a proponent of feminist thought, providing a biographical glimpse of de Lauretis’s experiences, White achieves the longstanding aspiration of the American feminist movement as the personal is political.

For researchers in the areas of cinema and semiotics, approaching these disciplines from a feminist and/or queer theoretical framework, much of this book will be familiar territory as many of de Lauretis’s most noted arguments on these subjects are presented in this text. Chapters such as “Rethinking Women’s Cinema” (based on an article originally published in 1985 in the New German Critique), in which de Lauretis highlights the challenges in identifying a distinctive feminist film aesthetic and feminist film theory, are testimony to the relevancy of this work, as it continues to question the progress of women’s cinema in forging a distinguishing practice and theory outside of the conventional parameters of the dominant cinematic paradigms. In “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation,” de Lauretis engages in a close reading of homo-sexual and hommosexual lexicon and of lesbian literary text in reckoning with the paradoxes of female homosexuality. And in “Public and Private Fantasies in David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly,” de Lauretis deconstructs the cinematic representations of Orientalism and its fantasy of the submissive Asian woman, postcolonialism, and male homosexuality in Cronenberg’s innovative twist on the Giacomo Puccini opera Madame Butterfly. Figures of Resistance is highly charged with de Lauretis’s most compelling discourses on representations of gender and sexuality.

This collection of essays by Teresa de Lauretis is essential to discussions on gender and sexual representations in film, media, and culture as these works critically examine the dichotomies of feminist and queer theories. Although there is no lack of complexity in the arguments presented in this book, this work remains accessible to individuals for whom feminist thought and queer theory are new terrain. For readers of film studies, feminist theory, queer theory, and gay and lesbian studies, Figures of Resistance is a key text not only because it presents critical arguments in these fields but also because it chronicles the work of a prolific feminist theorist and, in so doing, historically locates the course of feminist thought.