Why Feminist Film Theory?

Feminist Film Theory: A Reader edited by Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999, 320 pp., $65.00 hardcover, $22.50 paper.

Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability by Patricia White. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 270 pp., $39.95 hardcover, $17.95 paper.

The Queer German Cinema by Alice Kuzniar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, 314 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $19.95 paper.

The Films of Joyce Wieland edited by Kathryn Elder. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 280 pp., $26.95 paper.

Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano edited by Felicity Coombs and Suzanne Gemmell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 192 pp., $19.95 paper.

When I was a graduate student, folks in the English department started a feminist theory reading group. I didn't go to the group very often—I was busy digging my way out of the slough of dissertation despond—but I copied (and sometimes even read) the articles discussed and heard about the opinions and arguments that occasionally flared up. Since I wanted to be a film scholar, I was especially interested when the group focused on feminist film theory, tackling challenging work by high-powered film theorists like Mary Ann Doane and Kaja Silverman. At the end of the semester, I asked my friend Janet, one of the core members of the group, what she got out of studying all this heady stuff. Her reply: "The only thing I learned is that I hate feminist film theory."

I begged Janet to elaborate, and she made it clear that the group had narrowly concentrated on psychoanalytic feminist film theory. Now this was certainly understandable: for about a decade-and-a-half, from the film journal Screen's intoxicating engagement with French theory in the early 1970s to the return to cinema studies history in the late 1980s, feminist film theory was almost thoroughly "informed" (read: dominated) by psychoanalysis. Specifically, feminist critics used Sigmund Freud, postmodernist Jacques Lacan, and post-structuralist theories of interpellation borrowed from Louis Althusser to explain the ideologically retrograde ways Hollywood films displayed the female body and exerted a preternatural influence over their spectators. For feminist critics of this era, Hollywood had to be replaced by a Brechtian, anti-narrative, self-reflexive filmmaking that established more progressive and less manipulative relationships between spectators and films. As Laura Mulvey wrote, "women . . . cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything more than sentimental regret" (1975, 18). And after this decline, Hollywood's paradigms for telling a story will hopefully be replaced by more egalitarian and progressive film forms. So what's a Hitchcock fan to do?

As it turned out, in the mid-1980s, neoformalism, postcolonialism, and cognitive theories of spectatorship brought a much-needed diversity to film studies in general and feminist film study in particular, challenging the hegemony of what critic David Bordwell wittily and snottily called SLAB theory (scholarship influenced by theorists Ferdinand de Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Roland Barthes). In recent work on spectator identification, psychoanalytic critics themselves have cast doubt on Mulvey's sweeping distinction between Hollywood and alternative cinema. In her spectacular The Women Who Knew Too Much, Tania Modleski (1988) refuses to see Alfred Hitchcock's films as examples of the voyeuristic and sadistic urges common in Hollywood cinema. Instead, Modleski finds in Hitchcock "a thoroughgoing ambivalence about femininity" that allows female spectators the opportunity to identify with characters that resist "patriarchal assimilation" (3). Rhona Berenstein (1995) argues that the protagonists in classic Hollywood horror films of the 1930s indulge in role-playing and gender-bending that invite audience members to "engage in and exhibit a more fluid and malleable range of social and sexual identities than they would in their everyday lives" (233). Carol Clover (1992) has even discovered traces of a feminist sensibility in slasher movies, which encourage male adolescent spectators to identify with the active, resourceful female characters of such horror films as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II (Hooper 1986...