History of Feminist Film Theory

Diana Pozo
University of California, Santa Barbara

Today we are in many ways far away from the seemingly unified editorial

point of view represented in . . . early issues of the journal. A diversity of

topics, methods, and approaches, particularly as these are fostered in an

emphasis on emerging scholars, is characteristic of the current period. But

in other ways, the journal remains consistent with its origins: Camera

Obscura is passionate about ideas, about film, and about its sister media.

And its editorial staff are just utopian—or perhaps arrogant?—enough

once again to sign the current contribution:

-- The Camera Obscura collective

The foundational American feminist film journal Camera Obscura marked its thirtieth

anniversary with a historical retrospective discussing the changing shape of feminist film

theory. Camera Obscura, its editorial collective argues, has been successful because of

the tension between its origins as a feminist collective in the tradition of 1960s and 70s

left political activism, and its willingness to engage in “lively and unbridled debate”—to

reconsider its methodology in response to theoretical challenges (Camera Obscura 2006

Editorial Collective, 8-10). This narrative, which positions Camera Obscura, and

feminist film theory itself, as an entity in need of constant reevaluation, resists the highly-

critiqued “wave” model of feminist history. Rather than imagining feminism as a unified

concept that is periodically challenged, as one wave gives way to the next, the editorial

collective of Camera Obscura emphasizes that the definition of feminism has been

contested at every point in its history.

 In feminist film theory, the questions that define feminism continue to multiply.

Feminist film theorists must not only ask “what is a woman?” and question whether the

concept of “women” is an effective organizing principle for the study of film, they must

also question the nature of representation (does gender exist before representation or is it

created through representation?), and determine the aspects of film most important for

feminist analysis. Should feminists canonize women in the film industry? Or should they

focus on producing a feminist theory for all film, regardless of the gender of its

producers? What about women as spectators of film? What are the differences between

and among women (race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression,

physical ability, etc.), and how are these central to feminist engagements with film?

Perhaps because of this “lively and unbridled debate” at the center of feminist

film theory, feminism and feminist scholars have been central to many theoretical

developments in film and media studies more generally. Psychoanalytic feminists,

including Laura Mulvey and Claire Johnston, contributed to the acceptance of French

theory in American and British Film Studies in the 1970s. Feminist scholars of

spectatorship and domestic space including Tania Modeleski and Lynn Spigel helped lay

the foundation for the field of television studies. Feminist technology scholars including

Constance Penley and Lisa Cartwright contributed to the centrality of questions of the

body in contemporary discussions of “new media.” Shohini Chaudhuri argues that today

feminist film theory is central to mainstream academic film theory, and has thus shared

its fate, facing critique and cultural backlash since the 1980s (1).

Contemporary film theory syllabi tend to represent feminist film theory as a

moment in the past, signified by Laura Mulvey’s 1975 Screen manifesto, “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Though the piece is itself almost too well-known,

students often encounter it out of context (see Merck). I thus begin this entry with a brief

discussion of “Visual Pleasure” before moving on to discuss several feminist film theory

approaches to film spectatorship post-Mulvey.

“Visual Pleasure” in the Feminist Film Canon

Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane write of Mulvey’s central place as a signifier of

feminism and whipping girl in the feminist film canon:

“Visual Pleasure” provided a theoretical framework which feminist film critics

henceforth felt compelled to acknowledge—whether to extend and amplify

[Mulvey’s] insights or to criticize the psychoanalytic or anti-Hollywood

assumptions upon which they were based. It was as though her essay produced a

stunning recognition effect which thereafter determined the terms of the

discussion. (7)

Mulvey was not the first to propose a feminist perspective on film.1 Instead, as Bergstrom

and Doane suggest, Mulvey’s 1975 contribution to an existing discussion surrounding the

relationship between the feminist movement and the emerging discipline of film theory

transformed the field of possibility for feminists interested in film. Whether the effects of

Mulvey’s article changed the feminist film movement for the better or worse depends on

the critic. B. Ruby Rich argues that Mulvey’s article helped morph an activist movement

she terms cinefeminism—which emphasized film production and political organizing—

into feminist film theory, a “cottage industry . . . captivated by textual analysis,

1
See Rosen and Haskell.
theoreticism, and academic concerns” (2). Rich laments the shift from cinefeminism to

feminist film theory because she believes that Mulvey introduced a set of complex terms

that assimilated feminists into academic film theory and criticism, excluding some of the

original cinefeminists from the discussion.

Warren Buckland contextualizes this problematizing of terms within the work of

group of British feminists including Claire Johnston and Elizabeth Cowie. Mulvey, along

with Johnston and Cowie, used a variety of theoretical methods—including

psychoanalysis, structural anthropology, semiotics and Marxism—to challenge what

Buckland terms “the sociological ‘image-of-women’ approach to film analysis” (117).

This approach, represented by Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape and Marjorie

Rosen’s Popcorn Venus, among others, locates the truth of gender in external reality, of

which film is an accurate or inaccurate representation. To write about positive or negative

images of women is to assume that gender exists before representation. The British

feminists consider instead how ideology is produced by cinema, through its material and

signifying practices. It was this approach, Buckland argues, that led British

psychoanalytic feminists (notably Mulvey and Johnston) to propose models of counter

cinema, believing that cinema’s constitution of women could only be shifted through

revolutionary film practice (Buckland, 120). Though reactions to Mulvey’s work sparked

a deluge of film theory writing, “Visual Pleasure” itself calls for feminists to destroy the

visual pleasure in classical narrative cinema through their own revolutionary films.

Mulvey’s relationship with feminist activism, filmmaking, and film theory is thus

more complex than Rich suggests. Though Mulvey was part of “the Lacan Women’s

Study Group,” and graduated from Oxford University, she was not a professor. Mulvey
wrote “Visual Pleasure” more in the style of an activist manifesto than in that of an

academic article. This quasi-academic style was characteristic, however, of the British

feminist movement of the time, as women were rare in academia. Mandy Merck writes,

“In those years before women’s studies, feminist theoretical inquiry was largely

conducted in reading groups, conferences, occasional extramural classes, and a variety of

women’s and Left publications” (3). The shift identified by Rich from cinefeminism to

feminist film theory therefore parallels the general evolution of feminist theory from

outside to inside the academy, made possible by the gains of the feminist movement.

One of the most enduring critiques of “Visual Pleasure” is its lack of attention to

the question of female visual pleasure, or even of female spectators. This structuring

absence, identified by Bergstrom and Doane as the inspiration for the Camera Obscura

special issue, “The Spectatrix” (1989), has nevertheless been productive for feminist

scholars. By structuring their ideas in relation to Mulvey, feminists since the 1970s have

been able to articulate the importance of women’s film reception, as well as their

participation in film production.

The Spectatrix

However, the construction of a female spectator is doubly problematic. The idea that

there can be a single female spectator implies a monolithic concept of womanhood that

elides differences among women, implicitly privileging white, straight, cisgender2

women’s spectatorship. Secondly, the idea that individual spectatorship should remain

2
Cisgender people perform, embody, and/or identify with forms of gender presentation
and identity that matches with societal norms about proper behavior and presentation for
their sex. Transgender or genderqueer individuals perform and/or identify their gender in
ways that diverge from societally-sanctioned sex roles.
central to feminist film theory continues to privilege vision as the primary mode of

engagement with films for feminist critics and may privilege film perception and

criticism over filmmaking as a mode of feminist practice. This privileging of the film

image removed from its social context threatens to elide the many political, institutional,

industrial, national, and global power structures that determine film aesthetics and

practice.

The founding metaphor in the title of the journal Camera Obscura conceptualizes

Renaissance models of monocular vision as a productive contradiction for thinking about

feminism and film theory (Camera Obscura Collective, 7). A camera obscura, or “dark

chamber” refracts rays of light from a brightly lit “outside” through a small opening or

lens and projects the image in color, inverted, and reversed left-to-right as in a mirror.

The single “eye” of the camera obscura implies that there exists a single, objective

viewpoint from which reality can be captured and accurately represented, yet the

distortion of the image parallels the ways in which the act of representing must always

distort its subject. The spectator of a camera obscura must work to “right” the image, just

as a spectator uses ideology to interpret the rightness of representational images. This

optical model of the camera can also serve as a metaphor for human vision. Light rays

bouncing off objects in the natural world enter the eye and are projected on the retina as

inverted, curved, and reversed. The brain reorients these images in many ways to form a

model of the objects being seen.

A simple description of the traditional model of spectatorship follows a similar

pattern: a viewer receives images from the film screen, which are absorbed, reoriented

and interpreted in the mind of the viewer. From a feminist perspective, three critiques of
this model immediately emerge. First, as suggested by the original editorial collective of

Camera Obscura, the concept of projection and distortion of the “real” suggests that

something real and singular exists before the distortion of ideology, and offers no model

for the operation of this ideology. The collective writes, “The optical model is thus

insufficient as a metaphor for ideology because its presupposition of an anterior reality

which is inverted in its representation denies the materiality of ideology” (9). If

ideological distortion is part of the act of perceiving, then ideology structures material

reality to such an extent that it becomes more material and more proximate than any

reality that may exist.

Second, the optical model privileges the eye, a move which “unwittingly

reinforc[es] the Platonic mind-body split,” and “devalu[es] bodily senses and sensations

that are deemed less intellectually compelling” (del Río, 116).3 Further, mind-body

dualism is often mapped onto a binary notion of gender, privileging the rationally-coded

eye over more “bodily” senses such as touch, and creating binary gender hierarchies.

Third, the traditional model of spectatorship is often rooted in a psychoanalytic and

semiotic framework, a theoretical frame that has been criticized by feminists as overly

general and essentializing, ignoring individual female spectators and the importance of

race and class difference to female subjectivity (Bergstrom and Doane, 8-9).

Linda Williams offers one answer to the privileging of vision in a model of

spectatorship centered around the body through a theory of the “body genre” originally

3
del Río attributes this critique to Vivian Sobchack and Linda Williams. See Sobchack,
“What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject or Vision in the Flesh,” in Carnal
Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004); Williams, “Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the ‘Carnal
Density of Vision,’” in Fugitive Images, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995).
conceptualized by Carol Clover. Attempting to avoid essentializing the body, bell hooks

proposes a model of the “oppositional gaze,” discussing black women’s viewing

strategies that respond to and resist dominant readings of cinema.

Two Models of Female Spectatorship: Sameness and Difference

Linda Williams’s article, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess” begins with

three film genres that psychoanalytic feminist theory has deemed the most “perverse”:

pornography (sadism), melodrama (masochism) and horror (sadomasochism). Following

Sigmund Freud’s “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Williams examines in detail

the pleasures offered by these three “body genres.” While the traditional voyeuristic

model of spectatorship defines the spectator as separate from the filmic image, Williams

locates the difficulty that makes pornography, melodrama and horror “gross” in the lack

of distance between viewer and viewed. Williams writes, “what may especially mark

these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in

an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen

along with the fact that the body displayed is female” (270). While the voyeuristic “male

gaze” derives pleasure from the fetishistic distance between the spectator and the filmed

image, Williams argues that the body genre’s pleasure can often be found in the very lack

of distance from the filmed image that makes the body genre so captivating.

The voyeuristic gaze is “male” because the viewer must adopt a non-female

position in order to voyeuristically view sexualized images of women.4 Successful body

4
Mulvey’s model of voyeurism has been critiqued for its exclusion of queer readings of
film images. However, I believe that Mulvey’s discussion of the “male gaze” suggests
that the viewer is asked to imagine themselves as a straight male being attracted to a
genre films, though their images of excessive sensation are often written on female

bodies, produce excessive sensation in both male and female viewers, allowing for what

Williams calls “a strong mixture of passivity and activity, and a bisexual oscillation

between the poles of each” in the three body genres (275). Drawing on Freud, Williams

also characterizes pornography, melodrama, and horror as “genres of gender fantasy”

(277) for the ways in which viewers are able to oscillate between—and take up

different—gendered identifications. While the structure of voyeurism is based on binary

gender difference, Williams’s discussion of the body genre is based on bisexual gender

fluidity and viewer-film near-identity.

Another example of how Williams’s concept of the body genre is based on

establishing similarities rather than differences is that the problems that preoccupy these

genres are often the same as their solutions. Williams writes, “pornographic films now

tend to present sex as a problem, to which the performance of more, different, or better

sex is posed as the solution . . . In horror a violence related to sexual difference is the

problem, more violence related to sexual difference is also the solution. In women’s films

the pathos of loss is the problem, repetitions and variations of loss are the generic

solution” (276-277).

By contrast, the “oppositional gaze,” as theorized by bell hooks, is emphatically

based on difference, though this difference is not fixed in binary gender or oscillations

between the poles of gender. hooks locates the primal scene of oppositional looking in

the punishments enslaved blacks suffered from white slave-holders for the wrong sort of

female body. In the case of nonheterosexual and/or nonmale viewers, this produces a
queer viewing position. Freud allows for this sort of switching of body viewpoints in
fantasy, which is a mechanism equally available to males and females (see “A Child is
Being Beaten”).
look at their masters. These punishments did not stop black people from looking,

however. Instead, they produced “an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire,

an oppositional gaze” (hooks, 308). hooks writes, “By courageously looking, we

defiantly declared: ‘Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality’” (308). The

original form of the oppositional gaze was thus a defiant reaction to the construction of

binary race relations, not a reaction to binary gender. The oppositional gaze seeks to

reverse the power relationship of voyeurism, allowing the persons “looked at” to become

the bearers of the critical gaze, while those in social power become the objects of

examination. The fact that the majority of Hollywood films portray middle class white

characters becomes a source of strength for the oppositional gaze, as these films offer

white people as objects to be looked at. In the case of racist representations of black

characters, as in Amos ‘n’ Andy, hooks argues that such representations present aspects of

white culture and white perception for black scrutiny through the oppositional gaze.

Ultimately, the oppositional gaze is an elective, strategic viewing position, not an

essential component of black women’s experience. Although all the black women with

whom hooks talked while developing her theory were aware of racism, this knowledge

did not necessarily lead them to develop the strategies of resistance described by the

oppositional gaze. She writes, “Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of

resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant

ways of knowing and looking” (317). The distance implied in the oppositional gaze

therefore must be self-consciously and laboriously created in resistance to dominant

modes of spectatorship. This critical gaze is conceived by hooks not as an essential

starting point, but as the result of a process of learning, experience, and resistance

undertaken by spectators to oppressive regimes of representation.

Williams critiques Mulvey’s use of psychoanalysis by shifting focus away from

Freud’s concepts of fetishism and voyeurism towards the notion of fantasy in Freud’s “A

Child is Being Beaten.” hooks, however, rejects psychoanalysis altogether. By placing

her model of spectatorship firmly within the realm of the conscious and the overtly

political, hooks resists the tendency of psychoanalysis to describe an unconscious state

attributed to ahistorical concepts of gender and sexuality.

Beyond the Spectator: Expansion and Multiplicity

While general models of spectatorship have been important to feminist film theory,

theorists continue to inquire how feminist film theory relates to practice. A

comprehensive feminist theory must take into account both specific sorts of feminist

viewers and producers. The “women working” or “in practice” sections of Camera

Obscura, in which interviews with women working in the media industries and short

descriptions of alternative feminist film movements take their place alongside lengthier

theoretical articles are one example of feminist theory’s response to this question. While

most early discussions of women and film focused on Hollywood film and European and

American avant-garde movements, feminist film theory has more recently examined film

spectators and filmmakers from outside the U.S. and Europe. Trinh T. Minh-ha, as both

film theorist and practitioner, is one of few exceptions to the eurocentrism of early

feminist film theory.

 The “film” in “feminist film theory” has also come under scrutiny, as has the

“film” in “film theory” and “film studies.” Television, with its history of imagining a

female audience and its status as a domestic medium, was one of the first media to join

film under the rubric of feminist film theory. Video art, zines, online blogs, “fanvids,”

and even medical imaging technologies are examples of the many forms that have

become part of the arsenal of media analyzed by feminist film theorists and employed by

feminist media makers. Thus, questions of the “specificity” of film were displaced in the

way that the “specificity” of gender was dissolved. Clare Hemmings argues that many

narratives of feminist theory rely on the trope of a singular, unitary feminism that has

been lost or abandoned, while feminist film theory today more often appeals to a

narrative of ongoing diversity and multiplicity. In a retrospective written for Camera

Obscura’s 30th anniversary, the 2006 editorial collective writes:

Offering not a naïve pluralism but, rather, a more informed and more radical one,

Camera Obscura’s embrace of work on multiple media and subjects, from

multiple perspectives and with multiple concerns, has allowed the journal to

continue making an impact in film, media and cultural studies without losing sight

of either its initial vision or its various options for the future. (17)

As gaze theory and studies of spectatorship fall out of fashion in film and media studies,

it is this multiplicity of media and practice that feminist film theory cites as its future

strength. Recent writing overwhelmingly attempts to remain rooted in the analysis of

specific media objects and producers, rather than adopting a goal of making sweeping

theoretical statements about feminism and film. Contemporary scholarship on media and

resistance such as Anna Everett’s Digital Diaspora: A Race For Cyberspace—a history
of black “early adopters”—is feminist in that it focuses on women’s contributions to film

and media alongside those of other underrepresented groups. Just as feminism has

expanded to include antiracist, queer, and postcolonial politics, feminist film theory may

need to incorporate a set of theories about power and resistance in the way that it has

incorporated fluid spectatorship, multiple media, and multiple forms of media practice.

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