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Onwards and Outwards Resources: Feminist Film Theory
A selection of online resources by film theorists and critics, exploring gender, spectatorship and visual culture.
"[It] is the presupposition of the category of woman itself that requires a critical genealogy of the complex institutional and discursive means by which it is constituted." Judith Butler
- Camera Obscura Collective, 'Feminism and Film: Critical Approaches', Camera Obscura, 1 (1976) [PDF]
- Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Pyschoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993) [PDF]
- Excerpt from Doane, Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales (London and New York: Routledge 1991) [PDF]
- Judith Halberstam, 'The Transgender Look', in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies: Subculutral Lives (New York and London: New York University Press: 2005) [PDF]
"Looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future." bell hooks
- bell hooks, 'The Oppositional Gaze', in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992)
- Amanda Klein, 'Black Swan, Cinematic Excess, and the Full Body Experience', Flow TV. February 11, 2001
- Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Film, Theory, Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press 1987) [PDF]
- Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, 16.3 (1975) [PDF]
- Laura Mulvey, 'Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema inspired by Duel in the Sun', 1997
"In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed." Laura Mulvey
- Excerpt from Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (London and New York, Routledge 1999) [PDF]
- Linda Williams, 'Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess', Film Quarterly, 44. 4 (Summer 1991)
- Melissa Rigney,"Brandon Goes to Hollywood: Boys Don't Cry and the Transgender Body in Film", Film Criticism, 28. 2 (2003)
- Kaja Silverman, extract from “Suture”, in The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)
- 'An Interview with Kaja Silverman,' in Mobile Fidelities: Conversations on Feminism, History and Visuality, Martina Pachmanová, n.paradoxa, (2006)
- Linda Williams,'When the Woman Looks,' in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, eds. Doane, Mellencamp and Williams (American Film Institute Monograph Series, l983) [PDF]