Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism

Collecting some of the most important writing in feminist film criticism and theory, this volume offers readers a comprehensive survey of the varied contributions feminist scholars have been making to film study over the past two decades. In its scope, this text illuminates the range of theoretical, critical and educational directions open to feminist students of film. It also aims to encourage readers' participation in assessing and shaping the critical context in which films are produced and received. The editors have included a variety of perspectives informed by psychoanalytic, linguistic, historical, Marxist, textual, and postcolonial discourses. With emphasis upon the diversity of feminist film scholarship, this pluralist approach recognizes differences among women, and issues of race, class, nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality. The work includes reassessments of individual films, genres and cycles; of narrative and filmic conventions; and of spectator positioning and response. The editors have added course files that explore the rationale for feminist film courses and show how films and critical readings can be presented in a meaningful way.