Feminist Film Theory

The first study to apply a broad range of theory to contemporary film. With dazzling insight and critical aplomb, Maggie Humm highlights and explains feminist issues and offers a fascinating array of original film analyses. She draws on the work of Laura Mulvey, Annette Kuhn, E. Ann Kaplan and bell hooks to examine films such as Klute, Dead Ringers, A Question of Silence, Orlando and Daughters of the Dust.

Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema provides the first detailed consideration of women directors working before the Civil War and during Franco's dictatorship, and is the first to explore the impact of feminism on filmmaking in Spain. Part I focuses on three directors, Rosario Pi, Ana Mariscal, and Pilar Miro, whose careers span the history of sound cinema in Spain. The book highlights their struggle to achieve agency within the male-dominated film industry and draws on extensive archival research as well as in-depth textual analysis to reveal their negotiation with questions of authorship, female subjectivity and national cinema. Part II explores six films by women and men directors--three each from the Francoist and post-Franco periods--that foreground a number of issues of fundamental importance to feminism, from the indoctrination and "performance" of gender, to the fraught effort to reconcile power with sexual pleasure. The Afterword treats the remarkable recent boom in women directors and traces the shift in their work towards the exploration of multiple forms of difference.

This fascinating study relates horror film to recent interpretations of the body and the self, drawing from feminist film theory, psychoanalytic theory, cultural criticism and gender studies. Applying the term "horror" broadly, this work includes discussions of black comedy, thrillers, science fiction, and slasher films. Central to this book is the view of horror as a modern iconography and "discourse" of the body. Badley's thought-provoking analysis of films by directors Tim Burton, Tobe Hooper, George Romero, Ridley Scott, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Jonathan Demme, and Clive Barker, will be of interest to both scholars and students.

In Recreational Terror, Isabel Cristina Pinedo analyzes how the contemporary horror film produces recreational terror as a pleasurable encounter with violence and danger for female spectators. She challenges the conventional wisdom that violent horror films can only degrade women and incite violence, and contends instead that the contemporary horror film speaks to the cultural need to express rage and terror in the midst of social upheaval.

Oxford Readings in Feminism provide accessible, one-volume guides to the very best in contemporary feminist thinking, assessing its impact and importance in key areas of study. Collected together by scholars of outstanding reputation in their field, the articles chosen represent the most important work on feminist issues, and concise, lively introductions to each volume crystallize the main lines of debate in the field. This collection, edited by Morag Shiach, brings together exciting work in feminism and cultural studies from different countries and different historical moments. It combines 'classic' articles with more recent work to offer an insight into the challenges and innovations of work within cultural studies. The collection is organised thematically in ways which illuminate the development of theoretical and political debates within feminism and cultural studies. Different traditions within cultural studies are brought into relation with each other to explore areas such as commodification, women and labour, mass culture, fantasy and ideas of home.