This book derived its initial impetus from my desire to interweave
film analysis with feminism more extensively for a course on feminism
and film in Women's Studies at the University of East London.
However, as I wrote, I realised that moments of British feminist inde-
pendent film-making, feminist aesthetics and praxis have not been
adequately described, nor had attention been given to, the intellectual
context of Mulvey 1975 essay ' "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"'
or to the major feminist critics Kuhn, Kaplan and hooks. So my study
underwent a similar expansion to include contemporary British intel-
lectual history and key feminist critics (Chapter 1) as well as feminist
praxis (Chapter 7).

Feminist theory has always crossed disciplinary borders to recruit
the energies of autobiography, differing epistemologies and the social
polemic, and has found fresh representational identities in a complex
social time when identities are all too often constructed for us.
Currently, feminist theory is producing some of the most exciting and
intellectually challenging work in the academy. But to present the
sequence of these chapters as the evolution of contemporary feminist
theory over the last decades would be inaccurate. Rather, Feminism and
Film utilises, in a provisional way, some themes and techniques from
contemporary feminism (literary criticism, Black feminism, debates
about pornography and so forth) in film analysis.

The risks of 'border traffic', of going beyond the usual boundaries of
a discipline, mean that I can only scratch the screen's surface in an
eclectic way ( Humm 1991). My choice of particular feminist ideas and
critics is inevitably limited by the permitted length of the book, but I
use those which strike me as being applicable to a range of films not
just to those films I describe here. Obviously there are other feminist
critiques, perhaps most important, which are not so evidently
amenable to film analysis. At this point, I am not proposing a compre-
hensive theory of feminism and film. Rather I hope, simply, that
Feminism and Film will help to expand both film studies and feminist
thought by bringing together, contextualising and applying some fem-
inist ideas that have spectacularly dominated academic thinking in the
past decades.

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