Feminist Film Theory Essay

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FEMINIST FILM THEORISTS

Since it began in the 1970s, feminist film theory has revolutionized the way that films and their spectators can be understood. This book focuses on the groundbreaking work of Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, and Barbara Creed. Each of these thinkers has opened up a new and distinctive approach to the study of film and this book provides the most detailed account so far of their ideas. It illuminates the following six key concepts and demonstrates their value as tools for film analysis: • • • • • • the male gaze the female voice technologies of gender queering desire the monstrous-feminine masculinity in crisis

Shohini Chaudhuri shows how these four thinkers construct their theories through their reading of films as well as testing their ideas with a number of other examples from contemporary cinema and television. She concludes that the concepts have not remained static over the past thirty years but have continually evolved with the influence of new critical debates and developments in film production, signalling their continuing impact and relevance in an era that is often unthinkingly branded as ‘post-feminist’. Shohini Chaudhuri is Lecturer in Contemporary Writing and Film at the University of Essex. Her articles have appeared in Screen, Camera Obscura, and Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics. She has recently published a book called Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia (2005).

ROUTLEDGE CRITICAL THINKERS
Series Editor: Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London

Routledge Critical Thinkers is a series of accessible introductions to key figures in contemporary critical thought. With a unique focus on historical and intellectual contexts, the volumes in this series examine important theorists’: • • • • significance motivation key ideas and...