Feminist film theory

Feminist film theory examines how cinema represents gender and organizes looking, authorship, labor, and power through films and film cultures.

Male gaze: A way of looking that frames women as objects of visual pleasure for a presumed male spectator. Laura Mulvey used this concept to explain how classical cinema organizes looking around masculine desire.
Laura Mulvey: A British film theorist whose essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” shaped feminist film criticism. Her 1975 essay gave the male gaze its influential account within classical narrative cinema.
Psychoanalytic film theory: An approach that uses psychoanalysis to explain film form, spectatorship, and cinematic pleasure. Feminist film theory adapted its accounts of desire and spectatorship to analyze gendered power.
Feminist film criticism: Critical analysis of cinema informed by feminist questions about gender, power, and representation. It is the broader critical practice developed through feminist film theory’s concepts and debates.
Auteur theory: A theory that treats a film director as the principal creative author whose style shapes a body of films. Feminist critics question auteur accounts that overlook women’s collaborative labor and industrial constraints.
Scopophilia: Pleasure taken in looking, especially when looking turns another person into an object. Psychoanalytic accounts use it to explain the pleasures that sustain voyeuristic spectatorship.
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay analyzing visual pleasure and gender in classical narrative cinema. The essay is a foundational statement of psychoanalytic feminist film theory.
Representation (arts): The depiction or construction of people, events, and ideas through artistic forms. Feminist analysis asks how films construct gender rather than simply reflect it.
Intersectionality: An analytical framework for how overlapping social identities and systems of power shape experience. It challenges accounts of cinematic womanhood that treat gender as separate from race, class, or sexuality.
Postfeminism: A cultural framework that presents feminism as surpassed while selectively retaining its language and concerns. Its claims that gender equality has been achieved complicate feminist readings of contemporary cinema.

Linked from 36 pages