Feminist Film Analysis

CARLA CERQUEIRA
Communication and Society Research Centre, Portugal

The 1970s: Gender and psychoanalysis

Since its inception at the end of the nineteenth century, cinema has played an important
role both in reinforcing unequal power relations and in challenging social values and
identity configurations embedded in the collective imaginary (Marsh & Nair, 2004).
Cinema can particularly be seen as a “technology of gender” (De Lauretis, 1987) that
enables ideological meanings and assumptions to be (re)negotiated, accepted, or con-
tested. As members of the cultural industry, cinematographic producers contribute to
crystallizing certain types of social conceptions; but they can also function as mecha-
nisms of resistance and change.
It has been argued that films made in pre-code Hollywood (1929–1934) represent
women performing intelligence, independence, pleasure, and sexuality (Doherty, 1999;
Norden, 1984). In contrast, the years following World War II have been identified as a
setback for feminist achievements, since film and other cultural and media productions
were conveying the image of a woman closely associated with the domestic sphere, who
only valued beauty and consumption (Tuchman, 1979). This recoding and idealization
of women and femininity is seen as the result of a particular economic climate, in which
women’s increased purchasing power as mothers and housewives had to be exploited
and promoted at the expense of more emancipatory ideals concerning equality, auton-
omy, and labor.
In the 1960s and 1970s—a period marked by a second wave of feminism (see Kaplan,
1992)—the concern for media and cultural content and for the impact they had on
identity formation began. During that period many studies emerged that analyzed crit-
ically the androcentrism and sexism present in cultural and social institutions (Dow &
Condit, 2005). They also showed that, at a time when gender roles were significantly
changing in Western society, the media continued to use images that were not com-
patible with the diversity of roles taken on by women (e.g., Carter & Steiner, 2004;
Van Zoonen, 1994). Outstanding works like The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
(1949/2008) or Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963) are worth highlighting, for
they served as emblems of the development of analyses directed at cultural practices
such as the cinema (Hollinger, 2012).
Feminist film theory began to develop during this period as well, together with the
flourishing of film studies as an academic discipline (Hollinger, 2012, p. 7), especially in
the United States and United Kingdom (Kuhn, 1994, p. 72). The field thus developed in

The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects.

Patrick Rössler (Editor-in-Chief), Cynthia A. Hoffner, and Liesbet van Zoonen (Associate Editors).
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118783764.wbieme0112
2 FE M I N I S T FI L M A N A L Y S I S

conjunction with a political movement that pursued social change. This was reflected
in the research questions and outcomes, which focused on issues of representation and
reception and much less on authorship and production. Moreover, during the 1970s and
1980s, feminist film studies were based only on a straight dichotomy between “woman”
and “man” (Smelik, 2007, p. 491).
The studies criticized the stereotypical representations of activity and passivity as tied
respectively to man (and masculinities) and to women (and femininities). Moreover,
they uncovered how narrative structures mask, infantilize, or idealize women and men
and their sexualities. According to Erens (1990), US authors were initially inspired by
sociological approaches to the roles of women in film narratives and to the stereotypes of
femininity. In the United Kingdom the main influences were psychoanalysis, semiotics,
and Marxism, which were concerned less with roles and more with the sexist ways in
which film narratives framed women.
Pioneering works of the 1970s–1980s were Claire Johnston’s (1973) “Women’s
Cinema as Counter-cinema,” Laura Mulvey’s (1975) “Visual Pleasure and Narra-
tive Cinema,” and Teresa de Lauretis’s (1984) “Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics,
Cinema.” It is also important to note the contributions made by the British magazine
Screen, founded in 1952, initially under the name The Film Teacher, and by the US
journal Camera Obscura, founded in 1976.
Clare Johnston (1973) offered a study of the stereotypes of classic cinema and of
how they contributed to create an ideal woman as well as an ideal of femininity. She
drew on semiotics, as developed by Roland Barthes, to maintain that cinema is a
social construct that carries an ideological perspective disguised as common sense.
Laura Mulvey’s (1975) pioneering essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
used psychoanalysis and was influenced by Freud and Lacan. Mulvey introduced
the concept of the “male gaze.” According to her, power asymmetries underly classic
Hollywood cinema: Spectators are encouraged to adopt a male, heterosexual subject
perspective, while women characters are displayed as an object of desire for characters
within films, as well as for film spectators. The cinematic apparatus therefore promotes
a to-be-lookedness paradigm that turns women’s bodies into a passive spectacle for
male viewers. The notion of scopophilia (the pleasure of watching) is central to this
perspective; it analyzes how particular narratives and visual styles objectify women,
subjecting them to a controlling male gaze. Voyeurism would be another way of putting
it. Mulvey criticizes the way in which cinema developed this male gaze and exploited
the female character, treating it essentially as an object capable of generating moments
of erotic contemplation for male characters and spectators (e.g., through close-ups).
Thus the female character is treated as a product dreamed up by man, unrelated to
reality.
Supported by such analyses, in the 1970s a feminist alternative cinema emerged, char-
acterized by experimentation and by female authorship and directorship (Erens, 1990;
Smelik, 2007). For example, the first feminist film festivals in the United States and
in the United Kingdom took place in 1972, and the first magazine of feminist film,
Women and Film, was launched that same year. Although mostly it adopts the form
of fiction movie, this countercinema has also been carried out in the form of docu-
mentary. During this period, the feminist movement believed that women’s entrance
 FE M I N I S T FI L M A N A L Y S I S 3

into areas traditionally associated with men could change the type of content produced
by presenting, among other things, more diverse gender representations, different con-
ceptions of femininity, and the deconstruction of linear narrative and realistic aesthetic
codes. Researchers such as Johnston and Mulvey, who stood up against the cinemato-
graphic narratives of Hollywood, which eroticized and exploited women in order to
generate delight in spectators, proved to be very supportive of this resistance strategy.
According to Johnston (1973), alternative feminist film aims to demystify the sexist
ideology and to create new meanings. Women use cinema and audiovisual language
in order to give voice to their subjectivity and interests. In her essays from 1975 and
1989, Mulvey drew attention to the importance of the 16 mm format, made available
after World War II, in the production of feminist-oriented films, as it allowed anyone
to make their own film.

The 1980s and 1990s: Intersectionality

Mulvey was widely criticized for focusing on male spectators only and for ignoring
women as film viewers. Her 1975 article did not consider how women were watch-
ing movies. In a much later publication, Visual and Other Pleasures (Mulvey, 1989), she
argued, in rebuttal, that female spectators did not identify with the exaggerated fem-
inine passivity that had been programmed for them and adopted the dominant male
point of view as well.
During the 1980s and 1990s Kaja Silverman and Teresa de Lauretis made important
contributions to these debates, giving Western feminist film theory a new impetus.
Silverman’s (1988) work drew on continental and British theorists and on Lacan’s
theory and extended the feminist critique of narrative cinema to the question of
authorial voice (Chaudhuri, 2006). Teresa de Lauretis (1987) extensively criticized
psychoanalytic approaches like Mulvey’s and criticized how they dominated feminist
film-theoretical debates. She was among the first to stress that alternative feminist
film should not destroy the narrative and visual pleasures of mainstream cinema.
Recognizing the need to address other dimensions of identity as well, her work has had
a major influence by way of enhancing the dialogue between feminist and queer theory
as well as debate on gender, sexuality, gaze, and visual pleasure (Benshoff & Griffin,
2004; Gaines, 1999). De Lauretis and other authors such as Smelik (2007) suggested,
for instance, that female lesbian spectators could also take up an active and desiring
gaze, hence undermining the heteronormativity of mainstream cinema. In the 1990s
we witness a widening of the subject matter, to the extent that theory begins to take
into account the “lesbian representation” in film and “its spectators” and also to pay
heed to “racial difference” (Ricalde, 2002, p. 32).
The black feminist theorist bell hooks (1992) formulated concerns about the
latter explicitly, by showing how black spectators did not fit into any of the feminist
approaches to film, since they experienced specificities that were not presented in
Hollywood’s cinematic narratives. She wrote about an “oppositional gaze” through
which, “looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in a process whereby
we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and
4 FE M I N I S T FI L M A N A L Y S I S

invent the future” (hooks, 1992, p. 131). Likewise, Maggie Humm (1997) calls for the
analysis of a wider range of filmic desires and representations than those sighted by a
singular white, male “spectator”’ (see also Dyer, 1997; Thornham, 1997).
Next to the articulation of sexuality and ethnicity into feminist film studies,
masculinities were put on the research agenda as well. In this context, Pam Cook’s
(1982) essay “Masculinity in Crisis?” was a pioneer. If, until then, the main concern
lay in the male gaze and the female spectacle, herein is raised the question of the male
body as an erotic object, in other words as a source of the look of a woman or another
man. In the discussion of masculinity in cinema, the issue of homosexual desire was
also tackled (Dyer, 1982; Neal, 1983). A large part of the studies on masculinities in
film analyzed how hegemonic masculinity is much more contested than the original
feminist film studies—for instance those of Mulvey—had suggested (see, e.g., Modleski,
1991; Silverman, 1992).

From the 1990s to the present: Postfeminism

The period from the 1990s onward in feminist film studies has been labeled the third
wave of feminism, or a period of postfeminism. These terms refer to a cinema, where
there is greater diversity in terms of the representation of gender, women more often
playing strong characters whose experiences drive the narrative and men being more
often portrayed, at least partly, as objects of the (female) gaze. For feminist scholars, the
changes in contemporary cinematic representations and repertoires have led to intense
discussions about the ambivalent meanings of these changes.
Postfeminism, it is sometimes said, displaces older forms of trivialization and repack-
ages gender roles, generating a sense of newness; yet it also refreshes long familiar
themes of gendered representation, demonstrating the ongoing urgency of articulat-
ing a feminist critique (Tasker & Negra, 2007, p. 22). These postfeminist narratives,
about independent career women, for instance, seem to open up new possibilities for
women and their empowerment and agency, for diverse and emergent masculinities,
and for nonnormative sexualities. Hollywood and other kinds of commercial cinema,
as well as TV series, are the most analyzed forms because they, in particular, construct
the repertoires of postfeminist culture, including a rhetoric of choice, self-fashioning,
perpetual youth and beauty, and carefree humor (Whelehan, 2010). Films and series
like Brigit Jones Diary, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, or other forms of chick
lit and chick flick come to mind (see Chandler, 1997). Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller
(2013) edited a book that includes diverse manifestations of postfeminism in contempo-
rary Hollywood cinema. Also, Michele Schreiber (2014) analyzed postfeminist romance
cycle films from 1980 to 2012. Apart from individual female success and autonomy (be
it always contested), they also portray a firmly neoliberal, highly individualistic culture
in which equality, happiness, success, and other values are presented as by and large
the result of individual effort. Collective forms of organizing and empowerment are
unthinkable in most postfeminist narratives (see, for example, Duits & Van Zoonen,
2006; Gill, 2007b; McRobbie, 2004).
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Currently ongoing issues

Contemporary feminist film analysis is as diverse as the wider field of feminist media
studies. “Researchers may agree that cultural representations constitute an important
site for examination and struggle, but on all else they disagree” (Gill, 2007a, p. 7). The
field is characterized by a plurality of different approaches and perspectives: theoretical
frameworks, epistemological commitments, methodologies, and analysis. This reflects
the “complexity of discussions about gender and media in the twenty-first century”
(Van Zoonen, 2010, p. 1). Smelik (2007) points, in addition, to the diversity of current
cinema and its audiences: “The polyphony of voices, multiple points of view, and cine-
matic styles and genres, signify [sic] women’s successful struggle for self-representation
on the silver screen” (Smelik, 2007, p. 501). More and more associations, conferences,
and other initiatives exist, which reveal a great concern with the issue of the gender
inequalities that still persist in the cinematographic field.
However, the statistics in diverse countries still display the persistence of very visible
gender asymmetries with respect to the professionals involved in the sector (see, for
example, recent studies and articles disclosed by New York Women in Film & Television
at http://www.nywift.org/article.aspx?id=STAT). Also, if we dwell on the cinematic nar-
rative, even with the introduction of various technological innovations (concerning big
productions, we can explore the use of computer-generated images [CGI] and its impact
on Hollywood cinema: see Pierson, 1999), much continues to be the production of tra-
ditionally gendered verbal and visual discourses. It should also be noted that several
actors in the film world, including Hollywood, have raised their voices to challenge the
sexism that persists in the industry. For example, recently, in a rousing Oscar accep-
tance speech, Patricia Arquette decried the wage gap in cinema, proclaiming: “To every
woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for
everybody else’s equal rights. It’s time to have wage equality once and for all. And equal
rights for women in the United States of America” (Oscars 2015).
Within this diversity of studies and of practice, two issues have retained their rele-
vance. The first has to do with including diversity in actual research projects; the second,
with the translation of research into policy and politics.

Diversity
It is acknowledged that, “more recently, there has been a move away from a binary
understanding of sexual difference to multiple perspectives, identities and possible
spectatorships. This opening up has resulted in an increasing concern with questions
of ethnicity, masculinity and hybrid sexualities” (Smelik, 2007, p. 491). It seems to be
increasingly important to deconstruct social categorizations that promote and reify
dichotomous gender asymmetries and to seek to question different manifestations of
domination and subordination, inequalities, and privileges. For this purpose, within
feminist film analysis, an intersectional approach has emerged, which insists that differ-
ent categories of social identity intersect in ways that privilege some and disempower
6 FE M I N I S T FI L M A N A L Y S I S

others (Crenshaw, 1991; McCall, 2005). According to this approach, individuals are nei-
ther “just women” nor “just men,” but are defined also by ethnicity, class, sexuality, age,
physical ability, and so on. This diversity is further exacerbated by the wide range of
national cinemas and their situated traditions. However, the largest part of the research
largely reflects standard geopolitical divisions, as US and UK cinema attracts most of
the scholars’ attention (Pozo, 2014). While alternative cinema and auteur cinema are not
unknown topics for film scholars, their articulation with diversity is less well analyzed,
as are their meanings for audiences and their potential for evoking change.

Politics and policy

Feminist film studies emerged in concert with the second wave of the women’s
movement, which aimed for economic, social, cultural, and political transforma-
tions. However, throughout the years, the academy has moved away from societal
stakeholders that could facilitate and contribute to such change. In this particular
case, it seems crucial to make contact with film clubs—both as strategic actors and
means of dissemination of cinematographic narratives and as publics or spectators—as
well as with nongovernmental organizations that work with the themes of feminism
and citizenship; with producers, filmmakers, and the film industry; and with the
association of women filmmakers and other professionals who have a specific interest
in the topic of the maintenance of social inequalities in the film industry (see, e.g.,
FIA, 2010, or Directors Guild of America at http://www.dga.org). To create a greater
dialogue with civil society, it is crucial to implement effective change in professional
practices. This dialogue can be done through the creation of discussion networks
coordinated between the various stakeholders, which, among other initiatives, can
foster trainings and seminars and can be helpful in disseminating and rewarding
good practices. Moreover, in addition to widespread programs on media literacy, in
2011 the European Commission issued a call for projects enhancing film literacy that
would lead to the so-called semiotic empowerment of audiences—that is, to a broader
capacity of audiences to deconstruct widespread cinematic narratives. In the same
year the European Commission published an invitation to tender for a European-scale
experts’ study on film literacy in Europe.
To incorporate a feminist analysis of cinema means questioning the hegemonic
power structures that (re)produce and sediment asymmetric representations and
impact the lives of all individuals. This questioning must therefore take into account
the context, the location, and the history and all structures and social actors involved.
Thus this field of studies has been marked, especially recently, for intersectional,
longitudinal, and comparative approaches that explore how gender has intersected
with other identities in diverse contexts. Feminist film analysis, like other analyses in
the media field, could be characterized as being “explanatory, political, polyvocal and
transformative” (Wackwitz & Rakow, 2007, p. 258).

SEE ALSO: Feminist Theory and the Media; Racism and Orientalism: Role of Media;
Reception
 FE M I N I S T FI L M A N A L Y S I S 7

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Further reading

Mulvey, L., & Rogers, A. B. (Eds.). (2015). Feminisms: Diversity, difference and multiplicity in
contemporary film cultures. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.
Straube, W. (2014). Trans cinema and its exit scapes: A transfeminist reading of utopian sensibil-
ity and gender dissidence in contemporary film (Doctoral dissertation). Linköping University,
Linköping Studies in Arts and Science, No. 628. Retrieved May 14, 2016, from http://liu.diva-
portal.org/smash/get/diva2:742465/FULLTEXT02.pdf

Carla Cerqueira is assistant professor at the Lusophone University of Porto, Portu-

gal, and holds a postdoctoral grant in communication sciences from the Portuguese
 FE M I N I S T FI L M A N A L Y S I S 9

Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal. She is also a researcher at the Com-
munication and Society Research Centre, University of Minho, Portugal. She holds a
PhD in communication sciences with a specialization in communication psychology.
Her research interests include gender, feminisms, and media studies. She was vice chair
of the Gender and Communication Section of the European Communication Research
and Education Association (ECREA) and Gender and Communication YECREA rep-
resentative. She maintains an active involvement with diverse Portuguese nongovern-
mental organizations that work with gender and human rights.