This book brings together carefully selected essays on feminism and film with a view to tracing major developments in theory, criticism, and practices from 1973 to the present. It illuminates the powerful, if controversial, role feminist research has played in the emergence of Film Studies as a discipline during these years. Kaplan reprints pioneering essays that traced the ensuing debates and challenges to key theories that shaped the field. She details the Euro-American contexts within which feminist film theories and practices emerged and traces the changing influences of French, German, and American intellectual movements on feminist film research. After a wide-ranging introduction that sets the selection of essays in context, readers will find examples of social-role, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, gay and lesbian, postmodern, and postcolonial feminist film criticism, prefaced by introductory notes. This collection of essays examines the role of feminist research in the emergence of Film Studies as a discipline, and traces the developments in theory, criticism and practices of women and cinema since 1973, detailing the contexts within which feminist film theories and practices emerged. Notes on Contributors xi Introduction 1(18) E. Ann Kaplan Phase I. Pioneers and Classics: The Modernist Mode Introductory Notes 19(3) Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema 22(12) Claire Johnston Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 34(14) Laura Mulvey `Woman as Sign' 48(18) Elizabeth Cowie Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism 66(20) Christine Gledhill Woman's Stake: Filming the Female Body 86(14) Mary Ann Doane Male Subjectivity and the Celestial Suture: It's a Wonderful Life 100(19) Kaja Silverman Is the Gaze Male? 119(20) E. Ann Kaplan Dorothy Arzner: Critical Strategies 139(20) Claire Johnston Phase II. Critiques of Phase I Theories: New Methods Introductory Notes 151(8) Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship 159(22) Judith Mayne The Difficulty of Difference 181(22) David N. Rodowick Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema 203(23) Gaylyn Studlar Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship 226(27) Miriam Hansen Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema 253(12) Steve Neale Strategies of Coherence: Narrative Cinema, Feminist Poetics, and Yvonne Rainer 265(22) Teresa De Lauretis The Orthopyschic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan 287(30) Joan Copjec Phase III. Race, Sexuality, and Postmodernism in Feminist Film Theory Introductory Notes 309(8) Speaking Nearby 317(19) Trinh T. Minh-Ha Nancy N. Chen White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory 336(20) Jane Gaines Racism, Representation, Psychoanalysis 356(19) Claire Pajaczkowska Lola Young That Moment of Emergence 375(9) Pratibha Parmar Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation 384(34) Teresa De Lauretis Phase IV. Spectatorship, Ethnicity, and Melodrama Introductory Notes 409(9) Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator 418(19) Mary Ann Doane Women's Genres 437(13) Annettee Kuhn Desperately Seeking Difference 450(16) Jackie Stacey The Case of the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor's Stella Dallas 466(13) E. Ann Kaplan `Something Else Besides a Mother': Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama 479(26) Linda Williams Tears and Desire: Women and Melodrama in the `Old' Mexican Cinema 505(16) Ana M. Lopez Three Men and Baby M 521(14) Tania Modleski The Carapace that Failed: Ousmane Sembene's Xala 535(19) Laura Mulvey Further Reading 554(7) Index 561