1. Between Gazes Camelia Elias

2. 1. wave feminism  V. Woolf: “A Room of One’s Own”  socio-historical condition  Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex  sex/gender distinction

3. 2.wave feminism  French feminism vs. North American liberal feminism  focus on sexual difference and women’s experience:  biology  experience,  discourse,  the unconscious,  social and economic conditions

4. 3. wave feminism  pluralism  questions the validity and relevance of white middle class feminist discourse for different ethnic and racial groups  “English feminist criticism, especially Marxist stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression” (Showalter)

5. feminist film theory  GOALS:  to disempower film’s powerful misfiguring of the female (Humm)  to appropriate the power of dominant images  deconstruct the dichotomy:  man as subjects identifying with agents  women as objects for masculine desire

6. concerns  the spectator/screen relationship  processes of identification and pleasure in film  the relationship between narrative and desire

7. gaze theory 1.the camera, operated by men looking at women as objects 2.the look of male actors within the film 3.the gaze of the spectator (male) Men act, and women appear

8. assumptions  gender is a social construction that oppresses women more than men  patriarchy fashions these constructions  women’s experiential knowledge helps us to envision a non-sexist society

9. new trends Annette Kuhn: ‘Women’s Genres’  considers context as well as text  considers the social audience as well as the textual spectator  moves the emphasis from the text to culture  emphasizes pluralistic approaches

10. emotion and the arts  traditional aesthetics: focus is on disinterested pleasure  psychoanalytic theories of emotion:  emotion is a matter of the unconscious  feminist aesthetics:  perception and appreciation do not have a single standpoint  the viewer’s dynamics

11. the dynamics of the viewer  active, not just passive  cognizing, not just reacting  critical, not just absorbing

12. feminist influences  liberal feminism  socialist feminism / feminism in cultural studies  postmodern feminism  postfeminism

13. Sunday in New York

14. representations  isolated  glamorous  on display  sexualized to-be-looked-at-ness (Mulvey)

15. close-ups  destroy the illusion of depth  create flatness  create icons rather than verisimilitude POINT: the body is a function of discourse

19. man-handled

22. lessons in morality  “a man deserves the right to make a choice”  “morality never changes”  “the pendulum always swings back”

23. identifications mirrors  “As the narrative progresses she falls in love with the male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her to” (Mulvey)