Feminist film analysis

Abstract

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 contested. As members of the cultural industry, cinematographic producers contribute to crystallizing certain types of social conceptions; but they can also function as mechanisms 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, autonomy, and labor.