ABSTRACT

Film theory and criticism, like any other scholarly arena, has not developed in a vacuum and has been conditioned by historical factors; as the direction of British cultural studies was altered by the contemporary women’s movement and by the presence of feminists at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, film studies was similarly influenced. A significant number of women have been involved in film studies, and feminists have been among the most active of film theorists and critics; analysis of the cinematic representation of gender has become an area that even the most conservative of film scholars cannot entirely ignore. However because of cultural studies’ Marxist heritage, because scholars of color were present at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and because cultural studies scholars have focused on understanding the turmoil in British society since World War II-turmoil that has included racial unrest-British cultural studies scholars have also concentrated their attention on race and class. Until very recently that move has not been paralleled in mainstream film studies-even within the realm of feminist film studies, an interpretive community predominantly female and white. Some film scholars in the United States have consistently been concerned with issues of race and class, in addition to issues of gender, and this trend is-fortunatelygathering strength, but the mainstream of feminist film studies has not yet embraced it. 1 Some space at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema Studies has been reserved for a discussion of the relation of film to race and class, but in the past few years, Cinema Journal, the SCS organ that has frequently published feminist work, has included only a very few articles with a central concern for either race or class.