ABSTRACT
When the figure of a woman enters the "alcoholism film" her femininity exaggerates the pathological dimensions of the disease, for as Foucault and Doane observe, femininity and the pathological are coded together in patriarchal culture. The male alcoholic in the early modern films simply got drunk. His female counterpart in the 1940s and 1950s gets drunk and sexual. Sexuality and alcoholism were negatively joined in the female alcoholic film. Within two years of Lost Weekend, the female alcoholic would emerge in the Hollywood alcoholism film and take her place alongside the alcoholic hero. Between the years 1946 and 1962, at least 13 movies centering on a female alcoholic were produced. The degradation of female alcoholics spread to the degradation of the illness for males. Woman became the cultural metaphor for alcoholic. The physician-psychoanalyst would be given the power of vision that would penetrate the inner psychic life of the female alcoholic.
