ABSTRACT
Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, film theory has pulled further and further away from psychoanalytic paradigms. The 1990 double issue of Camera Obscura entitled “The Spectatrix” may serve as a watershed moment. In it, the editors asked sixty feminist film scholars to answer four questions on the idea of (the) female spectator(s). Each question was intended to elicit both intellectual history and a sense of future directions for feminist film and television studies, particularly in relation to psychoanalytic notions of spectatorship. The second question addresses this concern most directly:
At that moment, feminist film theory was facing what might be called the incommensurability of the psychic and the social. The amazing theoretical developments of the late 1970s and the 1980s showed how central identification processes are to the confrontations between subjects and texts. The subsequent call to consider differences other than an inaugural sexual difference led to interest in theories of subcultures and ethnographic methodologies that gave neither ontological nor epistemological priority to sex, gender, and sexuality.
