She Must Be Seeing Things

New feminist cinema has emerged under interesting but often difficult conditions. As well as the usual problems of entry for women into traditionally male-dominated cultural and industrial spheres, it has had to bear the additional burden of working alongside the paralyzing paradigms of a feminist cultural theory in which historical diagnoses have tended to harden into proscriptive dogma (for instance, that the gaze is inevitably voyeuristic, exploitative, and male, and that these terms are, to some extent, interchangeable. That fetishistic modes of producing meaning are absolutely unavailable to women, or at any rate, femininity, and so on …). Working within the confines of difference theory’s binary structuration, feminist theory has become—for a time—gridlocked by its own conceptual topology. Recent work on fantasy (Elizabeth Cowie and others ¹ ) and nonphallic fetishism (Laleen Jayamanne) is beginning to show how this blockage might be dismantled, and to open new possibilities for a feminist cinema which is both visually pleasurable and politically radical (that is, which might recoup some of the “endless loss inherent in the ‘tradition of the new’ ” ² ).