ABSTRACT
It is difficult to talk, let alonewrite, about catfightswithout exclamation points. That’s
because the catfight is one of visual culture’s loudest and most sensational materi-
alizations of gender excess. As mass media convention, the catfight owes as much
to the twentieth-century industrial development of popular film and television
genres and the loosening of censorship laws in the 1960s as it does to consumer
capitalism’s spectacularization of femininity, which produced the figure of the
‘‘Modern Woman.’’ Indeed, not unlike the visual display logic of modern woman-
hood, the catfight is staged as pure spectacle and is constitutive of what Liz Conor
has termed the ‘‘Modern Appearing Woman,’’ a new embodiment of feminine
subjectivity (2004: 2). For this reason, the catfight occupies a unique place in the
overlapping historical evolution of cultural scholarship and feminist film theory,
both as a stock commercial feature of ‘‘pulp’’ genres deemed low (comedy, melo-
drama, pornography, exploitation films) and as a perennial register of woman’s visual
objectification and exploitation in the mass media. While feminist theories of cine-
matic spectatorship have undergone significant revision in acknowledgement of the
nuance, complexity, and fluidity that mediate the organization of the gaze and blur
the boundaries of gendered identifications and desires, the catfight has remained
largely ignored andmocked. It has either not been taken seriously at all, or it has been
taken seriously for the wrong reasons. It has certainly never been dignified in the way
that Judith Butler’s (1990)Gender Trouble gave intellectual currency and cachet to the
role of drag performance. It is time to give the catfight its due.
