ABSTRACT
“Gender” is a term that refers to the behavioral, social and psychological traits typically associated with being male or female. Since the early 1970s, film critics, theorists, and philosophers have taken up the study of gender in film, engaging theories rooted in psychoanalysis, cultural studies, feminist historiography, and cognitivism. Scholars in film studies and philosophy have been particularly interested in thinking about the relation of viewers and films and whether gender is a central factor in understanding this relation. In what follows, we survey various approaches to the study of gender in film, noting points of convergence and divergence between them.
