ABSTRACT
What is now understood as reception studies developed nearly alongside both second-and third-wave feminism, and within film studies each has contributed to the other’s sophistication. This essay will approach this conjunction historically, tracing the emergence of each, chronicling three representative and influential debates in the 1980s that propelled the necessity for doing historical reception research, and concluding with a brief survey of several significant lines of reception research that begin in the late 1980s and continue through today.
