ABSTRACT
Despite this evident meditation on how feminism has inflected twenty years of film theory and film practice, I would argue that few of these studies are truly interested in the ways in which cinefeminism has aged. For example, Humm introduces her collection with the assertion that her purpose "in interrelating feminism with film is to look differently, with different visual pleasures than ... has been possible to date."5 She then goes on to examine a variety of different 'visual pleasures," covering subjects ranging from pornography and the gaze to Cronenberg, Black feminism, and postmodernism. While she herself asserts from the beginning that "to present the sequences of these chapters as the evolution of contemporary feminist theory ... would be inaccurate" and, instead, wants to "utilize, in a provisional way, some themes and techniques from contemporary feminism ... in film analysis,"6 I would argue that her method actually makes it very difficult to talk about different visual pleasures. What this chapter addresses, and what is witnessed by Humm's approach, is the lack of critical attention to feminist film theory's "hoariness."
