ABSTRACT
For the last twenty years, feminist film theory has explored gender in cinema through detailed analysis of filmic texts, focusing on elements such as
modes of narrative address, structuring principles of vision, and patterns of identification. Beginning with Laura Mulvey's landmark essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,''2 the evolution of feminist film theory was grounded in a paradigm of sexual difference in which the gaze of spectorial pleasure was affiliated with masculinity, and the "female" within mainstream cinema was assigned the position of object and spectacle, connoting, as Mulvey put it, an exemplary "to be looked-at-ness." Now, a recent generation of feminist film theorists has critiqued this founding paradigm, and the axioms of psychoanalysis on which it was based, arguing that it does not allow for other forms of difference: sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity. These arguments were largely based in deconstructions of mainstream (i.e., Hollywood) films. The task of theorizing how sexual difference and spectorial patterns of pleasure and identification are produced in films authored by women is certainly a less developed part of feminist film theory.
