Femanist Film Theory

 

Feminist Film Theory

Since the early eighties, the spectator has become a key centre of debate in feminist film theory. In recent critical studies the female spectator is produced variously as an absence within a mode of address that privileges masculine subject positions, the point of a specific generic address (work on 'women's' genres) and as a subject from whose position textual meaning becomes destabilised and pleasure reconceived.

These debates have keyed into studies of the figuration of the feminine within social and cultural discourses and representational forms in a larger attempt to account for the processes of feminine subjectivity; one that provides a dialogue between the rhetoric's of address in popular representation and the forms by which social life is organised and articulated. Feminist theorists have asked not only what the category 'woman' means and how it is produced, but what it means for women to take up their own position in relation to femininity. This has entailed turning away from cataloguing 'correct' or 'positive' images which are seen to voice women's 'reality', for such catalogues not only suggest that there are such final judgments to be made, but also pin down the feminine to an orthodoxy within which no struggle can be articulated. Instead, theorists have sought to find the right range of definitions inscribed within representations of sexual difference, disaggregating those categories which act to fix and polarise sexual difference. They have moved to analyse the diverse modes of subjectivity, to analyse the ways in which we may use our engagement with representational mechanisms to 'perform' the contradictory relations of gendered identities, focussing on differences between women and within the construction of femininity. The female spectator is formed in a delicate balance between the recognisable common strands of female subjectivity and the disparate particularities of her own history.

Research found from - http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/4.2/Swanson.html

In films there are shots purposely made to attract 'The Male Gaze' which is a shot where it focuses on the female body in a sexual way for example, this can also be done to the male figure but this is much less common in film.

In horror films usually the female body is used for its sex appeal, the women used are stereotypically good looking with little intelegence. In running scenes they usually have their boobs boucing up and down then they'll fall over while trying to get away. As they are getting murdered usually the weapon will be used on the chest of the women for example the woman on scream when the murderer stabs the woman in the chest area.