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Feminist Philosophy of Film

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Abstract

This chapter aims to survey and evaluate various approaches to feminist philosophy of film and to offer suggestions of new topics and directions for research. The focus is on feminist philosophy of film as it pertains to contemporary popular cinema. The first part of the chapter comprises an overview of feminist critique of mainstream films. Five broadly construed areas of interest are examined: images of women, spectatorship and the male gaze, audience-text negotiation, cognitivism, and ideology critique. The second part of the chapter engages with the question of how mainstream films can contribute to a constructive feminist philosophy of film. There are three themes that are drawn out here: subversion of patriarchal ideas, development of a resistant imagination, and expansion of the feminist imagination.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973); Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974).

  2. 2.

    Karen Hollinger, Feminist Film Studies (London: Routledge, 2012), 8.

  3. 3.

    Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory (London: Arnold, 1997), 14.

  4. 4.

    For example, Haskell calls attention to the subversive potential of the genre of the woman’s film, which had up to this point been dismissed as frivolous. A burgeoning and productive literature on the genre was subsequently instigated.

  5. 5.

    Note that Nöel Carroll launched a defence of the images of women approach in his article ‘The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm’. However, his account clearly requires consideration of more than image alone—also of narrative conventions, cinematography, and so on—and thus should be treated separately to the 1970s theories.

  6. 6.

    Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 833–844.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., 840.

  8. 8.

    Laurie Shrage, ‘Feminist Film Aesthetics: A Contextual Approach’, Hypatia 5, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 137–148.

  9. 9.

    Mulvey did address this issue in her ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”’, wherein she proposed that women could either identify with the passive woman on-screen or engage in a kind of identification with the male protagonist. However, this amendment fails to escape the totalising analysis of the male gaze and has been further critiqued by feminist film theorists.

  10. 10.

    B. Ruby Rich, ‘The Crisis of Naming in Feminist Film Criticism’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 45.

  11. 11.

    Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, in Film and Theory: An Anthology, eds. Robert Stam, and Toby Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 495–509; Linda Williams, ‘“Something Else Besides a Mother”: “Stella Dallas” and the Maternal Melodrama’, Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1984): 2–27.

  12. 12.

    hooks, bell, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, in Movies and Mass Culture, ed. John Belton (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 250.

  13. 13.

    Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 4.

  14. 14.

    Clifford T. Manlove, ‘Visual “Drive” and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchock, and Mulvey’, Cinema Journal 46, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 83; David N. Rodowick, ‘The Difficulty of Difference’, in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 181.

  15. 15.

    Cynthia Freeland, ‘Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films’, in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 746, 748.

  16. 16.

    Nöel Carroll, ‘The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 351.

  17. 17.

    Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding, decoding’, in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 102.

  18. 18.

    Christine Gledhill, ‘Pleasurable Negotiations’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 169.

  19. 19.

    hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, 254.

  20. 20.

    Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

  21. 21.

    The cultural studies approach is able to argue that in some circumstances, the choice to suspend critical faculties is precisely that: an active choice. It is overly burdensome to demand that women be alert and critical at all times and write them off as passive otherwise.

  22. 22.

    For a demonstration of this dichotomy, see the following Wonder Woman review: Lina Abirafeh, ‘Wonder Woman: Feminist Icon or Symbol of Oppression?’ HuffPost, June 23, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wonder-woman-feminist-icon-or-symbol-of-oppression_us_594d30bbe4b0f078efd980e3

  23. 23.

    Hollinger, Feminist Film Studies, 18–19.

  24. 24.

    David Bordwell, ‘Cognitive Theory’, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, eds. Paisley Livingston, and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), 356.

  25. 25.

    Carl Plantinga, and Greg M. Smith, eds. Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

  26. 26.

    See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  27. 27.

    Carroll, ‘The Image of Women in Film’, 356.

  28. 28.

    Flo Leibowitz, ‘Apt Feelings or Why “Women’s Films” Aren’t Trivial’, in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Nöel Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 219.

  29. 29.

    Curran and Donelan, ‘Gender’, 149.

  30. 30.

    bell hooks’ previously discussed analysis of the black female oppositional gaze is an example of this.

  31. 31.

    For more on defining ideology, see Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  32. 32.

    Freeland, ‘Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films’, 751–752.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 756.

  34. 34.

    Amanda Hess, ‘The Trouble With Hollywood’s Gender Flips’, The New York Times, June 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/movies/oceans-8-gender-swap.html

  35. 35.

    Carl Plantinga, ‘Emotion and Affect’, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, eds. Paisley Livingston, and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), 86.

  36. 36.

    Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000).

  37. 37.

    Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  38. 38.

    For examples of this approach, see Alison Butler, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (London: Wallflower, 2002); Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’, in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 22–33; and Linda Williams, ‘Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary’, Film Quarterly 46, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 9–21.

  39. 39.

    Mulvey is usually credited as kick-starting this debate, since in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, she argues that the male gaze is intrinsic to mainstream cinema, and that an alternative form of filmmaking thus must be found.

  40. 40.

    Lucy Fischer, Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 12.

  41. 41.

    This is not a recommendation that all female characters be likable and relatable. Indeed, insisting upon this would adhere to a patriarchal logic wherein female protagonists must be nice and cannot be abrasive or unpleasant.

  42. 42.

    See Chapter 2 of Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) for an overview of this.

  43. 43.

    Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 167.

  44. 44.

    José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 252.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 44–48.

  46. 46.

    Hilde Hein, ‘The Role of Feminist Aesthetics in Feminist Theory’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 285.

  47. 47.

    Amy Coplan, ‘Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects’, in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, eds. Amy Coplan, and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.

  48. 48.

    Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 153.

  49. 49.

    Murray Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 7.

  50. 50.

    Note that in referring to collective hermeneutical resources shared by women, I do not mean to imply that all women utilise and are in need of precisely the same hermeneutical toolkit.

  51. 51.

    Rebecca Mason, ‘Two Kinds of Unknowing’, Hypatia 26, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 294.

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  1. The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Zoë Cunliffe

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  1. Zoë Cunliffe
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Noël Carroll

  2. William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA

    Laura T. Di Summa

  3. Baton Rouge Community College, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Shawn Loht

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Cunliffe, Z. (2019). Feminist Philosophy of Film. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_28

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