Spectatorship, Cinematic Strategy and Mediation

Abstract

A significant proportion of feminist engagement with film theory has taken as its starting point the question of spectatorship and its relationship to pleasure and gender. This chapter will outline some of the key points of this debate in order to signal how questions of sexual difference and the specificity of the feminine have yet to be addressed adequately and it will suggest that Irigaray’s work on mediation can be used to formulate a new approach in relation to the films made by women under discussion in this book.