Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"This anthology makes it abundantly clear that feminist film criticism is flourishing and has developed dramatically since its inception in the early 1970s." ?Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Erens brings together a wide variety of writings and methodologies by U.S. and British feminist film scholars. The twenty-seven essays represent some of the most influential work on Hollywood film, women's cinema, and documentary filmmaking to appear during the past decade and beyond.

Contributors include Lucie Arbuthnot, Linda Artel, Pam Cook, Teresa de Lauretis, Mary Ann Doane, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Mary C. Gentile, Bette Gordon, Florence Jacobowitz, Claire Johnston, E. Ann Kaplan, Annette Kuhn, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, Sonya Michel, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, B. Ruby Rich, Gail Seneca, Kaja Silverman, Lori Spring, Jackie Stacey, Maureen Turim, Diane Waldman, Susan Wengraf, Linda Williams, and Robin Wood.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I Critical Methodology: Women and Representation
• Introduction
• Positive Images
• Screening Women's Films
• There's More to a Positive Image Than Meets the Eye
• The Place of Women in the Cinema of Raoul Walsh
• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
• Film and the Masquerade
• Theorizing the Female Spectator
• Hitchock, Feminism, and the Patriarchal Unconscious
• Women and Respresentation
• Can We Enjoy Alternative Pleasure?
• II Rereading Hollywood Films
• Introduction
• Gentlemen Consume Blondes
• Pre-text and Text in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
• The Case of the Missing Mother
• Maternal Issues in Vidor's Stella Dallas
• "Something Else Besides a Mother"
• Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama
• Seduced and Abandoned
• Recollection and Romance in Letter from an Unkown Woman
• Illicit Pleasures
• Feminist Spectators and Personal Best
• White Privilege and Looking Relations
• Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory
• III Critical Methodology: Feminist Filmmaking
• Introduction
• The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film
• Feminism, Film, and Public History
• Textual Politics
• In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism
• Rethinking Women's Cinema Aesthetics and Feminist Theory
• Dis-Embodying the Female Voice
• IV Assessing Films Directed by Women
• Introduction
• Images and Women
• Unspoken and Unsolved Tell Me a Riddle
• Desperately Seeking Difference
• Female Narration, Women's Cinema
• Helke Sander's The All-Round Reduced Personality/Redupers
• Feminist or Tendentious?
• Marleen Gorris's A Question of Silence
• Anti-Porn
• Soft Issue, Hard World
• Variety
• The Pleasure in Looking
• Glossary
• Selected Bibliography
• Index