Feminist and Queer Film Theory

Feminist and queer film theory studies how cinema constructs gender and sexuality, analyzing the gaze, representation, and spectatorship and imagining alternative, non-normative ways of looking and being looked at.

Definition

The strands of film theory that analyze how movies produce and naturalize gendered and sexual identities, and that develop critical and oppositional models of spectatorship and representation.

Scope

This topic covers the feminist critique of patriarchal looking relations that began with Mulvey, its elaboration and contestation by theorists of female spectatorship such as Doane and de Lauretis, and the subsequent queer-theory analyses of desire, identification, and representation that question the binary assumptions of earlier work. It addresses stereotyping, the politics of representation, and the search for counter-cinemas.

Core questions

• How does cinema construct and naturalize gender and sexual difference?
• Is there a distinctly female or queer mode of spectatorship?
• How are women and LGBTQ subjects represented, and with what effects?
• What would a feminist or queer counter-cinema look like?

Key theories

The male gaze and counter-cinema

Mulvey's argument that mainstream cinema structures the look around masculine desire, paired with her call for a counter-cinema that breaks visual pleasure to free the gaze.

Female spectatorship and masquerade

Doane's and de Lauretis's accounts of how women view films, including the concept of femininity as masquerade and the technologies through which gender is produced for and by the spectator.

Politics of representation

Dyer's analysis of how images type and stereotype social groups, foundational to queer readings of how sexuality is encoded, policed, and resignified on screen.

History

Feminist film theory emerged in the mid-1970s, with Mulvey's 1975 essay as its galvanizing text, and through the 1980s broadened to interrogate female spectatorship, race, and the limits of the gaze paradigm. Teresa de Lauretis's coining of 'queer theory' around 1990 and the rise of New Queer Cinema reframed the field around the construction of sexuality, fostering analyses of desire and identification that exceeded the male/female binary.

Debates

Can there be a female gaze?

Mulvey's early framework left little room for active female looking; subsequent theorists debated whether women's spectatorship is masochistic, transvestite, or capable of its own pleasures, and whether the gaze is inherently masculine.

Key figures

• Laura Mulvey
• Teresa de Lauretis
• Mary Ann Doane
• Richard Dyer

Seminal works

• mulvey1975
• delauretis1987
• doane1987

Frequently asked questions

What is the 'male gaze'?

Coined by Laura Mulvey, it describes how classical narrative film structures looking from a masculine, heterosexual viewpoint, presenting women as objects of visual pleasure for an implied male spectator.

How does queer theory change film analysis?

Queer theory shifts attention from fixed gay or lesbian identities to the ways films construct, destabilize, and resignify desire and gender, enabling readings that find queerness even in ostensibly heterosexual texts.