Fantasia

Abstract

The notion of fantasy, when applied to film, has either designated a particular genre — the fantasy film — in which the term marks those films which figure the supernatural or an imaginary world unknown to us yet, as with the science fiction film. Or the term has been used pejoratively to dismiss cinema and especially Hollywood cinema as escapist and as unreal — notably in the words of Hortense Powdermaker — as the ‘dream factory’.1 Within feminism the discussion of fantasy emerged as a necessity in the context of the demand ‘the personal is political’. The issue of fantasy, however, was never seen only in terms of male fantasy as a problem for women — whether in pornography, for example, or in the treatment of women by men as sex objects, or as an element in the sexism which divides women into virgins and whores, good girls and slags, wives (and mothers) and mistresses. Fantasy was also addressed from early in the modern women’s movement as a problem in relation to our own, politically recalcitrant, fantasies — whether as secret pleasures in Mills & Boon-style romantic fiction, or as, before falling asleep, imagined scenes of romantic encounter or seduction, or the desire when making love for domination or submission.KeywordsSexual DesireSexual PleasureAbsent FatherPublic FormCreative WritingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.