Paying Attention: Feminist Film Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Occasionally, I think back to 1991 and my first Society for Cinema Studies conference in Los Angeles. I was a nontraditional (read old) graduate student, considered myself a feminist, and was particularly interested in classical Hollywood cinema and its stars. I was not yet presenting my own work, but one of the panels I attended, made up primarily (if not completely) of other graduate students, focused on Hollywood stars. The room was packed, and I clearly remember that one of the panelists made remarks about how depressing some feminist film theory was?I heartily agreed with her?and that another presenter mentioned, in the course of her pa per, that Carmen Miranda had some control over the terms of her representation onscreen.1 The evidence was convincing, but during the question-and-answer period all hell broke loose. No fewer than three (women) audience members went after the assertion that a fe male star could have agency (She was completely within the ideol ogy! still rings in my mind), and the hapless student, to get them to back down, ended up retreating and proffering an apology about her work being preliminary. I sided with the panelist?as a woman born in the 1950s I knew that there had to have been politically active, as tute, and resistant women in Hollywood's past, even if they did not proclaim or understand themselves to be feminists. In fact, it will come as no surprise to readers of this journal that those students and their work turned out to represent what arguably was a vanguard of new approaches to women and film history. In the 1970s, film studies had begun to reject anecdotal and untrustworthy history and to theorize about films as purveyors of ideology with a par ticular focus on identity politics and sexual difference. Representation became the object of study and textual analysis the method; historical