Women, Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Humanism in Feminist Film Theory

Abstract

cism, and that in the main these are self-consciously acknowledged goals?goals shared by and recognized by those who engage in this sort of theoretical and critical activity, goals which are, as Moi remarks, political What feminist theory and feminist film theory have long recognized is their asymmetrical relationship to the sorts of theory and film theory that do not adopt the modifier feminist. The use of the modifier feminist signals the self-consciously political commitment to theory as practice. The problem, if it is a problem, is that there is theory, and then there is the work that is conducted by feminist critics and theorists. Conceived of in terms of asymmetry, theory (without the modifier) might be taken to be the privileged, central term, and feminist theory the disadvantaged, decentered term?the term which depends, for its definition, on the former. Indeed, feminist theory would in this sense be asymmetrically dependent upon theory, since the interventions of feminist theory are, in general, interventions in the language of, interventions within the broader critical frameworks of, theory. This asymmetry between theory and feminist theory might be seen to mimic or reproduce the sociological and political construction of the relationship between women and