Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

This article considers the question of embodiment through a comparative analysis of two ‘biopics’, Iris (2001) and The Iron Lady (2011), which both feature eponymous characters that have, or had, dementia. Embodiment draws our attention to the representation of the body in the films themselves, and to the socially significant ‘feelings’ or affects that circulate within and are reproduced around them. Shame, disgust and aversion are socially devastating affects conventionally associated with stigmatised bodies including those of the cognitively impaired but attention to the ‘feeling tone’ (Ngai, 2005) in these films demonstrates that a more varied range of affects and embodied social knowledge is produced. Embodiment is thus a starting point to explore what is at stake in these films both in their authorisation of particular versions of public lives and for their significance for the cultural politics of representation in the context of explorations of personhood and dementia.

Dementia and the biopolitics of the biopic: from Iris to The iron lady.

This thesis aims to problematise the hegemonic set of relations that has been aligned to gender and sex within the framework of binary thought when reading Woolf’s narrative of gender. Woolf’s elusive and intense style, the plasticity and ambivalence of her language and her complex, polyhedric characters make of Virginia Woolf’s literature a literature of her own; a radical literature that is able to draw new undefined landscapes, unsettled territories, dislocating and challenging routes mapped out through her experimental method, her crossing of generic boundaries, and her fluid and limitless characterisations. This project focuses on Woolf’s male characters as a reaction to the constraints that gender studies have generally imposed upon her writings. Two main objections have been considered; on the one hand, much of the critical effort related to gender and Woolf’s writing has focused on femininity, by ignoring her radical male characters. On the other hand, despite vast female-centred studies and the small amount of studies focused on masculinities there is a number of scholars who have dealt with rigid and fluid male characters (studies that assimilate Woolf’s work on masculinities to the discourse of patriarchy, war, imperialism and fascism; psychoanalytic perspectives on gender; studies that focus on homosexuality; and studies that focus on androgyny). However, most of these approaches to masculinities in Woolf have inscribed gender/sex in rigid binary taxonomies. My reading of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s collaborative body of work (their fluid conception of individuation and their concept of difference-in-itself) together with my reading of Men’s studies (Connell, Kimmel, Segal) and Difference Feminism (Irigaray, Jardine, Braidotti, Grosz, Olkowski, Colebrook) constitute the theoretical framework for this thesis in order to explore Woolf’s masculinities beyond gender/sex binary oppositions. This thesis has aimed to contribute to the field of Woolf Studies with an analysis of both Woolf’s criticism of rigid discourses of masculinity and by proving Woolf’s radical concept of gender and her proposal of alternative gender behaviours. My two case studies have been Septimus Warren Smith and Orlando. I have proved these two novelistic characters to be polymorphous and multilayered figurations of gender and paradigmatic examples of the Deleuzo-Guattarian process of becoming-woman (Septimus as the empty BwO and Orlando as the full BwO). Finally, this thesis evaluates the impact that Woolf’s visionary narrative of gender has had on more contemporary narratives. In order to analyse a more contemporary response to Woolf’s narrative I chose to work with two cinematic texts. This project focuses on Marleen Gorris’s Mrs Dalloway (1997) and Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) as new texts that extend, reread, implement and reappropriate Woolf’s work to respond to different social demands in relation to gender. It analyses the extent to which the gender narrative of these two cinematic texts fail or succeed in projecting radical figurations of masculinities beyond man/ woman, male/female, heterosexual/homosexual taxonomies. This thesis approaches literature conceptually, from a philosophical perspective. An interdisciplinary methodology has been used. The whole nature of the project is interdisciplinary in its focus on both different media, novels and film adaptations, and in the crossing of literature, film studies, philosophy, and cultural studies. The main focus throughout is Virginia Woolf’s novelistic narrative of gender and two late twentieth century approaches to Woolf’s gender narrative carried out by two film adaptations of Woolf. The analysis of Gorris’s and Potter’s adaptations has been purely narratological. Formalist devices of the cinematic media have been used in narrative terms. That is to say, I have analysed the transformation, adaptation, amplification, or re-evaluation that these two more contemporary cinematic narratives have carried out from Woolf’s complex narrative of gender at two specific contexts with given social demands.

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Deterritorialising patriarchal binary oppositions: Deleuze & Guattari, Virginia Woolf, Masculinities and Film Adaptations

This article argues that Orange Is the New Black (OITNB) uses postfeminist strategies to covertly promote prison reform and exercise a subtle critique of (female) mass incarceration while remaining...

Postfeminism Meets the Women in Prison Genre: Privilege and Spectatorship in Orange Is the New Black

<p> A selected bibliography of Virginia Woolf scholarship from 1991 to 2003. </p>

Virginia Woolf Scholarship from 1991 to 2003: A Selected Bibliography

Feminist Film Studies is a readable, yet comprehensive textbook for introductory classes in feminist film theory and criticism. 
Karen Hollinger provides an accessible overview of women’s representation and involvement in film, complemented by analyses of key texts that illustrate major topics in the field. Key areas include:


a brief history of the development of feminist film theory 


the theorization of the male gaze and the female spectator 


women in genre films and literary adaptations 


the female biopic 


feminism and avant-garde and documentary film 


women as auteurs 


lesbian representation 


women in Third Cinema.

Each chapter includes a "Films in Focus" section, which analyzes key texts related to the chapter’s major topic, including examples from classical Hollywood, world cinema, and the contemporary period.
This book provides students in both film and gender/women’s studies with a clear introduction to the field of feminist film theory and criticism.

Feminist Film Studies

For decades, the study of film adaptation has been troubled by questions of fidelity. Too often, adaptation studies have merely compared films to their literary sources, a "tiresome" endeavor, as Dudley Andrew points Out, that inevitably privileges the literary work over what comes to be seen as its inferior film derivation (266). In reacting to a long history of uninsightful comparisons of film and literature, scholars have tended to regard the study of adaptation as a naive approach to the examination of film and to favor, instead, methods that (as the popular adage in cinema studies proclaims) treat film as film. At the same time, however, the realization that literary adaptations make up almost half of all commercial film releases has precipitated a search for ways to reconceptualize issues of adaptation. (1) One recent approach that has reinvigorated adaptation studies considers a filmmaker's relationship to his or her source within the context of film production. This new focus represents a much needed reorientation of the study of adaptations, for even if film scholars have not been eager to consider the question of fidelity, filmmakers have persistently regarded it as a major aspect of filmmaking and promotion. Indeed, promotional materials often advertise film adaptations by lauding the degree to which they capture the essence, or voice, of their source narratives. Yet as many film scholars have demonstrated, a literary work never simply reappears on the screen, and a critical distinction must be made between "those narrative features that can be transferred from one medium to another and those that can't" (MacFarlane 9). Of the stock formal devices of narrative frequently called upon to present a text faithfully on film, perhaps a novel's most elemental, yet elusive feature is authorial voice. In an adaptation, a filmmaker necessarily mixes the verbal with the visual, perhaps hoping to capture the novel's crucial essence, the authorial timbre of the original. But because an author's voice is often understood only as a hovering presence throughout a text, it is the formal quality that challenges translation into the film medium most fully. Perhaps this problem of capturing a disembodied authorial voice may shed light on the related issue of locating authorial identity at all. For embedded in the concept of capturing a novel's essence is the bugbear of delineating an authoritative textual meaning, a concept that seems to equate a novel's narrative voice with the author's intention. As post-structuralist theory demonstrates, however, defining authorial intention often reveals more about the interpretive predispositions of a reader than about the author's narrative designs. In film, the challenge of capturing an authorial voice is even further complicated because a filmmaker often adapts a source from an historically distant era, and the problem becomes one of transposing a presence removed by time and place. In light of these exegetical complexities, the concept of fidelity--naively understood as a one-to-one mapping on of a novel to film--must be reconceived to account for (what Bakhtin might term) a film's historical heteroglossia. (2) Measurin g a film's fidelity to the narrative voice of its source thus becomes a way to uncover a filmmaker's biases in regard to her or his source text, as well as the social contexts of both works. Identifying the recent proliferation of film adaptations from historically distant novels as a "return of the classics" movement, Timothy Corrigan argues that fidelity to their sources is not the reason such adaptations are so popular. He suggests, instead, that this "return of the classics" reflects a conservative reaction against trends of postmodernist filmmaking that diminish traditional plot and character. This movement embodies, he claims, "a therapeutic turn from cultural complexity" and "an increasing concern with manner over matter" (72). Although the idyllic past envisioned in these films may never have existed, even when the source texts were written, its filmic embodiments present a fantasy of a time when life was simpler, offering escape and solace to world-weary contemporary viewers. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.35.2.237

Orlando's Sister, or Sally Potter Does Virginia Woolf in a Voice of Her Own

This article looks at Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 classic, Little Women, in order to confront the 1994 film adaptation with the long embattled history of women and feminism that the film ignores. This article recovers not only Alcott’s ambivalent portrayal of domesticity—where a woman’s self-expression must be subdued to self-abnegation focused on helping others—but also the rich, difficult history of feminist efforts to describe and re-describe this ambivalence. These ambivalences are lost in the 1994 feminist triumphalism of Robin Swicord and Gillian Armstrong’s film. Against the desire of contemporary women to see themselves no longer torn between little womanhood and nonconformity, to see ourselves instead as women with the ability to transform even the legacy of a restrictive past into a history of female triumph, this paper resurrects the novel itself: thick with patriarchally complicit aspects of nineteenth-century gender ideology.

Karen Hollinger

Papers

Feminist Film Studies

Orlando's Sister, or Sally Potter Does Virginia Woolf in a Voice of Her Own

A Feminist Romance: Adapting Little Women to the Screen

Chapter 2 Amy Adams and Emma Stone: Escaping the Ingénue