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

ed film poetry, free from time and place, this other group of film-makers were interested in exploring their world in a more prosaic and realistic manner, right here and now.” This notion, which Mekas had promoted for several years, was now endorsed by a growing number of 16 “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” in Sitney, Film Culture Reader, 80. 17 “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” in Sitney, Film Culture Reader, 83. 18 From Jonas Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” Film Culture 24 (Spring, 1962), in Sitney, Film Culture Reader, 89.

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"The Last Of The Great Bohemians": Film Poetry, Myth, And Sexuality In Greenwich Village And The Atlantic, 1930-1975

This dissertation presents an institutional history of the feminist film and media organization Women Make Movies (WMM) from its founding as a collective in the 1970s through the present and is the first comprehensive examination of the history of the organization itself. Drawing on the archival history of WMM—materials ranging from old newsletters, scrap paper, and correspondence to tax returns and board meeting minutes—this dissertation illuminates the past and present of this influential institution in broader social contexts, narratives of cultural history, and sets of political tensions.

Critically situating WMM’s history reveals how the organization’s transformations over time are imbricated in a number of larger historical tendencies. More specifically, these tendencies include evolving concerns about the role of visual media in education and feminist and social movements; fluctuating political and economic climates and their impact on independent media and non-profit arts organizations; changing media technologies and their effects on production and distribution; shifting interests, successes, and difficulties of social movements; and transforming conditions around the contemporary production of images, their circulation, and effects in a globalized media space. Moreover, this project argues that WMM was important for the growth of Film and Women’s Studies as academic disciplines and remains a significant force in shaping how we think about the past, present, and future of feminist moving image culture. Thus, this project enables productive lenses for a number of intellectual projects, including interdisciplinary discourses around women, gender, sexuality, and identity; economies and histories of the arts; studies of transnational media production and reception; and the relation between cultural history and institutions that create, distribute, or preserve media.

This project historicizes and culturally situates WMM to better understand its place in histories of independent film and feminism, its extensive influence in education and media culture, and its role in shaping trajectories of global feminist media practices.

Sustaining feminist film cultures: an institutional history of women make movies

This article reflects upon the research methods employed for microfemininewarfare (2013), an interactive database documentary that investigates female electronic dance music (EDM) artists. The purpose of the documentary is to feature the contributions of women as composers, to show how they came to be composers and to reveal the tactics used to approach significant issues of gender in the EDM community. I highlight the theoretical and methodological processes that went into the making of this documentary, subtitled “exploring women’s space in electronic music”. By constructing “electronic music by women” as a category, two objectives are addressed: first, the visibility of women’s contribution to the musical tradition is heightened; and, second, it allows an exploration of the broadening of discourses about female subjectivity. This article showcases feminist research-creation and friendship-as-method as effective research methods to glean meaningful content when applied to EDM fieldwork.

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What to Ask Women Composers: Feminist Fieldwork in Electronic Dance Music

As a gay man directing straight hardcore pornographic films in the 1970s, Zebedy Colt smuggled a certain queer eros into the visual culture of heterosexuality Indeed, he belonged to a queer cohort of hetero-pornographers whose subversive flourishes have gone largely unrecognized by porn studies and queer studies scholars, in part because of the incomplete archives generally used to narrate and analyze pornography Yet Colt's work, in such films as The Devil Inside Her (1976), Sex Wish (1976), Virgin Dreams (1977), and others, was a reactionary queer cinema, in which he leveraged a particularly misogynistic white masculinity to achieve his queer interventions This article attends to both his implantation of queer desire into the heart of normative heterosexuality and the gender and racial politics that allowed heteromasculinity to absorb those seeming challenges without any threat of veering toward a queer utopian horizon

Sex Wishes and Virgin Dreams: Zebedy Colt's Reactionary Queer Heterosmut and the Elusive Porn Archive

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks / Robin Blaetz 1 Swing and Sway: Marie Menken's Filmic Events / Melissa Ragona 20 Different/Same/Both/Neither: The Polycentric Cinema of Joyce Wieland / Paul Arthur 45 Evacuating Visual Fields, Layering Auditory Frames: Signature, Translation, Resonance, and Gunvor Nelson's Films / Chris Holmlund 67 Moving and Moving: From Minimalism to Lives of Performers / Noel Carroll 89 Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann / M.M. Serra and Kathryn Ramey 103 "Absently Enchanted": The Apocryphal, Ecstatic Cinema of Barbara Rubin / Ara Osterweil 127 Amy Greenfield: Film, Dynamic Movement, and Transformation / Robert A. Haller 152 Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History / Chuck Kleinhans 167 Chick Strand's Experimental Ethnography / Maria Pramaggiore 188 Amnesis Time: The Films of Marjorie Keller / Robin Blaetz 211 In the Ruins of the Image: The Work of Leslie Thornton / Mary Ann Doane 239 Sounds, Intervals, and Startling Images in the Films of Abigail Child / Maureen Turim 263 Peggy's Playhouse: Contesting the Modernist Paradigm / William C. Wees 290 Su Friedrich: Breaking the Rules / Janet Cutler 312 The Experimental "Dunyementary": A Cinematic Signature Effect / Kathleen McHugh 339 Women's Experimental Cinema: Some Pedgogical Challenges / Scott Macdonald 360 Appendix: Film Distribution 383 Bibliography 385 Contributors 401 Index 405

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Robin Blatez

Papers

Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks