CHAPTER 8

Feminist approaches to
film and television

Like many of the other concepts explored in this volume, feminism is a

much-discussed and much-contested term. To put it simply, feminism means
different things to different people in different times and places. For some (like this
author) it means the basic idea that men and women ought to be treated equally in
all aspects of culture. A more theoretical approach might be to say that feminism is
a critique of inequality based on one’s biological sex or gender expression; in most
places in the world today, men have more opportunities, more rights and privileges,
and more freedoms than do women. Feminism is thus a critique of patriarchy,
literally “rule by the father.” Patriarchy is a term used broadly in feminist theory
to describe the various overdetermined ideologies that keep men in socially
dominant positions. That said, for some people feminism represents a challenge
(or even a threat) to traditional ways of thinking about men and women, sex and
sexuality, the structure of the family, and the structure of the work place.
The feminism that most Westerners are probably somewhat familiar with
arose in the 1960s and 1970s. Following that, many scholars and critics saw a
period of cultural reaction to the women’s movement, a reaction most famously
described as a “backlash” by Susan Faludi in her book of the same name. What
that meant was that during the 1980s and 1990s, many conservative critics and
pundits began to demonize the women’s movement, coining inflammatory terms
such as “Femi-Nazi” and “National Organization of Witches” (instead of the
National Organization of Women). In the United States, the ERA (Equal Rights
Amendment)—which had been written to insure federal equality regardless of an
individual’s sex—had been passed by both houses of Congress in 1972, but by the
1980s it failed to be ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures. Clearly, in
ten years the national mood had changed significantly. In general, the 1980s did see
a rise in more conservative cultural politics across many different sectors of society;
indeed, the backlash to the idea of women deserving equal rights with men was
even successful enough to make many people wary of using the term “feminism”
itself. Feminism had been rebranded from a movement meant to open up and
equalize opportunities for everyone (whether male or female), into something that
many people saw as “man hating,” “male bashing,” or destructive of traditional
“family values.” When the term was co-opted, the ideas that it signified were
similarly co-opted, or even silenced, and many people refused even to speak the
word let alone self-identify as feminists.
Feminism is also a tricky topic for many people because sex roles are so intimate
8: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION 147

to our daily lives: sex (that is to say, whether one is male or female) has a biological
basis, and is central to very personal concepts of identity, sexuality, and one’s place
in society. Indeed, one of the more famous slogans of second wave feminism
was “the personal is the political,” which means that discrimination based on sex is
perhaps more subtle and private than that based on race or ethnicity or class. For
example, bias based on sex was and still is pervasive in the work place, in politics,
in schools, and in the media, but it also takes place within allegedly private or
interpersonal spheres, such as marriage, the family, and religious belief systems.
Furthermore, the ideas and ideals of feminism have much more impact upon our
daily lives than do concepts of auteur theory or genre theory. As such, many
more people have some understanding of what feminism means than they do
poststructuralism, primarily because it has become such a pervasive personal,
public, and politicized issue in recent decades. Another way of saying this is that
ideological biases based on sex or gender expression are heavily overdetermined
in Western nations and Western cultural artifacts. Arguably, they are embedded
in every single cultural institution in which human subjects—as distinct entities
termed men and women—participate. And since bias based on sex permeates so
many different ideological structures and social institutions, it may be “harder” for
some people to see and acknowledge than other forms of discrimination.
Most of us live intimately (if not unconsciously) with dominant notions of sex
and gender (see below), having been assigned one of two possible sex identities at
a very early age. Even individuals who have one of the many biological conditions
that can cause ambiguous sexual characteristics (conditions broadly termed as
intersex syndromes), usually find themselves forced to accede in daily life to one
of two strikingly different sex/gender categories. Similarly, people who identify
as transsexual or transgender often face a great amount of psychic and often
physical violence in many cultures, a fact that suggests how overly charged the
issue of sex and/or gender is for many people. Indeed, sex is one of the most
fundamental structuring binaries of Western culture (if not all global cultures), and
as such it is one of the hardest to pull apart or deconstruct. Like all linguistic
and structural binaries, the allegedly opposite terms of sex and/or gender (male/
female, masculinity/femininity) are defined against one another, and one term is
culturally privileged (in this case male/masculinity is more culturally valued than
is female/femininity). Even when these terms can be shown to overlap—whether
in biological cases of intersex conditions or the simple observation that men can
have (what are thought to be) feminine qualities and women can have (what are
thought to be) masculine qualities—Western culture continually asserts an opposing
(and to a great extent mutually exclusive) definition of sex and gender. If being
masculine is thought to entail strength, stoicism, and aggression (as in the common
phrase “boys don’t cry”), being feminine is defined in opposing terms: delicacy,
emotionality, and passivity.
Further complicating feminist studies (let alone feminist media studies) is the
number of diverse ways feminists themselves have sought to label, classify, and
define the movement. For example, it is now common to speak of three different
“waves” of feminism, and over the years the broad movement has given rise to
myriad approaches variously labeled radical feminism, cultural feminism, bourgeois
feminism, Marxist feminism, womanism, and poststructuralist feminism, among
many, many more. Feminism also means different things dependent upon nation
or region. One of the goals of contemporary Western feminism might be attaining
148 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

equal pay for equal work, while in other regions of the globe feminism might be
about trying to end the legal beating and rape (or even murder) of women by their
own family members. As such, feminism really ought to be considered feminisms.
And as we shall see, even within film and television studies, there are different
approaches to and applications of feminist theory—some of them are firmly rooted
in cultural studies methodologies, while one particularly rich vein of feminist film
theory has drawn on various psychoanalytic and structuralist approaches associated
with apparatus theory. Additionally, feminism intersects with just about every
other issue discussed in this volume, from the study of authorship (auteur theory),
to genre, to fandom/reception practices, and to thinking about race and nation.
This chapter explores ideas and concepts germane to second wave feminism and
the rise of feminist film and television theory during those same decades, roughly
the 1960s–1980s. Chapter 12 will explore in greater detail some of the theoretical
shifts in thinking about gender and sexuality that have come to be defined more
recently as third wave feminism.

Basic terms and concepts

At its basis—whichever variation we choose to single out and focus on—feminism

might best be described as a critique of the diverse inequities created and
maintained in various human cultures based on biological sex. As such, feminism
is an ideological critique, and owes a great deal to concepts first developed within
Marxism. Recall that Marxism sought to expose and challenge social inequities
created and maintained by class; feminism seeks to expose and challenge social
inequities created and maintained by sex and/or gender. However, the cultural
critic is immediately faced with a series of essentialist dilemmas that the use of
the terms sex and/or gender create. In popular usage, sex and gender are used
somewhat interchangeably, but feminist theory has attempted to clarify matters
by assigning sex and gender different (but related) definitions. Thus, the term
sex is used to refer to the differing biological characteristics of men and women,
whether they be chromosomal, hormonal, and/or physical. Biologists define sex
(or sexual) characteristics as either primary (based on sexual organs and their
reproductive functions) or secondary (based on other physical features such as
breast development or facial hair). Gender, on the other hand, is emphatically
not biological—it is social and cultural. Gender refers to the complex and diverse
ways that people are treated (or choose to behave) based on their biological sex.
In many places throughout recent Western culture, individuals of the female sex
were expected to express their gender by being demure and passive, speaking softly,
freely expressing emotion and sentiment, all the while maintaining a (private) home
and raising children. At the same time, individuals of the male sex were expected
to express their gender by being strong, assertive, stoic, and to earn a good living in
a (public) venue, in order to support the wife and kids back home.
The tricky issue then becomes: where does one draw the line between sex
and gender? Which aspects of masculinity and femininity (terms usually
descriptive of gender rather than sex) are biologically determined, and which are
purely social constructs? We might agree that lactation and nursing babies have
a basis in biological sex, whereas the fact that Western women are expected to
wear make-up and high heels is a facet of their playing a social role, that is to say
gender. But what about a quality like leadership? Leadership is usually linked to
8: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION 149

traditionally masculine gender roles: is there something biological in male humans

(and allegedly lacking in human females) that gives rise to superior leadership
skills? People who believe there is something biological about leadership skills (or
the lack thereof) might be best described as gender essentialists. An essentialist
approach to gender suggests that since there are significant differences between
male and female biology, those differences “naturally” give rise to the social roles
(or genders) enacted by men and women. There are many men (and even women)
who fall into this gender essentialist camp, people who believe that biology is
destiny, that qualities such as aggression and/or passivity are linked primarily (if
not solely) to one’s biological make up. However, there are also many men and
women who support an opposing, more socially-determined view of gender: these
people might be broadly termed gender anti-essentialists, or more commonly
anti-essentialist feminists. The anti-essentialist approach to gender suggests
that even if there are biological differences between men and women, they are
insignificant compared to the social, linguistic, and structural conditioning that each
human being receives about gender from the moment they are born. Thus, while
an essentialist feminist might argue that (biological) sex gives rise to (socio-cultural)
gender expressions, an anti-essentialist feminist might argue the reverse: that it is
the gender roles we enact socially and culturally that determine what sex we are
perceived as being.
Recent feminist approaches have also shifted their emphases away from what
might be termed “Women’s Studies” and towards a more inclusive area of research
termed “Gender Studies.” The newer terminology suggests that masculinity is
just as culturally constructed as is femininity, and that although the roles men are
expected to play within most given cultures usually privilege them over female
roles, such masculine roles might in their own way be constrictive and even
unhealthy. For example, men in Western cultures tend to die at earlier ages than
do women; but is that because of biological differences (sex) or the social roles
they are expected to perform (gender)? According to traditional Western gender
roles, men are expected to be aggressive (and even violent) risk takers. Is reckless
behavior something encoded into male DNA (a biologically essentialist belief),
or is it something that men in Western societies learn to enact as part of being
masculine (a more social-constructionist, anti-essentialist belief)? These questions
are important ones to ask, and some cultural critics today would probably argue
that they require a “both/and” answer rather than an “either/or” approach. In
other words, some scholars argue that biology does contribute to certain aspects of
our sexual and/or gendered identity, but so do the complex cultural environments
within which we exist.
Furthermore, it is patently obvious that genders are expressed in many different
ways depending on a multitude of cultural variables. History, nation, region,
class, religion, etc. all impact on how a given individual’s sex (male or female)
is expressed through his/her gender role (masculinity or femininity); this basic
observation lends considerable credence to the anti-essentialist model of gender.
To give a few brief examples, women who follow Judeo-Christian religious
traditions rarely wear burqas, the enveloping head-to-toe garment that women in
certain Islamic communities are expected to wear as a matter of course. Similarly,
some masculinities in the Middle East allow for heterosexual men to hold hands,
a sign of gender expression that would probably be interpreted in the West as
homosexual. In yet another example, in the United States it is usually considered
150 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

important for women to shave their legs and under their arms before they present
themselves publically; this is less the case in Europe and other regions of the world.
Masculinity in the West has also undergone various changes in recent decades:
many young men now sport unshaven faces and tattoos, expressions of gender for
which their fathers and grandfathers rarely opted (unless they were working class
sailors).
It is self-evident that gender roles fluctuate: they differ in various historical
eras, and they differ from region to region, nation to nation, community to
community, family to family, father to son, and mother to daughter. The ideal
Western gender roles of the 1950s—briefly sketched above with the (private)
stay-at-home Mom and the (public) working Dad—are for many people today
an economic impossibility, even as they may still be considered desirable goals
by some people. However, such an ideal was out of reach even in the 1950s for
many American families, based on other social factors such as class or race. For
example, the racism of pre-civil rights America caused many white business owners
to deny jobs to black men (who would also have had a very hard time attaining
the education necessary for white collar jobs), forcing many black women to
become the breadwinners of their families. In a famous bit of racial/racist “science”
reflecting this history, sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report The Negro
Family: The Case for National Action (also known as the Moynihan Report) more or
less blamed the lower class status and outright poverty of many African American
families not on the socioeconomic impact of the era’s institutionalized racism,
but rather on black families’ allegedly disordered gender relations. The point to
remember here is that gender does not exist as a discrete category: in any given
society it is deeply intertwined with other social factors like class, race, ethnicity,
regionality, sexuality, and so forth.
To return to another basic feminist critique, across much of the globe human
societies have tended to be male dominated, or patriarchal. Most Judeo-Christian
religions proscribe different roles for men and women, allowing men positions of
leadership denied to women. The traditional Western nuclear family, as described
above, also sets out different tasks for men and women, and places the male as
the head of the family. Because most white middle-class men worked outside
the home (while white women were contained within), men were expected to
become involved in social organizations like politics and business associations—to
lead local, state, and federal governments. Because men as a group were perceived
as stronger and more aggressive than women, they led state militias and staffed
most of the Armed Services. They also comprised most of the sports teams and
much of the audience for spectator sports. And as is also historically apparent, the
film and television industries were mostly staffed by male producers, directors,
agents, and studio moguls; the images of men and women they constructed in
their media texts tended to reflect their eras’ patriarchal assumptions about sex and
gender. Classical Hollywood narrative form itself is usually structured around an
active male protagonist and a more passive female love interest. Television genres
and formats are perhaps less proscriptive when it comes to gender (because they
are more diverse than Hollywood narrative filmmaking), but TV too finds ways to
differentiate between men and women and suggest what type of gender expressions
are possible for each. Again, it is important to remember that film and television
are ideological state apparatuses that work to maintain the status quo of
dominant ideology; in the case of gender, much film and television tends to uphold
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the dominance of patriarchy, interlocking with other ideological state institutions

like religion, sports, and the government that do the same. To quote feminist
and anti-racist cultural critic bell hooks’s famous turn of phrase, “Patriarchy has
no gender.” To critique patriarchy is not to attack men. Patriarchy is instead
an overdetermined ideological structure that pervades most global cultures,
shaping—some might say deforming—the many ways we think about men and
women.

First and second wave feminism: Impact on film and television

As noted above, it is commonplace (albeit overly simplistic) to speak of three

broad historical eras or “waves” of feminism in the West. Partly this is because
feminist activism has been thought to wax and wane according to other social
forces, such as the Great Depression and World War II, both of which occurred
between the first and second waves of feminism, somewhat “interrupting” the
development of feminist thought as more pressing struggles were met. (Of course,
World War II greatly contributed to the feminist movement in its own way, as
women were encouraged to enter the work force in unprecedented numbers in
order to bolster the war effort.) First wave feminism refers to the struggles
surrounding sex and/or gender inequities that occurred in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, actions and struggles centered on issues such as women’s
rights to vote, to enter professional careers, frequent public spaces, receive birth
control information, and even smoke cigarettes. (In the United States, many first
wave feminists were also involved in the temperance movement which led to the
era of Prohibition [1920–33].) Second wave feminism describes the feminist
actions and struggles of the 1960s and 1970s; in many ways, second wave feminism
was part of the broader countercultural and civil rights movements of that era,
and its goals included freeing up access to birth control, legalizing abortion, and
continuing to fight for equal access to education and jobs. Third wave feminism
arose roughly in the 1990s, and is primarily a shift in ways scholars think about
gender and sexuality. Third wave feminism is perceived as moving beyond the
(frequently) essentialist, bourgeois, white, and heterosexual shortsightedness of
much second wave feminism. Incorporating concepts drawn from structuralist and
poststructuralist theory, such as the social and linguistic construction of gender,
third wave feminism suggests that all qualities of gender (like female passivity and
male aggression) are creations of the linguistic and mediated structures within
which we are born. While many second wave feminists may have accepted an
essentialist, biological explanation for female passivity and/or male aggression,
third wave feminists do not. Their position is that the culture and media that
surrounds us teaches us to be masculine or feminine, that being male or female
really has very little to do with biology. Third wave feminism is thus considered an
anti-essentialist feminism.
Obviously, there was very little scholarship about film and television during
feminism’s first wave; after all, TV would not be an important cultural artifact until
the late 1940s/early 1950s, and films were seen by many as nothing but a cultural
curiosity. However, feminist thinking about media was an integral part of film
studies as it matured or came of age in the 1960s; the feminist scholarship about
television that soon followed helped expand “film studies” into “film and television
studies” more generally. As such, feminist approaches to film and TV were vital to
152 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

the expansion of the discipline throughout the 1970s, and multiple books, journals,
conferences, and film festivals were increasingly devoted to topics exploring
gender in the media. Recall that much early film theory was comprised of basic
auteur and genre approaches; as such, a generation of second wave feminist film
scholars began to explore gender in connection to those approaches. Pioneering
female film directors like Lois Weber, Alice Guy-Blaché, Dorothy Arzner, and Ida
Lupino were rescued from the dustbin of (male-written) film history, as feminist
film theorists began to ask questions like “What does it mean to be a female
auteur?” Female screenwriters (Anita Loos, Frances Marion), actresses (Mae West,
Katharine Hepburn), and actress/moguls (Mary Pickford) were reclaimed as
important feminists, women who worked within—and frequently challenged—
the male dominated world of classical (and pre-classical) Hollywood cinema. One
of the central goals of this earlier feminist film scholarship was to rewrite the
canon of film history, to go in search of women’s voices throughout the history
of the medium, in order to investigate and explore their (previously overlooked)
importance. And as film studies became film and television studies, scholars focused
on other powerful women in the media industries. A small sampling might include
Lucille Ball (who with her husband Desi Arnaz owned her own TV studio, Desilu
Studios) as well as Irna Phillips and Agnes Nixon, who, respectively, created the
long-running soap operas As the World Turns (1956–2010) and All My Children
(1970–2011). Other more recent figures of feminist inquiry have included Mary
Tyler Moore (a force in 1970s television production via her MTM Enterprises),
and Roseanne Barr, whose “unruly woman” persona challenged patriarchal
assumptions about femaleness and femininity in the 1990s.
Other second wave feminists turned their analytical tools towards Hollywood
film genres, noting how most film genres were (and still are) centered on men: the
war film, the western, the gangster film, comedy, science fiction, horror, film noir,
etc. On the other hand, female genres in Hollywood are so rare they have to be
singled out and named as such: the classical era’s woman’s film or melodrama,
a format that has more or less evolved into today’s chick flick. It is a given (even
today) that most Hollywood films center on a male protagonist and relegate women
to the roles of love/sex interest (or occasionally the villain). As such, women’s
stereotyped roles in Hollywood film can often be easily described in terms of the
virgin/whore dichotomy (also known as the Madonna/whore dichotomy).
As the later term suggests, this split is central to Western culture and Christianity
in general; it tends to reduce a woman’s subjectivity onto a singular aspect of her
being—her sexuality. As this virgin/whore discourse frames and shapes femininity,
women are either “good girls” who abstain from sex (the virgin, the Madonna, or
the Mother whose sexuality is contained and controlled by patriarchal structures
like the church and the family), or they are the “bad girls” who are sexually
active (the whore, the femme fatale, the “tragic mulatto”). In Hollywood
genre filmmaking, virgins range from the sheriff’s wife or farmer’s daughter in
the western to the just-married heroine of the classical horror film. The whores
in both of those genres, respectively, are the saloon keeper with a heart of gold
(a Hollywood euphemism for prostitute), or else countless sexualized monsters
like those found in The Vampire Lovers (1970) or Species (1995). It is easy to find
remnants of the virgin–whore dichotomy configuring representations of women
in multiple Hollywood genres, as well as in specific filmic contexts. For example,
the trope also lingers in the formula of the slasher film—wherein sexually active
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teenage girls are killed for their transgressions while the asexual “final girl” defeats
the killer.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, second wave feminist film theorists focused on the ways
that the so-called woman’s film (or Hollywood melodrama) did or did not
offer up spaces for feminist critique. Do the films inure women to their status as
suffering and sacrificial second class citizens, cathartically allowing them a good cry
at the movies even as they must then return home to less-than-blissful marriages?
Or do the films present a critique of the patriarchal structures (marriage, family,
lack of work opportunities) that so entrap and enclose women? Do today’s chick
flicks embrace and celebrate female bonding and independence, or do they merely
chronicle the proper way for a young woman to find her Mr. Right? (Those
questions might best be answered on a film by film basis, although even today it
is difficult for most feminist critics—myself included—to label most mainstream
films or TV shows as in any way feminist. Instead, most popular culture seems to
negotiate nervously with patriarchy in hegemonic ways, perhaps lightly tweaking
patriarchal assumptions while simultaneously shoring up its dominance.) Film noir
was also a topic of interest for second wave feminist film scholars, as its images of
femme fatales (“spider women”) seemed both stereotypical—villainous women
using their sexuality to lure men to their doom—as well as potentially empowering.
Important work on TV soon followed the film scholarship: for example, Tania
Modleski’s Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women was among
the first feminist works of scholarship to take seriously Harlequin romances and the
TV soap opera, “low art” forms deemed by most to be unworthy of consideration.
The work of Modleski (and many others in this mode) helped mount a critique of
the “high art” bias still found in much of the era’s film and television scholarship;
it helped open up a broader range of film and TV texts for scholarly study, as did
cultural studies in general.
Among the most important work of second wave film critics and scholars—
partly because much of it was widely distributed via mass market paperback
books—partakes of what has been called basic image (or stereotype) analysis,
a form of structuralist content analysis designed to reveal persistent patterns and
character motifs within Hollywood filmmaking. As such, image analysis can be and
has been performed on many different filmic subgroups, such as Irish Americans,
Native Americans, gay men and lesbians, etc. The scholarship mentioned above
focusing on the virgin–whore dichotomy is a good example of second wave
feminist image analysis. Other important image analyses of women from this era
include Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & the American Dream and
Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Each
book reviewed hundreds of Hollywood films and revealed a cinematic history of
vamps, princesses, long-suffering mothers, and mad women—each often some
variation of the virgin or the whore. Haskell’s book also celebrated the strong
female characters of the classical Hollywood cinema (those played by Mae West,
Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, etc.) but noted how they were
co-opted or contained by the generic imperatives of film noir or the woman’s
film. Haskell lamented the mid-1960s demise of the Hollywood Production Code
because she felt it had been useful in the creation of complex female characters.
When the Code fell, she argued, male producers simply opted for more sex and
violence, replacing the strong women found in previous eras’ musicals, screwball
comedies, and women’s films with nubile actress-models whose chief attribute was
154 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

their pneumatic sexuality. Haskell further argued that despite the rise of second
wave feminism, Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s had failed to keep up; instead,
they tended to offer images suggestive of first wave feminism, as in the period
musicals Mary Poppins (1964), Funny Girl (1968), and Star! (1968). (Compare this
to the somewhat analogous Hollywood films The Butler [2013] and Selma [2014],
released some sixty years after the civil rights movement occurred.) Haskell went so
far as to accuse male Hollywood of not knowing how to create realistic or complex
female characters at all, citing a slew of buddy movies (or male-male love stories, as
she called them) such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Midnight Cowboy
(1969), and The Sting (1973): in those films women are relegated to marginal
female love interests, or absent all together.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, feminist film and television scholars continued
to explore gender in relation to a wide range of texts and industrial contexts.
Lynn Spigel explored how television became a ubiquitous household appliance
in the 1950s, and what that development had to tell us about gender during the
postwar era. By the 1990s, it was not unusual to find feminist work being done
on any and all manner of film and TV shows, from “quality television” to I Dream
of Jeannie (1965–70), and from the Home Shopping Network to the nightly
news. Shows that seem skewed toward women in their approach (such as Cagney
& Lacey [1981–8]) also came in for close scrutiny, as did the rise of music videos
and the phenomenal popularity of the pop singer Madonna. In short, there is no
area of film and television studies that cannot be investigated in terms of gender
and sexuality. And as third wave feminism arose in the academy in the 1990s, it
began to redress some of the shortcomings it perceived in second wave feminism,
primarily by acknowledging the diversity of women’s experiences. Today it is not
good enough to assume that all women respond to the same texts in the same way,
a naïve and (essentialist) assumption of some second wave feminist thinking. Today
feminist media theorists including bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherríe Moraga, B.
Ruby Rich, Diane Negra, Mary Kearney and many others insist on the diversity
of women’s experiences of and representation within film and television texts,
specifically seeing gender as imbricated in other forms of social difference such as
class, race/ethnicity, regionality, nation, age, and sexuality. But before we return
to those concerns (in Chapter 12), we must first examine the incredible impact
psychoanalysis had upon second wave feminist film theory.

Laura Mulvey: Psychoanalysis, apparatus theory, and gender

One of the most important feminist interventions in film studies occurred in 1975,
when Laura Mulvey published her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema” within the pages of Screen magazine. While much feminist media
scholarship up to that time (like Molly Haskell’s) had been focused on the content
of Hollywood films (and to a lesser extent the content of European art cinema),
Mulvey’s essay focused on the patriarchal nature of Hollywood form itself. Mulvey’s
essay shifted the scholarly discussion away from how Hollywood films represented
gender, by arguing that Hollywood form itself can be thought of as gendered, and
more precisely gendered male. Drawing on then-prevalent theories of the cinematic
apparatus (see Chapter 7), including its use of psychoanalysis to theorize the
pleasures of looking (scopophilia) and the construction of the cinematic spectator,
Mulvey persuasively argued that Hollywood form was designed to speak to and/
8: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION 155

or appease the male unconscious. She examined the different pleasurable looks that
Hollywood cinema affords its spectators, and concluded that they were all male.
For example, Mulvey argued that the narcissistic gaze encourages the spectator to
identify with the central male character on screen. The voyeuristic gaze, which
looks at human bodies on screen in an erotic or libidinal way, is also male, since it
is the female body that is usually objectified or put on sexualized display for the
male (character, camera, and audience member). As Mulvey puts it,

As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his
look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male
protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic
look, both giving a satisfying sense if omnipotence.
(720)

Regardless of the genre or individual film text, Mulvey suggests that Hollywood
narrative form (its storytelling mechanisms as well as its editing, lighting, framing,
etc.) creates a situation in which man is the bearer of the look, and woman is that
object to-be-looked-at. As such, Hollywood cinema constructs and facilitates a
specifically patriarchal way of seeing, a way of seeing that has come to be called the
male gaze.
Mulvey’s essay pointed out how Hollywood cinema is comprised of three
specific “types of looks” that make up the working mechanism of cinema: (1) the
look of the camera on the sound stage that records the actors as they perform
their characters, (2) the looks of the diegetic characters at other diegetic characters
and things, and (3) the look of the spectator in the audience watching the screen.
Noting that much of classical Hollywood cinema was shot by men (look 1), and
that male protagonists are more likely to be given point-of-view shots than are
female characters (look 2), Mulvey argued that in classical Hollywood syntax the
spectator is also assumed to be male, regardless of his or her actual gender (look
3). Indeed, each of these three looks is exactly the same when a male protagonist
is given a point of view shot: the male camera’s look (1) is the same as the male
character’s look (2), forcing the spectator’s look (3) to be aligned quite literally
with that of the (male) camera and (male) character. (Recall that within Screen or
apparatus theory, the spectator refers more to a place in the cinematic machinery
than an actual human being) (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2). As such, even “real” women
in the audience are forced to look through the eyes of the male filmmakers and
male characters, especially as the men (filmmakers and characters) look at other
women with desire. In a later article, Mulvey suggests that women in the audience
have only two very limited choices when confronted with the dynamics of the
male gaze: either to identify against her own gender (aligning her gaze with the
male camera and characters), or else to identify with the women on screen who are
presented as less than human subjects—literally sexual objects of the libidinal male
gaze.
But that is not the end of the story for Mulvey, because even as Hollywood
form and the male gaze work to frame women as glamorous, sexualized, and on
display, “in psychoanalytic terms the female figure poses a deeper problem. She
also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her
lack of penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (721). Mulvey
suggests this threat is dealt with in two ways within classical Hollywood cinema:
 156 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

Fig 8.1 Fig 8.2

In I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932)—or almost any classical … is immediately followed by a subjective shot of what he is looking at,
Hollywood film—an objective shot of the protagonist looking … suturing everyone in the audience into the “male gaze” at the female body.

either through narratives which sadistically investigate and punish women (and
the mystery they represent), or through fetishistic scopophilia, in which the
onscreen woman is literally turned into a collection of objectified and fetishized
body parts that work to cover over the threat of castration caused by an actual
female subject. Mulvey cites the generic narratives of film noir and the work of
Alfred Hitchcock as prime examples of the first mechanism. Many mysteries and
hard-boiled detective fictions, as well as Hitchcock films like Vertigo (1958) and
Marnie (1964), are about little more than a male protagonist’s obsessive drive to
investigate and observe (through the male gaze) the enigmatic mystery of a woman.
And as far as fetishization goes, just about any classical Hollywood musical
number or more recent music video contains fetishized close up shots of women’s
body parts, part of a sexualized male fantasy world constructed by (usually male)
singers/songwriters and film and video makers. Laura Mulvey’s ideas about the
male gaze have been tremendously influential in film studies; her “Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema” became one of the most frequently anthologized essays
within the discipline. That said, her ideas—like much of apparatus theory itself—
have also been critiqued as essentialist and reductive. One of the first problems
that arises is how monolithic and overwhelming the idea of the male gaze is (or
became) for some theorists. Based upon the proposition that all Hollywood films—
Screen theory’s classical realist texts—inherently construct a male subject position,
every Hollywood narrative film whether it be Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) or
Norma Rae (1979) automatically exploits and reinscribes the male gaze. Because
of this assertion, Mulvey’s essay called for an end to narrative (Hollywood) cinema
and challenged filmmakers to find new ways of making films that would not speak
(solely) to the male unconscious. As such, her essay did spur a vibrant feminist
avant-garde film culture throughout the 1970s and 1980s, of which Mulvey’s own
film Riddles of the Sphinx (1979) remains exemplary. Other important feminist films
that were created in response to the essay (either in whole or in part) include Sally
Potter’s Thriller (1979), Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite (1979), Lizzie Borden’s Born
in Flames (1983), as well as works by Barbara Hammer, Ulrike Ottinger, Chantal
Akerman, and Yvonne Rainer.
8: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION 157

Indeed, Mulvey’s essay arguably inspired a generation of experimental

filmmakers (both men and women) to seek out new ways to tell stories and make
films. Like some experimental writers before them, some of those filmmakers went
in search of what has been called écriture féminine, a practice of female writing
(or female filmmaking) meant to transcend or exist outside of phallogocentric
language systems (like Hollywood narrative form). While many fascinating films
and videos were made in this tradition, their experimental nature foreclosed
the possibility of their crossing over into a larger, more mainstream audience.
Furthermore, the whole project of creating or defining a female language (or
discourse) rests upon questionably essentialist assumptions: do men and women
really make films (or write novels) differently, based on their biological and/or
social conditioning? If so, is there one proper form or style of female writing (or
female filmmaking) to which all women are supposed to adhere? And perhaps more
problematically, if we are already always caught up in phallogocentric language
systems from the moment we are born, is it even possible to “get outside” of that
system and imagine something new?
The case of a more popular female filmmaker like Sofia Coppola may be
somewhat illuminating in these respects. Coppola’s films—including The Virgin
Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), Somewhere (2010),
and The Bling Ring (2013)—do seem to mount a challenge to usual Hollywood
style: they often feature dream-like and/or anachronistic elements, and often
center less on narrative occurrences and more on aimless or “lost” characters as
they struggle to make sense of the world around them. But should Coppola’s
auteur signature necessarily be considered a feminine or female auteur signature? It
might be somewhat different from normative Hollywood style—and that different
style may open up spaces to express new types of ideas, including feminist ones—
but clearly male directors can and do make films in styles similar to Coppola’s.
Similarly, there are female directors in Hollywood who make mainstream action
films that are indistinguishable from those directed by men. In a perfect world,
filmmakers of all genders and races could make films and videos about whatever
subject matter they wanted, in whatever styles they chose. However, trying to find
and classify a female film and video aesthetic, or an African American or Chicano
film and video aesthetic, or even a New Queer aesthetic is a problematic and
potentially reductive project, reducing the complexity of any given filmmaker to
one essentialized element of his or her race, gender, or sexuality.
Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay had far less impact on mainstream Hollywood
film practice—let alone television, which her essay did not address—than it did
on media scholarship and experimental filmmaking. If anything, films that play to
an overtly libidinal male unconscious are arguably more prevalent today than they
were during the classical era, while everything from “soups to nuts” is advertised
with images of near-naked young women used to entice the heterosexual
male gaze. Mulvey’s thinking may have also fallen out of favor somewhat as
the essentialist aspects of apparatus theory were more generally replaced by
poststructuralist and cultural studies approaches in the 1980s and 1990s. However,
Mulvey’s thoughts on the dynamics of objectification (if not her revolutionary call
for a women’s experimental cinema that would challenge Hollywood’s dominance)
can and do continue to illuminate thinking about gender in film and television
texts. This dynamic remains an important one to consider when analyzing film and
television, but there is also the need to look at texts and contexts more carefully.
 158 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

Some of the more interesting scholarship to follow after Mulvey’s explores the
objectification of male bodies on screen. The display of the male body onscreen
was far less common during the classical era of Hollywood than it is today; in that
era, male bodies were usually meant to signify strength and stoicism, especially
during action and/or torture sequences (unlike female bodies, which were usually
presented as sexualized spectacle, unimportant to the narrative information).
However, since the 1980s, men’s bodies have become increasingly objectified in
Western cultures, in both advertising and in film and television. Some films, like
300 (2006), use CGI to fetishize their male characters’ bodies, but do so mostly
in accordance with earlier Hollywood practices that showcase the male body in
order to dramatize its power and virility (and thus uphold its patriarchal privilege).
Other films like Magic Mike (2012) present the dancing male body as more of a
sexualized spectacle, without the narrative action sequences as “camouflage.” One
even earlier film that subverted (by inverting) the dynamics of the male gaze was
Thelma & Louise (1991), during the scene in which a shirtless J. D. (Brad Pitt)
poses seductively for Thelma (Geena Davis). Shot as a series of shot-reverse-shots
exchanges from Thelma’s point of view, the film sutures its audience into Thelma’s
libidinal gaze at J. D., just as a Hollywood film might have sutured a libidinal
gaze at Marilyn Monroe into that of her male co-star (and by extension the male
spectator) (see Figures 8.3 and 8.4). Some feminist theorists insist that this example
of objectification should still be considered an example of the male gaze in action,

Fig 8.3
In Thelma & Louise
(1991), the dynamics
of the male gaze are
reversed, with Thelma
(Geena Davis) doing the
looking …

Fig 8.4
… at the objectified body
of J. D. (Brad Pitt).
8: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION 159

even though it is a woman gazing at a man; if so, this then creates a homosexual
or homoerotic effect that can be potentially threatening to a heterosexual male
spectator, now forced to gaze with desire at the body of another man. But why can
it not also be a female heterosexual gaze, which is clearly what is occurring within
the diegesis?
Rather than claiming that any sexually objectifying gaze is necessarily male,
some scholars suggest that it is the camera which does the objectifying, and
that the sex of the person holding the camera, or doing the looking within the
diegesis, does make a difference. The gaze might be better thought of as multiple
and varied, depending upon who is doing the photographing, the sexes of the
characters involved in the scene, and the actual audience members watching it. In
the example above from Thelma & Louise, reversing the genders involved in the
traditional voyeuristic gaze has the ability to unseat and destabilize it, not merely
replicate it. The editing patterns of classical Hollywood style that create and
encourage spectators’ gazes—whether they be narcissistic, voyeuristic or fetishistic—
have been endemic to Western visual cultures for over one hundred years (if not
longer). John Berger’s important volume Ways of Seeing documents these tropes as
far back as the work of Renaissance figure painters. They are probably not going to
go away in the near future. The point is to be aware of them, and like any aspect of
film or televisual style, continue to find new ways of working with them, tweaking
them, amending them, if not forthrightly replacing them. As the people making
film and television texts continue to diversify in terms of gender, so will the stories
they tell hopefully diversify, as well as the ways in which those stories are told. And
feminist cultural critics will be there to observe, comment, and critique.

Case Study 1: The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

Different critics and scholars o"en have different interpretations of what exactly might
constitute a “feminist film” or a “feminist TV” show. Today, many texts appear to speak
to certain feminist issues but ultimately still seem to support dominant patriarchal
ideologies in various ways (as in an actual episode of The View [1997–] devoted to
breast augmentation strategies). Perhaps a better question to ask rather than the
(quite essentialist) question “Is this a feminist text or not?” is “In what ways does this
text negotiate with dominant patriarchal ideologies about sex roles?” Or: “What does
this text reveal about social inequities based on gender?” When asking those types
of questions, film and TV analysis becomes more nuanced and more productive, and
allows the cultural critic to examine a wider range of texts than those only written
and directed by women, or those made within a self-proclaimed feminist avant-garde
movement. Of course it is important to have “Women Make Movies,” as the name of
one feminist film/video distribution outlet would have it. However, women can make
movies in line with dominant patriarchal ideologies just as men can; likewise, it is
more than possible for a man to make a film that has important things to say about
gender and female oppression. The Magdalene Sisters—though written and directed
by Peter Mullan, and centering on the victimization of women—is exactly that sort of
film.
The Magdalene Sisters is an independent film made in Scotland but set in County
Dublin, Ireland during the mid-1960s. Though a work of fiction, the film is based on
the actual accounts of women who were incarcerated in that era’s Magdalene asylums,
160 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

a sort of social refuge/convent/workhouse system created by and controlled by the

Catholic church. (The more recent film Philomena [2013] is also about the abuses
women suffered within the Magdalene asylum system.) Peter Mullan’s film dramatizes
the brutal mistreatment that many young women suffered in those places, and how
that era’s patriarchal institutions (including the family, religion, business, and local
community governance) worked together in ideologically overdetermined ways to
maintain and legitimate a system of remarkable cruelty to young women. In exposing
the specifically gendered and sexualized dynamics of one historical place and time,
The Magdalene Sisters might be said to be doing queer work (see Chapter 12). In other
words, the film demonstrates that gender and sexuality are far from fixed entities, that
how they are understood by a community or culture varies from place to place and
time to time. Furthermore, the film dramatizes how particular socio-cultural institutions
shape and construct specific views of gender and sexuality, and in the case of Catholic
Ireland in the mid-1960s, how those specific views led to the persecution of over 30,000
women.
The Magdalene Sisters centers on three young women who are introduced in three
short vignettes at the start of the film. Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is introduced at a
community wedding celebration, where she is drawn aside and raped by a cousin. When
the men of the family discover this, they usher the perpetrator out of the room (his fate
is le" uncertain), but Margaret’s father, in collusion with his local Catholic priest, sends
Margaret off to a Magdalene laundry, as she is now considered a disgrace to her family,
having been sexually violated. The adolescent orphan Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is
similarly transported to the Magdalene laundry a"er the people who run the orphanage
see (and fear) the sexual attraction she holds for the local teenage boys. Rose (Dorothy
Duffy) is introduced as a young woman who has just given birth out of wedlock; her
parents force her to give up her “bastard child” for adoption and ship her off to the
Magdalene asylum as well. Once there, the girls are expected to work in the laundry
without pay, and maintain a convent-like regimen of silence and prayer. They are also
subjected to various forms of psychological and physical abuse at the hands of the nuns
who run the institution. Instead of expressing compassion for the young women they
oversee, the nuns have internalized the patriarchal belief system of the Catholic church,
with its gendered hierarchies and inherent violence.
The head of the laundry/convent is Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), a sadistic older
woman who rules the asylum with an iron hand. As do her fellow nuns, sister Bridget
constantly belittles and harasses her charges, calling them stupid and sinful. But Sister
Bridget also knows these young women comprise her workforce, allowing her to earn
the money which keeps her in power as leader of the institution. Mullan underscores the
overdetermined connections between capitalism and Catholicism during Sister Bridget’s
initial interview with her three new charges: while the audio track features Sister Bridget
extolling Catholic dogma about hard work being the way to heavenly salvation, the visual
track shows her greedily counting and packaging the money she earns by exploiting her
incarcerated workforce (Figure 8.5). Thus, in addition to the young women’s persecution
based on their alleged religious crimes (for Catholics of the era, unwed sexuality was a
mortal sin tantamount to murder), and their persecution by their families and especially
their fathers (who send them away out of shame), there is also a capitalist motive for
the brutal and oppressive system. At another point in the film, Mullan again underscores
the connections between capitalism and patriarchal Catholicism when he represents the
laundry as a cogwheel-filled industrial space, or when he depicts a priest blessing a new
washing machine (see Figure 8.6).
8: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION 161

Fig 8.5
A close up of Sister
Bridget counting money
in The Magdalene Sisters
(2002) suggests the real
reason so many young
women are incarcerated in
the laundry.

Fig 8.6
Money and religion are
again intertwined in The
Magdalene Sisters (2002)
when the priest blesses
the new washing and
drying machines.

Much of the film depicts the cruel treatment the young women receive at the hands
of their “benefactors.” Rose suffers in silence from mastitis, a painful inflammation
of the breasts that can occur a"er pregnancy; her baby and proper medical care are
nowhere to be seen. Margaret prepares for an escape, only to witness the runaway
Una (Mary Murray) brought back to the asylum by her father who violently beats her in
front of all the other young women (as well as Sister Bridget who does nothing to stop
the attack). Bernadette’s failed escape results in a gruesome and bloody head-shaving
at the hands of Sister Bridget and her nuns, a fate also meted out to Una (see Figure
8.7). In another scene, the girls are made to stand naked in front of two nuns who play
a humiliating “game” with them, mocking their bodies based on their sizes, shapes,
and amount of body hair. Unlike the usual objectifying and fetishizing ways women’s
bodies are portrayed on screen, there is nothing sexy or titillating about this scene,
and the spectator is not invited to find it erotic. The women’s bodies are plain and
varied, without fetishizing make-up, costumes, hairstyles, lighting (or airbrushing, as is
commonly done with photographs of women in fashion magazines). The gaze that these
 162 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

Fig 8.7
In The Magdalene Sisters
(2002), the penalty
for trying to escape the
workhouse is a brutal and
bloody head-shaving from
Sister Bridget.

women are subjected to—in this case from the leering nuns—is shown to be cruel,
demeaning, and controlling (see Figure 8.8). Even at the end of the film a"er Bernadette
has escaped the asylum, Bernadette reacts with anxiety when she sees two nuns
watching her.
Perhaps the most tragic character in the film is Crispina (Eileen Walsh), a seemingly
mentally challenged young woman who has been placed with the nuns for having had a
child out of wedlock, as was Rose. Crispina’s soul survives on the rare glimpses of her son,
brought to the gate of the asylum by a kindly family member, even as she is forbidden
to speak to him or even acknowledge his existence. Psychologically immersed in the
very ideological institution that is abusing her, Crispina believes she can communicate
with her son through a matching set of Saint Christopher medals—one belonging to her
son and one that she wears around her neck. When the medal goes missing, Crispina
fears she is being punished by God and attempts to kill herself, first by sleeping in a
wet nightgown to bring on the flu (which she believes is not quite the sin of suicide),
and then by taking more drastic measures by attempting to hang herself. Crispina is

Fig 8.8
In The Magdalene Sisters
(2002), nuns taunt and
humiliate their nude
charges as part of a
sadistic game. Compare
the shot of these women
with how popular media
usually represents the
female form.
8: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION 163

also being sexually abused by Father Fitzroy, the local priest who oversees the asylum.
Margaret secretly avenges Crispina by putting a poisonous plant into the priest’s clothes
as they are processed in the laundry, and a public spectacle ensues: in front of the
gathered community, the priest rips off his clothing to reveal the itching fiery lesions
covering his body caused by the poisonous plant. At the same moment, Crispina also
acknowledges an itching in her groin and has a complete breakdown, screaming over and
over at the priest “You are not a man of God!”
Silence is a powerful theme throughout The Magdalene Sisters, used to symbolize
not just the repression of gender and sexuality in this place and time, but also how
silence tacitly gives approval to the heinous deeds and immoral practices represented.
In the case of Margaret and Rose, their mothers remain silent even as their daughters
are mistreated. Is this because as patriarchal wives they are not allowed to express an
opinion? Or is it that they are afraid to express an opinion, when the men in their lives
are shown giving in to such violent behaviors? Or do they share their husbands’ points
of view, having internalized the church’s patriarchal teachings about the sinfulness of
women? Clearly, not only the nuns who run the asylum but also the older women who
have spent their entire lives incarcerated within it have done the latter. Silence is also
powerfully invoked during Crispina’s public denunciation of the predatory priest. All the
inhabitants of the laundry as well as the gathered townspeople (including policemen
and public officials who should suspect something “wrong” has been going on) remain
silent in response to Crispina’s allegations; in this way writer-director Mullan indicts their
complicity in the abusive Magdalene asylum system, which they refuse to see for what it
really is.
While the abuses against women depicted in The Magdalene Sisters may seem totally
of another era and unrelated to today’s feminist struggles, it is perhaps surprising to
note that the last Magdalene laundry closed in 1996. The film reminds us that even in a
decade (the 1960s) celebrated for its countercultural ideals and feminist consciousness
raising (at least in some areas of the West), such abuses against women and women’s
sexuality could be and were still being perpetrated on such a massive scale. The film
may also ask us to think beyond Western borders, and to acknowledge the abuses
that women are still suffering around the globe at the hands of repressive doctrines
expressed through families, churches, communities, and even capitalism itself. Today,
wealthy Western white women may take for granted their rights to an education, a
career, and a closet full of designer shoes, but there are millions of women the world
over who are still struggling for basic human rights. Contemporary feminist film
and media production, theory, and scholarship is still dedicated to addressing those
inequities.

Case study 2: Masters of Sex (“Pilot,” 2013)

The Showtime serial Masters of Sex is another good example of a film or TV text that
engages with and explores issues related to historical constructions of gender and
sexuality from a potentially feminist point of view. Created by writer and producer
Michelle Ashford (The Pacific [2008]), the show is one of the few contemporary on-air
television dramas to have a female showrunner. The vast majority of television
producers and showrunners are still male, as are the vast majority of Hollywood film
directors. However, recent years have seen the rise of a number of significant female film
directors and showrunners. Among the latter are Jill Soloway, who started writing and
 164 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

producing for shows like Six Feet Under (2001–5) and United States of Tara (2009–11);
most recently she created the critically acclaimed and award-winning Amazon Prime
sitcom Transparent (2014–). African American female showrunner Shonda Rhimes has
garnered considerable buzz with her shows Scandal (2012–) and How to Get Away with
Murder (2014–), while the Netflix hit Orange is the New Black (2013–) was created by Jenji
Kohan. Ilene Chaiken was one of the creators of the lesbian serial drama The L Word
(2004–9) and now produces for Empire (2015–). Similarly, Lena Dunham (Girls [2012–])
and Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project [2012–]) seem to be as successful behind the camera
as well as in front of it, both starring in hit shows that they either created or produced.
It seems that TV—and especially cable and streaming TV—are affording women more
chances than are feature films to be creative executives, to tell different types of stories
from female (and hopefully feminist) points of view.
Showtime’s Masters of Sex dramatizes the life and work Dr. Bill Masters and Virginia
Johnson, two real life sex researchers of the postwar era who revolutionized the ways
in which medical doctors—if not entire Western populations—think about gender,
sex, and sexuality. Before their laboratory work with actual human subjects, knowledge
about sexuality had been gained either through interviews and questionnaires (the
basis for Alfred Kinsey’s two best-selling books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
[1948] and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female [1953]), or theorized in mostly abstract
ways by armchair psychoanalysts building on Sigmund Freud’s notions of the Oedipal
complex. Masters and Johnson documented that human sexual response goes through
four phases: arousal, plateau, orgasm, and resolution (see Figure 8.9). They also showed
that some women can be multi-orgasmic, and that clitoral stimulation was central to
a woman’s sexual pleasure. Masters and Johnson helped to demystify human sexuality,
and contributed to a major shi" in the culture’s understanding of women and women’s
sexuality. Whereas many previous theorists considered that women’s pleasure in sexuality
was either unimportant or even impossible, Masters and Johnson’s work contributed to
the sexual revolution, insisting on the importance of pleasure, intimacy, and healthy
sexuality to both men and women. Their work was thus highly significant to second
wave feminism, as it suggested that women as well as men could and should have equal
access to sexual pleasure.
Masters of Sex dramatizes a time in American history when sexuality was o"en

Fig 8.9
Showrunner Michelle
Ashford’s Masters of Sex
(2013–) dramatizes the
sex research undertaken
by Dr. Bill Masters and
Virginia Johnson that gave
substantial impetus to
second wave feminism.
8: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION 165

thought of as a (at times onerous) marital duty. In the show’s pilot episode, Bill Masters
(Michael Sheen) and his wife Libby (Caitlin Fitzgerald) are trying to have a baby. They
have rather passionless and even somewhat painful sex—not for pleasure, desire, or
love—but for the sole purpose of trying to get pregnant. Libby blames herself because
she cannot fulfill her prescribed function as a wife—to give birth to children—even as
Masters withholds from her the knowledge of his own low sperm count. (Masters’ initial
professional work as a fertility expert was soon eclipsed by his sex research.) The pilot
episode contrasts their cold sex scene with one between Virginia Masters (Lizzy Caplan)
and a young intern, Dr. Ethan Haas (Nicholas D’Agosto). Whereas Bill mechanically enters
Libby from behind (because he believes that is the best position to ensure conception),
Virginia and Ethan run through a series of sexual acts and positions from which they
derive considerable pleasure. The rights to female empowerment and female sexual
pleasure (literally embodied in Virginia) are major themes throughout the series. The
show also plays frequently with Western society’s expectations about gender roles: in
the pilot episode Virginia tells Ethan that she is content to be his friend (albeit with
“benefits”); it is Ethan who is emotionally besotted with Virginia, and he even strikes
her in the face and calls her a “whore” out of his felt rejection. An autonomous female
partner is seemingly more than he can handle.
Virginia Johnson is portrayed as a strong, capable, and compassionate person. She
is a single mother raising two kids and holding down a job, in an era when such an
arrangement was frowned upon by many people, including women themselves (in the
pilot episode Virginia is berated by a snippy female registrar who thinks Virginia belongs
at home with her family). The terse and cold-hearted Bill Masters quickly realizes he
needs Virginia’s help with the human side of his research—especially with his female
subjects (see Figure 8.10). She explains to him why a woman might fake an orgasm, and
recruits new women to take part in the study. Although Virginia technically works for
Masters, she finds ways to empower herself in the sexist world of the research hospital,
and eventually becomes co-author of Masters’ study. Throughout the first season she also
is instrumental in helping a female doctor research ways to prevent cervical cancer. The
serial nature of Masters of Sex is itself important, as it allows for complexity and nuance
in both character development and the range of ideas that the show can address. Over
the two seasons produced (so far), Masters of Sex has explored a host of issues related to

Fig 8.10
In Masters of Sex
(2013–), Dr. Bill Masters
(Michael Sheen) quickly
realizes he needs Virginia
Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) to
help him with his study.
166 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

women and sexuality in complex and thoughtful ways, including prostitution, male and
female impotence and sexual dysfunction in general, racism and interracial relationships,
male and female homosexuality, and even the question of what should be done when a
child is born with an intersex syndrome, i.e. with ambiguous genitalia. As they did in real
life, Masters and Johnson themselves eventually become sexually intimate; he deludes
himself that their sex is only for the “good of the study,” while Virginia has a much more
knowing and self-aware take on what is really going on.
Masters of Sex plays like a more feminist version of Mad Men (2007–15), in that
both focus on women in the workplace during an era when men still called most of
the shots—if not all of them. However, Masters of Sex’s critique of postwar American
gender roles is sounded much more strongly than in Mad Men. Some viewers of Mad Men
apparently decode it not as a critique of outmoded gender norms, but as a nostalgic
wish for the “good old days” wherein the workplace was filled with booze, cigarettes, and
subservient women. Masters of Sex—perhaps due to its female showrunner, its multiple
female writers, and occasional female directors—each week makes much more forceful
assertions about the limits placed on women in the postwar era. In so doing, it invites
us to compare and contrast the limits our contemporary cultures may still be placing on
women in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion

Although we end our chapter on “Feminist Approaches to Film and Television”

at this point, that is not to say that this form of criticism has come to an end,
any more than auteur, genre, or psychoanalytic criticism has come to an end.
Feminism continues to be an integral part of contemporary cultural criticism,
especially within various and varied cultural studies approaches (Chapters
10–12). Indeed, Chapter 12 introduces ideas germane to third wave feminism,
and especially how those approaches can and do differ from those of second
wave feminism. Feminist approaches to film and TV now regularly include
considerations of men and masculinities on screen as well as women and
femininities on screen. Contemporary approaches also tend to pay more attention
to related discourses of class, race, regionality, sexuality, etc. than did second
wave approaches. However, we might also note from a contemporary perspective
that while some cable and streaming television services are increasingly giving
women and women of color the chance to create and produce television, the
Hollywood film industry seems a bit more reticent to offer those opportunities.
That said, Disney’s Frozen (2013) and Maleficent (2014) are two recent films that
rewrite classic fairy tales from more feminist perspectives. Both became surprise
blockbuster hits, and especially the former, written by Jennifer Lee; Frozen has
broken all sorts of national and international box office records and become a
cultural phenomenon. As with the hegemonic negotiation of any cultural issue,
one can say that these films (and other film and TV shows like them) suggest
new and emergent forms of gendered relations in the West. How we represent
and understand men and women, and masculinity and femininity, continues to
change as both men and women begin to confront (and respond to) the critiques
of gender inequity sounded by feminist scholars, theorists, and media producers
alike.
8: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION 167

Questions for discussion

1 Identify some films or TV shows that you might consider feminist. In what ways do
the texts hegemonically negotiate with patriarchy? Are women’s issues, strengths,
and/or autonomy undercut in any ways by male characters, narrative events,
costuming, etc.?
2 What was the last film or TV show you watched that sexually objectified a male
body (or bodies)? Was the male body “doing things” or was it merely a spectacle
that stopped the narrative (as Mulvey argues women’s bodies do)? Who was the
text “aimed at”: women, men, teenagers, kids, or some sort of general or mixed
audience? How do genres influence the way male and female bodies are depicted on
screen?
3 Try to become aware of how mainstream media habitually depicts women as
sexualized objects and/or fetishizes their body parts. Besides film and television,
where else does this occur? Try to find some recent fan art on the Internet that
calls attention to those dynamics by reversing them, as did the recent mock-poster
for The Avengers (2013), found at http://www.comicbookmovie.com/images/users/
uploads/33503/Official%20Avengers%20Promo%20Poster_parody.jpg.

References and further reading:

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt
Lute Books, 2012 (1987).
Bean, Jennifer M., Diane Negra, Amelie Hastie, and Jane Gaines, eds. A Feminist
Reader in Early Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2002.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin Group 2009 (1972).
Brundson, Charlotte, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel, eds. Feminist Television
Criticism: A Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Carson, Diane, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R. Welsch, eds. Multiple Voices in Feminist
Film Criticism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Indianapolis,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York:
Doubleday, 1991.
Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987 [1973].
hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York and London:
Routledge, 2010.
Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, 1978.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Methuen,
1983.
Kearney, Mary Celeste, ed. The Gender and Media Reader. New York and London:
Routledge, 2011.
Kinsey, Alfred Charles, Pomeroy, Wardell B., and Martin, Clyde E. Sexual Behavior
in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948.
Kinsey, Alfred Charles, Pomeroy, Wardell B., Martin, Clyde E., and Gebhard, Paul
H. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953.
168 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

Kuhn, Annette. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, Second Edition. New York:
Verso, 1994 (1982).
Modleski, Tania. Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women. New
York: Methuen, 1984 (1982).
Modleski. Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory.
New York: Methuen, 1988.
Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1984.
Moynihan, David Patrick. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (the
Moynihan Report). Washington, DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research,
U.S. Department of Labor, 1965. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2010.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Timothy Corrigan,
Patricia White, and Meta Mazaj, eds. Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and
Contemporary Readings. Boston and New York, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2011
(1975). Pp. 715–25.
Rich, B. Ruby. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2002.
Rosen, Marjorie. Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & the American Dream. New York:
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973.
Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema. New York
and London: Routledge, 1993.