tan sipei's Profile

owever, the feminist movement adamantly shared with the New Left a critique of the politically conservative role of the mainstream media, and a commitment to the progressive possibilities within what B. Ruby Rich would call “cine-feminism.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists organized around several media concerns including women’s lack of employment within the field, sexist and stereotypical depictions of women found within dominant media, the creation of a distinctly feminist media education and institutions, and the invention of new languages for avant-garde feminist mediamaking and criticism. Differences within feminism often led to debate between these various projects (particularly between “activist” and “academic” mediamakers and theorists), fueling several active streams of movement media with often contradictory aims. The mid-1980s brought a backlash against feminism (part of a general quieting of the American left). This co-existed in perhaps contradictory ways with contemporary claims of “post-feminism” (the gains of feminism were thought large enough for some to suggest that sexism had been vanquished), and in this climate the feminist media movement collapsed. Discrete feminist practices, on the other hand, continue unabated, and in ever greater numbers, due in large part to the ideas, images, and institutions created during the hey-dey of the women’s movement. While most feminist media institutions closed due to  de-funding (as is true for most counter-cultural organizations of this period), feminists continue to visibly contribute to dominant and alternative media, teaching and writing, and media activism. Feminists have professionalized, inhabiting positions of cultural power, just as they have dispersed, bringing their multiple interpretations of gender inequality to other more viable movements. Meanwhile, global feminist media movements have taken on an urgency of their own, learning from, challenging, and adapting the concerns and practices of this highly productive, earlier American tradition.

Mainstream Hollywood cinema has for decades represented an erotic realm by using language and images of our patriarchal culture. It has satisfied and reinforced the masculine ego and repressed the desire of women

eminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey's essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' published in 1975 has proved to be one of the most influential articles in the whole of contemporary film theory

se psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him.

Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.