Waugh (1992) argues unequivocally that feminism clearly emerged from Enlightenment modernity, with its conceptions ofjustice and subjectivity as being ‘universal’ categories. However, she notes that, in articulating issues of sexual difference, feminist discourses weaken the extremes of universalism in Enlightenment thought. It is in this sense of articulating difference that Waugh argues feminism can be […]

The debate around the contextualisation of postmodernism and post-colonialism brings political and aesthetic dimensions together, particularly around the issue of representation. Craig Owens (1983) regards postmodernism as a crisis in Western representation, both in its authority and universal claims; a crisis that Owens states had already been Voiced’ by hitherto marginal or repressed discourses, feminism […]

The intersection of postmodernism and post-colonialism explores many of the issues around identity, nationality and difference. McRobbie (1994) and Yeatman (1994) both reflect on the interconnections between postmodernism and post­colonialism in understanding both the political and cultural complexity of the contemporary world. Yeatman (1994:3) contends that ‘Acceptance of the reality of the postmodern condition means […]

Seyla Benhabib (1992, 1994), in her essay ‘Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism’, maintains that ‘no other text has marked the contemporary discussion concerning the complex cultural, intellectual, artistic, social and political phenomena which we have come to designate as “postmodernism” as much as Jean Francois Lyotard’s (1984) short treatise on The Postmodern Condition: A […]

The intersection of feminism, postmodernism andpost-colonialism INTRODUCTION Postmodernism as an intellectual movement captured a tendency across a range of disciplines and aesthetic practices for a radical reappraisal of modernist normative structures and representations. Debates emerging from within feminism had already challenged feminism’s dichotomous frame of reference around biological and philosophical essentialism and historical reification, which […]

Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis became a primary tool for feminist film analysis initially among the editors and writers of the British film journal Screen as well as among French film theorists. Byars (1994:95) notes that, although there was a recognition of a power imbalance inherent in society, these psychoanalytic theorists operated with a model which […]

Mayne (1994) maintains that the development of feminist film theory and criticism in the United States has been shaped by three major forces, all of which are, like feminist film theory, phenomena of the late 1960s and early 1970s. These include the women’s movement, independent film-making and academic film studies. She goes on to note […]

It has become a commonly held view, in contemporary film theory, that the simultaneous development of cinema and psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century was not accidental. Mayne (1994:56) contends that the affinity between the two has been described in a variety of ways, ‘from cinema’s obsessive re­enactment of those oedipal crises theorized […]

As well as being a literary theorist and cultural critic, Kristeva was also a practising psychoanalyst. Kristeva’s thinking was very much influenced by Lacan but she shifted away from him in her analysis of the ‘semiotic’. Rowley and Grosz (1990:193) note that ‘Whereas the symbolic is associated with the paternal—the realm of Lacan’s Law of […]

Cixous founded Women’s Studies at the University of Vincennes in 1975 and is a keen proponent of ‘feminine writing’—texts which subvert dominant phallogocentric logic. She criticises Freudian psychoanalysis for its thesis of a ‘natural’ anatomical determination of sexual difference, but endorses Freud’s belief in the bisexual nature of all individuals. Rowley and Grosz (1990:198) note […]