Feminist Film Theory and Postfeminist Culture

Abstract

In order to contextualise the subgenre of the postfeminist biopic, Chapter 1 lays out a series of debates within feminist film theory and postfeminism. It begins by exploring the dominant concerns of early feminist film scholarship, reviewing the methodologies of key scholars, and discussing why various forms of cultural analysis have supplanted earlier approaches such as gaze theory. In a second section the chapter considers the concept of postfeminism, a contested term that has been used by journalists and some scholars to describe contemporary culture since the early 1990s. Postfeminism has been variously interpreted as a backlash against feminism, a double entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist themes, a historical shift away from feminism, and an epistemological break with feminism. After considering each perspective, the chapter concludes that one of the less popular definitions within the debate, the argument that postfeminism represents an epistemological break from second-wave feminist ideas, is most constructive to identifying the shared characteristics of what I call the postfeminist biopic.