Dressed to kill: Postfeminist noir

Cinema Journal

Volumn 44, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 121-127

  Mizejewski, Linda ^a  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949863612     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2005.0010     Document Type: Review

References (14)

1. The theoretical uses of this term usually bracket postfeminism with postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. For instance, Ann Brooks, in Postfeminism: Feminism, Cultural Theory, and Cultural Forms (London: Routledge, 1997), includes a chapter on media and film studies that defines feminist film theory as psychoanalytic and postfeminist film theory as that which calls on theories of racism, postcolonialism, and spectatorial pleasure
2. This presumes - mistakenly I believe - that only psychoanalytic textual readings are feminist and that feminist film theory cannot address questions of race, history, and consumerist pleasures. Scholarship on the popular conception of postfeminism does not usually share these assumptions. See in particular the debates around the television series Ally McBeal (1997-2002) in Mary Douglas Vavrus, "Putting Ally on Trial: Contesting Postfeminism in Popular Culture," Women's Studies in Communication 23, no. 4 (fall 2000): 413-28
3. Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read, "'Having it Ally': Popular Television (Post-) Feminism," Feminist Media Studies 2, no. 2 (2002): 231-49
4. and Elayne Rapping, "You've Come Which Way, Baby?" Women's Review of Books 17, nos. 10-11 (July 2000): 20-23
5. Because of these texts' ambiguities about female masculinities, homophobia, and sex and gender difference, Blue Steel and The Silence of the Lambs have both been objects of fascination for theorists delineating the slipperiness and even cynicism of the feminist agendas and issues in these films. See, for example, Cora Kaplan, "Dirty Harriet/Blue Steel: Feminist Theory Goes to Hollywood," Discourse 16, no. 1 (fall 1993): 50-70, and
6. Elizabeth Young, "The Silence of the Lambs and the Flaying of Feminist Theory," Camera Obscura 27 (September 1991): 5-35
7. Charlotte Brunsdon, Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes (London: Routledge, 1997), 101
8. Vavrus, "Putting Ally on Trial," 425
9. Jane Arthurs, "Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama," Feminist Media Studies 3, no. 1 (2003): 87-88
10. Jonathan Van Meter, "Body Beautiful," Vogue, April 2002, 251
11. Taking Lives even echoes Blue Steel's scene of the heroine caught in the crossfire of a sexist joke between two male colleagues - except that in the later film, the Jolie character gets to turn the joke around on the men with a resounding slap to their egos. But this is before she is actually slapped in the face by one of them when her involvement with the killer allows him to escape
12. Adrienne Rich, "The Anti-feminist Woman," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 82
13. Vavrus, "Putting Ally on Trial," 413
14. The sexual/racial secret of the narrative in Twisted exemplifies Linda Williams's argument that American cinema remains fixated on the specter of the black rapist and threatened white womanhood, "the hyperexpressive body of the black man, in melodramatic configuration with the body of the white woman, and the white man." Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 300