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Description
From Virginia Woolf to bell hooks, women have written, thought about and worked with film, images, and the visual in philosophical ways since the inception of cinema, and yet their names are generally missing from the discipline of film philosophy. This anthology brings together, for the first time, a collection of writings by women philosophers, writers and thinkers on philosophical aspects of film and visual culture. The collection of texts in this book demonstrates a century of women writing about the visual, considering aesthetics, politics, and challenging dominant ideologies. All can inspire us to think anew about film and visual cultures.
Feminist Film Philosophy re-frames the body of work available to film philosophers in schools, universities, and cinema audiences, and stages a long-overdue intervention in the field, thereby enabling the development of the discipline in important and vital ways.
Table of Contents
List of Permissions
Acknowledgements
Note on the Texts
General Introduction
Part 1: Thinking for a Feminist Philosophy of Cinema
1. The Cinema – Virginia Woolf
2. The Male Gift – Christine Battersby
3. A Note on Anger – Marilyn Frye
4. The Sensory Celebration (I) – Anne Dufourmantelle
Part 2: Film Aesthetics
5. Vision and Choice in Morality – Iris Murdoch
6. The Language of Film – Katherine Thomson-Jones
7. Back to the Future? Contemporary Cinema and the Challenges for Theorists – Sylvie Magerstädt
8. Horrorism; or, On Violence Against the Helpless – Adriana Cavarero
9. Shimmering Phantasmagoria: Trans/Cinema/Aesthetics in an Age of Technological Reproducibility – Eliza Steinbock
10. Remembering in Art: The Horizontal and the Vertical – Siri Hustvedt
Part 3: Film Phenomenology and Bodies
11. Céline Sciamma's 'Queer' Cinema: Affirming Gestures of Refusal in Tomboy and Girlhood – Katharina Lindner
12. Pain and Imagining – Elaine Scarry
13. Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation – Iris Marion Young
14. The Beasts that Perish – Mary Midgley
Part 4: Film and the Time Machine
15. Creating Movies with a New Dimension: Time – Maya Deren
16. Feminist Temporalities: Memory, Ghosts, and the Collapse of Time – Brydie Kosmina
17. Sharing Time Across Unshared Horizons – Gail Weiss
18. Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography – Elizabeth Freeman
Part 5: Film's Political Power 19. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power – Audre Lorde
20. “Whose Pussy is This?” A Feminist Comment – bell hooks
21. Posthuman Humanities: Life Beyond Theory – Rosi Braidotti
22. Notes on an Alternative Model-Neither/Nor – Hortense J. Spillers
23. Seeing in the Dark: Attentive Engagement – Jane Stadler
Part 6: Changing the Dominant Imaginary
24. Breasts – Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
25. Accessible Futures, Future Coalitions – Alison Kafer
26. Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images – Patricia Hill Collins
27. Women and Bugs – Cynthia A. Freeland
Product details
| Published | 28 May 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 440 |
| ISBN | 9781839026591 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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This comprehensive and meticulous labour of love, edited with such rigour and care by Lucy Bolton, will be a primary resource for scholars, students and practitioners. I will be using it as the key text on several of my own courses and I am sure other scholars working in the fields of feminism and visual culture will do so, too. A feminist feast that is both timely and pivotal within film studies and beyond.
Anna Backman Rogers, Professor of Aesthetics, Culture and Feminist Theory, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and author of Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden's Wanda (2020) & Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (2019)
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This first-of-its-kind collection brings together essential voices in feminist film philosophy, skillfully weaving foundational and contemporary perspectives into a cohesive whole. Lucy Bolton demonstrates impressive scholarly judgment in creating a resource that makes complex philosophical concepts both accessible and intellectually rigorous. This thoughtfully curated reader will be an invaluable addition to courses exploring the rich intersection of feminist theory and film studies.
Kelli Fuery, Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries, Chapman University, USA, and author of Ambiguous Cinema: From Simone de Beauvoir to Feminist Film-Phenomenology (2022)
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A superbly curated selection of writings, cutting across fields and time periods, deepens understanding of feminist film philosophy and the many forms of feminist thought and practice in relation to film. With an eye towards what it means to study film at this moment in history, this reader introduces likely and unlikely feminist perspectives that unsettle established canons of thought in film. Each section of this well-crafted reader takes up specific themes - dominant imaginaries, time, bodies - that infuse both energy and rigour into the study of film, bringing questions of aesthetics and politics into conversation with the wider domains of ethics, visibility and power. Provocative and inspiring, this essential reading asserts that a serious appreciation of film in the 21st century cannot be sustained without recourse to the urgent, creative and on-going work of feminism.
Aparna Sharma, Film Professor, Department of World Arts and Cultures/ Dance, University of California Los Angeles, USA
























