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The Feminist Film Philosophy Reader

  • Textbook
The Feminist Film Philosophy Reader cover

The Feminist Film Philosophy Reader

  • Textbook
Quantity
Available on May 28 2026
$35.95

Available for purchase via Bloomsbury etextbooks on publication date

This title is available for exam copy requests

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 Figures
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

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published May 28 2026
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Extent 440
ISBN 9781839026584
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Lucy Bolton

Lucy Bolton is Professor of Film Philosophy at Que…

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