The first voices heard as criticism of the film correspond to the feminists. Political struggles for the rights of women and sexual revolution in the 70s, is the context of a film critic against stereotyped and sexist representation (the mother, the whore, the virgin, the faithful wife ...) contributing to a paternalistic and patriarchal system.
One of the first women to lift her voice from England, is Laura Mulvey, film theorists and feminist, who in her article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" written in 1973, sowing the bases for the feminist critique of classical cinema Hollywood. Voyeurism and fetishism on women, is the focus of her critique. 
The woman, to identify with the images on the screen must assume a passive and narcissistic: be looked, and a masochistic position: to be punished. Or get pleasure through transsexual identification with the protagonist, accepting the identification with the masculine.
Awareness of gender, race or class is an achievement forced by the historical experience of contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism. How would grow in a society where gender was truly consensual, if we decide our own gender in adolescence or in the transition to adulthood? What role does each of us hidden, locked up as a consequence of threat of violence and ridicule? The world is clearly gendered as male. The classic way of integration of women consist to request that they be men, in part or in certain times.
The concept of gender, Christine Delphy (interview on "Critique Utopie")
Cruising-1980_William Friedkin
Lemora. Lady Dracula_Richard Blackburn and Robert Fern, 1973 (Go to 0:38:00 m to 0:45:42)
Excellent work
ReplyDeleteDianne