Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (2015)
Duke University Press
In Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, Patricia White explores the dynamic intersection of feminism and film in the twenty-first century by highlighting the work of a new generation of women directors from around the world: Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf, Nadine Labaki, Zero Chou, Jasmila Žbanic, and Claudia Llosa, among others. The emergence of a globalized network of film festivals has enabled these young directors to make and circulate films that are changing the aesthetics and politics of art house cinema and challenging feminist genealogies. Extending formal analysis to the production and reception contexts of a variety of feature films, White explores how women filmmakers are both implicated in and critique gendered concepts of authorship, taste, genre, national identity, and human rights. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema revitalizes feminist film studies as it argues for an alternative vision of global media culture.
Teresa de Lauretis. Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory. Edited and with an Introduction by Patricia White (2007)
University of Illinois Press
Figures of Resistance brings together lectures and essays by internationally renowned feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis, including “Re-thinking Women’s Cinema: Aesthetic and Feminist Theory,” “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation,” “The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian,” “Eccentric Subjects,” “Habit Changes,” “The Intractability of Desire,” and the previously unpublished “Figures of Resistance.” White’s introduction provides an overview of de Lauretis’s thought and its importance for feminist and critical theory.
Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (1999)
Indiana University Press
Lesbian characters, stories, and images were barred from onscreen depiction in Hollywood films from the 1930s to the 1960s, together with all forms of “sex perversion.” Looking at the lure of some of the great female stars and at the visual coding of supporting actresses, Uninvited identifies lesbian spectatorial strategies and looks at gothics and the maternal melodrama from a lesbian perspective.