Cinematic Howling: Women's Films, Women's Film Theories.

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

Feminism in western academic and mainstream cultures faces a crisis. Certainly right-wing factions continue to argue a patriarchal agenda. More dangerous, however, is what Hoi F. Cheu terms “feminism without women.” Cheu notes that many feminists concentrate on uncovering encoded normatizing of women in male-authored art. Such projects expose gender assumptions but offer little new—nothing about women as creative or political agents. Cheu references critic bell hooks, who has called for what she refers to as “radical possibility”: only when scholarship embraces the avant-garde will a true “cultural revolution” occur, and only then will there be an alternative to conventional mass media. Cheu argues that both Hollywood and universities offer an ‘unfeminist feminism,’ the former in its drive to promote gender and political conformity, and the latter in not realizing that “tackling [only] the patriarchal representation system [results in] the critical enterprise fall[ing] into an abyss of negation.” When it comes to current academic film theory, universities “unintentionally sustain the exile of women’s cinema that has existed since the beginning of film history.”

It is this banishment Cheu attempts to rescind, and his collection of essays addresses mostly female-authored films and scripts. Nine articles range from Disney’s Mulan (which functions as the mainstream backdrop against which the avant-garde projects of the later chapters better emerge), through Agnès Varda’s film Sans Toit ni Loi , to Angela Carter’s script The Company of Wolves. The essays are academic and presuppose knowledge of critical theories, but the writing avoids the typical obfuscation of contemporary scholarship. Ironically enough, most of the theories Cheu engages are male-centric, but consciously so. He works with what is available and often labours to extend it, transforming, for example, Freud and Lacan into a more female-centered context for Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions. Cheu’s arguments are sometimes not as smoothly focused and developed as they could be, but they are accessible and their insights are interesting and convincing. The text is intended for an academic readership, but it will engage both the novice undergraduate and expert professor.