By Catherine Bellwood
Feminist film theory emerged in the 1970s as a response to the ways mainstream cinema reflects and reinforces patriarchal ideologies. Rather than treating film as a neutral medium, feminist critics interrogated how narrative, visual style, and genre construction are shaped by gendered assumptions. One of the most prominent genres examined through this lens is the "woman’s film."
The woman’s film, often associated with melodrama, centers female protagonists and domestic settings, focusing on emotional dilemmas, personal sacrifice, and relational conflicts. While once dismissed as sentimental or trivial, feminist scholars reclaimed the genre as a rich site for analyzing female desire, repression, agency, and spectatorship.
Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay on the "male gaze" argued that classical cinema positions women as objects of visual pleasure for a presumed male viewer. This insight helped feminist theorists explore how genres like melodrama or romance complicate—or sometimes resist—such positioning. Later scholars like Teresa de Lauretis, Ann Kaplan, and Mary Ann Doane deepened this analysis by examining how female spectators negotiate identification, pleasure, and alienation within genre conventions.
Rather than defining the woman’s film solely by its themes, feminist theory investigates how genre codes—lighting, framing, plot structure, sound—encode gendered meanings. The genre becomes a space of tension: it may reflect dominant norms, but it also gives voice to female experiences often marginalized in other genres.
Today, feminist film theory continues to evolve, incorporating insights from intersectionality, queer theory, and trans studies. The woman’s film, once relegated to the margins, now stands as a central terrain for understanding how genre both expresses and contests gendered identities.
Sources: Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis, Ann Kaplan, Mary Ann Doane; feminist writings on melodrama and spectatorship.