Shortly after I started the PhD program in the School of Cinema-TV at the University of Southern California in 1984, Critical Studies program chair Beverle Houston asked me to create a bibliography of the most significant work in feminist film theory for an industry event at which she was speaking on the image of women in film. Since she anticipated audience boredom or dismissal, the list could be no longer than one page—a constraint that I then found doable, but now find both amusing and touching. (Beverle died, too young, in 1988.)
My reflection is not offered as mere nostalgia, nor is it only a preemptive apology for omitting here, because of word count, worthy scholarly work. Instead, it is to acknowledge the subsequent explosion of feminist work in media studies and suggest that one step in writing a genealogy of the interaction of feminism and the subfield of “star...
University of California Press