Chapter four: feminist counter-cinema

It was in the discursive context of radical feminism that tropes of female bonding and of 'the gaze' could be mobilised to effect feminist and lesbian readings of popular cinema. Whilst I am aware that most radical feminists rejected man-made popular culture altogether, radical feminism nevertheless informed a lesbian counter-cinema; as well as being productive in the practices of many lesbians who did not adopt a specifically lesbian-feminist identification. Obviously, I will not attempt an exhaustive account of feminist film theory through the 1970s and 1980s as this would not be necessary for the purposes of outlining a discursive context for practices lesbian spectatorship for, as I have previously argued, accounts of gender and representation in feminist film studies are drawn from the same models which informed feminist theory more generally