The Female Gaze

Alicia Malone’s take on Influential Women in Film! “Once again Alicia Malone champions women filmmakers, opening the floodgates to a great new wave of female voices and creative vision.”―Maria Giese, filmmaker and activist #1 Bestseller in Movies & Video Guides & Reviews With the success of the Wonder Woman movies and the results following the outcry of the #MeToo movement, now is the time to highlight the female influences in film history previously left unheard! The voices of powerful women in old Hollywood—told. You may have heard the term “male gaze,” coined in the 1970s, about how art and entertainment have been influenced by the male’s perspective. What about the opposite? Women have been making movies since the very beginning of cinema. In The Female Gaze, Alicia Malone explores the ideas, thoughts, and views we learn from women from behind the scenes. What does the world look like through the “female gaze”? Learn about women who changed the world. Discover brilliantly talented and accomplished women directors, both world renowned and obscure, who have shaped the film industry in ways rarely fully acknowledged. Find mini-essays written by women like Alicia Malone and other diverse female film critics. Featuring past and present films, this behind the scenes guidebook is perfect for the Hollywood history fan in your life. Inside, observe: • How female directors’ voices shaped films and the film industry • The advancements and accomplishments of influential women in history and film • The lives of these women and the struggles they faced throughout Hollywood history If you liked Women in Art or Camera Man, you’ll adore the powerful women in history found in Alicia Malone’s The Female Gaze.

The Female Gaze in Documentary Film – an International Perspective makes a timely contribution to the recent rise in interest in the status, presence, achievements and issues for women in contemporary screen industries. It examines the works, contributions and participation of female documentary directors globally. The central preoccupation of the book is to consider what might constitute a ‘female gaze’, an inquiry that has had a long history in filmmaking, film theory and women’s art. It fills a gap in the literature which to date has not substantially examined the work of female documentary directors. Moreover, research on sex, gender and the gaze has infrequently been the subject of scholarship on documentary film, particularly in comparison to narrative film or television drama. A distinctive feature of the book is that it is based on interviews with significant female documentarians from Europe, Asia and North America.

The female gaze is used by writers and readers to examine narratives from a perspective that sees women as subjects instead of objects, and the application of a female gaze to male-dominated discourses can open new avenues of interpretation. This book explores how female manga artists have encouraged the female gaze within their work and how female readers have challenged the male gaze pervasive in many forms of popular media. Each of the chapters offers a close reading of influential manga and fancomics to illustrate the female gaze as a mode of resistant reading and creative empowerment. By employing a female gaze, professional and amateur creators are able to shape and interpret texts in a manner that emphasizes the role of female characters while challenging and reconfiguring gendered themes and issues.

In The World Wars Through the Female Gaze, Jean Gallagher maps one portion of the historicized, gendered territory of what Nancy K. Miller calls the "gaze in representation." Expanding the notion of the gaze in critical discourse, Gallagher situates a number of visual acts within specific historic contexts to reconstruct the wartime female subject. She looks at both the female observer's physical act of seeing - and the refusal to see - for example, a battlefield, a wounded soldier, a torture victim, a national flag, a fashion model, a bombed city, or a wartime hallucination. Interdisciplinary in focus, this book brings together visual (twenty-two illustrations) and literary texts, "high" and "popular" expressive forms, and well-known and lesser-known figures and texts.

Many Canadian women fiction writers have become justifiably famous. But what about women who have written non-fiction? When Anne Innis Dagg set out on a personal quest to make such non-fiction authors better known, she expected to find just a few dozen. To her delight, she unearthed 473 writers who have produced over 674 books. These women describe not only their country and its inhabitants, but a remarkable variety of other subjects: from the story of transportation to the legacy of Canadian missionary activity around the world. While most of the writers lived in what is now Canada, other authors were British or American travellers who visited Canada throughout the years and reported on what they found here. This compendium has brief biographies of all these women, short descriptions of their books, and a comprehensive index of their books’ subject matters. The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-Fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1836-1945 will be an invaluable research tool for women’s studies and for all who wish to supplement the male gaze on Canada’s past.

"In response to the poor representation of women in art galleries and museums, Philadelphia-based collector Linda Lee Alter decided in the 1980s to focus on art by women. The result, now at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is an extraordinarily diverse and powerful collection of nearly 500 objects by some of the most influential female artists of the past 50 years. Emphasizing contemporary living artists, but including major works by Louise Bourgeois, Elizabeth Catlett, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and others, Alter formed her collection with the intent of giving it to a public institution in order to make women artists more visible. This gorgeously illustrated volume celebrates the collection and its legacy by bringing together leading scholars of feminism, and modern and contemporary art to discuss how the artists in Alter's collection saw and transformed the world. Among the essays are discussions of the impact of feminism in Chicago, Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay area; self-portraiture by women in the 1970s and 1980s; the legacy of Elizabeth Catlett on younger African American artists; collaborative practice among women; an interview with Linda Lee Alter; and an appreciation by artist Diane Burko." -- Publisher's description.

Entertainment Weekly, "Fall's 20 Must-Reads" (2018) Essence, "Fall 2018 Guide to All Things Funny" Bustle, "18 New Nonfiction Books to Know in October 2018" "Robinson offers deft cultural criticism and hilarious personal anecdotes that will make readers laugh, cringe, and cry. Everything may indeed be trash but writing like this reminds us that we're gonna make it through all the terrible things with honesty, laughter, and faith."--Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author New York Times bestselling author and star of 2 Dope Queens Phoebe Robinson is back with a new, hilarious, and timely essay collection on gender, race, dating, and the dumpster fire that is our world. Written in her trademark unfiltered and witty style, Robinson's latest collection is a call to arms. Outfitted with on-point pop culture references, these essays tackle a wide range of topics: giving feminism a tough-love talk on intersectionality, telling society's beauty standards to kick rocks, and calling foul on our culture's obsession with work. Robinson also gets personal, exploring money problems she's hidden from her parents, how dating is mainly a warmed-over bowl of hot mess, and, definitely most important, meeting Bono not once, but twice. She's struggled with being a woman with a political mind and a woman with an ever-changing jeans size. She knows about trash because she sees it every day--and because she's seen roughly one hundred thousand hours of reality TV and zero hours of Schindler's List. With the intimate voice of a new best friend, Everything's Trash, But It's Okay is a candid perspective for a generation that has had the rug pulled out from under it too many times to count.