Feminist Review, 2010

Film Criticism , 2014

Esprit Createur, 2002

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2007

In her essay "Professions for Women," Virginia Woolf says "It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality" (1346). Nowhere is this insight truer than in the culture's preoccupation with the femme fatale, a figure I want to identify as a phantom, an illusion and myth that I wish not so much to kill, but to deconstruct as a category that feeds cultural gender fantasies. Feminist film critics have long recognized the ideological power of the femme fatale: first in terms of her role as a projection of male fear and desire; later, as a politically forceful symbol of unencumbered power. I want not only to extend recent emphases by critics such as Christine Gledhill, Elizabeth Cowie, and Jans Wager on how noir speaks to women but also to show the striking extent to which femme fatales-seductresses whose desires and malevolence are seemingly unmotivated-don't in fact exist in the noir movies in which so-called bad women appear. Instead film noir's lead female characters predominantly demonstrate complex psychological and social identity, resisting the spectator's habit (traced in criticism and cultural responses) of seeing past her as opaque or ambiguous (thus a screen on which to project male fears and desires) or of fixing on her as the thing, a dangerous body, to be labeled and tamed by social roles and institutions. This essay will point to the dearth of film noir's actual femmes fatales, evil women whose raison d'être is to murder and deceive, focusing on films in which the femme fatale is presented in terms of exigency. That is, I want to call attention to the many female characters in original-cycle noir who are shown to be limited by, even trapped in, social worlds presented as psychotically gendered. Exigency for most so-called femme fatales moves these women to express-in aggressive physical and verbal gestures-an insistence on independence, which is then misread as the mark of the femme fatale. Readings of and references to the femme fatale miss the extent to which her role depends on the theme of female independence, often misconceiving her motives and serving mainly to confound our understanding of the gender fantasies that surround these so-called bad women. Such myths are propelled by the culture now both by film criticism and popular culture. Indeed, critics have settled in their discussion of women in noir on the few female characters who conform to the notion of the quintessential femme fatale (as she is represented by Phyllis Dietrichson [Double Indemnity], Kathie Moffett [Out of the Past], and Brigid O'Shaughnessy [The Maltese Falcon]), who then define the category. This has two significant consequences: first, these few really bad women draw all of the attention; second the construction of a false binary opposition between femme fatales and other

Released in November 2015, Crimson Peak is a movie written and directed by the visionary Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, who willingly codified his work to 'fit the gothic romance mode' 1. Right from the powerful evocative capacity of its title and the flamboyant imagery conveyed by its posters, the film clearly relies on a self-proclaimed gothic backdrop where decaying walls and vaulted corridors give birth to the wildest of dreams, on and off camera. It is thus no surprise for the viewer to witness the foretold demise of the childlike American heroine Edith Cushing, whose marriage with the mysterious English Baronet Thomas Sharpe encloses her fragile body within the gloomy walls of the isolated manor of Allerdale Hall. This breathing house, like a negated maternal space transcribed by Del Toro's dazzling digitally-enhanced sets, progressively breeds corpse-like spectres, all female, who tentatively aim at scaring Edith out of the place she has been trying to make her own. Nevertheless, the true source of evil forces in Allerdale Hall is encapsulated in the crimson-clad Lucille Sharpe, Thomas's sister and secret lover, who slowly poisons Edith's mind and body while vampirically draining her of any sense of resilience. Her staged identity wavering between the devouring moth-like mother figure and the embodied sentient conscience of the house, she provides the viewer with multiple insights into a form of female empowerment. This paper will thus put into perspective the filmmaker's use of hackneyed gothic tropes and his attempts at transcending them in his modernised translation of nineteenth-century female gothic fiction. It will further explore the thought-provoking display of conventional motifs where evil may lie in the deformed (female) body, the de-corporealised repressed doppelgänger, the haunting/haunted locus that consumes itself, or the self-referential act of writing and ghosting oneself as character, villain, or heroine.

Dissertation, 2019

I seek to investigate the representation of gender in film, particularly the ideological meaning of the femme fatale; what it represents. I want to also ask if it challenges the traditionally constructed ideas about gender in cinema? To comprehend the nature of this investigation, questions will be asked on what constitutes objectivization and misogyny on screen, and also importantly, what constitutes a femme fatale. The treating of females as objects, as an idea, shall be investigated in relation to the gaze. In this sense, I want to ask if the representation of the femme fatale is misogynistic or a source of empowerment? I employ a political philosophic interpretation or unmasking of the femme fatale, with a blend of feminist scholarship. I put four films in conversation with each other in an attempt to unmask the ideological meaning of the femme fatale. The films include My Cousin Rachel (2017), Audition (1999), Species (1995), and Species 2 (1998). The construction of the femme fatale in My Cousin Rachel (2017) is misogynistic because it promotes a view that male reasoning is superior to female reasoning. On an ideological level, the femme fatale in the film may be taken to represent a protest against naming and the patriarchal construction of social behaviour. Audition (1999) employs the femme fatale to serve as a violent attack on patriarchy. The femme fatale in Audition (1999) is presented as an obsessed torturer with a sense of madness attached to her. It is this madness; this other dark side of her that invalidates her resistance. Instead of deploying the femme fatale, Species 2 (1998) deploys a fatal man/homme fatale. Species 2 (1998) attempts to shift from patriarchal gender constructions by placing women in positions of power and highlighting issues around body politics in terms of sexual assault and abuse. Species (1995) reinforces the traditional gender constructions in a sense that it depicts women as the ‘objects of the gaze’ and men as the ‘bearers of the gaze’. The femmes fatales presented by the films in question are paranoid constructions with a surplus and excess attached to them. The fatal status of the femmes fatales is attached to them not so much because they cause harm to men, but because they are fundamentally fatal to the very order that empower men and oppress women; the patriarchal order. Less than the Gramscian notion of War of maneuver, the notion of War of position is appropriate in dealing with patriarchal cinema. One of the first and fundamental steps in challenging this male centred cinema is to recognize the material conditions of various groups. We have to interrogate the political economy of cinema in terms of who owns the means of production and who does not; the ones with power and the ones without. If the ideological power of the patriarchal cinema is not properly challenged at an ideological level, then cinema for women will always entail struggle.

Feminisms