Linda Williams Replies

confirmation of my growing dread that cinema is no longer the object of cinema studies but has instead become the victim of academics whose primary interests, training, and hopes for advancement lie in literature, communication, feminism, popular culture, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, or in something else. I do not mean to minimize the contributions these and other fields bring to cinema; but rape is not a contribution. Cinema has rarely been more than vicariously acceptable in American academic circles (precisely because it is vicarious), and the effort to establish it has, unfortunately, entailed its prostitution to other disciplines. The result is that cinema studies is ceasing to deal with movies, and is illdealing instead with meta-theory, feminism, narrative, and what-have-you. And, knowledge of film is apparently not a prerequisite for publication in film magazines or for teaching film. We are witnessing repudiation by the academic community-even by Cinema Journal-repudiation not only of the phenomenological approach to cinema ignited by Bazin, Cahiers, and Sarris (in which theory is logically posterior to sensual, emotional, and intellectual absorption in actual movies), and not only of the passionate need for film of that generation, but a fundamental repudiation of cinema as an art worthy of serious study on its own terms

Art · Humanities · Cinema and Media Studies

• Contesting feminism

  Kyle Barrowman•Feminist Media Studies•2025

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