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This essay examines the concept of a ‘female gaze’ in documentary film with a specific consideration of the work, and viewpoints, of women directors. The question asked is whether a film as a creative artefact, as well as if the working opportunities within the film industry, are affected by the fact that the person making the film is biologically female. French concludes that it is indeed so, and that “part of this recognition is due to visible female aesthetic approaches, world, views, and treatments of subjects, themes, and the overall privileging of female subjectivity.”

Modernism and The Poetics of Sameness and Presence”. The author argues that through a paradigm shift from post-modernism towards what she proposes to refer to as meta-modernism, a new kind of poetic comes to the fore in which senses of ‘sameness’ and ‘presence’ and a drive towards inter-subjective connection and dialogue are pivotal. At the same time a turn to the subject, the real and the private, are the preferred strategies to address the central topics in contemporary culture; that of (often traumatic) memory and identity. The re-evaluation of the subject as an active, embodied and emotional individual is fundamental to such a shift.

In this chapter, Yamamoto-Wilson examines the role of the Other’s gaze in early modern masochistic fantasy, starting with reader responses to martyrologies (particularly Foxe), hagiography and bloody histories, and moving on to erotic and proto-pornographic narratives (among which Nicholas Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica is preeminent) and narratives of sexual insecurity. Georges Duby, Lisa Silverman and others have argued that, in the late Middle Ages, dolor was the property of women, and Melissa Sanchez demonstrates how, in the early modern period, the political subject was discursively feminized through injunctions to suffer. The gaze of the Other both emasculates and humiliates, but perseverance in suffering (whether in the martyr’s sacrifice or the masochist’s fantasy) leads, paradoxically, to triumph. While the Other is sometimes depicted as male, there is an emergent sense of a transgressive female gaze, reflected in the writings of Thomas Nashe, Samuel Butler, Mary Wroth and others. This chapter focuses on the male anxiety generated by the gaze of a female Other in the literary discourse of early modern England.

The work of Francesca Woodman has commonly been read in light of her depression and tragic suicide at the age of just twentytwo as the figuration of (or rehearsal for) an act of disappearance. This essay aligns itself with the scholarship of Claire Raymond (2010) who argues through Kant’s notion of the sublime that, in actual fact, Woodman stages a precise dissection of what it means to be both the subject and object of her own gaze. Drawing on feminist theories of spectatorship and photography, this chapter demonstrates how Woodman engages with visual tropes in order to ‘image’ the fragile and liminal moment of a young girl becoming-woman. As such, the author argues, that Woodman addresses directly the manifold ways in which gender norms are brought to bear on the female body through the mechanics of the gaze.

This chapter focuses on Reichardt’s genre mixing, slow cinematic techniques, minimalism, neorealism and her use of the “female gaze” as well as “the open image” or “crystal image” as defined by Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn. Reichardt subtly shifts the environmental and political issues highlighted in her prior films back to the nineteenth century debate of Manifest Destiny and its effects on the landscape and native peoples. Based on historical events during the 1845 “terrible trail” tragedy, Meek’s Cutoff explores contemporary political issues of leadership and community by loosely linking Meek’s violence with George W. Bush era torture tactics and foreign policy. In her feminist Western, Reichardt used an aspect ratio of 1:37:1 creating a claustrophobic framing aesthetic and while this echoes the pioneer women’s vision during their long march in the dessert, it also created distribution concerns.