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tiaelisabeth's review against another edition
3.0
I really appreciate how broad So Mayer reaches with this book, incorporating a truly global and gender-inclusive selection of more than 500 contemporary feminist films. That said, this also makes for a bit of a scattered read in that some films only get a line of analysis, or 3 paragraphs at best. Trying to grab onto a substantive argument or piece of theory becomes a bit like chasing smoke, as things tend more toward cataloguing feminist cinema than close-reading or theorizing. Their effort to think about the feminist potentiality of a lot of films, including very mainstream and typical Hollywood films, means that there is also a lack of acknowledgement of the ways in which some of these films have received criticism from feminists or related groups. That said, this introduced me to a lot of films that are now on my watchlist though and might make a good read for an early undergrad course, but didn’t give me the depth I hoped for at a graduate level, ultimately. And that’s totally ok!
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