FEMINIST FILM THEORY AND PRETTY WOMAN

In Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman, Mari Ruti traces the development of feminist film theory from its foundational concepts such as the male gaze, female spectatorship, and the masquerade of femininity to 21st-century analyses of neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, postfeminism, and the revival of “girly” femininity as a cultural ideal. By interpreting Pretty Woman as a movie that defies easy categorization as either feminist or antifeminist, the book counters the all-too-common critical dismissal of romantic comedies as mindless drivel preoccupied with trivial “feminine” concerns such as love and shopping. The book's lucid presentation of the key concerns of feminist film theory, along with its balanced reading of Pretty Woman, shed light on a Hollywood genre often overlooked by film critics: the romantic comedy.

Mari Ruti is Professor of critical theory at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life (Other Press, 2006); A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living (SUNY Press, 2009); The Summons of Love (Columbia University Press, 2011); The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (Fordham University Press, 2012); and The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (Columbia University Press, 2013), The Age of Scientific Sexism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), and Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).