The animated films of Walt Disney have played an important role in American culture. Most Americans, either during childhood or adulthood, have been exposed to at least some of them. The films themselves have, in some respects, reflected American society and culture. They may also, at least to some extent, have influenced them. As academic scholarship on the history of Hollywood film has grown, various aspects of Disney's influence and cultural position have likewise come to be the focus of study. In recent decades, also, there has been a continually greater interest in the role of women in American society and how that role is constructed. Uniting both these scholarly interests, this thesis analyses how Disney films depict femininity, and the ways in which such depictions correspond with those in the larger arena of Hollywood film. To make these issues more comprehensible, it describes the beginnings of animated film in the United States, together with the early career and works of Walt Disney. In order to cast light on the manner in which such portrayals have changed over time, the films examined are analysed in relation to three particular time periods: 193 7-67, 1967-89, and 1989-99. By examining the depictions to be found within individual films, and comparing these depictions both with one another and with selected live-action, mainstream Hollywood films of the same eras, a better understanding of the make-up of the Disney films as a body of work is achieved, and a corrective offered to some of the misconceptions of Disney to be found within American society in general.

In this dissertation I explore a number of contemporary science fiction franchises in order to ascertain how the figure of the action heroine has evolved throughout her recent history. There has been a tendency in film criticism to view these strong women as ‘figuratively male’ and therefore not ‘really’ women, which, I argue, is largely due to a reliance on the psychoanalytic paradigms that have dominated feminist film theory since its beginnings. Building on Elisabeth Hills’s work on the character of Ellen Ripley of the Alien series, I explore how notions of ‘becoming’ and the ‘Body without Organs’ proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari can be activated to provide a more positive set of readings of active women on screen. These readings are not limited by discussions of sex or gender, but discuss the body in terms of its increased capacities as it interacts with the world around it. I do not argue for a Deleuzian analysis of cinema as such, because this project is concerned with aspects of representation which did not form part of Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema. Rather I use Deleuze and Guattari’s work to explore alternative ways of reading the active women these franchises present and the benefits they afford. Through these explorations I demonstrate, however, that applying the Deleuzoguattarian ‘method’ is a potentially risky undertaking for feminist theory. Deconstructing notions of ‘being’ and ‘identity’ through the project of becoming may have benefits in terms of addressing ‘woman’ beyond binaristic thought, but it may also have negative consequences. What may be liberating for feminist film theory may be also be destructive. This is because through becoming we destabilise a position from which to address potentially ideologically unsound treatments of women on screen.

Lesbianism has received unprecedented screen time in the cinema in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. This marks a significant shift away from a prior invisibility, historically interrupted only by invocations of pathologisation, isolation and tragedy. At the same time, critical discourses have increasingly replaced identity categories such as “the lesbian” with the more fluid notions of “queer” sexuality. In this paradoxical context, this thesis identifies and theorises the kinds of cinematic language through which the figure of “the lesbian” has continued to be made legible on the screen. If the cultural invisibility of lesbianism is arguably a thing of the past, the invisibility of lesbianism in academic scholarship is an increasingly notable feature of the current critical landscape. The majority of anthologies on “queer” or “gay” cinema exclude lesbians both as contributors and as objects of study, rendering insecure the equation of political progress with screen visibility. Identifying a shift away from defining lesbian cinema as “about lesbians”, this project offers a series of close readings of narrative feature films released between 2001 and 2013 that put lesbianism in motion. The thesis discusses a range of recent films to consider how the cinematic language of lesbianism has moved beyond the twin burdens the term has historically carried, as deplorably singular and threateningly doubled. In dialogue with debates in psychoanalytic feminist film criticism about the woman in cinema, the first two chapters consider the relationship between lesbianism, narrative and genre in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001), Nathalie (Fontaine, 2003) and Chloe (Egoyan, 2009). My argument explores how these films expose the contradictory relationship between absence and presence in cinema’s production of lesbianism, troubling the ease with which sex can be read as the visual evidence of sexuality. The subsequent two chapters move from psychoanalytically informed studies of the cinematic coding of lesbian fantasy to an investigation of the affective, spatial and temporal registers of desire and eroticism that have provoked recent debates in feminist theory. These chapters consider the ways in which the in-between and expectant modes of subjectivity and sensation that characterise adolescent sexuality coincide with, and accent, lesbian desires in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007), She Monkeys (Aschan, 2011) and Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011). Moving from transactions of power to those of pleasure, the final chapter offers a close reading of Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013) and of the discursive constructions of explicit lesbian sex surrounding it. My reading of the film argues that it formally queers desire in a way that unsettles the over-privileging of sex in the characterisation of lesbian sexuality. Across these five chapters, this thesis explores the relationship between the figuration of the singular lesbian and the multiple registers of her desire and sexuality. In conclusion, the thesis argues that a new field of figurations, emerging from the influences of queer theory, has pushed at the limits of lesbian legibility and generated nuanced and sensitive renderings of debates about sexuality on the screen.

This thesis interrogates the ways in which the body-centred practices of women film artists embrace the materiality of direct animation in order to foreground gendered, subjective positions. Through the researcher's own creative practice, it investigates how this mode of film-making, in which the artist works through physical engagement with the film materials and the material processes of film-making, might be understood as feminine and/or feminist. Direct animation foregrounds touch as the primary sense. Its practices are process-based and highly experimental, because images are made through the agency of the body operating within restrictive parameters, making results difficult to predict or control with precision. For these reasons, direct animation has not been embraced by mainstream, narrative-focused, studio-based models of production, unlike other forms of two and three dimensional animation. It has remained a specialist area for the individual artist and auteur, and, to date, there is a paucity of commentary about direct animation practices, and what exists has been dominated by male voices. In order to develop ideas about the ways in which women represent themselves in an expanded film-making praxis that is focused on the body and materiality of process, this PhD inquiry, encompassing a body of films with written contextualisation, is situated in the context of the direct animation practices of three artists (Caroline Leaf, Annabel Nicolson, and Margaret Tait); and informed by conceptual frameworks provided by Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. This thesis proposes, via interaction between these three axes of research, that women film artists, operating independently, are able to create a female imaginary that represents women and is recognised by them, by constructing positions of practice outside the dominant symbolic modes of patriarchy, which evolve through the maternal body and the materialities of the feminine.

Feministische Filmtheorien erforschen Kino als kulturelle Institution und untersuchen vor allem seine geschlechtsspezifischen Repräsentationsstrategien, seine Subjektivitätskonzepte und seine geschlechterdifferenten Produktions- und Rezeptionsbedingungen. Ihre Anfänge nahmen sie während der zweiten Frauenbewegung der 1960er Jahre. Gesucht werden u. a. Gegenentwürfe zur männlichen Perspektive populärer Filme, in denen Frauen als passive Objekte fungieren.