In this work of feminist film criticism, Mary Ann Doane examines questions of sexual difference and knowledge in cinematic, theoretical, and psychoanalytic discourses. "Femmes Fatales" examines Freud, the female spectator, the meaning of the close-up, and the nature of stardom. Doane's analyses of such figures as Pabst's Lulu and Rita Hayworth's Gilda trace the thematics and mechanics of maskes, masquerade, and veiling, with specific attention to the form and technology of the cinema. Working through and against the intellectual frameworks of post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory, Doane interrogates cinematic and theoretical claims to truth about women which rely on judgements about vision and its stability or instability. Reflecting the shift in conceptual priorities within feminist film theory over the last decade, "Femmes Fatales" addresses debates over female spectatorhsip, essentialism and anti-essentialism, the tensions between psychoanalysis and history, and the relations between racial and sexual difference. Doane's nuanced and original readings of the "femme fatale" in cinema illustrate confrontations between feminism, film theory and psychoanalysis. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in women's studies, communications studies and film theory.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A collection of essays presented at a conference to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the release of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, Women and the Canadian State both celebrates and critically assesses the Report. Women bureaucrats, activists, and academics consider the impact, successes, and failures of the Report from a variety of viewpoints and reflect on the experience of Canadian women since its publication in 1970.

How a nation educates its children tells us much about the values of its people. From the Salon to the Schoolroom examines the emerging secondary school system for girls in nineteenth-century France and uncovers how that system contributed to the fashioning of the French bourgeois woman. Rebecca Rogers explores the variety of schools--religious and lay--that existed for girls and paints portraits of the women who ran them and the girls who attended them. Drawing upon a wide array of public and private sources--school programs, prescriptive literature, inspection reports, diaries, and letters--she reveals the complexity of the female educational experience as the schoolroom gradually replaced the salon as the site of French women's special source of influence. From the Salon to the Schoolroom also shows how France as part of its civilizing mission transplanted its educational vision to other settings: the colonies in Africa as well as throughout the Western world, including England and the United States. Historians are aware of the widespread ramifications of Jesuit education, but Rogers shows how French education for girls played into the cross-cultural interactions of modern society, producing an image of the Frenchwoman that continues to tantalize and fascinate the Western world today.