Hitchcock and Feminist Theory
My paper focused upon the relationship between the film's of Alfred Hitchcock and feminist theory. Both Laura Mulvey in her article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema as well as Kaja Silverman in her chapter Suture use the films of Hitchcock as their primary source of example to exmaine issues of symbolic patriarchy and subjectivity. The film's in which I focused on were Psycho, for its brutal treatment of the viewer in its repositionment of subject relationships, Vertigo, for its sadistic handling of the its female character, and Rear Window for its treatment of voyeurism. I also explore the issue of sexual representations, specifically in how it relates to the Hays Code in its limitation of sexual content and the ways in which this leads to fetishization within the cinema.