Gender studies and feminist film theory as a theoretical and methodological framework for research in Audiovisual Culture

Abstract

The fundamental objective that this paper presents is the vindication of the feminist film theory and gender etudies as a competent theoretical framework with adequate research methodologies in audiovisual communication. It develops an analysis of the sources as well as an insight into the value of the methodologies and a commissioning in dialogue of the different lines of research that converge in media studies (for example, Structuralism, Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Aesthetics and Textual Analysis) positioning, in this context, the contribution of gender studies and the feminist film theory and showing as a result, thereby, their methodological validity beyond certain positivist positions, in what Casetti has come to call “field theories”. In other words, it shows the possibility of a return to theoretical methodological positions and a deepening into a critical sense from a positioned research that aims to find the right questions to its subject matter which is related to the vision, representation, the construction of subjectivity and identity, pleasure and contemporary culture as well as the internal logic, the processes of meaning and content analysis of audiovisual texts, claiming both its interdisciplinarity and its comprehensive opening in favour of seeing the audiovisual practice as a ‘meaning production’ practice that surrounds both the director and the audience in a dialectical relationship as a social practice (Johnston) audiovisual production “as a practice of meaning-production involving both filmmaker and filmviewer in a dialectical relationship — as a social practice” (Johnston).