Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema provides an introduction to feminist film theory as a discourse that grew in cultural significance since the early 1970s to the present. Janet McCabe traces the broad-ranging knowledges produced by feminist film scholarship, from formalist readings and psychoanalytical approaches to debates initiated by cultural studies, race and queer theory. This book thus documents a dynamic critical field, charting the numerous feminist interventions, and critically assesses how the social, political and cultural contexts informed debates and shaped the writing of a feminist film theory.