What It Means to Be a Woman: Theorizing Feminist Film History Beyond the Essentialism/Constructionism Divide

Under what conditions can a feminist film historiography be imagined and practised today? How should we conceptualize the relationship between a feminist-oriented historiographical work like the Women Film Pioneers project, and the recent theoretical perspectives such as those raised within the framework of Gender Studies? Or, more precisely, how do we conceive of our work on women film pioneers at a moment like the present, when the very idea of “women” no longer appears to describe a unified, unproblematic reality and emerges instead as an intellectual artifact or a sociocultural construction? The purpose of this paper is then to interrogate our practice of feminist historiography in light of recent gender criticism of traditional sexual categories. This seems an unavoidable task, as one of the most important results of that critique during the last two decades or so has been the deconstruction and even the displacement of what had constituted – and still to my eyes necessarily constitutes – the basic category of any feminist discourse – that is, the concept and category of “women.”