Feminist theory has been at the forefront of critical analysis for more than two decades. With dazzling insight, Maggie Humm highlights and explains feminist issues and offers a fascinating array of original film analyses. Feminism and Film is the first book to apply such a broad range of theory to contemporary film.

Humm begins with an in-depth historical survey of contemporary feminist theory, visual aesthetics and film theory, with a particular focus on the work of Laura Mulvey, Annette Kuhn, E. Ann Kaplan and bell hooks. Subsequent chapters examine the most pressing questions posed by feminism about reproduction, pornography and the gaze, autobiography and literary theory, postmodernism, Black feminism and "the personal is political" in relation to a variety of mainstream and independent films, including Klute, Dead Ringers, A Question of Silence, Orlando and Daughters of the Dust.