Star Gazing

"Star-Gazing" puts female spectators into theories of spectatorship. Combining film theory with a body of ethnographic research, Jackie Stacey investigates the place of movie stars - Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, Deanna Durbin - in women's memories of wartime and post-war Britain, when cinema-going was at an all-time high. Demonstrating the importance of cultural and national location, Stacey focuses on three key processes of spectatorship - escapism, identification and consumption. Her study challenges the universalism of the psychoanalytic approach which has dominated the feminist agenda within film studies for two decades, and gives a new direction to questions of popular culture, female pleasure and female desire.