Guilty as Charged: Feminist Film Theory and the Early Modern Imagination

The patriarchal unconscious is put “on trial” in this chapter through its resemblance to early modern ideas of the imagination. In the early modern period, witches and pregnant women were persecuted, scapegoated and reified according to their psycho-sexual capacity to corrupt body-image and the perception of reality. This chapter will show a figurative link between this historical belief and the notion of objectification in feminist film theory. The figures of the witch and maternal imagination are argued to form an ideal paradigm through which to restage an examination and analysis of the theories of origins and processes of originality in film theory, enabling a different perspective where the psyche and libidinal desire are not captured in a literal sense but in a historical and material sense. Studies of the supposed power of the ultrasound (Kukla, Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the Maternal Through Politics, Home and the Body. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn.) are further discussed in light of the maternal imagination to question claims of subordination by cinema and visual culture.