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If the 1991 box office success of Thelma and Louise was unexpected, more surprising was the heated debate that followed its release, a debate over the film’s political status and social implications. While Joan Smith of The Guardian argued that the film’s †....

Middle of Essay
.... and negative images of women, reinscription and subversion of patriarchal ideologies. The tension between the film’s uses of narrative and image works to interrogate and problematize both feminist and antifeminist assumptions about gender, power, and subjectivity. In Alice Doesn’t Teresa de Lauretis claims that feminist film theory has gone well beyond the simple opposition of positive and negative images, and has indeed displaced the very terms of that opposition to a sustained critical attention to the hidden work of the apparatus. It has shown, for instance, how narrativity works to anchor images to noncontradictory points of identifi ....