Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis by Mary Ann Doane New York:  Routledge, 1991,  vi + 312 pp., $49.95; $15.95 paper Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema by Amy Lawrence Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1991,  x + 212 pp., $37.50; $15.95 paper The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference and Film Theory by D. N. Rodowick New York:  Routledge, 1991,  xii + 162 pp., $13.95 paper

Some of the most imaginative and creative work in psychoanalytic theory these days comes from film scholars. Perhaps this is partly due to the relative freedom from responsibility to clinical experience and practice that characterizes academic film theorists

as opposed to practicing analysts, who, will-we-nill-we, are to a certain degree always chained to the particular case. And yet true responsibility to our particular cases sometimes requires that we step back to see the more abstract concepts that inform our clinical work. Film studies remains one of the most stimulating ways to step back.

And nowhere is psychoanalytic film theory more relevant than in the burgeoning area of gender studies, since film theory has from the start been especially concerned with issues of sexual difference. Given the growing acceptance of the notion of the socially constructed quality of much of what we think of as gender difference, it makes sense to explore these issues through a large-scale, mass-audience cultural form like film; we can expect to find encoded in the form and content of even B-grade movies many of the structures that constitute gender difference.

Not surprisingly, much of this work has been undertaken by feminist film theorists; one of the foundational essays in feminist film theory is Mary Ann Doane's “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” which, along with 11 other of her essays, has been collected in the volume Femmes Fatales. Building partly on Laura Mulvey's theorizing of female spectatorship in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in particular on the idea that spectatorship is divided along lines of sexual difference, with the position of spectator identified as male and that of the spectacle as female (thus constructing the woman's body as a fetish to ward off male castration anxiety), Doane explores further the situation of the woman who nevertheless attempts to occupy the position of spectator. In theorizing that position (a positi