Skip to main content

  • HOME
  • CURRENT CONTENT
  • ALL CONTENT
  • SUBMIT
  • ABOUT
    • Journal
    • Editorial
    • Call for Editor(s)
  • INFO FOR
    • Librarians
    • Authors
    • Reprints and Permissions
    • Subscriptions and Single Issues
  • MORE
    • Alerts
    • Contact Us

  • Login

  • Advanced search

Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Login
Advanced Search
  • HOME
  • CURRENT CONTENT
  • ALL CONTENT
  • SUBMIT
  • ABOUT
    • Journal
    • Editorial
    • Call for Editor(s)
  • INFO FOR
    • Librarians
    • Authors
    • Reprints and Permissions
    • Subscriptions and Single Issues
  • MORE
    • Alerts
    • Contact Us
Feminist Media Histories
Audiences and Moviegoing
Laura Isabel Serna
Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 4 No. 2, Spring 2018; (pp. 25-30) DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.25
Laura Isabel Serna
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Search for this author on this site
  • View author's works on this site
  • Article
  • Info & Metrics
  • PDF
PreviousNext
Loading
  • audiences
  • film history
  • moviegoing

Observers—sociologists, reformers, inspectors, journalists—have been interested in cinema's audiences virtually since the medium's emergence. Their observations constitute a rich source base for scholars that gives us access, however oblique, into the experiences of moviegoers. As these sources show, motion picture exhibition has been a dynamic social space for subjects marked by gender, race, class, national or regional identity, and age. These various vectors of identity, quite often in concert, shaped how audiences responded to what they saw on the screen, the performative milieu of the theater, and the discursive space of fan magazines and other print venues that published news and advertisements about motion pictures. Around the world, women's filmgoing became a particularly vexed topic, and women emerged as savvy observers of cinema's role in modern society.1 In this short essay, I trace a genealogy (not the genealogy) of feminist scholarship on audiences, sometimes referred to as historical spectatorship, and suggest the generative possibilities of a feminist orientation in historicizing cinema's audiences.

In early scholarly accounts of cinema audiences, most of which focused on the nickelodeon, the contours of women's engagement with cinema were initially subsumed by concerns with class and ethnicity. In their considerations of American cinema, for example, Lary May and Robert Sklar argued that moviegoing became the site of a struggle for control over American mass culture, as the middle classes sought to exert control over the nickelodeon's working-class, ethnic …

View Full Text

Log in using your username and password

Enter your Feminist Media Histories username.
Enter the password that accompanies your username.
Forgot your user name or password?

Log in through your institution

You may be able to gain access using your login credentials for your institution. Contact your library if you do not have a username and password.
If your organization uses OpenAthens, you can log in using your OpenAthens username and password. To check if your institution is supported, please see this list. Contact your library for more details.

PreviousNext
Back to top

Vol. 4 No. 2, Spring 2018

Feminist Media Histories: 4 (2)
  • Table of Contents
  • Table of Contents (PDF)
  • Cover (PDF)
  • Index by author
  • Front Matter (PDF)
eTOC Alert

RSSRSS Icon

Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word on Feminist Media Histories.

NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person you are recommending the page to knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Audiences and Moviegoing
(Your Name) has sent you a message from Feminist Media Histories
(Your Name) thought you would like to see the Feminist Media Histories web site.
Print
Alerts
Sign In to Email Alerts with your Email Address
Citation Tools
Audiences and Moviegoing
Laura Isabel Serna
Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 4 No. 2, Spring 2018; (pp. 25-30) DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.25
Laura Isabel Serna
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Search for this author on this site
  • View author's works on this site

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Request Permissions
Share
Audiences and Moviegoing
Laura Isabel Serna
Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 4 No. 2, Spring 2018; (pp. 25-30) DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.25
Laura Isabel Serna
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Search for this author on this site
  • View author's works on this site
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Technorati logo Twitter logo CiteULike logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
View Full Page PDF
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

  • Top
  • Article
    • NOTES
  • Info & Metrics
  • PDF

Related Articles

Cited By...

Similar Articles

FIND US Facebook Account LinkRSS Feeds LinkTwitter Account LinkLinkedin Account LinkYoutube Account LinkEmail Link

Customer Service

  • Reprints and Permissions
  • Contact

UC Press

  • About UC Press

Navigate

  • Home
  • About
  • Submit
  • Editorial
  • Contact

Content

  • Current Issue
  • All Content

Info For

  • Librarians
  • Authors
  • Subscriptions and Single Issues

Copyright © 2019 by the Regents of the University of California  Privacy   Accessibility