Framing Feminism

November 19th, 2025 Centennial Chair and Professor of Film & Media Studies Patricia White dives deep into researching women in film.

Written by
Tomas Weber

Photography
Laurence Kesterson

On the French Riviera, a young woman falls under the spell of a brooding aristocratic widower. They marry. On arrival at his Cornish estate, it becomes clear that his late wife, Rebecca, still rules the house from beyond the grave. Her presence lingers on, driving an unsettling chain of events. 

That’s the premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning film Rebecca (1940). But to feminist film scholar Patricia White, the haunting classic is also an allegory for the unseen women who, though long sidelined, have quietly propped up the film business behind the scenes.

“Women have long been important to film history,” says White — and not just as on-screen icons. Rebecca is a case in point. The film, which captivated White as a teenager and sparked her love for cinema, was adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s novel by the English screenwriter and later producer Joan Harrison and several collaborators, including and uncredited Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife. 

“It’s a woman’s story,” says White, who published a book about the film in 2021. “It was marketed to women. And the film is about the power of a woman you never see — but who controls everyone.” 

White, who is Centennial Chair and professor of film & media studies, entered the field in the 1980s. She was in the first class of film studies majors at Yale. It was an era when concepts like the “male gaze” — which refers to the way film and TV present women as objects for male desire — were being widely debated, fueled by psychoanalysis and a critique of Hollywood’s patriarchal playbook. 

“Film and feminism were both really hot,” says White, who is also the coordinator of gender & sexuality studies at Swarthmore. “They came into the academy at the same time and began opening up traditional disciplines.” 

After a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness at University of California–Santa Cruz, White joined Swarthmore in 1994. Five years later, she published her first book, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability, which traced how lesbian desire found its way into Hollywood films — even when it was prohibited. During Hollywood’s Production Code era, between the 1930s and 1960s,  “sex perversion” was banned. But White uncovered the visual hints and clues that brought lesbian desire into focus.

Patricia White

“A narrow focus on the sexism of classical Hollywood or of male-dominated blockbuster films became untenable,” she says. “I was always interested in independent cinema, and it was clear that women everywhere were gaining greater access to the means of production.”

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Patty white sits in red movie theater style seats

While White was writing about Hollywood’s past, a revolution was unfolding in the film business. In the 1990s and early 2000s, cheaper cameras and digital editing tools were lowering the barriers to entry, and a new  generation of women filmmakers was seizing the opportunity. For White, it was a turning point.

“A narrow focus on the sexism of classical Hollywood or of male-dominated blockbuster films became untenable,” says White. “I was always interested in independent cinema, and it was clear that women everywhere were gaining greater access to the means of production.”

She dove in, writing numerous articles on independent women’s cinema. In 2015, she published Women’s Cinema/World Cinema, a book that analyzed the work of feminist filmmakers from Iran, Lebanon, Taiwan, Bosnia, and beyond. Feminist filmmaking, White argued, was now a global movement.

She didn’t stop at theory. White sits on the board of Women Make Movies, a nonprofit feminist arts organization in New York that is dedicated to supporting women filmmakers, where she interned during college. And on campus, she heads the Aydelotte Foundation, Swarthmore’s interdisciplinary research center that advocates for an expanded understanding of the liberal arts.

As White sees it, teaching students media literacy is an urgent obligation. She is co-author of a popular introductory film studies textbook The Film Experience. With everybody carrying a movie camera in their pocket, “we’ve never needed a basic competence in semiotics more than we do now,” she says. Whether in a Hollywood blockbuster or in an AI-generated TikTok clip, “we need to understand how visual, audio, and textual signs come together to create an ideological message.”

As for the film business, it remains tough for women. In 2024, the number of actresses in leading roles in top-grossing  films hit a ten-year low. Still, women filmmakers in the post-#MeToo era have been making important gains — a development White is following closely.

She contributed a chapter to a book on Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s megahit that grappled with one of popular culture’s most controversial icons.

“Barbie is a fraught icon for feminist debate,” White says. “But to want to be in conversation with little girls and their mothers about whether we can use this symbol in a way that’s subversive — I think that’s great.”

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