Rich's 1980 essay, 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence', left an indelible imprint on feminist research. Even though students today may not have read the essay, the term 'compulsory heterosexuality' nonetheless peppers their essays. The legacy of French philosopher Michel Foucault is no less pervasive. Though he had no sympathy for feminists, his work, in particular the three volumes of The History of Sexuality (1990), continues to provide a methodological framework for some of the best scholarship in the area today. 1 In the 1980s, both writers, it might be argued, were fundamental in moving research on sexuality into the forefront of academic inquiry across the Humanities and in transforming Women's Studies into Gender Studies -but also in diffusing the influence of Second Wave Feminism within the university. By the 1980s, feminism had become an intellectual and policygenerating force, which provided a receptive international audience for the work of public figures (such as Rich and Foucault) who radically extended research into sexuality per se, outside the conventional discourse of sexology. It is all the more paradoxical, therefore, that one of the outcomes of these interventions was a radical undermining of feminism itself. Mourning feminismAdrienne Rich and Michel Foucault inaugurated two very different paths of inquiry within Women's Studies, both of which resulted in the virtual disappearance of the term 'women' -replaced by the terms 'gender' and 'sexuality'. There are reasons for regretting the loss of this term, but there is another term -also lost as a result, at least in part, of the findings of these two paths of inquiry that we mourn with perhaps greater fervour: that of 'feminism' as something in which all women have a stake. Adrienne Rich, quite rightly, pointed to a blind spot of feminism: its failure to consider the way in which 'woman' was a monolithic term that implied 'heterosexuality', excluding certain women, lesbians, from its larger category. Feminism, in its emphasis on woman, reproduced the same compulsory heterosexuality, argued Rich, that it purported to oppose. Meanwhile, bell hooks made many of the same complaints about the treatment of African-American women. The term woman became by its very Sexualities 11(1/2)

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Tilda Swinton’s status as a fashion icon exemplifies the contradictory functions that Walter Benjamin attributes to fashion as both exemplifying commodity fetishism and expressing a utopian ‘image wish’. This vexed relationship with fashion inflects Swinton’s cinematic performances, enhanced by her emphasis on disguise and transformation that calls into question the nature of identity and its authenticity. Her persona speaks to the fluid and fragmented dimensions of contemporary European identities, which are rooted, but also cross borders, national and otherwise; similarly, her public presence testifies to the way that contemporary culture has generated new forms of celebrity as a means of representing identities in which the negotiation of gender is a significant component.

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This brief introduction offers an outline of the purpose and scope of the volume, which provides a synthetic overview of the work of a scholar characterized by a subtle and complex engagement with, and analysis of, cinema and moving-image installation art that takes place over a fifty-year span, addressing a massive list of films and artworks. It establishes that the goal of the book is not simply to summarize this oeuvre, but to offer “un passage,” a point of entry into the perspectives of this scholar, showing how they shifted and developed over many years.