Feminism's third wave and the feminist revisionist film subgenre

In this thesis, I discuss a previously unidentified subgenre of the mainstream women's film: the feminist revisionist film. An examination of feminism and film demonstrates how the two intersect to create the subgenre, which consists of films that have historical settings but include anachronistic feminist ideas. A trend within the subgenre seeks to replace Eurocentric second-wave feminism with the more racially-sensitive third wave feminism. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea is a literary foreshadowing of the subgenre. Andy Tennant's 1999 film Anna and the King and Patricia Rozema's 1999 film Mansfield Park are two examples of this subgenre. However, the films' foci on non-white racial groups occasionally and eventually completely are redirected to white feminism. These attempts at third-wave feminism, the dominance of second-wave feminism, and the resulting implications for the fields of feminism and film theory are the central concerns of this thesis.