One of the first to write seriously about a fraught subject, she also played a major role in developing the field of film studies and feminist film theory.
Linda Williams, a trailblazing scholar whose research was foundational to the field of film studies and to feminist film theory, and who wrote extensively about pornography, died on March 12 at her home in Lafayette, in Northern California. She was 78.
Her husband, Paul Fitzgerald, said the cause was complications of a hemorrhagic stroke she had five years ago.
“Linda was there before there was any such thing as feminist film studies,” B. Ruby Rich, the former editor in chief of the journal Film Quarterly, said in an interview. “She played a pivotal role in its development, but she was not orthodox.”
Ms. Rich continued: “She did not stay in her lane at a time when people were really guarding boundaries and really policing what others were doing. She was fearless about following her inquiries wherever they would lead. In any branch of academics or scholarship, that is really, really unusual.”
A longtime professor of film and media at the University of California, Berkeley, Ms. Williams wrote and edited articles and books on subjects as diverse as surrealism, spectatorship and the television series “The Wire.”
She was keenly interested in how various film genres affected the body — for example, the way horror movies could induce shivers — and in her 2002 book, “Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson,” she explored how the tropes of melodrama figured in widening and narrowing America’s racial divide.
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Source: Movies - nytimes.com
