Judith Butler has been called upon time and again to explain the motivation for her seminal work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. One particularly telling rationale for her project appears in Undoing Gender: “I wanted something of gender trouble […] to disturb — fundamentally — the way in which feminist and social theory think gender […] one has to understand the sea- change that took place when feminist studies turned from being the analysis of ‘images’ of women […] to being an analysis of sexual difference at the foundation of cultural and human communicability” (2004, 207– 8). And yet, few commentators on Gender Trouble saw it as a reaction to “the analysis of ‘images’ of women,” as Butler herself notes. Certainly, no discipline at the time of Gender Trouble's writing more exemplified the analysis of images of women than film theory. Feminist film theory established the terms by which images of women became the central epistemological question of the 1970s and 1980s in film and related disciplines. That a Hegelian philosopher took as her starting point the analysis of “images of women” speaks to how transdisciplinary the analysis of images of women was at the time. Feminist film theory, like Woman herself, refused to stay domesticated, confined. As Janet McCabe explains in Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema, “the body of work called feminist film theory and criticism has played a crucial — and often controversial — role in the emergence of film studies as an academic discipline; in turn, film studies shaped feminist concerns as well as granted feminist research a space to flourish” (2004, 1). This body of work was so far- reaching that by 1990, it played a crucial role in the advent of queer theory, a term coined by one of the founding scholars of feminist film theory, Teresa de Lauretis (1991).