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Since its debut at the San Francisco Film Festival in March 1986, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It has become a much extolled reference point from which mainstream film critics evaluate progress in Hollywood's proffered images of women. Crediting Lee's film with inaugurating a new wave of increasingly radical and innovative depictions of female sexuality in cinema, Caryn James writes in a recent New York Times article: "Nola Darling, the sexually voracious heroine of She's Gotta Have It, who unapologetically juggles three men at once, is no longer quite so daring" (James 2006). While She's Gotta Have It received mostly favorable reviews in mainstream media, feminist reception of Lee's film was decidedly unfavorable. In a review, first published shortly after the film's theatrical release, bell hooks, the black feminist film critic, writes, "It is not progressive, nor does it break away from the traditional portrayal of female sexuality in film. She's Gotta Have It can take its place alongside a growing body of contemporary films that claim to tell women's stories while privileging male narratives, films that stimulate audiences with versions of female sexuality that are not really new or different" (hooks 1996, 231). The disparity between mainstream and feminist receptions of Lee's film should not be surprising; feminist criticism generally assails male-directed films for their thematic and formal devaluation of female characters, while mainstream criticism largely ignores such critiques, preferring to emphasize the increase in the number of films that present actresses in leading roles. In short, the latter stresses representational politics in the film industry whereas the former stresses the politics of representation on the film screen. As part of the film industry's current marketing strategy of recycling popular films from past decades, the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of She's Gotta Have It in mainstream media overlooked feminist criticism of Lee's film, except where it served to spark curiosity and thus unintentionally contributed to the film's commercial success. This oversight invites renewed consideration of the film's politics of representation.
In this essay, I will argue that Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It is a relic of the liberal modernist imagination and therefore promotes a theory of the subject as knowing, self-determining, and absolute. Specifically, the film's critique of the double standard imposed...