Jackie Stacey

Jackie Stacey is a feminist film theorist. She has contributed to the fields of cultural studies, ethnography, and feminist film theory, particularly in regards to star studies and examining the spectatorial response to film. She is a currently professor of Media and Cultural Studies and the director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Arts and Languages (CIDRAL) at the University of Manchester. She previously worked in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University as a professor of women's studies and cultural studies. She has served as co-editor of Screen since 1994. As an author, she has been largely collected by libraries.

Stacey received a Bachelor of Arts degree in European Studies in 1982 from the University of Sussex and a Master of Arts degree in Women's Studies in 1985 from the University of Kent. She received her doctorate in 1992 from the University of Birmingham.

In her 1987 article "Desperately Seeking Difference," Stacey posits that there is a very strong connection between lesbian films and films that feature female bonding and friendship. She argues that there is inherently a "homoerotic component" in films about women with intimate friendships, even if there is no explicit homosexual contact between the female characters. Stacey links this argument to her work in spectatorial theory by comparing the homoerotic way in which the female characters on screen interact with one another to the way the female spectators in the audience form a connection with the films' female stars. Stacey suggests that the way female spectators view the stars they see on screen must pertain to some element of desire, as their idealization of the stars negates the concept of purely narcissistic identification. Rather than viewing the female spectatorial experience through the lens of either male desire or female identification, Stacey calls for a deconstruction of the binary and a more nuanced spectrum with which to explore female spectatorship.

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