June 26, 2025

This week we’re presenting Female Perversions (1996) on Thursday, June 26th at 8pm.

Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 7:50 and we’re starting the film at 8:10!

For this course in our continuing education of Advanced Tilda Studies, we’ll take a trip over to the Psychology building with Female Perversions. Often noted as Tilda’s first film made in the United States, crossing the pond did little to curb her penchant for finding provocative projects with unexpected collaborators and source material. In this case, she teams up with director Susan Streitfeld, a painter turned agent-to-the-stars in her filmmaking debut, to adapt Louise J. Kaplan’s tome of feminist psychoanalytic theory, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. Swinton was not the first choice to star in the film, as Streitfeld thought she was both too young and too Scottish to play the central character, but Streitfeld changed her mind when she met with Tilda and saw that she had the proper lack of inhibition needed to play this challenging role.

In Female Perversions (the book), Kaplan sets out to break from contemporaneous psychoanalysis that focused nearly exclusively on the proclivities and aberrations of male subjects. Starting out from the twin theses that “perversions are never about what they seem, but are instead vehicles for deeper, unspoken desires” and “perversions stem not [just] from one’s sexual orientation, but from the social expectations put on one’s gender identity,” Kaplan lays out how so-called ‘female perversions’ are not mirrors of the male perversions (or subservient positions to fulfill masculinity’s desires) but reflective of women’s specific roles in relationship to society.

This may seem to be a challenging text to adapt into a narrative film, but Streitfeld, Swinton, and the rest of the team deliver an indelible portrait of a woman, Eve Stephens, navigating several of the concepts discussed by Kaplan, experiencing sexual liberation and mental duress, balancing familial strife, career demands, and romantic affairs in gorgeously sleek, ivory-hued, extremely 90s apartments and office spaces. This is a phenomenally fashionable film overall, worth seeing just for the blazers-and-lingerie fits that Tilda sports throughout the film (Streitfeld notes s homeovestism—an erotic reaction to wearing clothing expected of one’s sex—as one of Eve’s ‘female perversions), but also for the symbolically rich dream sequences throughout. It’s also a masterful actorly showcase, not just for Tilda but for Amy Madigan as her kleptomaniac Anthropologist sister, and Dale Shuger as her masc/butch teenage nibling.

I will note here that there is some challenging material in Female Perversions, especially in regards to self-harm, that could be fairly upsetting for some folks—just so you aren’t caught off-guard by that.

As a reminder, our first From Below BBQ of the summer is tomorrow, Sunday, June 22nd at 4pm! It looks like the rain will let up in time, so all systems are go!

Stefan, Charlie, and Stark