Women Filmmakers: Genre and Gender in French, British and US Cinema and TV Series
3 – 4 july 2025 University of Le Mans, France
In the introduction to Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas (2012), Christine Gledhill argued that genre and gender rarely intersect as concepts in film studies, even though both terms are governed by “bodies of conventions [and] rules of inclusion and exclusion” (2). Since then, such intersections have gained greater scholarly attention, marked by an increased proliferation of publications delving into women’s authorship in the context of genre film. This conference aims to further this investigation through an examination of women filmmakers’ engagement with genre and gender expectations. With a particular focus on transnational and comparative approaches across US, British, and French filmmaking, we propose to explore how women directors grapple with the intertwined notions of genre and gender.
Already in the 1980s, Teresa de Lauretis noted that the elaboration of film genres and techniques plays a crucial role in shaping gendered subjectivities and identities. When developing her argument that cinema belongs to the “technologies of gender” that produce “cultural conceptions of male and female” (1984, 5), she evoked the power of film genres to inscribe gender difference in narrative and visual conventions, emphasizing the need to disrupt the “masculine-feminine polarity” (82) to allow for new subjectivities. How can cinema resist the power of genre to determine gender according to hegemonic and heterosexual norms? In what ways do female filmmakers bend the codes that have prevailed in male-dominated Hollywood? How does women’s work within genres not only undo or subvert these popular formats, but also draw on their generative potential?
This conference aims to shed light on the intertwined notions of genre and gender through the prism of women’s cinema to examine whether it is possible to challenge or rewrite the highly conventionalized generic worlds of Hollywood cinema. Traditionally, feminist examinations of films made by women privileged experimental or art-house cinema, owing in part to the assumed co-implication between genres and reinforcement of gender stereotypes, as well as ideologically problematic (mis)representations. This resulted in conceptualizations of women’s filmmaking as “counter-cinema” that resisted the power of the gaze (Mulvey 1975), conceived as a direct challenge to Hollywood’s conventions and, more broadly, to popular genre film. Meanwhile, Claire Johnston’s (1972) model of “counter-cinema”, based not on the language of negation but “infiltration”, that is, challenging the hegemonic norms from within, opened path to examine women directors working within studio-era Hollywood genre films, such as those by Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino. As Patricia White observes, in contrast to Mulvey’s embrace of “the destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon”, Johnston’s work anticipates a current postfeminist climate of the 21st century, which is “much less suspicious of pleasure than was the cultural feminism of the early 1970s” (2015, 9). It also redirects scholarly attention towards the development of feminist discourse within generic conventions, in line with the postmodernist concern with appropriations, remakes, and rewriting. The awareness of genericity – the ability of a film to mobilize one or several genres (Schaeffer 1989) – prompts female directors to employ pastiche and metafiction as tools of generic remaking. Mary Harrod calls attention to such self-reflexive techniques used by women filmmakers in “heightened genre films” – a phrase that she uses to analyze their participation in the construction of genericity as a powerful aesthetic and affective experience. Based on a corpus of post-1990s US films made by Kathryn Bigelow, Amy Heckerling, Sofia Coppola, Kimberly Peirce, Greta Gerwig, among others, her book examines the notion of “cine-fille”: the female director as an auteur exploiting cinephilic intertextuality to fashion her own artistic vision. A growing interest in female directors working within popular formats is also attested to by a recent wave of publications on “disreputable” genres, including horror film: Alison Peirse’s Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre and Patricia Pisters’s New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and The Poetics of Horror, both published in 2020, and Barbara Creed’s Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema (2022).
We are interested in approaches that consider women’s filmmaking within a broad spectrum of genres and diverse production contexts, from the so-called mainstream cinema to films made on the outskirts of Hollywood. Our project extends the growing body of work on women’s genre authorship in US-American and British contexts to include French women filmmakers as well, who have significantly contributed to the culturally impactful realm of genre cinema. Investigating how genres meet gender in women’s film practice is pressing, given the increased cultural visibility of genre films authored by women and the critical implications of their embracement of forms historically categorized as “male”, such as war films, Westerns or horror cinema. For instance, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) offers a compelling take on the Western by filming the experience of the Frontier from the perspective of women whose voices are relegated to whispers in the face of decision-making husband. In American Honey (2016), Andrea Arnolds departs from her earlier focus on the impoverished British housing estates to rewrite the genre of the road movie in the post-recession US context, while in You Were Never Really Here (2017) Lynne Ramsay turns to noir to interrogate violent masculinity, addressing a war-related trauma and child sex trafficking. In France, Julia Ducournau makes history by becoming the second female filmmaker after Jane Campion (with The Piano in 1993) to win the Palme d’Or with Titane (2021), a refreshing revision of the body horror which unpacks, in a queer gesture, gender and sexual identities, while opening up the notion of kinship beyond heteronormativity. It is equally important to examine how women filmmakers undercut the scopic drive by means of transforming the visual language of genres conventionally associated with femininity, such as the heritage costume drama, romantic comedy or female biopics. Sofia Coppola’s latest biopic Priscilla (2023) allows Elvis Presley’s young wife to grow into a woman who discovers her own desires after seeing herself through the King’s eyes. While the camera continuously returns to protagonist’s body to represent her “looked-at-ness” and the desire it inspires, Coppola uses the close-up not to objectify her subject but to arouse a phenomenological experience which defines the treatment of femininity in her cinema. Céline Sciamma’s engagement with teenpics in Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011) and Girlhood (2014), and her critically-acclaimed costume drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), provide yet another instance of rewriting of the traditionally female-orientated forms. Other films might bend the genres to undercut the pleasure related to narrative and chronological order, visual and aural complementarity, actors/actresses and expected characterizations. Possible avenues of research include but are not limited to:
- Female genre auteurs: what are ther new paradigms of female authorship within genre filmmaking?
- Comparative approaches: how do male and female filmmakers employ genre, including genres that have historically been associated with male viewing pleasures (the Western, horror cinema or the war film, among others)?
- How do women filmmakers making genre films engage with feminist topics or themes assumed to belong to femininity?
- Emergent gender and intersectional identities in films by women
- Pastiche, self-referentiality and meta-genericity in women’s filmmaking
- Critical reviews and their impact on the trajectory of film genres: does a close examination of critical literature reveal any favorable/negative biases as regards women’s genre cinema?
- Genre, gender and film sound: how do music and sound participate in the technologies of gender and the construction of genre in women’s cinema?
- The #MeToo movement has brought visibility to sexual harassment in patriarchal society: how have women filmmakers used genres to respond to this cultural moment?
Please send your abstract (about 250 words) and a short biography to the conference website https://femme.sciencesconf.org/by 31 October 2024. You will need to create an account before submitting your proposal.
Contact: Delphine.Letort@univ-lemans.fr