[ecrea] CfC Women Who Kill

*Calls for Chapters*

*Women Who Kill*

*in English-speaking Cinema and TV Series*

*of the Postfeminist Era*

Within the fields of film and television studies, feminist critics and 
scholars of the 1980s and 1990s have extensively analyzed the figures of 
women murderers in classical film genres like film noir and melodrama, 
as well as in less savory genres like the horror films of the 1970s and 
1980s. Such figures, often adapted from literary sources (/The Maltese 
Falcon/, /Leave Her to Heaven/,/Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?/, /Tess 
of the D’Urbervilles/), have existed since the silent era. Yet what may 
have been an exception seems to be becoming more common. Women who kill 
abound in contemporary films and TV shows, including /Butterfly Kiss/ 
(Michael Winterbottom, 1995), /The Wire/ (HBO, 2002-2008), /Kill Bill/ 
(Quentin Tarantino, 2003-2004), /Monster/ (Patty Jenkins, 2003), /Lost/ 
(ABC, 2004-2010), /Jennifer’s Body/ (Karyn Kusama, 2009), /Bathory/ 
(Juraj Jakubisko, 2008), /Luther/ (BBC, 2010-), /The Hunger Games/ 
(2012-2015), /The Americans/ (FX, 2013-), /Orange Is the New Black/ 
(Netflix, 2013-), /Prisoners/ (Denis Villeneuve, 2013) and /Gone Girl/ 
(David Fincher, 2014). The increasing number of these characters 
probably goes hand in hand with the increasing number of strong female 
heroines. Far from displaying gratuitous violence by women, some of 
these contemporary works justify or, at least try to explain, why the 
murders happened in the first place (as an act of revenge, an answer to 
their oppression, a way to fit in their environment, an expression of 
their psychotic personalities, and so forth), while others tend to 
question these very motives.Seeing as many of today’s producers, 
filmmakers and screenwriters have gone through film school, it is more 
than likely that many are aware of the theses developed in feminist film 
and television studies; Diablo Cody, for instance, admitted having 
Barbara Creed’s /Monstrous-Feminine/ in mind when writing the screenplay 
for /Jennifer’s Body/. The series and films are also, no doubt, reacting 
to discourses that have been widely circulating in the media, and that 
testify to the impact queer, gender and feminist studies have had on 
popular culture at large. Another contemporary phenomenon that must be 
taken into account is postfeminism, a “market-led phenomenon” which, by 
promoting female success stories, seems to “lead to the conclusion that 
the time for feminism is past” (Gamble 42-44). These women who kill may 
simply be symptomatic of postfeminist trends.

This collected volume will explore several lines of inquiry: the female 
murderer as a figure that destabilizes order; the tension between 
criminal and victim; the relationship between crime and expression (or 
the lack thereof); and the paradox whereby a crime can be both an act of 
destruction and a creative assertion of agency. It will also aim at 
assessing the influence of feminist, queer and gender studies on 
mainstream television and cinema, notably in the genres (film noir, 
horror, melodrama) that have received the most critical attention from 
this perspective, but more importantly perhaps, at analyzing the 
politics of representation by considering these works of fiction in 
their contexts and addressing some of the ambiguities raised by 
postfeminism.

Proposals must include a 300-500-word abstract, a short bibliography and 
a bio, and should be sent to the editors by December 31, 2016:

Zachary Baqué: (zachary.baque /at/ univ-tlse2.fr) 
<mailto:(zachary.baque /at/ univ-tlse2.fr)>

Cristelle Maury: (cristellemaury /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(cristellemaury /at/ gmail.com)>

David Roche: (mudrock /at/ neuf.fr) <mailto:(mudrock /at/ neuf.fr)>

_Selected Bibliography_

Andrin, Muriel. /Maléfiques, le mélodrame filmique américain et ses 
héroines, 1940-1953, /Bruxelles, Berne, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2005.__

Birch, Helen, ed. /Moving Targets Women Murder and Representation/. 
Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.__

Burfoot and Lord, eds. /Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and 
Violence/. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier, 2006.

Cadiet, Loïc, ed. /Figures de femmes criminelles : De l'Antiquité à nos 
jours/. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010.

Cardi, Coline and Geneviève Pruvost, eds. /Penser la violence des 
femmes/. Paris: La Découverte, 2012.

Clover, Carol. J. /Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern 
Horror Film/. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1992.__

Cowie, Elizabeth. “/Film Noir /and Women.” /Shades of Noir: a Reader/. 
Ed. Joan Copjec. London and New York: Verso, 1993. 121-65.__

Creed, Barbara. /The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, 
Psychoanalysis/. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

---. /Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny/. Manchester: 
Manchester UP, 2005.

De Lauretiis, Teresa. /Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema/. 
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Doane, Mary Ann. /Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, 
Psychoanalysis/. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Gamble, Sarah, ed. /The Routledge Companion to Feminism and 
Postfeminism/. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Grant, Barry Keith, ed. /The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror 
Film/. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996.

Grossman, Julie. /Rethinking the Femme Fatale: Ready For Her 
Close-Up/.//London: Palgrave, 2009.

Halberstam, Judith. /Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of the 
Monster/. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.

---. /Female Masculinity/. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1998.

Hanson, Helen. /Hollywood Heroines Women in Film Noir and the Female 
Gothic Film/. London and New York: I. B. Tauris 2008.

Hanson Helen and Catherine O’Rawe. /The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, 
Contexts/.//London: Palgrave, 2010.

Hildenbrand, Karen, ed. /Cycnos/ 23.2 (2006) “Figures de femmes 
assassines, représentations et idéologies.” 
<http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=618>.

hooks, bell. /Real to Reel: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies/. New York 
and London: Routledge, 2009 [1996].

Inness, Sherrie A. /Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in 
Popular Culture/. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1998.

---, ed. /Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture/. 
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Jones, Ann. /Women Who Kill/. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Kaplan E Ann, ed. /Women in Film Noir. /London: BFI, 1978.

Kuhn, Annette. /Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema/. London and New 
York: Verso, 1993.

Modleski, Tania. /Loving with a Vengeance/. London and New York: 
Routledge, 2006.

Nalepa, Laurie and Richard Pfefferman. /The Murder Mystique: Female 
Killers and Popular Culture/. Wesport, CO and London: Praeger, 2013.

Parker L. Juli, ed. /Representations of Murderous Women in Literature, 
Theatre, Film and Television: Examining the Patriarchal Presuppositions 
Behind the Treatment of Murderesses in Fiction and Reality/. Lewinston, 
NY: Edwin Mellen Press Ltd, 2010.

Plain, Gill. /Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the 
Body/. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2001.

Rosalind, Gill. /Gender and the Media/. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.

Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds. New Femininities: 
/Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. /Basingstone, UK: 
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Russo, Mary. /The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity/. New 
York and London: Routledge, 1995.

Seal, Lizzie. /Women, Murder and Femininity: Representations of Women 
Who Kill/. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Stables, Kate. “The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the 
/Femme Fatale /in 90s Cinema.” /Women in Film Noir. /Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. 
London: BFI, 1998. 164-82.

Tasker Yvonne.  “Women in Film Noir.” /A Companion to Film Noir/.//Ed. 
Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 353-68.

---. /Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television Since 
World War II/. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011.

Walker, Janet. “Hollywood, Freud and the Representation of Women: 
Regulations and Contradiction, 1945-early 60s.” /Home is Where the Heart 
is/,/Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film/. Ed. Christine Gledhill. 
London: BFI, 1994. 197-214.

Wallace, Marilyn. /Sisters in Crime/. New York: Berkley Books, 1989.

Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” /The Dread of Difference: 
Gender in the Horror Film/. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin, TX: U of 
Texas P, 1996: 15-34.

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