[Commlist] CFP Edited Volume - Women and Hollywood: Tales of Inequality, Abuse and Resistance in the Dream Factory

CFP Reminder for Edited Volume

Deadline for Abstracts: Friday 15 July 2022

Women and Hollywood: Tales of Inequality, Abuse and Resistance in the 
Dream Factory

Edited by Karen McNally



Responses to the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation trial prompt 
numerous questions about the reception of Hollywood movie stardom as 
legal cases of abuse play out in the combined ages of television and 
social media. Moreover, the layered gender dynamics can be 
contextualized within a contemporary framework of exposure and 
resistance that includes the imprisonment of Harvey Weinstein on rape 
and sexual assault charges, and the pay inequalities publicized by 
actresses including Michelle Williams and Octavia Spencer. Amplified by 
the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, as well as by organizations and 
initiatives such as the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and 
Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, issues of inequality and various forms of 
abuse have become central to our understanding of the female experience 
of contemporary Hollywood.
Yet these narratives are far from revelatory, hidden or limited to a 
contemporary context. The power imbalances and mistreatment that have 
partly defined women’s careers in the American film industry are as 
long-established as they are persistent, built into the structure of 
Hollywood and stretching across its entire history. From the 
euphemistically- termed ‘casting couch’ to the control of stars’ 
reproductive choices, and from the indirect expulsion of female 
directors (O’Hara, 2021), to male ownership of women’s work (McLean, 
2022) and the multiple limitations placed upon women of colour, the 
professional experience in Hollywood for women has consistently been 
different from that of their male colleagues. These inequalities have at 
the same time been both enacted and challenged in plain sight. 
Backstudio pictures (Cohan, 2019) and stardom films (McNally, 2021) 
disturb their promotion of Hollywood mythology with characters who 
negotiate their professional lives around these gendered obstacles; 
historical films and TV dramas revisit and revise these myths with 
alternative histories; and biopics, documentaries, press articles, 
television interviews, biographies, autobiographies and social media 
become sites of disclosure, resistance and activism. These storied 
spaces convey the extent to which abuse and inequality has become an 
historically pervasive and recognized aspect of women’s experience in 
the film industry and of the structural fabric of Hollywood.
This volume seeks a range of original essays that explore film, 
television and other media narratives depicting inequality and abuse as 
part of women’s professional and personal lives in Hollywood. The book 
aims to address both fictional and non-fictional narratives and to 
explore historical and contemporary case studies.

Areas of interest might include but are not limited to:

•	Conflict between Hollywood mythology and exposure of female experience 
in backstudio pictures and stardom films
•	Narratives of stars and other actors, directors, screenwriters, 
producers, costume designers
•	Implicit and explicit exposure in scandal magazines •	The use of 
autobiography by female stars to construct alternative narratives • 
Screen narratives of Hollywood as activism
•	Documentary and alternative histories of Hollywood
•	Intersectional inequality in the experiences of women of colour
•	The male saviour and a patriarchal system
•	Sexual abuse as professional control
•	Depictions of the impact of ageism on women’s careers •	Fact and 
fiction boundary crossing in the biopic
•	Specific eras of inequality for women in Hollywood
•	Narratives of individual and/or collective challenges to inequality
•	Press narratives of abuse cases
•	The impact of social media on narratives of inequality and abuse • 
Narratives of disappearance from the screen due to inequality or abuse
•	Exposing vs normalizing inequality and/or abuse through its depiction
•	Studio controls over relationships and reproductive choices • 
Hollywood narratives framed through historical context
•	The careless mistreatment of women’s bodies in narratives of Hollywood
•	Hollywood’s emotionally abusive relationship with women
•	The impact of women writers, directors and producers on the exposure 
of inequality and narratives of resistance


Chapter proposals should be submitted as a 300-400 word abstract to the 
editor, Dr Karen McNally, at (womenandhollywoodbook /at/ gmail.com) by Friday 
15 July 2022. Please include an author biography of 100-150 words. Final 
chapters will be 6,000 to 7,000 words and due by Friday 16 December 
2022. Please feel free to email with any queries prior to submission of 
abstracts. A leading publisher is being approached for publication.


Works Cited:

Steven Cohan, Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the 
Mystique of Making Movies (Oxford: OUP, 2019)

Adrienne L. McLean, All for Beauty: Makeup and Hairdressing in 
Hollywood’s Studio Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022)

Karen McNally, The Stardom Film (New York: Wallflower-Columbia 
University Press, 2021)

Helen O’Hara, Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film 
(London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2021)


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