*Women Who Kill*
*in English-speaking Cinema and TV Series*
*of the Postfeminist Era*
Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, October 13-14, 2016
This symposium is organized by the group working on “Creating
Disorder” within the CAS (EA 801). It is meant as a follow-up to the
international conference “Unspeakable Acts: Murders by Women,”
organized in February 2015 by Aurélie Guillain, Emeline Jouve,
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas and Héliane Ventura, which focused mainly
on 19th- and 20th-century literature and drama. The symposium will
seek to pursue the lines of inquiry raised at the conference: 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.
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/, /Mildred Pierce, 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/ (2004), /Lost/ (ABC, 2004-2010), /Jennifer’s
Body/ (Karyn Kusama, 2009), /Bathory/ (Juraj Jakubisko, 2008),
/Luther/ (BBC, 2010-), /The Hunger Games/ (2012-), /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.
The symposium will aim, first, 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 their
ambiguities.
Proposals must include a 300-500-word abstract, a short bibliography
and a bio, and should be sent to the organizers by March 14, 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)>
_Scientific Committee_: Donna Andréolle (Université du Havre),
Jean-François Baillon (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), Elizabeth de
Cacqueray (UT2J), Georges-Claude Guilbert (Université François
Rabelais Tours), Aurélie Guillain (UT2J), Hélène Charlery (UT2J),
Emeline Jouve (Université Champolion Albi), Marianne Kac-Vergne
(Université de Picardie), Gilles Menegaldo (Université de Poitiers),
Monica Michlin (Université Paul Valéry), Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot
(Université de Bourgogne) and Shannon Wells-Lassagne (Université de
Bretagne Sud)
_Selective 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
fe/mmes. 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 Laurentis, 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.
---. /On/ The Wire. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2014.
