[Commlist] CFP: Cine-feminisms and the Academy Symposium

CFP: Cine-feminisms and the Academy Symposium

UNSW Sydney, 12-13th December 2019


The contemporary media landscape is shaped by increasing precarity and 
awareness of gendered issues. The global screen industry is grappling 
with the cultural and industrial shifts precipitated by the #MeToo and 
Time’s Up movements. For some, the Harvey Weinstein revelations and 
subsequent scandal resulted in a re-evaluation of the gendered operation 
of Hollywood. The industry has responded on the red carpet, through the 
media and in film festival juries. What role do – and can – forms of 
film feminisms (or cine-feminism) play within this context?

This symposium will explore questions around the state, place and forms 
of contemporary cine-feminisms. There is little question that women’s 
filmmaking is gaining new currency and profile in film festivals, in 
film funding and in academic publishing. Calls for greater gender equity 
in the film industry are resulting in shifts in the ways (some) film 
funding bodies allocate resources and in how (some) film festivals 
select and program work. Decades of lobbying by women working both 
within and on the margins of the film industry have been the driving 
force in creating these shifts, often in engagement with the long 
history of feminist film scholarship on the work of women behind the 
camera, in front of the camera, and in front of the screen. The recent 
commitments to greater gender equity in the film industry can also, of 
course, be understood as one way that the industry has responded to 
negative publicity (in particular, the high-profile cases of sexual 
harassment, sexual assault and gender-based discrimination that have 
captured public attention) and economic opportunity (targeting female 
viewers).


While this (re)newed interest in women’s filmmaking has been enabled by 
cine-feminisms to what extent and in what ways does – or can – it create 
opportunities for feminist teaching and research in the academy? What 
place does cine-feminism have in the academy today? When, where and how 
does it shape and inform how both film history and film theory are 
understood and taught and how questions of authorship, genre, 
performance, intermediality, and industry are explored? In the shifting 
university sector, are there particular issues that cine-feminist work 
bumps up against in terms of syllabus design, recognition of engagement 
and outreach, research funding and publications?

We invite proposals on any area related to cine-feminisms/film 
feminisms, including but not limited to:

• Contemporary and historical cine- and media feminisms
• Feminist screen theories and pedagogy
• “Doing” feminist screen studies
• Feminist cine-activisms – on screen, online, in press, on the streets
• Diverse feminist screen cultures in the digital age

Keynote will be delivered by Dr Anna Backman Rogers (University of 
Gothenberg, Sweden)

Dr Anna Backman Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in Feminism and Visual 
Culture at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the author of 
American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and The Crisis Image 
(Edinburgh UP, 2015) and Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure 
(Berghahn 2018). She is also the co-editor with Laura Mulvey of 
Feminisms (Amsterdam UP, 2015) and the co-editor with Boel Ulfsdotter of 
Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and 
Aesthetics and Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, 
Identity, and Activism (both with Edinburgh UP, 2017). Her current 
research is on the films of Lynne Ramsay and Barbara Loden’s WANDA.

CFP closes 13th of September 2019. Please send your proposals including 
a title, an abstract (250 words), and a short biography (80 words) to Dr 
Jessica Ford (jessica.ford /at/ newcastle.edu.au) 
<mailto:(jessica.ford /at/ newcastle.edu.au)>  and Dr Jodi Brooks 
(j.brooks /at/ unsw.edu.au) <mailto:(j.brooks /at/ unsw.edu.au)> by 13th of September 
2019.
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