[Commlist] CFP - Women Filmmakers: Genre and Gender in French, British and US Cinema and TV Series

*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/ 
<https://femme.sciencesconf.org/>by *31 October 2024*. You will need to 
create an account before submitting your proposal.

Contact: (Delphine.Letort /at/ univ-lemans.fr) 
<mailto:(Delphine.Letort /at/ univ-lemans.fr)>

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