From the Margins to the Mainstream: Women in Film and Television

Description

This book explores the various issues raised by women’s fraught integration into the mainstream in film and television, whether it be off screen as filmmakers and film critics or on screen in film and TV series. Marianne Kac-Vergne and Julie Assouly consider the varied representations of women in films such as Jackie Brown (1997), Marie Antoinette (2006), It’s a Free World… (2007) and Wonder Woman (2017). They particularly look into the overlooked gendered aspects of voice-overs and the adverse tropes used to represent maternity in television series as well as the complex motif of the vagina dentata in contemporary film and television. The chapters analyze independent, art-house, Hollywood and TV productions often in transnational contexts, shedding light on how definitions of femininity are culturally specific yet cross national, class and racial lines. The contributors include renowned scholars such as Yvonne Tasker, Celestino Deleyto, David Roche and Nicole Cloarec, as well as emerging yet well-published film scholars. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents Figures Series editors’ foreword Acknowledgements Introduction Part One Women speaking from the margins Interview with Vivienne Dick 1 Lizzie Borden and Vivienne Dick: Fighting for female filmmaking (Céline Murillo) 2 Daughters behind the camera (Nicole Cloarec) 3 Molly Haskell’s take on feminist film theory: The place of feminist film criticism outside academia (Anne Hurault-Paupe) Part Two Women in semi-independent cinema 4 Racial bodies in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) (Hélène Charlery) 5 ‘She’s a whole lotta woman’: Pam Grier’s star image in Jackie Brown (1997) (David Roche) 6 Women on the border: A cosmopolitan approach to the representation of contemporary femininity in It’s a Free World… (2007 7 Marie Antoinette (2006), fashion queens and Hollywood stars (Sara Pesce) Part Three Women protagonists in mainstream television and blockbusters 8 Voice-overs: Renewing gender representations in American TV series (Anaïs Le Fèvre-Berthelot) 9 Moving into the mainstream: Pregnancy, motherhood and female TV action heroes (Anne Sweet) 10 In the mouth of fearfulness: Women, power and the vagina dentata in contemporary American cinema (Charles-Antoine Courcou 11 Can women be superheroes? Reflections on American cinema and beyond (Yvonne Tasker) Index