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

by Marianne Kac-Vergne (Editor), Julie Assouly (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350120181
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	07/14/2022
Series:	Library of Gender and Popular Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Marianne Kac-Vergne is Associate Professor of American Studies at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France. Her research interests are masculinity, femininity, Hollywood genres and science fiction. She is author of Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future (I. B. Tauris, 2017).

Julie Assouly is Associate Professor of American Studies at Université d'Artois, France. Her research themes are pictorial intertextuality, intermediality and cultural transfers in American cinema, specifically the films of the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson. She is the author of L'Amérique des frères Coen (2015).
Marianne Kac Vergne is Associate Professor of American Studies at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France. Her research interests are Masculinity, Femininity, Hollywood genres and Science Fiction. She is author of Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future (I. B. Tauris, 2017).
Julie Assouly is Associate Professor of American Studies at Université d'Artois, France. Her research themes are American cinema, the Coen brothers, Wes Anderson, pictorial intertextuality, New Hollywood, Americana and nostalgia. She is series editor of série cinémas and co-editor of La culture italo-américaine à l'écran: Cinéma et télévision (Italian American Culture on Screen: Cinema and Television) (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Series Editors' Foreword
Introduction
Part I: 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 II: 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) - Celestino Deleyto
7. Marie Antoinette (2006), Fashion Queens and Hollywood Stars - Sara Pesce
Part III: 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 Courcoux
11. Can Women be Superheroes? Reflections on American Cinema and Beyond - Yvonne Tasker (University of Leeds, UK)
List of References
Index

Editorial Reviews

Address[es] enthralling issues, such as the relationship between the male gaze and spectator identification; beauty, desirability and the white and black female body ... and the gendered hierarchy in American TV series' voice-overs, to name but a few. ... The message of this essay collection is loud and clear” —Historical Jourbanal of Film, Radio and Television

From the Publisher