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Film, TV, Video

“Researching the Influence of Feminist Film Theory on 21st Century Films and TV Series” (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France, November 18-19 2021)

Conference Report
Eléa Brossier and Mikaël Toulza

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1The two-day conference “Researching the Influence of Feminist Film Theory on 21st Century Films and TV Series” was organized by Hélène Charlery (Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès), Emilie Cheyroux (Institut National Universitaire Champollion, Albi) and Cristelle Maury (Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès) at Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès on November 18-19, 2021. It followed a symposium organized by Zachary Baqué, Cristelle Maury and David Roche in Toulouse on October 13-14, 2016, entitled “Women Who Kill in English-Speaking Cinema and TV Series of the Postfeminist Era”, which resulted in the publication of a collective volume in 2020. With ten contributions (six based on films and four on TV series), and an impressive keynote given by Janet Staiger (University of Texas at Austin), the symposium aimed to assess the influence of feminist film theories and intersectional feminist theories on 21st-century films and series produced in the English-speaking world.

2The first panel revolved around the representation of assault and violence. Delphine Letort (Université du Mans) investigated the series Unbelievable (Netflix, 2019). She argued that this “feminist tale of rape” should be included in the recent deluge of post-#MeToo TV series and movie productions. Not only does the series tell the true story of serial rapes that occurred between 2008 and 2011, but it also allows the victims to discuss the events. Letort questioned the series’ feminist rhetoric’s operativeness in creating a female narrative. Unbelievable shifts, within the series, from the male detective’s point of view to that of female detectives Duval and Rasmussen. Letort deconstructed the discourse held in the first episode, the vagueness of which silences the victims and undermines the credibility of their testimonies. As the detectives progressively focus on the female survivors, the series turns into a feminist narrative. Unbelievable, Letort concluded, is a series that raises the issues and changes the value of speech.

3Arya Rani (University of Texas, Dallas) then studied the representation and reception of sexual violence in Hollywood films since the beginning of the #Metoo movement, which she credits for the development of the emerging #Metoo movies category. Focusing on Bombshell (Roach, 2019) and The Assistant (Green, 2019), Rani argued that these films’ portrayal of sexual harassment and misogyny in the workspace denounces the scopophilic and voyeuristic gazes in visual media. The films differ, however, insofar that Bombshell is also a female empowerment story that adopts an optimistic point of view on the dismantling of patriarchy, while the female protagonist in The Assistant is silenced by her colleagues. The films’ representations of this struggle echo a wider debate on women’s possible difficulties to be heard in a patriarchal society. Rani contended that the main objective of post-#MeToo storytelling is not so much to display what happened behind closed doors but to prompt belief in the victims’ ordeals, thus ultimately emphasizing the necessity for textual devices and images to work in tandem.

4Katrijn Bekers and Gertjan Willems (University of Antwerp) compared several representations of female artists in biopics focused on women writers. They questioned how the figure of the author, a symbol of independence and creativity, is represented in different movies and periods. They particularly focused on post-#Metoo literary biopics, which they believe go further than #Metoo films, without any direct representation of sexual harassment. Bekers and Willems dealt with #Metoo related notions such as women empowerment, power of speech, and intersectional representation. They established a historical classification of these feminine literary biopics composed of four categories. The “Patriarchal literary biopics” not only focus on a female protagonist, but also reveal how films focus on female characters. Thus, “second-wave feminist literary biopics” ascribe women’s success to their own competences and genius, and the narrative emphasizes their independence and career. Bekers and Willems’ third category was labeled “post-feminist literary biopics,” meaning traditional biopics that include elements of feminist theory. Finally, they traced the “#Metoo literary biopics” back to recent female literary biopics such as Colette (Westmoreland, 2018) and Wild Nights with Emily (Olnek, 2018). In the latter category, women’s words are repressed and distorted, and female authors’ confidence emerges from their queer partners.

  • 1 Shambu, Girish. “Times up for the Male Canon”, FilmQuarterly.org, published on Sept. 21, 2018, http (...)

5Theresa Geller (UC Berkeley) then studied Todd Haynes’s filmmaking and his own storytelling, in order to build a feminist methodology that bypasses what Girish Shambu calls hommo-citational practices in film studies: “Male critics and scholars making reference predominantly to work—whether writings or films—by other men. Citation is never neutral. It is always political. […] The result is a partial representation of the world that remains silent about its own limitedness1.” Geller stated that hommo-citation fosters critical division between feminism and theory. She advocated for “feminist recitation” instead, which she linked to queer theory and intersectional film theory. Geller fleshed out how these concepts could contribute to feminist studies, particularly by challenging the perspective of male scholarship. Geller attributed the emergence of a cinematic practice of feminist recitation to Haynes’s work, particularly in his return to the subgenre of the woman’s film. For her, it is necessary to acknowledge the feminist antecedents of Haynes’s work reestablished by feminist recitation in order to construct an intersectional and queer theory that overturns hommo-citation.

6Janet Staiger inaugurated the second day of the symposium with a compelling keynote which focused on the quest for feminist filmmaking, the very definition of which remains laborious. Staiger wondered whether a filmmaker could make a feminist film if their previous films were not feminist. She admitted to her lack of personal resolution regarding these ontological questions, which have become even more complex since second-wave feminism and the the inclusion of intersectional matters. Drawing on the assumption that feminist filmmaking had to be confronted with norms, Staiger proposed a historiographical account of scholarly and critical approaches to what feminist filmmaking might be.

  • 2 Kaplan, E. Ann. “Aspects of British Feminist Film Theory: A Critical Evaluation of Texts by Claire (...)
  • 3 De Lauretis, Teresa. “Aesthetics and Film Theory: Rethinking Women’s Cinema”, New German Critique, (...)
  • 4 Penley, Constance. The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Saint Paul: Unive (...)
  • 5 Doane, Mary Ann and Linda Williams. “Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film”, (...)

7In the early 1970s, the short-lived Women and Film magazine and Molly Haskell’s monograph From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women at the Movies (1974) proved crucial in defining feminist filmmaking as a need to represent “real women” and question how the status quo could be challenged. In this vein, Laura Mulvey’s criticism of scopophilia in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” concluded on a call for the creation of a counter-cinema that would steer away from mainstream clichés. In the 1980s, E. Ann Kaplan2 evoked the works of Claire Johnston and Pam Cook to argue for the need for feminist criticism to challenge generic expectations from the audience. For Teresa De Lauretis,3 difference had to be seen differently, meaning that feminist aesthetics was to adapt to female subjectivity and to women’s point of view. Feminist criticism gradually shifted from envisioning the female body as spectacle to advocating for a more complex and potentially disruptive female point of view. Such disruption, Constance Penley4 believed, could prove positive as long as it was not recuperated by traditional cinema. Whereas, for Annette Kuhn, conventional cinema remained an important vector of change, Mary Ann Doane and Linda Williams argued that the disruption triggered by the adoption of a female point of view could also be reinterpreted by a masculine discourse so as to validate its own hegemony.5 These matters were rendered more complex still in the last twenty years by intersectional scholars and authors. Should the form of counter cinema feminist film theorists advocate for bear the marks of feminist film theory? If so, this ideological juxtaposition must occur in both content and technique. For Mary Gentile, even though a film might not be feminist, feminist reading proved influential in exposing a movie’s patriarchal undertones. Understood in this light, feminist filmmaking could be assessed by paying close attention to the spectators, which Staiger referred to as feminist spectatorship, and their perception of feminist attitudes.

  • 6 Nochimson, Matha P. “Kathryn Bigelow, Feminist Pioneer or Tough Guy in Drag?”, Salon.com, published (...)

8By the late 1980s, feminist film theory had proposed three approaches as to how a film could be deemed feminist: to portray real women, create a counter cinema and/or to encourage a feminist spectatorship. Janet Staiger illustrated the difficulties in defining feminist filmmaking with a case study of the reception of the works of Kathryn Bigelow: The Loveless (1981), Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990), Point Break (1991), Strange Days (1995), The Weight of Water (2000), K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), The Hurt Locker (2008), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Detroit (2017). Staiger noticed that the reception of Bigelow’s films runs from primarily descriptive, to feminist, to currently not feminist, hence shedding light on the general inability to characterize the full body of work as feminist. Blue Steel drew critical interest because it is a movie that forces men to identify and align with a female protagonist, and Point Break places women in genre roles usually fulfilled by male characters. Critics agreed that Bigelow was an unusual filmmaker insofar as she was dislocating and mixing genres, but the question of the movies’ feminism remained a bone of contention. While, for Christina Lane, Bigelow’s movies appeared to be feminist, others such as Angela Martin would rather describe the director as a “feminist transgressor.” The Hurt Locker, which allowed her to be the first ever woman to win an Oscar for best director, was interpreted as bearing signs of Bigelow cross-dressing to adapt to Hollywood’s expectations and sexist requirements.6 Finally, Zero Dark Thirty portrays the ultimate reversal of gendered genre conventions as its female protagonist heads the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Staiger’s thorough analyses led her to conclude that attempts to label Bigelow’s body of work, or any other films, as feminist might be useless. Feminism itself keeps on evolving, so what might count as “good feminism” is bound to change with time. Rather, critics and scholars should question a movie’s potential feminist agenda in relation to its epoch and target audience. Staiger vividly encouraged future scholars working on the question to take into account historical and cultural specificities while finding feminist filmmaking.

9The following talk by Elizabeth Mullen (Université de Bretagne Occidentale) considered Gone Girl (Fincher, 2014) and I Care a Lot (Blakeson, 2021) as examples of 21st century monstrous-feminine (Creed 1993), where the monstrous is grounded not in the abject body but in the multifaceted aspect of representation itself. While these movies seem to have little in common apart from their lead actress being Rosamund Pike, Mullen established that both characters she plays (Amy in Gone Girl and Marla in I Care a Lot) are heavily privileged and manipulate patriarchal norms to step away from being perfect objects for misogynistic catharsis. Mullen’s case study of the final interrogation scene in Gone Girl attributed the protagonist’s monstrosity to her mastery of the narrative. Similarly, Marla is a monstrous con-woman unabashedly hungry for wealth and power who goes as far as to be associated with a Russian mafia bandit (Peter Dinklage) to expand her scam. Remarking that the monstrous-feminine is alive and kicking in the 21st century, Mullen noted, however, that both movies relied on a masculine framing, that is to say that the female menace is eventually put down. Even though diversity seems to be the golden rule nowadays, Mullen demonstrated that the dangerous female energy that could be turned against men is ultimately evacuated in both movies, and that the real winner is patriarchy.

10In the next talk, Johanna Schmertz (University of Houston-Downtown) asserted that, even though Netflix’s Atypical (Robia Rashid, 2017-2021) appears to be a fictional tale of a high-school functioning autistic boy, Sam (Keir Gilchrist), and his negotiations with normal male adulthood, the series offers a posthuman feminist space for negotiating kinship and gender roles. Schmertz focused on the construction of kinship structures along networked affiliations and dependencies. The series’ first season was criticized for revolving around a typical nuclear family living inside a single-family home, and because lead actor Keir Gilchrist was not himself on the autistic spectrum. Schmertz noted a shift in Atypical’s approach to kinship from the second season on in the queer storyline crafted around fan-favorite characters starting with Sam’s younger sister Casey (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who became the center of queer fans’ attention after Lundy-Paine came out as non-binary. Kinship norms are further challenged by Zahid, Sam’s best friend played by gay comic Nik Dodani. In light of Dodani’s persona, Schmertz read Sam and Zahid’s relationship as a form of queer kinship, Sam being “unhomied” by his best friend metaphorically standing for a homosexual couple breaking up. This led Schmertz to the conclusion that Atypical’s approach to kinship partially heals some of the losses which heteronormative kinships make, as Judith Butler puts it, “ungrievable.”

11Because of technological issues the academic community has, regrettably, been accustomed to since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Krystian Marcin Gradz (University of Szczecin, Poland) could not fully deliver his paper on the renegotiations of female subjectivities in the Netflix animated series Disenchantment (2018-). He nonetheless showed that the recent series portrayed female subjectivities in a non-normative way that challenged stereotypes of passivity and submission often attributed to female characters.

12In panel 4, Cristelle Maury (Université Toulouse II Jean Jaurès) grounded her case study of Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves (2013) in feminist filmmakers’ more general interest in film noir since the late 1990s. A self-conscious postmodern filmmaker, Reichardt directed the movie as a statement of equality, a response to classical film noir and its scholarship. Maury contended that Reichardt’s mastery of film noir conventions effects the deconstruction of gender stereotypes attached to the genre. The movie’s reflexivity is used both to depart from mainstream conventions and the “mechanisms of realism.” The director’s interweaving of pleasure and attribution of a central place to the image of the woman first relies on the recycling of generic convention of the caper films for feminist purposes. Maury underscored the parallel drawn between harming the environment and sexist violence. She thus explored the movie’s ecofeminist perspective, which transforms and deglamorizes the figure of the femme fatale with minimalist aesthetics and neutral outfits. Finally, the film’s departure from mainstream conventions severs the link between eroticism and death in its construction of what Maury, in a nod to Mulvey, referred to as “a new language of desire.”

13In the second presentation of this panel, Fiona Handyside (University of Exeter), studied the intersectional feminist film On the Rocks (2020), Sofia Coppola’s first feature film to have people of color as its central romantic couple. For Handyside, On the Rocks testifies to the shift in gendered representations operated in contemporary comedies of remarriage after the banking crisis of 2008. The movie follows a biracial woman, Laura (Rashida Jones), searching for her voice in her father Felix’s (Bill Murray) footsteps rather than in her relationships. The father-daughter relationship is explored through a succession of narrative and diegetic battles of perspectives imbued with intersectional undertones. Handyside argued that On the Rocks delves into the issue of female equality in the sexual and social realm. This intersectional contemporary exploration of how remarriage comedies work establishes the significance of Laura’s gender, class and ethnicity for how she negotiates her right and capacity to choose a husband.

14Wrapping up the symposium, Hélène Charlery (Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès) proved that Issa Rae’s series Insecure (HBO, 2016-2021) engages with contemporary discussions between black feminists theorizing black female empowerment on screen in the midst of the contemporary digital era. Charlery expanded on Christina M. Baker’s argument that Insecure is an example of black woman resorting to filmmaking as an act of resistance. Issa Rae contributed to the empowerment of black people by garnering artists and crew members to tell her story. Having an awkward black woman as its lead, Insecure departs from traditional images of Jezebels, Mammies and Sapphires and proposes a fresh take on stereotypes of blackness. Charlery’s scrutiny of the opening scene ascribed Issa Rae’s character’s insecurity to the (too) many gazes imposed on her body and identity. Charlery demonstrated that the camera blurs the white male gaze and introduces the oppositional gaze as defined by bell hooks in 1992. In turn, the series questions the intra and interracial dimension of hooks’s black feminist representational theory. Academically and popularly acclaimed, Insecure grants visibility and criticizes the heteronormative construction of characters by making it hard to put Issa Rae in a box.

15On the whole, this enriching symposium raised both theoretical and aesthetic issues as the panelists delineated the contours of 21st-century feminist movies and series and established the ascendancy of feminist theory over current film and television production. The corpus had a specific political meaning and referred to a plethora of cinematic concepts, from Laura Mulvey’s theory of male gaze to Kaja Silverman’s theory of female voice, through Teresa De Lauretis’s “guerrilla cinema,” which were successfully adapted and updated to a post-#MeToo context and intersectional concerns of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.

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Notes

1 Shambu, Girish. “Times up for the Male Canon”, FilmQuarterly.org, published on Sept. 21, 2018, https://filmquarterly.org/2018/09/21/times-up-for-the-male-canon/, consulted on Jan. 6, 2022.

2 Kaplan, E. Ann. “Aspects of British Feminist Film Theory: A Critical Evaluation of Texts by Claire Johnston and Pam Cook”, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no.2, 1974, 52-55.

3 De Lauretis, Teresa. “Aesthetics and Film Theory: Rethinking Women’s Cinema”, New German Critique, no.34, Winter 1985, 154-175.

4 Penley, Constance. The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Saint Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

5 Doane, Mary Ann and Linda Williams. “Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film”, Substance, no.11, vol.4, 1983.

6 Nochimson, Matha P. “Kathryn Bigelow, Feminist Pioneer or Tough Guy in Drag?”, Salon.com, published on Feb. 24, 2010, https://www.salon.com/2010/02/24/bigelow_3/, accessed on Jan. 6, 2022. Camron, Irin. “"It's Through Her Eyes That She Sees": Kathryn Bigelow On 60 Minutes”, Jezebel.com, published on Jan. 3, 2010, https://jezebel.com/its-through-her-eyes-that-she-sees-kathryn-bigelow-o-5482581, accessed on Jan. 6, 2022.

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References

Electronic reference

Eléa Brossier and Mikaël Toulza, ““Researching the Influence of Feminist Film Theory on 21st Century Films and TV Series” (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France, November 18-19 2021)”Miranda [Online], 25 | 2022, Online since 25 April 2022, connection on 17 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/46584; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.46584

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About the authors

Eléa Brossier

PhD candidate
Université Toulouse 2 – Jean Jaurès
elea.brossier@univ-tlse2.fr

Mikaël Toulza

PRAG
Université Toulouse 2 – Jean Jaurès
mikael.toulza@univ-tlse2.fr

By this author

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