*CFP* “RECLAIMING THE SCREEN: ADDRESSING OVERLOOKED WOMEN IN FILM AND TELEVISION”, DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY

Reclaiming the Screen: Addressing Overlooked Women in Film and Television

Postgraduate Conference

Friday 14th June 2019

CATHI, De Montfort University, Leicester.

Keynote speaker: Dr. Shelley Cobb (University of Southampton).

‘[T]he tragedy of film history is that it’s fabricated, falsified, by the very people who make film history’ – Louise Brooks

De Montfort University’s Cinema and Television History Institute (CATHI) is pleased to invite Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers to its eighth annual postgraduate conference, focusing on overlooked women in the film, television and media industries. This conference seeks to offer a platform uncovering, challenging, and drawing attention to issues relating to overlooked self-identifying women across all areas of women’s film and television history, culture, and production. There is a continued lack of gender equality within the film industry, exemplified most recently by the absence of any female nominees within the 2019 Academy Awards’ Best Director category. This conference aims to offer a platform to the voices of underrepresented, unheard and undervalued women. This conference is also an opportunity to highlight examples of women’s autonomy and agency within the television and film industries, from any era and any part of the globe.

In hosting this conference, we hope to look backwards, seeking and uncovering forgotten women, both on screen and behind the camera. In looking backwards, we aim to also push forwards in relation to challenging patriarchal structures of industrial and cultural misogyny. We welcome a broad range of proposals from a diverse range of voices, looking at the interconnectedness of past, present and future issues for female-identifying individuals on and off-screen.

The event will end with a roundtable focused on improving and challenging issues that the conference presents.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

•    The gendering of industry roles.
•    Ageing woman and visibility on and off-screen.
•    Women in film and television academia.
•    Women in the film industry.
•    Representations of trans women, behind and in front of the camera.
•    The intersections of class, race, sexuality, and able-bodiedness of women.
•    The politics of the gaze, and challenges to how we look at women on screen.
•    Coming of age female representation.
•    Underrepresentation of female labour.
•    Examples of transgressive, monstrous and subversive femininities on screen.
•    Forgotten figures.
•    The #MeToo movement.

Proposals for twenty-minute presentations (both traditional and non) should include the title of the presentation, a 250-word abstract, and a brief biographical statement. Proposals should be submitted to cath.postgrad@gmail.com by Friday 12th April 2019.

Applicants will be notified in late April/early May.

£5 conference fee: to be paid in cash upon registration

MA travel bursaries available – email cath.postgrad@gmail.com for more information.