*CFP* "RESEARCHING THE INFLUENCE OF FEMINIST FILM THEORY ON 21ST CENTURY FILMS AND TV SERIES", SYMPOSIUM

 Symposium: Researching the Influence of Feminist Film Theory on 21st Century Films and TV Series

Université Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaurès

November 19th, 2021

 

The Jeudis du genre research group (CAS 1, EA 803) is calling for papers on the influence of feminist film theories and intersectional feminist theories on feminist films and TV series produced in the English-speaking world of the 21st century. The objective of the symposium is to acknowledge how the works of feminist scholars and feminist film scholars have influenced filmmakers and screenwriters (Radner and Stringer 2011; Roche 2014 and 2018; Maury and Roche 2020), and pursue inquiry of cross-fertilization between films and series, and feminist (film) theory.

One task will be to delineate the contours of a feminist cinema and define “feminist cinema”. This could involve assessing the ways in which productions fall within the scope of the third and fourth waves of feminism, and/or respond to the postfeminist/neo-feminist/new feminist contexts. Is feminist cinema films and TV series whose subject is women? Films and series made by women? Or can it all boil down to films ans series which adopt a political stand in keeping with Amelia Jones’s definition of feminism as “a political or ethical engagement with questions of culture” (Callahan, 4)?

Black, Latinx and queer scholars and filmmakers have called into question the stereotyped representation and/or the absence of black women, Latinas and lesbians in mainstream cinema (Beltrán, Bobo, hooks, Mayer, Reid) while pointing out the existence of films that challenge such commodified portrayals. The concepts of “womanist film” (Reid), Latinidad Feminista (Baez), and “auteure poetics and apparitionality” (Mayer) open perspectives to further the conversation on feminist cinema and on the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.

Another line of inquiry will consist in assessing the ongoing influence of feminist film theory on today’s feminist productions, forty-five years after Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey first identified the need to take up struggle with women’s image in film and advocated a radical cinema to counter the patriarchal ideology of mainstream cinema. In what ways are there traces of Christine Gledhill (1984)’s questioning this necessity for feminist cinema to be a counter-cinema? What of Teresa de Lauretis’s “guerrilla cinema” (1990)?

We would also like to look into the reception of feminist cinema at a time of growing awareness about the absence of women filmmakers and screenwriters from mainstream productions, the Hollywood industry being one of the most striking examples of this phenomenon. The socio-historical factors that surround and possibly influence the reception of films ans series as feminist seem key to understanding today’s feminist cinema. The example of the reassessment of Jennifer’s Body in the context of the #MeToo, Time’s Up movements shows the importance of “contextualizing the space of reception” (Staiger, in Radner and Stringer, 14). Black feminist writers and film specialists (bell hooks, Jacqueline Bobo, Mark Reid) have developed theories on the filmic gaze that rely on a critical reception of films, thereby pointing at the importance of an intersectional gaze for black feminist filmmaking.

We welcome all theoretical papers and case studies which fall into one or more of the three lines of inquiry such as (and this is not limitative):

• papers attempting to identify feminist cinema and TV series, and to chart the presence of feminist ideas in the 21st century; 
• papers on intersectionality in films and TV series, whether in the filmmaking process or in reception; 
• papers on the influence of seminal essays such as Laura Mulvey (1975), Kaja Silverman (1984), bell hooks (1992), and other works of feminist film scholarship on feminist filmmakers of the 21st century, in mainstream or in independent cinema and in series; 
• papers on feminist filmmakers politicizing mainstream genres; 
• papers on genre and feminism; 
• etc.

 

We hope this symposium will ultimately contribute to paving the way to a heightened visibility of feminist films and the research thereof, in the wake of Ruby Rich’s call to name feminist practices in order to counter the “lack of an adequate language [which] has contributed to the invisibility of key aspects of our film culture – an invisibility advantageous to the prevailing film traditions” (67).

Proposals must include a 300-500-word abstract, a short bibliography and a bio, and should be sent to the three organizers by March 1st, 2021. helene.charlery@univ-tlse2.fr; emilie.cheyroux@univ-jfc.fr; cristelle.maury@univ-tlse2.fr

Applicants will receive a response regarding their submission by April 1st, 2021.