Women Filmmakers: Genre and Gender in French, British and US Cinema and TV Series
3-4 July 2025
University of Le Mans, France
In the introduction to Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas (2012), Christine Gledhill argued that genre and gender rarely intersect as concepts in film studies, even though both terms are governed by “bodies of conventions [and] rules of inclusion and exclusion” (2). Since then, such intersections have gained greater scholarly attention, marked by an increased proliferation of publications delving into women’s authorship in the context of genre film. This conference aims to further this investigation through an examination of women filmmakers’ engagement with genre and gender expectations. With a particular focus on transnational and comparative approaches across US, British, and French filmmaking, we propose to explore how women directors grapple with the intertwined notions of genre and gender.
Already in the 1980s, Teresa de Lauretis noted that the elaboration of film genres and techniques plays a crucial role in shaping gendered subjectivities and identities. When developing her argument that cinema belongs to the “technologies of gender” that produce “cultural conceptions of male and female” (1984, 5), she evoked the power of film genres to inscribe gender difference in narrative and visual conventions, emphasizing the need to disrupt the “masculine-feminine polarity” (82) to allow for new subjectivities. How can cinema resist the power of genre to determine gender according to hegemonic and heterosexual norms? In what ways do female filmmakers bend the codes that have prevailed in male-dominated Hollywood? How does women’s work within genres not only undo or subvert these popular formats, but also draw on their generative potential?
This conference aims to shed light on the intertwined notions of genre and gender through the prism of women’s cinema to examine whether it is possible to challenge or rewrite the highly conventionalized
Source: Abderrahmene Bourenane <bourenane.is.ka>