From the Margins to the Mainstream

Explores gender in English-language cinema and television to offer fresh perspectives on a topic that has been historically dominated by North American and British scholars.

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.