Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz lectures in the English Studies Department at the University of Barcelona.

Interested in the relationship been genre and gender, Paszkiewicz proposes that genre is both constricting and liberating for female filmmakers. She examines recent films directed by female auteurs in genres considered "male":　Jennifer’s Body (2009), a horror film directed by Karyn Kusama; The Hurt Locker (2008), a war film by Kathryn Bigelow; Meek’s Cutoff (2010), a western by Kelly Reichardt; Marie Antoinette (2006), a costume drama by Sofia Coppola; and The Intern (2015), a romantic comedy by Nancy Meyers. Each of these women demonstrates not only an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre in which she is working but also a willingness to play with and on the conventions of the genre, imbuing it with a feminine perspective. Paszkiewicz’s own knowledge, both of genres and of the scholarly literature on the subject, is equally encyclopedic, and one would say that she has mastered her own particular genre—the academic theoretical essay.'

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Impossible Liaisons? Genre and Feminist Film Criticism1 Subversive Auteur, Subversive Genre2 Repeat in order to Remake. Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body3 Hollywood Transvestite. Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker4 Genre in the Margins. Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff5 Genre on the Surface. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette6 What a Woman Wants? Nancy Meyers’s The InternAfterword: Desperately Seeking Wonder WomenBibliographyIndex