Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood

Mary Harrod is Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of From France with Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and the co-edited collections The Europeanness of European Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2015), Women Do Genre in Film and Television (Routledge, 2017, winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Edited Collection Prize 2019) and Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2021).

“Mary Harrod’s Heightened Genres and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood is a clever, challenging, yet satisfying read for an audience wishing to explore the representation of women on screen and the work of female directors of Hollywood in the contemporary, post-MeToo era.” (Fruzsina Papp, European Journal of American Studies, February 27, 2023)“Harrod’s is an important and timely addition to the expanding scholarship on women-authored genre films and roles in major film industry contexts. … In particular, her construction of the concept of ‘heightened genre’ is useful in that it builds upon recognizable terminology and an established subfield of film studies, while revising the terms of genre theory in ways that actively counter gender bias in reference to the films under discussion.” (Sonia Lupher, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 20 (1), 2022)

• 1. Introduction: Little Women and Cine-filles.- 2. Genre as Pastiche in Women's Filmmaking.- 3. Pastiching the Popular.- 4. Art Imitating Life Imitating Art.-  5. Conclusion: Communal Autofiction and Public Subjectivity in The Bling Ring.