Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body.

Gendered Frames, Embodied Cameras: Varda, Akerman, Cabrera, Calle, and Maïwenn is the first book to link these five filmmakers together through an analysis of the relationship between filming one’s own body and the creative body. Through engaged artistic practices, these female filmmakers turn the camera to their bodies as a way to show the process of artistic creation and to produce themselves as filmmakers and artists in their work from 1987–2009. By making visible their bodies, they offer a wider range of representation of women in French film. Through avant-garde form, in which tangible corporeal elements are made image, they transform representational content and produce new cinematic bodies with the power to influence signifying practices in contemporary French culture. By rendering visible their artistic practice and praxis and their camera in their work—reflexive practices that also unite these filmmakers—these women also visually claim the role of filmmaker and creative subject. Thus they establish their authority in a film industry in which women’s participation and recognition of their achievements have historically been lower than that of their male counterparts.

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body.

Gendered Frames, Embodied Cameras: Varda, Akerman, Cabrera, Calle, and Maïwenn is the first book to link these five filmmakers together through an analysis of the relationship between filming one’s own body and the creative body. Through engaged artistic practices, these female filmmakers turn the camera to their bodies as a way to show the process of artistic creation and to produce themselves as filmmakers and artists in their work from 1987–2009. By making visible their bodies, they offer a wider range of representation of women in French film. Through avant-garde form, in which tangible corporeal elements are made image, they transform representational content and produce new cinematic bodies with the power to influence signifying practices in contemporary French culture. By rendering visible their artistic practice and praxis and their camera in their work—reflexive practices that also unite these filmmakers—these women also visually claim the role of filmmaker and creative subject. Thus they establish their authority in a film industry in which women’s participation and recognition of their achievements have historically been lower than that of their male counterparts.