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2020 | Book | 1. edition

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Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television

Editors: Diğdem Sezen, Feride Çiçekoğlu, Aslı Tunç, Ebru Thwaites Diken

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This volume provides an overview of the landscape of mediated female agencies and subjectivities in the last decade. In three sections, the book covers the films of women directors, television shows featuring women in lead roles, and the representational struggles of women in cultural context, with a special focus on changes in the transformative power of narratives and images across genres and platforms. This collection derives from the editors’ multi-year experiences as scholars and practitioners in the field of film and television. It is an effort that aims to describe and understand female agencies and subjectivities across screen narratives, gather scholars from around the world to generate timely discussions, and inspire fellow researchers and practitioners of film and television.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction
Abstract
This chapter offers an outline of the four women editors’ academic paths’ interweaving and overlapping with the #MeToo Movement and the worldwide transformation about how female agency and subjectivity is perceived in film and media industry. The outcome of the International Conference on Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television that was held at Istanbul Bilgi University in April 10–13, 2019 is gathered under three sections for this book: “The women behind the camera”, “women on screen”, and “women in context and culture: representational struggles across genres and platforms.” In this introduction, the editors pay their tribute to all women who have been kept invisible and mute in storylines, behind the cameras and in the production processes.
Diğdem Sezen, Aslı Tunç, Feride Çiçekoğlu, Ebru Thwaites Diken

Women Behind the Camera

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. Agnès Varda and the Singular Feminine
Abstract
After her passing in 2019, French director Agnès Varda left a pioneering, deeply personal oeuvre. Her connections and collaborations had always influenced her work: her marriage to Jacques Demy, her status as “mother” of the French New Wave, her co-directorship with artist JR. The personal reflections in her final documentaries, particularly The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and her final film Varda par Agnès (2019) invite new consideration of these sometimes friendly, sometimes fraught relationships between Varda and the men who made films around and alongside her. In undertaking this reconsideration, this essay poses broader questions about Varda’s legacy and examines what both film studies and popular cinephilia can learn from her singular, feminine approach to screen art.
Colleen Kennedy-Karpat
Chapter 3. Female Agency in Pelin Esmer Films: The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019)
Abstract
This chapter focuses on two films of Pelin Esmer, The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019), which show how theater transforms the lives of a group of women from the countryside over fourteen years. The subjective experience of Esmer is also set forth by an in-depth interview covering her story from her first visit with a hand-held digital camera to a village in southern Turkey, initiated by a news item in 2003. Arendt’s concept of plurality, as rejuvenated at the turn of the century by Kristeva, highlights the transformative power of storytelling with the premise “life is a narrative.” The main argument of this chapter revolves around this premise, claiming that digitality and plurality increase female agency both on screen and behind the camera.
Feride Çiçekoğlu
Chapter 4. The Feminine Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), Bird Box (2018)
Abstract
The chapter explores how the distinction between the inside and the outside and its different articulations (the local and the global, home and abroad, the present and the apocalyptic, the normal and the exceptional) are operationalized in a gendered fashion in Susanne Bier’s films: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), and Bird Box (2018). The films subvert this distinction, giving important twists to the (im)possibilities of female subjectivity. While the ‘outside’ permeates the inside, society and nature, the present world and the apocalyptic, law and violence become indistinct categories. The chapter suggests that the apocalyptic paves the way to a messianic opening and the move from vision to touch marks the transition from the realm of the masculine symbolic order to the primal feminine ground zero.
Ebru Thwaites Diken
Chapter 5. Consuming Bodies, Abject Spaces: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Transcultural Expressionism
Abstract
Writer director Ana Lily Amirpour’s critically acclaimed vampire western film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and her follow-up western thriller, Bad Batch (2016) are both, in Amirpour’s words, “dark fairytales.” Girl Walks is set in the fictional Iranian ghost town, Bad City, and Bad Batch is set in a US border town called Comfort. Focusing on abject spaces, subjectivities, and ways of life and using metaphors of vampirism and cannibalism, these films illuminate the violence animating socio-economic relations within a transcultural America. At the centre of both film-worlds are wandering female heroines, whose quests for survival and yearning for intimacy simultaneously invoke and revise the scripts of genre films and comprise a resonant image of contemporary US culture.
Joanna Mansbridge

Women on Screen

Frontmatter
Chapter 6. Claire Underwood: Feminist Warrior or Shakespearean Villain? Re-visiting Feminine Evil in House of Cards
Abstract
This chapter offers a comparative textual analysis of two female villains more than four centuries apart, Claire Underwood in the political thriller House of Cards (2013–2018) and Lady Macbeth in Shakespearean play Macbeth (1603), focusing on the themes of motherhood, seduction, and madness. The Underwoods, as the perfect Machiavellian figures—ruthlessly pragmatic and manipulative—also correspond to other Shakespearean characters, such as Iago from Othello and Henry Bolingbroke from Richard III. This chapter follows the storyline of House of Cards where Claire Underwood takes center stage in the show’s final season by bringing many feminist issues, such as rape and abortion, to the narrative and transforming herself into a cruel anti-heroine, even exceeding her husband’s moral transgressions.
Aslı Tunç
Chapter 7. The Phenomenology of Orphan Black as Molecular Politics
Abstract
Orphan Black stands out as an innovative filming of woman understood in her phenomenological reality, provocatively engaging preconceived ideas of being female. The iterations of the clones beget a pristine intentionality and motility, disengaged from a dominant symbolic order, while building their stories without reporting to an original unity. The clones are multiple but are also one, and they forge an alliance based on and enhanced by difference. The constant switching among each other provides a dynamic economy of exchange where the only form of currency being circulated is literally the self. Each clone supplies a different state of femininity with its own specificities, and together they generate a broader score always open to new contributions, a molecular politics or (re)invention towards a post-oedipal society.
Luca Barattoni
Chapter 8. ‘I Will Not Be Bullied into Submission’: Discussing Subjection and Resistance in GLOW (2017)
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the Netflix original series, GLOW (2017) which is inspired by the 1980’s television wrestling show, GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (1986–1989). By adopting textual analysis as its method, this chapter is interested in the usage of self-reflexivity as a narrative strategy in the series to emphasize the empowering influence of taking part in this show on women even though they mainly appear as performing highly stereotypical roles in terms of gender, race and nationality. Judith Butler’s theories on subjection, power and performativity are employed to examine the ways in which the characters are empowered and question how the whole mindset behind the performed stereotypes is revealed and subverted in GLOW by means of the series’ self-reflexivity.
Ayşegül Kesirli Unur, Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan
Chapter 9. Female Body Language: Cutting, Scarring, and Becoming in HBO’s Sharp Objects
Abstract
This chapter focuses on HBO’s mini-series Sharp Objects (2018). Based on Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, it explores the lives of three women: Camille Preaker, who carves words into her skin; her mother, Adora Crellin, who has Munchausen syndrome by proxy; and Amma Crellin, Camille’s teenaged half-sister and the perpetrator of several murders. Through Camille’s body and the words she inscribes into it, the series captures the multidimensional forms of violence against/by women and queries into the reverberations of violence as a “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.” The chapter argues that by foregrounding the interrelations between skin, language, and female subjectivities, Sharp Objects exposes regimes of obedience and resistance, and offers the possibility of conceiving cutting as becoming-woman, as a precarious opening to oneself and to others.
Mihaela P. Harper
Chapter 10. The Strong Female Lead: Postfeminist Representation of Women and Femininity in Netflix Shows
Abstract
This chapter analyzes four original Netflix shows with strong female leads. We discuss the representation of women and femininity in these shows in the context of postfeminist media culture. We find evidence that women in the strong female lead category are considered strong for their performance of masculinity, which is viewed positively as a strength, and not for their femininity, seen negatively as a sign of weakness. We call the shows in which women perform masculinity in order to convey strength “strap-on” shows. We argue that a better way to represent women is to recode attributes such as softness, sensitivity, emotionality and gentleness as positive qualities rather than weaknesses.
Derya Özkan, Deborah Hardt

Women in Context and Culture: Representational Struggles Across Genres and Platforms

Frontmatter
Chapter 11. The Technological Turn of the Femme Fatale: The Fembot and Alternative Fates
Abstract
This chapter will claim that the femme fatale today has evolved into the female robot: the fembot. It will be suggested that the fembot is represented through the characteristics associated with the archetype of the femme fatale. However, while the fate of the femme fatale has classically met a tragic end, the fembot manages to create a space where she does not have to comply with the intended existence behind her creation. The fembot transgresses the representation of the femme fatale and can be said to be a figure of resistance. This shift will be demonstrated through the analysis of two recent examples: Ex Machina (2014) and Westworld (2016–).
Şirin Fulya Erensoy
Chapter 12. Women Remembering: Gender and Genre in Persona and Happy Valley
Abstract
An international crop of television series has been mobilizing genre conventions to explore themes of women’s agency, violence and trauma, and the political meaning of memory and forgetting. Persona (Sṃahsiyet; 2018, PuhuTV), a hybrid detective series, psychological thriller, and conspiracy series from Turkey follows Nevra Elmas (Cansu Dere) of the Istanbul Police Homicide Division as she digs into her own repressed past to unravel the motives behind a string of murders. The British police procedural Happy Valley (2014–2016, BBC One) centers on sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) as she works through personal trauma while tracking down the man who raped her daughter. Both Persona and Happy Valley envision a political project predicated on women’s ability to harness memory and affective labor. They represent a larger set of crime dramas that allow for more nuanced portrayal of women characters.
Kenan Behzat Sharpe
Chapter 13. Bridal Anxieties: Politics of Gender, Neoconservatism and Daytime TV in Turkey
Abstract
This chapter analyzes the reflections of Turkey’s neoconservative and neoliberal politics of gender on daytime television. The focus is on Bridal House, a popular daytime TV show in Turkey which interpellates women as domestic subjects competing with other women to prove their domestic abilities, particularly the ability to navigate the etiquette of domestic consumption. Hierarchies are instigated among women through symbolic battles on “tasteful” consumption, and the marital household surfaces as a space of constant regulation where women strive to be ideal housewives. By analyzing Bridal House through a Bourdieusian framework, this chapter traces the representations of the “ideal female subject” along neoconservative and neoliberal lines, and demonstrates the ways in which symbolic violences are enacted on women in contemporary Turkey’s daytime TV culture.
Feyda Sayan-Cengiz
Chapter 14. International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels: “Women’s Cinema, Women’s Resistance, Cinema of Resistance”
Abstract
Women’s film festivals, as discursive and material sites of activism, consist of special places within the culture of film festivals. This chapter draws from International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels as a space of feminist representational struggles to fight against gender discrimination by the means of “cinema” in Turkey. By focusing on the programming strategies it is argued that Filmmor Festival claims an inclusive transnational feminist politics with an emphasis on solidarity, resistance, agency, and women’s experiences within and beyond the borders. The mobile aspect breaks the İstanbul-centered nature of the festival circuit. The “differential modes of consciousness” by Chela Sandoval provides a framework to trace the possibility of a feminist politics that moves beyond the dichotomial discourses around gender politics in Turkey.
Nazan Haydari
Chapter 15. Machine Gaze on Women: How Everyday Machine-Vision-Technologies See Women in Films
Abstract
Machine vision algorithms play a significant role in managing the traffic of images and influencing the opinions and behavior of people in everyday life by ranking, filtering, predicting, deciding, censoring, recognizing and generating images. The tools employing specifically designed machine vision algorithms are also being used to analyze gender perspective in films. The results are effective for policymaking and creating awareness for gender imbalance in film culture. Machine vision systems provide new ways to study moving images Adopting an experimental approach, this chapter looks at women images in films through commercially available machine vision systems and discuss whether we can also learn about machine ways of seeing by looking at films through these systems.
Diğdem Sezen
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television
Editors
Diğdem Sezen
Feride Çiçekoğlu
Aslı Tunç
Ebru Thwaites Diken
Copyright Year
2020
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-56100-0
Print ISBN
978-3-030-56099-7
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0