7. Gendering Taste

This chapter addresses a persistent excuse given for women’s differing success in screenwriting—that they write differently, or about different subjects to men. Despite copious evidence to the contrary, these myths are upheld in the talk of film workers, without much recourse to what women are expected and commissioned to write. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s work on taste, this chapter dismantles this entrenched view of women’s screenwriting. After demonstrating the clear significance of the ‘taste’ for employers, it unpacks how women’s taste as constructed and embodied is used to criticize and even blame women screenwriters for their lack of success. When women screenwriters have success, it is frequently ignored or written off as anomaly, and women are seen as successful only when they write films for men.