Genre meets gender in films from around the worldThis remarkable collection challenges traditional ways of thinking about the relationship between genre and gender, understanding their meeting as a mutually transformative encounter. Responding to postmodernist conceptions of genre and postfeminist theories of gender and sexuality, these essays move beyond the limits of representation. Testing new thinking about genre, gender, and sexuality against closely analyzed films, they explore generic convention as means of putting into play what our culture makes of us, while finding in genre's repetitions infinite possibilities of cross-generic, cross-gender, cross-sex permutation. At the same time the aesthetic and emotional dimensions of gender and sexuality come into view as elements fueling the dramatic worlds of film genres, producing in the encounter new gendered perceptions, affects, and effects.Drawing on the intensifying transnational context of film production and on postcolonial thinking, this volume's essays explore the transformational transactions between gender and genre as world-circulating Hollywood generic practices intersect with and are stimulated by American independent, European, Indian, and Hong Kong cinemas. Such revised concepts of genre and gender question taken-for-granted relationships between authorship and genre, between center and periphery, between feminism and generic filmmaking, and between filmmakers and their audiences.Contributors are Ira Bhaskar, Xiangyang Chen, Steven Cohan, Luke Collins, Pam Cook, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Derek Kane-Meddock, E. Ann Kaplan, Samiha Matin, Katie Model, Deidre Pribram, Vicente Rodriguez Ortega, Adam Segal, Chris Straayer, Yvonne Tasker, and Deborah Thomas.
Christine Gledhill / Introduction Part One: Refiguring Genre and Gender Jane Gaines / The Genius of Genre and Ingenuity of Women; Pam Cook / No Fixed Address: the Women's Picture from Outrage to Blue Steel; Deidre Pribram / Circulating Emotion: Race, Gender and Genre in Crash; Luke Collins / '100 % Pure Adrenaline:' Gender and Generic Surface in Point Break Part Two: Postfeminism and Generic Re-inventions E. Ann Kaplan / Troubling Genre/Reconstructing Gender; Yvonne Tasker / Bodies and Genres in Transition: Girlfight and Real Women Have Curves; Samiha Matin / Private Femininity, Public Femininity: The Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film; Lucy Fischer / Generic Gleaning: Agnes Varda, Documentary and the Art of Salvage Part Three: Gender Aesthetics in ''Male'' Genres Adam Segal / It's a Mann's World?; Deborah Thomas / Up Close and Personal: Faces and Names in Casualties of War; Katie Model / Gender Hyperbole and the Uncanny in the Horror Film: The Shining Part Four: Genre and Gender Transnational Ira Bhaskar / Subjectivity and the Limits of Desire: Melodrama and Modernity in 1940s-50s Bombay Cinema; Xiangang Chen / Woman, Generic Aesthetics and the Vernacular: Huangmei Opera Films from China to Hong Kong; Vicente Rodriguez Ortega / Homoeroticism Contained: Gender and Sexual Translation in John Woo's migration to Hollywood Part Five: Generic Trans-ings: Between Genres, Genders and Sexualities Derek Kane-Meddock / Trash Comes Home: Gender/Genre Subversion in the Films of John Waters; Chris Straayer / Femme Fatale or Lesbian Femme: Bound in Sexual Difference; Steven Cohan / The Gay Cowboy Movie: Queer Masculinity on Brokeback Mountain Bibliography
''A superb collection of essays representing an exceptionally high order of film scholarship: thoughtful, insightful, and well-written. With provocative insights and stellar contributors, the volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of cinema studies.'' Virginia Wright Wexman, co-editor of Women and Experimental Filmmaking
