From the Margins to the Mainstream - (Library of Gender and Popular Culture) by Marianne Kac-Vergne & Claire Nally & Julie Assouly & Angela Smith

Book Synopsis

This book explores the various issues raised by women's fraught integration into the mainstream in film and television, whether it be off screen as filmmakers and film critics or on screen in film and TV series.

Marianne Kac-Vergne and Julie Assouly consider the varied representations of women in films such as Jackie Brown (1997), Marie Antoinette (2006), It's a Free World... (2007) and Wonder Woman (2017). They particularly look into the overlooked gendered aspects of voice-overs and the adverse tropes used to represent maternity in television series as well as the complex motif of the vagina dentata in contemporary film and television.

The chapters analyze independent, art-house, Hollywood and TV productions often in transnational contexts, shedding light on how definitions of femininity are culturally specific yet cross national, class and racial lines. The contributors include renowned scholars such as Yvonne Tasker, Celestino Deleyto, David Roche and Nicole Cloarec, as well as emerging yet well-published film scholars.

Review Quotes

"Address[es] enthralling issues, such as the relationship between the male gaze and spectator identification; beauty, desirability and the white and black female body ... and the gendered hierarchy in American TV series' voice-overs, to name but a few. ... The message of this essay collection is loud and clear" --Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

About the Author

Marianne Kac-Vergne is Associate Professor of American Studies at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France. Her research interests are masculinity, femininity, Hollywood genres and science fiction. She is author of Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future (I. B. Tauris, 2017).

Julie Assouly is Associate Professor of American Studies at Université d'Artois, France. Her research themes are pictorial intertextuality, intermediality and cultural transfers in American cinema, specifically the films of the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson. She is the author of L'Amérique des frères Coen (2015).