Introductory description

This module introduces students to analysing representation through the structuring prism of gender across a range of audio-visual and secondarily written media in France since the upheavals of second wave feminism.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1 - Introduction: studying gender and the media in Francophone contexts - Les Valseuses
(Bertrand Blier, France 1974)
Week 2 - Regimes of the gaze in classical screen narratives - Cet obscur objet du désir (Luis
Buñuel, France/Spain 1977)
Week 3 - Theorising the representational other - L’Enfant (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne,
Belgium/France 2005)
Week 4 - Gender in the cinéma du corps - A ma soeur! (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2001)
Week 5 - Unruly women: female stardom and comic genres - Gazon maudit (Josiane Balasko,
France 1995)
Week 6 - Reading week
Week 7 - Representing the ‘crisis of masculinity’ - Ma Femme est une actrice (Yvan Attal, France
2001)
Week 8 - Authorship and literary revisionism: the case of the polar - Fred Vargas, Debout les
morts (1995)
Week 9 - Gender in television and new media - Episode from Un gars une fille (1999-2003) and
Engrenages (2008-2014)
Week 10 - Gendering media coverage of the political sphere - select print and broadcast coverage
of recent/contemporary political events (possibly alongside Welcome to New York; Abel Ferrara,
USA/France 2014

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• (1) to consolidate students' skills in analysing the politics of representation through audio-visual and written media, especially with regard to gender in the post-1970s period but also developing methodologies with practical applications beyond this focus;
• (2) to consolidate students' familiarity with the critical paradigms of continental philosophy alongside Anglo-American cultural studies;
• (3) to foster interdisciplinary understandings of different media (both fictional and information) as inextricably intertwined mediators of culture, with an emphasis on relatively popular forms;
• (4) to situate the study of French culture within transnationally influential approaches to the study of contemporary culture, as well as in relation to global culture itself.

Indicative reading list

Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation : Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices

Christine Bard, Un siècle d’antiféminisme (1999)

Ros Gill, Gender and the Media (2007)

Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini (1961)

Luce Irigaray, Fécondité de la caresse (1984)

Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ (1975)

Julia Kristeva, ‘Pouvoirs de l’horreur’ (1982) and ‘Révolution du langage poétique’ (1974)

Quandt, James. ‘Flesh & Blood, Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema.’ Atforum International
(February 2004): 126-132.

Keesey, Douglas. ‘Sisters as one soul in two bodies.’ In Catherine Breillat, 42-71. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2009.

Trevor H. Maddock and Ivan Krisjansen, ‘Surrealist poetics and the cinema of evil: the significance
of the expression of sovereignty in Catherine Breillat’s A ma soeur (2001)’, Studies in French Cinema, 3:3 (2003), pp. 161-171.

Williams, Linda. ‘Cinema and the Sex Act.’ Cineaste, 27:1 (December 2001), 20-25.

Downing, Lisa. ‘French Cinema’s New ‘Sexual Revolution: Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre.’ French Cultural Studies, 15:3 (2004): 265-280.

Beugnet, Martine. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Cairns, Lucille. ‘Girls on the Edge: Liminality’, in Sapphism on Screen, Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema.’ Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse,’ (1975)

Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (1995)

Christina Johnston, ‘Representations of homosexuality in 1990s mainstream French cinema’, Studies in French Cinema, 2:1 (2002), pp. 23-31.

Alain Brassart, L’Homosexualité dans le cinéma français (2007)

Tarr, C. with B. Rollet. 2001. Cinema and the Second Sex: Women’s Filmmaking in France in the1980s and 1990s.

Deleyto, Celestino. ‘Contemporary romantic comedy and the discourse of independence.’ In The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy, 148-176. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009.

Geneviève Sellier, ‘La Nouvelle vague, un cinéma à la première personne du masculin singulier’ (1997)

Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, Ignorée de tous... sauf du public : Quinze ans de fictions télévisées françaises 1995-2010 (2014)

Y. Tasker and D. Negra (eds), Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (2001)

Diana Holmes and David Looseley (eds) Imagining the Popular in Contemporary French Culture (2013)

Diana Holmes, David Patten, Loic Artiago and Jacques Migozzi (eds) Storytelling in Popular Fiction (2013)

Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (eds), Gender, Race and Class in Media (3rd Edition, 2011

International

All modules delivered in SMLC are necessarily international. Students engage with themes and ideas from a culture other than that of the UK and employ their linguistic skills in the analysis of primary materials from a non-Anglophone context. Students will also be encouraged to draw on the experiences of visiting exchange students in the classroom and will frequently engage with theoretical and critical frameworks from across the world.

Subject specific skills

This module will develop students’ linguistic skills through engaging with primary materials in the target language. It will build students’ capacity to engage with aspects of French culture through analysis of this primary material and through seminar discussion aimed at deeper critical thinking. In particular, students’ awareness of gender and representation in French media will be enhanced through lectures and seminars which engage in scholarship in the field.

Transferable skills

All SMLC culture modules demand critical and analytical engagement with artefacts from target-language cultures. In the course of independent study, class work and assessment students will develop the following skills: written and oral communication, creative and critical thinking, problem solving and analysis, time management and organisation, independent research in both English and their target language(s), intercultural understanding and the ability to mediate between languages and cultures, ICT literacy in both English and the target language(s), personal responsibility and the exercise of initiative.