Playboy, November 1999 (MIA ST JOHN)
by Christine Gledhill
Category: Performing Arts

This 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 post-feminist 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 fuelling 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 includes essays that 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 centre and periphery, between feminism and generic filmmaking, and the supposed gendering of genres, 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, E. Deidre Pribram, Vicente Rodriguez Ortega, Adam Segal, Chris Straayer, Yvonne Tasker, and Deborah Thomas.