From Hashtag to Hollywood

Today, we received the great news that the FWO (Research Foundation Flanders) grants a PhD Fellowship to Katrijn Bekers. The next four years, she’ll be working on her research project ‘From Hashtag to Hollywood: Fourth-Wave Feminism and the Representation of Women in Biopics‘, supervised by myself and Sofie Van Bauwel (Ghent University). In this project, Katrijn will study how how the representations of women in recent biopics interact with fourth-wave feminism. We have already started the research for this project since some time, which has resulted in an article on the ‘#MeToo Literary Biopic‘ in Adaptation. I’m very much looking forward to continuing this research and collaboration!

The #MeToo Literary Biopic

The latest issue of Adaptation has been published and includes an article by Katrijn Bekers and myself entitled ‘The Woman Writer on Film and the #MeToo
Literary Biopic’. You can read the full article here.

Denise Gough and Keira Knightly in Colette, a #MeToo literary biopic

In this article, we examine the representation of female authors’ lives in English-language biopics and the relation to feminist contexts. We identity four categories of such films: the patriarchal literary biopic, the second-wave feminist literary biopic, the postfeminist literary biopic, and finally the #MeToo literary biopic, a new category of films that has recently begun to emerge. By analyzing the films Colette (2018) and Wild Nights with Emily (2019) in more depth, this article shows how these films correspond to the #MeToo movement. The #MeToo literary biopic is characterized by (a) excessive attention to difficult publication processes and the disclosure of women’s words, (b) emphasizing the persistent censoring of women’s words, (c) deconstructing the myths surrounding female authors, and (d) underscoring (female) solidarity and empowerment.

S.O.S. Sandwichman 

On the occasion of the Fugitive Cinema programme in CINEMATEK, the great film analytical website ‘Anatomie van de Film’ (in Dutch) published a text on two of the collective’s key films: the social documentaries S.O.S. Fonske (1968, Patrick Le Bon, Robbe De Hert & Guido Henderickx) and Death of a Sandwichman (De dood van een sandwichman, 1972, Robbe De Hert & Guido Henderickx). You can read the text here (in Dutch).

The authors are Sofia Van Laer, Katrijn Bekers and Atalya De Cock, who wrote this text as part of the research seminar on Fugitive Cinema that I taught at the University of Antwerp last year, together with Steven Jacobs.

Feminism & film in Toulouse

The last two days I attended the symposium ‘Researching the Influence of Feminist Film Theory on 21st Century Films and TV Series’ at the Université Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaurès. This was not only a very pleasant experience because it was the first time in two years that I met international colleagues in the flesh again, but first and foremost because of the highly stimulating symposium programme (see below), ranging from in-depth film and television analyses to reception studies and theoretical considerations.

Symposium programmeDownload

Organizer Cristelle Maury and keynote speaker Janet Staiger

Katrijn Bekers and I presented our research, based on Katrijn’s thesis, on the representation of female writers throughout film history. We argue that in recent years a new category of the ‘female literary biopic’ has emerged, what we call the ‘#MeToo literary biopic’. A big thank you to conference organizers Hélène Charlery, Cristelle Maury and Émilie Cheyroux for providing us with this opportunity and for the organization of this wonderful event!