Desperately Seeking Wonder Women

Abstract

This Afterword summarizes the arguments made throughout the book, underscoring the variety of ways in which women filmmakers draw on generic conventions. It focuses on the benefits of considering the mode of generic production not as an obstacle, but as a resource for creative imagining. It highlights that the constructed opposition between women’s culture and men’s culture has a profound impact on critical reception and discursive circulation of films, and details several critical strategies employed to make sense of particular examples of women’s cinema. The central argument is that the discourses around “exceptionality” (and in some cases “masculinity”) that surround women filmmakers tend to marginalize their genre film production as a rare anomaly and obscure other possible dimensions of their films: the popularity among a wide range of audiences, engagement with feminism filtered through the generic, intertextual connections with other women’s work, to give only some examples. Rather than being rare examples of a subversive ‘counter-cinema’, all of the films under discussion show the potential advantages of conceptualising women’s cinema as genre cinema – understood as a ‘constellation’ of cultural, aesthetic and ideological materials – which facilitates a more inclusive range of possibilities than those allowed by the traditional auteurist readings.