Subversive Auteur, Subversive Genre

This chapter offers a theoretical revision of auteur theory as a gendered concept, as well as reconceptualisation of women’s cinema and film authorship in relation to genre theory. It starts by raising several questions: is the much-debated concept of auteur equally applicable to female filmmakers, and if so, how, and in what cultural and industrial contexts? Does the female director working in genre film ‘transcend’ the industrial form in the way that the male auteur is said to ‘transcend’ genre? The first section of this chapter briefly explores the gendering of the politique des auteurs and discusses the implications of the ‘death of the author’ for feminist criticism. It then goes on to consider new approaches to film authorship, which offer a more dialogical, ‘interactive’ relationship to wider film cultures than the previously discussed perspectives. The remainder of the chapter builds on Jane Gaines’s (2012) argument on the interchangeability of the critical categories ‘women’ and ‘genre’, and the problematic question of feminist/authorial subversion of mainstream forms. The chapter’s central argument is that rather than subverting genres, some women directors explore their aesthetic and imaginative power.