1st Edition
Independent Women From Film to Television
Independent Women: From Film to Television explores the significance for feminism of the increasing representation of women on and behind the screen in television contexts around the world.
"Independent" has functioned throughout film and television history as an important euphemism for "feminist". This volume investigates how this connection plays out in a contemporary environment that popular feminist discourse is constructing as a golden age of television for women. The original essays in the volume offer insights into how post-network television is being valued as a new site of independent production for women. They also examine how these connotations of creative control influence perceptions of both female creators and their content as feminist. Together, they provide a compelling perspective on the feminist consequences of how independence and "indie" have intensified as cultural sensibilities that coincide and engage with the digital transformation of television during the first decades of the 21st century.
The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.
Introduction: independent women: from film to television
Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber
1. Women’s indie television: the intimate feminism of women-centric dramedies
Jessica Ford
2. Olive Kitteridge (Lisa Cholodenko, 2014), quality television and difficult women: female discontent in the age of binge-viewing
Jodi Brooks
3. Teresa Fernández-Valdés and female-produced TV series in Spain. Cable Girls/Las chicas del cable as case study
Francisco J. López Rodríguez and Irene Raya Bravo
4. Mar Coll’s Matar al padre / Killing the Father (Movistar+ 2018): a female Auteur between filmand television in Spain
Concepción Cascajosa-Virino
5. Breaking upwards: the creative uncoupling of Desiree Akhavan and Ingrid Jungermann
Maria San Filippo
6. Drawn (to) independence: female showrunners in contemporary American TV animation
Mihaela Mihailova
7. Sorority flow: the rhetoric of sisterhood in post-network television
Elizabeth Alsop
Biography
Claire Perkins is Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of American Smart Cinema (2012) and co-editor of six collections including (with Michele Schreiber and Linda Badley) Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (2016), Transnational Television Remakes (2016), and US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films (2015).
Michele Schreiber is Associate Professor of Film and Media at Emory University, USA. She is the author of American Postfeminist Cinema: Women, Romance and Contemporary Culture (2014) and co-editor (along with Claire Perkins and Linda Badley) of Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (2016).
