This edited volume investigates the reconfiguration of gender in French banlieue cinema, interrogating whether the films produced over the last two decades provide new and viable models of resistance to dominant modes of power. Contributors take a critical approach which identifies gender as a marker of both body and identity politics to highlight the need to overcome a binary approach to banlieue aesthetics, which limits inquiry into the basis of conflict. Given that a feminizationand, to some extent, queeringof the once exclusively-masculine space is underway, contributors ultimately conclude that the banlieue and its on-screen representations cannot be properly understood unless intersectionality as a systematic approach is applied as an interpretive lens. Scholars of film, gender studies, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.
This book analyzes the treatment and transformation of gender in French banlieue cinema at the intersection of race, body politics, ethnicity, religion, and social/economic class. The contributors explore films from 1995 to today with special emphasis on recent films providing innovative representations of banlieue identities.
Part I: Intersectional Approaches to Banlieue Cinema. Race, Religion,
and Social Marginalization
Chapter 1: Deessentializing Patriarchal Islam, Recentering Female
Spirituality: The Examples of Divines (2016) and Mignonnes (2020), Evie
Munier
Chapter 2: Gender, Race, and the Pitfalls of White Feminist Subjectivity in
Regarde-moi (Audrey Estrogo, 2007), Brett Bowles
Chapter 3: Revisioning the Banlieues: From Mainstream Cinema to Grassroots
Visual Representations, Ashley Harris
Part II: Women and Education: Gender and Resistance in Banlieue Schools
Chapter 4: Unequal Expectations: Emotional Labor in Banlieue Classroom Films,
Eric Bulakites
Chapter 5: Gender Dynamics and Spatiality in Banlieue Cinema Schools, Kévin
Drif
Part III: Gender and Performance: Body Politics in Banlieue Spaces
Chapter 6: Queer Masculinity on the Margins: Banlieue Spaces and Sex Work in
Camille Vidal-Naquets Sauvage, Peter Tarjanyi
Chapter 7: Dancing in the Banlieue: Rechoreographing Gender in Houda
Benyaminas Divines and Maļmouna Doucourés Mignonnes, Tessa Nunn
Chapter 8: From the American Musical to French Hip Hop: The Political Dance
of Black Girlhood in Céline Sciammas Bande de filles, Mary M. Wiles
Marzia Caporale is professor of French and Italian and associate faculty member in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Scranton.
Claire Mouflard is associate professor of French and Francophone studies at Hamilton College.
Habib Zanzana is professor of World Languages and Literatures at the University of Scranton.
