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Chapter 5 Troubling Genre/Reconstructing Gender E. Ann Kaplan In Film/Genre, Rick Altman notes the irony of “producers . . . actively destroying genres by creating new cycles,” while film scholars “are regularly trying to fold the cyclical differences back into genre, thus authorizing continued use of a familiar, broad-based, sanctioned and therefore powerful term” (1999, 71). Meanwhile, Christine Gledhill notes postmodern practices of “picking and mixing” that enable “film-makers to take inspiration from critical as well as studio categories” (2000, 223). In a situation, then, when many Hollywood studios regularly collapse traditional genres into each other, and filmmakers do not confine their work within a specific genre, should we assume that genre is waning as a critical and production category? I hope to argue that this is far from the case. Genre and gender are still mentioned in trade journals like Variety, even if in terms often different from classical categories.1 And as Gledhill has argued, with the waning of critical auteurism and “grand theories” of cinema, genre criticism became a mechanism for remapping Hollywood (223). “Genre analysis,” Gledhill notes, “tells us not just about kinds of films, but about the cultural work of producing and knowing them” (222). In this chapter, I am interested in the cultural work feminist critics performed in “inventing” the genre of the woman’s film, and how genre impacts on feminist cinema practices in the current postmodern moment. I distinguish what critics do in furthering cultural and aesthetic knowledge through studying genre from what studios do in the interests of marketing, and from what filmmakers do influenced by both. Early on, Hollywood saw the utility of genres for successful marketing of films. Genres are constructs rather than natural entities, and so, as critics discovered and despite Hollywood’s marketing efforts, genre is a very unstable category. As Rick Altman argues, genre is a multivalent term multiply and variously valorized by diverse users (1999, 99). Once initiated, however, Hollywood continued the business of making genre films and marketing them accordingly, despite the fact that genre aspects of marketing always change. i-xii_1-262_Gled.indd 71 12/13/11 11:17 AM 72 E. Ann Kaplan But gender is also a construct—one that genres have helped to reinforce. Genres have traditionally been central to preserving female (and male) stereotypes in classical Hollywood cinema (e.g., virgin/whore or mother/mistress in family melodrama, the femme fatale in film noir), and therefore have attracted feminist scholars’ attention regarding representation.2 If genre in the traditional sense has ceased to occupy its determining position in Hollywood film production, that may result from challenges by the women’s movements of the 1970s as well as by feminist scholars’ research that opened up the stereotypes and necessitated more complex gender representation; there is now awareness of gender as a construct —as unsteady, easily destabilized, but equally more open to adventurous invention. Newly emerging stereotypes illustrate postmodern genre mixing (the killer woman, for example, may be found across a range of films and the figure is not being marketed in regard to genre), requiring us to distinguish critical understanding of film from studio concerns. In what follows, I argue first that historically, genre was important in providing a useful pathway through which feminist film theorists could assert a critical position vis-à-vis dominant cinematic and critical strategies. That is, feminist critics used genre as a concept to invent a new genre—the women’s picture or woman’s film—thereby drawing attention to aspects of Hollywood melodrama that had been neglected by (largely male) critics. Secondly, through my examples—Sister My Sister (Nancy Meckler, 1994) and Memsahib Rita (Pratibha Parmar, 1994)—I show how some female directors have drawn on traditional Hollywood genres for feminist ends. That is, genre categories not only proved useful as critical referents through which to comment on positions women occupied in certain genres (such as the horror film or film noir featured in my case studies), but they inspired feminist directors to imagine aspects of their social and political worlds through a genre lens, combining aspects of Hollywood genres with the genre feminist critics “invented,” namely the woman’s film. Such uses turn genre to purposes very different from those of Hollywood. Both Meckler and Parmar use a cross-generic address: we could say that each converts her chosen traditional genre into something new, or that each adds cultural resonance and depth to her work by introducing into the woman’s film aspects...

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