In this seminar Professor Christine Gledhill from the University of Sunderland will outline briefly some of the historiographic and research issues confronted by the recently established Women’s Film and Television History Network – UK/Ireland as a context for her own explorations of the work of “gender” in cinema, focusing on film trade press, journalistic, public campaign group and fan responses to the establishment of cinema as a new and popular art form.

She is concerned with gender as a constructed and shifting performative condition with material effects but not necessarily co-incident either with the identities of actual men and women, or with the subjective processes of watching films. This means paying sympathetic attention to popular and journalistic discourses rather than assessing them from outside their own frameworks and creates difficulties for the political projects of feminism when putting women back into film history. The distinction women/feminist is familiar to women’s history, but for film history comes up against specific problems of authorship, the connection between women as filmmakers, representations of women and psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship. Her goal is to find a way of bringing the two sides of the project – women filmmakers and film texts – into productive tension.

Christine Gledhill is Visiting Professor in Cinema Studies at the University of Sunderland. She has co-ordinated a two-year AHRC funded series of workshops resulting in the formation of the Women’s Film and Television History Network – UK/Ireland. She has written widely on feminist film criticism, British cinema, melodrama and genre studies, including her monograph, Reframing British Cinema, 1918-1928: Between Restraint and Passion, and a forthcoming edited collection of essays, Gender Meets Genre in Contemporary Cinemas, due to appear January 2012.