2015 was a big summer for women in Hollywood. It saw the pioneering release of movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Spy and the latest in the recent trend of remakes and sequels with the films Jurassic World and Terminator Genysis. During this roundtable will we consider how the women-driven films of summer 2015 both disrupted the often unapologetic sexism of Hollywood, and were simultaneously contained by it. Fury Road, Spy, and Jurassic World all centered on the character arc of women protagonists, but the shape of those arcs and the subsequent subject-positions of their heroines are vastly different. The surrounding cultural conversation about Furiosa (Mad Max), Susan Cooper (Spy) and Claire (Jurassic World) are the latest in a long conversation about how representations of women on screen are formed through the gendered gaze, cinematography, and heteronormativity—a conversation whose dialectic arguably began with Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic, Alien.
We will consider the heroines of 2015 in the context of their cinematic predecessors—characters vaunted for shattering and redefining gender, and characters accused of being “male action heroes with boobs.” We will explore the theoretical complexities of representing “the sex which is not one,” and why some heroines inspire revolution, while others seem only able to remind us we’ll be happiest walking off into the sunset…and back into heteronormativity.
About the presentersJessica McCall
Dr. Jessica McCall is a Professor of English at Delaware Valley University. She received her Ph.D. in Early Modern Literature from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas under the guidance of Dr. Evelyn Gajowski. Dr. McCall’s research interests involve the functions of myth and its intersections with gender, power, and who gets to be fully human. Her first monograph, “Myths of Warrior Women from the 16th Century to the Present” is forthcoming from De Gruyter.
Sarah Maitland
Sarah Maitland finished her Ph.D. in the spring of 2015. Her dissertation, “Temperance in the Age of Feeling: Sensibility, Pedagogy, and Poetry in the Eighteenth Century,” examines the influence of classical temperance on the emerging fields of neurology and education during the Romantic period. Her research interests also include Spenser and Milton studies, the sentimental novel, and popular culture. Sarah Maitland is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Virginia University.