Subverting technologies of gender in male-dominated gender regimes: (self) representations of Spanish and Swedish women filmmakers

Abstract

This article analyses (self)representations of women filmmakers active in the Swedish and Spanish film industries, looking at how “technologies of gender,” as theorised by Teresa de Lauretis, work to resist change within the industry’s “gender regimes” (as conceptualised by Raewyn Connell), but are also simultaneously reinvented by women film workers. Even though the gender regimes of Spain and Sweden are quite different, and despite the diversity of positions adopted by women film workers concerning cinema—as art, commodity, and socio-political technology—there are striking similarities in the obstacles faced by women in a male-dominated industry. We identify these similarities in a series of interviews with women filmmakers from both countries. What emerges as shared across both contexts is the ambivalent negotiation that women film workers have to carry out in their self-representations, when entering an industry built around a male norm. But along with these representations marked by the relation to patriarchal technologies of gender, many women creators also search for bottom-up narratives and appropriations of such technologies to construct themselves and their works outside and beyond the androcentric model of the current film industry.