“On and off screen: Women's work in the screen industries”

Similar to many creative (and other) industries, the film and television industries have for long been permeated by male norms, and by the male worker as the norm.In this context, women workers have always been considered "oddities"unless they have acted in front of the camera.To a large extent, women have been (and still are) image (Fischer, 1976;Mulvey, 1975).Women's work behind the camera have been counteracted, not least through efforts to exclude them from positions characterized as "creative" or "above-the-line" such as director, producer, and script writer.Further, women have been met with pervading difficulties in allocating finances for their projects and with circumscribed possibilities to have their work screened in the cinema.And although (a few) women are key through their function as "image, " films with a woman protagonist are usually provided with a lesser budget than films with a male lead, and women actors get distinctly less paid than their male counterparts (SFI, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalier- obehmed/2017/08/22/full-list-the-worlds-highest-paid-actors-and-actresses-2017/?sh=2e1c961f3751).Let us give an example of the former: in the Swedish film industry, recently hailed worldwide of being one of the most gender equal screening industries, feature films made between 2013 and 2016 differed in terms of budget depending on the whether the protagonist in a film was male or female.Films with a male lead had on average a 33% higher budget than films with a woman lead.In that same period, women feature film directors had on average a budget ranging between 66% and 86% of the budget of films with a man as director (SFI, 2018).The report published in 2018, by the Swedish Film Institute, concluded that: "[films with women in] key functions generally have overall lower budgets than men" (SFI, 2018, p. 17).Following the international impact that the #Metoo-movement has had and still has, and the recent demands for a 50/50 dispersion between men and women on above-the-line positions in the film industry, gender issues have advanced to the forefront in discussions dealing with the working situation in the film and screen industries.These discussions have appeared in various national contexts in print and social media, as well as in academic work (see, e.g., Jansson et al., 2020; Liddy, 2020;Marghitu, 2018;Meziani & Cabantous, 2020;O'Brien, 2019).It has become obvious that gender inequality pervades all screen industries, large and small, and that women screen workers in different national screen contexts share similar experiences.As film and television production is becoming more and more globalized, with single productions often being the outcome a variety of regional and national industries, finances and competences, working and gendered experiences of being in the industry are also becoming increasingly globalized.Still, there are regional and local differences in how women screen workers experience their work and career situation and these need to be addressed.There are also various aspects of screen work that remain to be tended to academically.Hence, this special section offers a sample of national and local studies that all investigate how gender and equality work is done in four different contexts.It is our hope that this small sample may inspire not only more studies of national contexts, but also inspire to future cross-national studies.Before discussing how various academic fields have engaged with the screening industries in terms of work experience and representation, we wish to point out that film and television, as two available media formats reaching large and heterogeneous audiences, constitute two of the most central expressions of our time, and that both contribute to reflect and mold our understanding of society, of others -and of ourselves (de Lauretis, 1987;Dyer, 1993).

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.