Quebec Feminist Film Culture in the 21st Century: A Transnational Perspective

This dissertation looks at the emergence of transnational feminist audio-visual practices in Quebec that endorse, develop, and promote approaches to gender-specific issues in the film industry and cinematic imaginaries within the geo-cultural and geo-political francophone space. Drawing on transnational feminism, on media ecology’s environmental approach to media, and transnational approaches to film studies, each chapter examines the circumstances, networks, and infrastructures that enabled feminist film culture in Quebec within the larger context of global, and specifically francophone, media. In this study, I bring together disparate formations of feminist media cultures, activism in the film industry, and filmmaking practices, including online distribution and curation of video documentary and video-art, questions of female authorship, feature fiction films shown in A-list international film festivals, and diasporic filmmaking practices from postcolonial francophone subjects migrated to Quebec. My case studies demonstrate how these contemporary feminist media and filmmaking practices in Quebec are both situated within the genealogy of Quebec women’s cinema from the late 1960s and 1970s, and also transcend their nationalist theoretical and political frameworks. Chapter 1 explores the Montreal-based, feminist/queer artist-run centre Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV), and its use of media technology. I draw both on feminist approaches to media technology to illustrate GIV’s use of video technologies since the 1970s as a way of doing feminist political work, and on feminist critiques of platform studies to assess how GIV adapts its working methods to streaming platforms. Chapter 2 examines contemporary configurations of Quebec women’s cinema within international film festival circuits through the work of three filmmakers, Chloé Robichaud, Sophie Deraspes, and Geneviève Dulude-De Celles. I combine the concepts of cinéma-monde and feminist theorizations of women’s cinema and female authorship to address Quebec transnational cinema from a gender-specific perspective. In Chapter 3, I critique hegemonic feminist film discourse in Quebec that universalized the category of “woman” and aligned with the dominant narrative of national identity in Quebec, which denied its colonial past and essentialized Quebec society as white and francophone. Against this backdrop, I illustrate how the work of three diasporic francophone filmmakers in Quebec - Gentille M. Assih, Hejer Charf, and Maryanne Zéhil expands dominant understanding of women’s cinema by foregrounding the gendered experience of immigrant subjects across various cinematic forms, including documentary, experimental films, and feature fiction.

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