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Female Agencies and
Subjectivities in Film
and Television
Edited by
Diğdem Sezen · Feride Çiçekoğlu
Aslı Tunç · Ebru Thwaites Diken
Female Agencies and Subjectivities
in Film and Television
 Diğdem Sezen • Feride Çiçekoğlu
Aslı Tunç • Ebru Thwaites Diken
Editors

Female Agencies and

Subjectivities in Film
and Television
Editors
Diğdem Sezen Feride Çiçekoğlu
Department of Transmedia, Digital Art Department of Cinema
and Animation, School of Computing, Istanbul Bilgi University
Engineering & Digital Technologies Istanbul, Turkey
Teesside University
Middlesbrough, UK Ebru Thwaites Diken
Department of Cinema
Aslı Tunç Istanbul Bilgi University
Department of Media Istanbul, Turkey
Istanbul Bilgi University
Istanbul, Turkey

ISBN 978-3-030-56099-7    ISBN 978-3-030-56100-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

Editors would like to give their sincere thanks to Kenan Behzat Sharpe,
whose outstanding abilities in copy-editing and proofreading were crucial
for the readability of this volume.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Diğdem Sezen, Feride Çiçekoğlu, Aslı Tunç, and Ebru
Thwaites Diken

Part I Women Behind the Camera   9

2 Agnès Varda and the Singular Feminine 11

Colleen Kennedy-Karpat

3 Female Agency in Pelin Esmer Films: The Play (2005) and

Queen Lear (2019) 27
Feride Çiçekoğlu

4 The Feminine Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema: The

Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), Bird Box (2018) 45
Ebru Thwaites Diken

5 Consuming Bodies, Abject Spaces: Ana Lily Amirpour’s

Transcultural Expressionism 65
Joanna Mansbridge

vii
viii Contents

Part II Women on Screen  85

6 Claire Underwood: Feminist Warrior or Shakespearean

Villain? Re-visiting Feminine Evil in House of Cards 87
Aslı Tunç

7 The Phenomenology of Orphan Black as Molecular Politics107

Luca Barattoni

8 ‘I Will Not Be Bullied into Submission’: Discussing

Subjection and Resistance in GLOW (2017)127
Ayşegül Kesirli Unur and Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan

9 Female Body Language: Cutting, Scarring,

and Becoming in HBO’s Sharp Objects145
Mihaela P. Harper

10 The Strong Female Lead: Postfeminist Representation

of Women and Femininity in Netflix Shows165
Derya Özkan and Deborah Hardt

Part III Women in Context and Culture: Representational

Struggles Across Genres and Platforms 189

11 The Technological Turn of the Femme Fatale: The

Fembot and Alternative Fates191
Şirin Fulya Erensoy

12 Women Remembering: Gender and Genre in Persona

and Happy Valley209
Kenan Behzat Sharpe

13 Bridal Anxieties: Politics of Gender, Neoconservatism

and Daytime TV in Turkey229
Feyda Sayan-Cengiz
 Contents  ix

14 International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels:

“Women’s Cinema, Women’s Resistance, Cinema of
Resistance”249
Nazan Haydari

15 Machine Gaze on Women: How Everyday Machine-

Vision-Technologies See Women in Films271
Diğdem Sezen

Index295
 Notes on Contributors

Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan was born in New York, USA, in 1989. She
studied Urban and Regional Planning in the Faculty of Architecture at
Istanbul Technical University and for six months at Trento University,
Italy, through the Erasmus Program. She completed her MA degree in
Film Studies at Bahçeşehir University. Her MA thesis is focused on map-
ping the multicultural components of Jim Jarmusch’s early films. After
working for film programming companies and film festivals, she is cur-
rently a Research Assistant at the Department of Film and Television,
Istanbul Bilgi University and a Ph.D. student at Media and
Communication Studies, Galatasaray University.
Luca Barattoni (Ph.D. University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill) is
Associate Professor of Italian and World Cinema at Clemson University.
Among his publications: Jewish Identities in Latin American Cinema.
Special Issue for Post-Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, 2019
(with Patricia Nuriel); “Edipo Re e lo statuto del soggetto” in Fulvio
Orsitto and Federico Pacchioni, eds. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Prospettive
Americane. Pesaro: Metauro, 2015; Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012; “Bergsonian themes and the human
condition in Pirandello’s Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinema Operator”
Forum Italicum, 2011.
Feride Çiçekoğlu is a professor and director of the master program in
film and television at Istanbul Bilgi University. She holds a Ph.D. in archi-
tecture from the University of Pennsylvania. The military junta of 1980 in
Turkey interrupted her teaching career. She spent four years as a

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

political prisoner after which she adapted her first novella about a child in
the prison for the screen and resumed her academic career with film. She
has edited and written in collections on digital culture, gender, urbanism,
and film. Most recently, she has co-edited The Dubious Case of a Failed
Coup: Militarism, Masculinities, and 15 July in Turkey (2019).
Şirin Fulya Erensoy completed her Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies at
Bahçeşehir University in 2017. Her thesis explores the films of the New
French Extremity and their use of the body as a site where social anxieties
are played out. Şirin conducts research on short film production in Turkey
and video activism as an alternative media practice. She is currently a guest
lecturer at Kadir Has University and Istanbul Bilgi University. Şirin has
worked as a producer and advisor for international documentaries shooting
in Istanbul. She is also the editor and the anchor of the weekly news bul-
letin This Week in Turkey on Medyascope TV.
Deborah Hardt is a Lecturer in the Cinema and Media Studies
Department at Izmir University of Economics. She holds an M.A. in
Media Studies from The New School in New York and is a Ph.D. candi-
date in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate
School in Saas-Fee Switzerland.
Mihaela P. Harper is Assistant Professor in the Cultures, Civilizations
and Ideas Program at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Her research
spans comparative literature and cultural studies with a focus on the ethical
and political dimensions of contemporary visual and literary texts. Her
work appears in a variety of journals, including Symplokē, the Journal
of Modern Literature, and the Slavonic and East European Review, as well
as in the edited volumes Crime Fiction as World Literature (2017) and
Simulation in Media and Culture: Believing the Hype (2011). She is the
co-editor of Bulgarian Literature as World Literature (2020).
Nazan Haydari is associate professor of Media Department at Istanbul
Bilgi University, Turkey. Her research interests and publications are on
radio and women, feminist media, intercultural communication and
critical media pedagogy. She holds a Ph.D. in communications from
Ohio University, United States. She is the co-editor of Case Studies
in Intercultural Dialogue by Kendall Hunt. Her recent publications
appear in Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to an
Old Medium (edited by Golo Föllmer and Alexander Badenoch), The
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedia of Intercultural

Communication and Feminist Media Histories Journal.
Colleen Kennedy-Karpat holds a PhD in French from Rutgers University
and teaches in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent
University in Ankara, Turkey. She is the author of Rogues, Romance, and
Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s (Fairleigh Dickinson 2013) and
co-editor of the collection Adaptation, Awards Culture and the Value of
Prestige (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Other essays have appeared in
Adaptation, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, and several edited
volumes, most recently A Companion to the Biopic (Wiley 2020). Her
research focuses on adaptation, genre, stardom, and French national cinema.
Joanna Mansbridge is assistant professor in the Department of English
at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research and teaching interests
span contemporary US drama, transnational performance, feminism, film,
and visual culture. Her current research focuses on performance,
ecology, urbanism, and intermediality. Her articles appear in Theatre
Topics, Theatre Research International, Modern Drama, Canadian Theatre
Review, Genre, and Journal of Popular Culture, along with chapters in
edited collections. Her monograph Paula Vogel (University of
Michigan Press, 2014) is the first book-length study of the play-
wright. She is on the international advisory board for the perfor-
mance studies journal, Performance Matters.
Derya Özkan is an Assistant Professor in the Cinema and Media Studies
Department at Izmir University of Economics. She received her Ph.D. in
Visual and Cultural Studies in 2008 from the University of Rochester,
USA. From 2008 to 2011, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the
Institute of European Ethnology at Ludwig Maximilian University
of Munich, Germany and she was the Director of the research project
“Changing Imaginations of Istanbul. From Oriental to the Cool
City” funded by a grant from the DFG Emmy Noether Program
from 2011 to 2016.
Feyda Sayan-Cengiz is Assistant Professor of Political Science and
International Relations at Manisa Celal Bayar University, Turkey. She
received her PhD degree in Political Science from Bilkent University
(2014). She was a Visiting Researcher at Columbia University Department
of Anthropology (2009–2010). She has published articles on politics of
gender in Turkey, politics of identity, Islamic media, media ­representations
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

of gender, neoconservatism and women’s movements. Her book, “Beyond

Headscarf Culture in Turkey’s Retail Sector” was published by Palgrave
Macmillan in 2016. Her current research projects focus on populist gen-
der discourses and self-help culture.
Diğdem Sezen is a lecturer at Teesside University, School of Computing,
Engineering and Digital Technologies, Transmedia, Digital Arts and
Animation Department. She holds a PhD in Communications from
Istanbul University in 2011. During her PhD, she was a Fulbright fellow
at Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Digital Media. Between
2017 and 2019 she was a visiting researcher at Rhine-Waal University
of Applied Sciences in Germany at the EU funded RheijnLand.
Xperiences innovation project. Her research focuses on interactive
narratives, transmedia storytelling, and digital culture. She also
teaches and publishes across this spectrum.
Kenan Behzat Sharpe received his PhD in Literature from the University
of California, Santa Cruz in 2019. His research centers on the film, music,
and poetry produced by twentieth-century left-wing movements in Turkey
and the United States. He has published in the Journal of the Ottoman and
Turkish Studies Association and has contributed to various edited volumes
on the global 1960s, aesthetics and politics in the 1930s, and Turkish lit-
erature. Sharpe is also a co-founder of the online Marxist-Feminist journal
Blind Field and an assistant editor at Commune Magazine. He works as a
journalist, writing a weekly arts/culture column for the independent
Turkish news site Duvar English and contributes stories to Al-Monitor,
Jacobin, and other outlets. He currently lives in Istanbul.
Ebru Thwaites Diken is an assistant professor in the Department of
̇
Film and Television at Istanbul Bilgi University. She holds a BA in
Economics from Bosphorus University, Turkey and a PhD in Sociology
from Lancaster University, UK. Her current research interests include
female subjectivity in film, film and social theory, Scandinavian cinema,
director’s ethics and digital visual cultures. She has recently published a
book, ‘The Spectacle of Politics and Religion in Contemporary Turkish
Cinema’, funded by the Scientist Repatriation Support Fund of the
Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey and several
articles in international peer review journals.
Aslı Tunç is a professor at the Media and Communication Department
at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. She has a BA in communication
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

s­ ciences from Istanbul University and an MA in film and television studies

from Anadolu University. She received her Ph.D. in media and communi-
cations at Temple University in Philadelphia in 2000. She has given lec-
tures and seminars at universities in the USA, the UK and Greece on the
freedom of expression and the media’s changing role in Turkey and around
the world. She has written numerous publications and country reports on
the issues of democracy and media, social impacts of new media technolo-
gies, and media ownership structure in Turkey.
Ayşegül Kesirli Unur studied advertising and film at Istanbul Bilgi
University. She finished her MA degree at Istanbul Bilgi University,
Department of Cultural Studies. She completed her joint PhD at
Bahçeşehir University, Cinema and Media Research and University of
Antwerp, Communication Studies. Her PhD dissertation concentrates on
Turkish police procedural TV series and how police procedural genre
is formed in the Turkish context. Currently, she works as an assistant
professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of Film and
Television.
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Five sequential shots in The Beaches of Agnès (2008), each
derived from a still photograph, all of which feature Jean-Luc
Godard on the set of Varda’s film-­within-­a-film Les Fiancés du
Pont Macdonald (1962) 15
Fig. 2.2 Agnès Varda, center frame, in Varda par Agnès (2019)
discussing how her work on the documentary The Gleaners
and I (2000) got her thinking about how the material of her
own films—right down to the reel cases beside her—might
find new life in another form. In the background is one of her
cabane (cabin) installations, this one made from film stock of
her early feature Le Bonheur (1965) and filled with sunflowers,
which are a recurring motif in the film 20
Fig. 3.1 Fatma Fatih trying a moustache in Oyun (2005) 34
Fig. 3.2 Fatma Fatih as Queen Lear (2019) 34
Fig. 15.1 Google Cloud Vision API’s analyses of a close-up of general’s
wife from Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman
(1928)280
Fig. 15.2 Chart of images to be tested with machine vision platforms 282

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Diğdem Sezen, Feride Çiçekoğlu, Aslı Tunç,

and Ebru Thwaites Diken

Harvey Weinstein, once one of the most powerful film producers and a
titan of Hollywood, probably never anticipated such a disgraceful end to
his career. On a chilly day in a New York City courtroom in March 2020
he looked puzzled and frail on a wheelchair while his final sentence was
read out to him. The jury had found him guilty of two of the five charges
he faced and sentenced him to 23 years in jail for sexual abuse. Six women
who had testified against him were in tears holding one another tight. This
was the kind of cathartic scene that we mostly see in movies.

D. Sezen (*)
Department of Transmedia, Digital Art and Animation,
School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies,
Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK
e-mail: d.sezen@tees.ac.uk
A. Tunç
Department of Media, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey
e-mail: asli.tunc@bilgi.edu.tr
F. Çiçekoğlu • E. Thwaites Diken
Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey
e-mail: feride.cicekoglu@bilgi.edu.tr; ebru.diken@bilgi.edu.tr

© The Author(s) 2020 1

D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film
and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_1
2 D. SEZEN ET AL.

This scene deeply resonated with us during the last stages of editing this
book, the product of a long period of collaboration, the final two years of
which coincided with a worldwide transformation in how female agency
and subjectivity is perceived, especially in film and television. Our editorial
team consists of four women academics in the fields of film, television,
media, and transmedia storytelling, from different generations and back-
̇
grounds. Our paths have crossed at Istanbul Bilgi University over the last
two decades, since the beginning of this century. When we first started out
it was beyond our imagination that the period of our collaboration for
organizing an international conference on Female Agency and Subjectivity
in Film and Television (April 10–13 2019, Istanbul ̇ Bilgi University,
Istanbul) and editing the outcome of the conference in this book would
be marked as a cathartic transformation highlighting our title.
Many things have indeed changed since October 5, 20171 when the
New York Times first broke the story of high-profile actresses accusing
Weinstein of sexual assault. With the help of social media and the #MeToo
hashtag, women all around the world started to share their own experi-
ences of harassment or assault. The floodgates had been thrown open. The
culmination of similar cases fueled a global #MeToo movement and
numerous revelations about many prominent men in media, journalism,
and politics shook those sectors to its core. Accusations were almost iden-
tical: powerful men had used their influence to intimidate and coerce
women into performing sexual acts or enduring sexual harassment against
their will. With the Weinstein case, the mainstream media conveniently
focused on the famous actresses who identified themselves as victims. Yet,
the MeToo movement galvanized complaints in other industries as well,
such as tech companies in Silicon Valley, auto-plants or service sectors like
tourism. Many well-known women in the entertainment sector jumped on
the bandwagon, as in Oprah Winfrey’s speech2 promising young women
“that a new day is on the horizon” at the Golden Globe Awards in 2018.
Time Magazine declared the MeToo Movement and “The Silence
Breakers” its Person of the Year.
#MeToo definitely opened a new chapter in how scriptwriters of films
and TV series began to challenge gender norms and focus on strong
women character representations touching on controversial themes, sto-
ries of the margins, especially by those most vulnerable to sexual vio-
lence—women of color, Indigenous women, queer and trans youth. Those
third-rail subjects not only inspired millions but unsettled them. While the
Weinstein scandal was tarnishing the reputation of famous film and
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

television celebrities (including Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Louis

C. K., Ben Affleck, Brett Ratner, James Toback, Matt Lauer, and Charlie
Rose) streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime added
new productions of female-injected series to their watch lists. For instance,
women-­centric series such as Big Little Lies and The Handmaid’s Tale won
big at the Golden Globes and Emmys. HBO had to equalize pay for men
and women, and The Crown agreed to pay its male and female leads
equally.
After Kevin Spacey was fired from the show House of Cards, Robin
Wright stepped into the lead as a bigger success. In the midst of all the
developments mandating women in the director’s chair, studios’ mentor-
ing programs, and actresses’ demands on producing roles to have more
control, the #MeToo movement revealed the continuing lack of women
shaping female characters and storylines. Of the top 100 grossing films of
2017, women represented 8% of directors; 10% of writers; 2% of cinema-
tographers; 24% of producers and 14% of editors, according to the Center
for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State
University.3
A New York Times analysis has found that, since the Weinstein scandal
broke, at least 200 prominent men have lost their jobs after public allega-
tions of sexual harassment, yet only forty-three percent of their replace-
ments were women. Of those, one-third is in news media, one-quarter in
government, and one-fifth in entertainment and the arts.4
Although no other nation has experienced anything close to the US,
the impact of the #MeToo movement was nonetheless global in the media
and entertainment sectors, yet at times complicated. For instance, in
France where seduction is treated as cultural norm, actress Catherine
Deneuve co-signed a letter depicting #MeToo accusers as puritanical.
Scandinavia, long a bastion of gender equality, was not totally immune. In
Norway, reports of harassment in media organizations were followed by a
petition signed by almost 500 women complaining of harassment and
abuse in the acting profession.5 Women in Italy, Spain and other European
countries began to speak out, detailing how they were discriminated
against and sexually exploited. According to United Nation Women
Report estimates, between 2016 and 2019 #MeToo and its sister hashtags
garnered 36 million social media impressions from many parts of the
world across languages and beyond borders.6
This #MeToo explosion included Turkey (under the hashtag
#SenDeAnlat), where domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment
4 D. SEZEN ET AL.

cases remain alarmingly high. According to the “We Will Stop Femicide”
Platform, consisting of different women’s rights NGOs, 41% of women
living in Turkey have suffered from sexual assault at least once in their
lives, and 93% of women have experienced some form of sexual harass-
ment.7 Similar to Hollywood, though, the #SenDeAnlat movement was
spearheaded by celebrities such as Sıla Gençoğlu, one of the country’s
most popular female singers, filing a legal complaint against her boyfriend,
actor Ahmet Kural, accusing him of violence and revealing the details on
social media in 2018.
Amidst this turmoil, our incentive to organize an international confer-
ence on Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television turned out
to be a more timely intervention than any of us could have foreseen. The
passing of Agnès Varda on March 29, 2019 put her on the agenda, even
more than she had been during the previous years, due to her lifelong
devotion to gender equality and her unique vision of filmer en femme. Just
a month before her passing, her final film Varda par Agnès (2019) pre-
miered at Berlin Film Festival. Her joy of life, resilience and intimacy was
celebrated as an alternative to the masculinist policies poisoning the film
industry in that final festival she attended with her daughter and producer,
Rosalie Varda, and her entire crew. The global response to her passing
manifested a deep love and appreciation of not only her work but her life
in general and demonstrated how it was no longer possible to demarcate
the personal lives from the works of artists. The tone of the consensual
global obituary for Varda was starkly different from the controversial one
for Bernardo Bertolucci, who had passed a few months earlier in November
of the previous year. His oeuvre was no longer mentioned with the idol-
ization that usually favored the masculine cinéastes of the twentieth cen-
tury. The sexual harassment in his 1972 film Last Tango in Paris became
part of his legacy. Bertolucci had revealed that during the rape scene in the
film a stick of butter was used as lubricant without informing Maria
Schneider, the actress who was nineteen at the time of the shooting.
Bertolucci argued that it was necessary to humiliate Schneider in order to
make his film. “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” he had
said. “I wanted her to react humiliated.” His passing did not end the criti-
cism and his words were no longer taken as a sign of his genius as a film-
maker but of misogyny, and abuse of power.8
How Bertolucci’s legacy was marked was yet another sign that the myth
of the “masculine singular” was shattered. The process had neither been
sudden nor without an academic background. Geneviève Sellier’s
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

monograph La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma au masculin singulier (2005),

translated as Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema by Kristin
Ross (2008) highlighted, more than a decade ago, that a change was com-
ing.9 Agnès Varda herself was one of the vanguards of that change,
throughout a career spanning more than six decades. Les Glaneurs et la
Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) her first film with a digital camera,
which she started shooting on the first day of the year 2000, marked a new
period not only in her career, but in female agency behind the camera at
the beginning of the new century.
The structure and progression of this book highlights the transforma-
tion briefly outlined above. There are three sections, each devoted to a
different aspect of the conference title: “The women behind the camera”,
“women on screen”, and “women in context and culture: representational
struggles across genres and platforms.”
The first section starts out with Colleen Kennedy-Karpat’s article on
“Agnès Varda and the Singular Feminine” with reference to Geneviève
Sellier’s aforementioned monograph. Focusing on Varda’s representation
of Godard in a pastiche of silent slapstick (Les Fiancés du Pont Macdonald,
1962) that appears in Cléo from 5 to 7 and of JR in Faces Places (2017),
Kennedy-Karpat highlights the politics of memory in Varda’s work and
shows how Varda’s resilience, including her acceptance of her own vulner-
ability, helped transform the canon. Feride Çiçekoğlu’s article “Female
Agency in Pelin Esmer Films: The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019)”
highlights the freedom and flexibility of the digital camera and tracing the
example of Pelin Esmer shows how it empowered women directors in the
new century. Çiçekoğlu argues that the two films of the director Esmer
from 2005 and 2019, following a group of women from a southern prov-
ince of Turkey over fourteen years from their initial attempts to form a
theater group to their travelling troupe performing for the villages of the
region, stand witness to the empowerment of women both behind the
camera and on screen. Ebru Thwaites Diken elaborates on how the dis-
tinction between the inside and the outside is operationalized in a gen-
dered fashion in Susanne Bier’s three films: The Brothers (2004), In a
Better World (2010), and Bird Box (2018) in her article “The Feminine
Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema”. She finishes with a controversial
and provocative question as to whether blindness can be considered sub-
versive due to a complete lack of the gaze, which is essentially masculine,
referring to Irigaray. The final article of this section “Consuming Bodies,
Abject Spaces: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Transcultural Expressionism” is by
6 D. SEZEN ET AL.

Joanna Mansbridge. Mansbridge discusses how A Girl Walks Home Alone

at Night (2014) and the director’s follow up feature, The Bad Batch
(2016) use metaphors of vampirism and cannibalism, illuminating the vio-
lent fantasies animating relations within an economically divided, transcul-
tural United States.
The second thematic section, “Women on Screen,” contains contribu-
tions focusing on women’s screen representations. Aslı Tunç examines the
character Claire Underwood from the Netflix drama House of Cards
(2013–2018) by questioning whether Underwood is a feminist warrior or
a Shakespearean villain by revisiting the concept of female evil and focus-
ing on the themes of motherhood, seduction, and madness. Luca Barattoni
self-formation in TV series Orphan Black (2013–2017). Ayşegül Kesirli
Unur and Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan focus on Netflix Original series GLOW
(2017) and question its self-reflexive approach through a comparative
analysis of the show and its inspiration, the 1980s cable TV show GLOW:
Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (1986–1989). Mihaela P. Harper discusses
HBO’s miniseries Sharp Objects (2018) as women’s storytelling represent-
ing internal and external lives of the three generations of women and
highlights how the series complicates the relationship between self and
body, self-consciousness and cultural context. Derya Özkan and Deborah
Hardt assess the contents of female-­driven stories on Netflix through story
arcs and inquire how the selected shows feature and emphasize
female agency.
The third section concentrates on the representational struggles across
genres and platforms. Şirin Erensoy analyzes two examples, Ex-Machina
(2014) and Westworld (2016–) and argues that film noir’s femme fatale
today has evolved into emancipated female robot: the fembot as a figure
of resistance. Kenan Behzat Sharpe approaches the crime dramas Persona
(2018) and Happy Valley (2014–2016) and explores the themes of wom-
en’s agency, violence and trauma, and the political meaning of memory
and forgetting. Feyda Sayan-Cengiz traces “ideal female subject” along
the lines of neoconservative and neoliberal discourses of gender by analyz-
ing popular Turkish daytime TV show Bridal House. Nazan Haydari
focuses on Filmmor International Women’s Film Festival as a site of activ-
ism by drawing from the programming strategies published on the festival
catalogs and she explains how the Filmmor IWFF becomes an inclusive
ground for solidarity, resistance and agency of women. Diğdem Sezen,
finally, discusses the machine gaze for women’s representation in algorith-
mically driven visual culture and plays with algorithmically driven machine
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