MC: Dr Mary Harrod (Warwick University): Out of Time: The Politics of Fantasy in French Screen Romance of the 2010s

In this lecture, I will put concepts of romantic fantasy and transnational (post)feminism into dialogue with one another through the case study of contemporary French filmed romantic comedy. More specifically, I will explore the way in which the genre’s recently amplified embrace of fantastic tropes – notably linked to time-travel and atemporality more broadly – while in some ways mirroring global trends, responds to a situation whereby greater demands for gender equality have troubled Gallic cultures of intimacy. Focalising a range of differently positioned case studies, the paper will draw on concepts of romance as both textual and social genre to consider the narrative and iconographic contortions required to keep the former alive as the latter comes under increasing fire, as well as fault-lines within these and thus the shifting social context that they instantiate. Significantly, this optic encompasses concepts of transnational (market) identity, bearing in mind the intersectionality between generational (temporal) and cultural (geo-spatial) difference recently foregrounded by French responses to #MeToo, and simultaneously representing a classic topos of the fantastic mode. In this regard, the lecture will finally interrogate the recent trend from the point of view of affective theories of cosmopolitanism and felt internationalism, especially as these intersect with popular feminism as an increasingly global concept, to ask whether the trans-local marketisation of ‘progressive’ discourses of gendered intimacy depoliticises these.

\\ Dr Mary Harrod (Warwick University)'s is Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Warwick. She has authored multiple books: From France with Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy (I.B. Tauris, 2015), Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and co-edited the following collections: The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalization (I.B. Tauris, 2015, with Mariana Liz and Alissa Timoshkina); Women Do Genre in Film and Television (Routledge, 2017, with Katarzyna Paszkiewicz), Winner of British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Edited Collection Prize 2019; and Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2021, with Diane Negra and Suzanne Leonard). She is also the co-chief General Editor of French Screen Studies, with Ginette Vincendeau.

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