Abstract
Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: Female body genres and the women of the New French ExtremityIn the essay Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, Linda Williams coins the concept of body genres. These genres include melodrama, horror and porn, which are linked through their impact on the spectator’s body and intensifying viewing experiences. According to Williams, these three film genres emphasize the notion of spectacle, but they place the female body in its centre. The female body is moving and is being moved, which causes its vulnerability to the hegemony of the male gaze. But we can conduct research from a feminist perspective and find films that simultaneously tell about a visceral excess and develop an intellectual transgression through the body. The best example of this tendency is the New French Extremity, precisely the female directors such as Catherine Breillat, Mariny de Van or Virginie Despentes. They maximize the somatic spectacle in their films, which annihilates the pleasure that the male spectator derives from the fetishized female body.
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