Unmasking Gender: Power, Identity, Privilege in Film Conference : Call for Papers

Professor Kirsty Fairclough will be delivering the keynote for the Unmasking Gender: Power, Identity, Privilege in Film Conference at MediaCity, University of Salford, Manchester, UK on 10th December 2025 convened by Dr Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou and Pete Deakin.

Call for papers:

In the 1970s Anglo-American feminist scholars in a variety of disciplines began to explore the problematic representations of women in Hollywood cinema, issues and concerns over female spectatorship, as well as the history of women’s cinema in Hollywood and beyond. Two seminal works Marjorie Rosen’s 1973 Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream, and Molly Haskell’s 1974 From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, pointed to stereotypical portrayals of women mostly in Hollywood films.

By end of the millennium, for cultural commentators like Susan Faludi (1999), it was curiously Western masculinity that had apparently reached an apocalyptic state. Its traditional markers – strength, a breadwinner status, social dominance, emotional self-efficacy and regulation – had been pathologised. In the wake of this sociocultural evolution, old jobs were lost; so-called masculine spaces once filled with miners, dockers and engineers were left barren or converted to penthouse homes and middle-management sites for the newly saturating white collar (so went the rhetoric), while the modern western male was increasingly under pressure to conform to commercial cultures of style, celebrity, and consumption. Ros Coward (1999) asked: when looking back on the achievements of feminism, “Is it now holding us back?” Is it demonising men and denying them the right to understanding and equality in a world that is perhaps far harsher for them than ever before?

Many years later, and in wake of the hashtag#MeToo Movement and the current sociopolitical climate that has seen Andrew Tate’s brand of hypermasculinity, misogyny and anti-feminism poll favourably in and beyond the ‘manosphere’, we believe there is an urgent need to re-examine gender in contemporary cinema. From researchers and scholars, from outreach initiatives to practice-based research among others, we welcome a diversity of approaches from a broad variety of perspectives on how film is grappling with contemporary portraits of gender in cinema in and beyond Hollywood.

Please submit abstracts for individual papers (max 250 words) with presentation title, up to 5 key words, your full name, affiliation, 50 word biography, and email address to conferencesalford@gmail.com

Submission deadline: 28 September 2025.
Notification of acceptance of papers: 5 October 2025.