Irina Cruz Pereira, who was a predoctoral researcher at ADHUC, will defend her doctoral thesis titled Heroines of Popular Feminism: Authorship by Women in Hollywood, supervised by Dr. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (ADHUC-Universitat de les Illes Balears) and with Dr. Rodrigo Andrés (ADHUC-Universitat de Barcelona) as a tutor.
In 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road was called "the Trojan horse of feminism" and Star Wars: The Force Awakens was boycotted for featuring a female lead. Dozens of superhero movies have been released in the last decade, but none has been starred or directed by a woman until Wonder Woman (2017). The female characters in these films and their creators occupy spaces that are culturally considered masculine: action heroines replace heroes and filmmakers assume a position of authority that in Hollywood they had been denied. Women's authorship is located in the directing role (Patty Jenkins in Wonder Woman), but also in production (Kathleen Kennedy in the Star Wars saga) and editing (Margaret Sixel in Mad Max: Fury Road). Studying how and with what results these creators and their works occupy cultural spaces traditionally considered as masculine, this thesis proposes a reflection on the relation between the controversial reception of these films and the forms of popular feminism that permeate contemporary popular culture.
Public act through Teams; it is necessary to register in advance to the email: lauravara@ub.edu.
