Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics (Sep 2022)
Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood: Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008) as Teen Gothic
Abstract
In this video essay I explore intertextuality in Twilight as a marker of cinephilic female authorship. I aim to show that the film relies for much of its gripping effect on overtly re-engaging overdetermined structures of feeling established by earlier texts, in other words by invoking genre memory. Considering the key genres with which the film engages – notably Gothic horror and romance as well as the teen film – I demonstrate how Twilight repeatedly appeals to cultural knowledge at not only an intellectual but also an emotional level. I suggest that apostrophising the mind and the body simultaneously and in a way that cannot be parsed demands to be read as a feminist gesture, since the mode of address adopted by what I call heightened genre films such as this one forecloses the viability of Cartesian dualistic understandings of human experience on which patriarchal exclusions of women and other groups have often rested.
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