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This paper derives from a research project concerned with how women鈥檚 mainstream filmmaking across a range of Hollywood genres has since the late 1980s challenged a number of existing paradigms of film engagement, feminist and beyond. After outlining the broad parameters of the research – which also takes in films by Amy Heckerling, Sofia Coppola, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Kimberly Peirce and Greta Gerwig – it will take the case study of Kathryn Bigelow鈥檚 Detroit (2017) to illustrate some of its concerns. Specifically, the paper will draw on affect theory to argue that Detroit demonstrates the way in which socially constructed, individually experienced emotions engender material realities, at the levels of both content and form. In the first place, the film depicts graphically how violence is a consequence of (groundless) collective fear, by focusing on the true story of the murder of several African Americans in 1967 after one of them angrily shoots a toy gun that is mistaken for a real one. In the second, it relies heavily for its emotive power on a self-conscious engagement with various genres – in particular the war film and the sacrificial trauma film (King 2011) – and specific films, including from Bigelow鈥檚 own oeuvre. This approach invites a cerebrally engaged mode of spectatorship, yet one that is also viscerally affecting: in its impetus not only to claim but also to demonstrate how even the most collectively significant actions and events are rooted in personal experiences, feelings and mental states, the film works on individual, embodied viewers through collective structures of feeling negotiated by over-determined genre films. Thus echoing Steve Shaviro鈥檚 well-known analysis of Blue Steel (1990) to illustrate how 鈥淏igelow affirms and celebrates visceral immediacy as an effect of simulation鈥� (1993, my emphasis) through heightened genericity, this reading also gives the lie to old models of film theory that have sought to separate the (gendered) domains of thought and sentiment. In so doing it posits a 鈥榗ine-fille鈥� female film author instantiated by a mode of address that is formally feminist and queer.

On Friday 25 September 2020 at 12-1pm (UK time), 糖心TV will be launching its inaugural report on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report will highlight the University鈥檚 progress towards the SDGs, covering case studies on various initiatives that are contributing towards the goals.