Introduction: Gender, Space, and Affects in Film

The way mobility and gender are perceived and analysed in the cinema needs to change. As this chapter retraces the scholarship on gender and space, it draws attention to the binaries, starting with the figure of the flâneur, that have portrayed women as being restricted in their movement and in their wilfulness. A transformation of women’s spatial imaginaries beyond patriarchal boundaries requires the consideration of space as fluid, practised, and affective rather than conceived and fixed. Placing feminist geographer Doreen Massey’s concepts of space-time and power-geometries in dialogue with feminist film theory and affect theory shows how cinema may act as a ‘way of thinking’ towards the world and contribute to transforming negative affects into productive forces, as advocated by Rosi Braidotti.

Conclusion: Forms of Affirmative Aesthetics

An affirmative approach to film consists of making visible what the diegesis may conceal. As the chapter reflects on the political impact of art and the affect of films onto the bodies of the spectators, it concludes that looking for affirmative aesthetics is about mapping the feminist forms that will allow us to build a future beyond gendered and racialised power relations.

Streets: Freedom, Diaspora, and the Erotic in Head-On

This chapter focuses on the street as a contested space, one that especially enforces gendered and racialised roles. In spite of the punishment reserved for those who refuse conventions, Head-On (Fatih Akin, Gegen Die Wand [Head-On]. DVD. Germany; Turkey: Strand Releasing, 2004) uses performance, eroticism, and abjection to disrupt the gendering and racialisation of space and the subject. Feminist affirmative forms appear when one looks beyond the negativity present in the diegesis.

Cars: A Micro-analysis of Space and Bodies in Vendredi soir

While the car traditionally appears as male domain, the haptic aesthetic and poetic forms of Claire Denis’ film Vendredi soir (2002) disconnect cars from masculine power. Through a micro-analysis of the film’s forms, spaces, and bodies, the chapter shows how the film suspends the gendered relationships at play in public and private spaces. In this chapter, Ceuterick emphasises the affirmative aesthetic of the film, which transforms the car into a home, gendered bodies into lived bodies, and intimacy into a passage between real and imaginary.

Houses and Wilful Women: Wadjda

This chapter uses Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour, Wadjda. DVD. Saudi Arabia/Germany: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012) as a case study to show how the wilfulness of women requires dissimulation and persistence in order to obtain the same rights as men have. A phenomenological analysis of the film shows how bodies give rise to wilful forms on screen and modify the gendered power relations (the power-geometries) at play in different spaces, such as the house, the school, and the street. Through micro-instances of activism, the wilful child converts the house into a heterotopia, making space beyond patriarchy and assumptions of a certain ‘feminine’ docility.

Women’s Road Movies and Affirmative Wandering: Messidor

Through a close analysis of the road movie Messidor (Alain Tanner, Messidor. VHS. Switzerland: Citel Films, 1979), this chapter exemplifies the limits of considering the mobility of women in the same terms as men’s. The numerous obstacles that women need to overcome before even leaving home in the road movie genre shatter the romantic idea of travel as freedom to be found on the road. Instead, the seemingly transformative potential of mobility is to be found in the habitation of space itself. Considering space and mobility outside of gendered models calls for other tools, concepts, and vocabulary, which include attention to the forms that wilfulness takes on screen.