The limits of exceptional women: the cinema of Stephanie Rothman and the trouble with archives

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of gendered authorship in the U.S. film industry and focuses on how women’s directorial labor is represented in film history and its accumulated archives. Specifically, the project evaluates women’s labor in the cinematic paradigm of second wave exploitation films—films produced under the exploitation style from 1960 to 1980—and utilizes a case study of director Stephanie Rothman to articulate the lack of industrial, disciplinary, and archival attention paid to women’s directorial labor and the reverberations of this absence on gendered labor parity in the contemporary film industry.