To Örebro University

The aim of this chapter is to analyse how two documentary films, Elisabetta Lodoli's Ma l'amore c'entra? and Isabel de Ocampo's Serás Hombre, critically explore the interrelation between the performance of hegemonic masculinities and gender-based violence. Our methodology focuses on the affective and performative dimensions of documentary cinema since we look for ways in which emotions work in and through gender-based violence, shaping performances of masculinity. We also identify ‘moments of affection’, where possibilities of transformation can be envisioned. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first provides the theoretical framework, which combines feminist critiques of how gender-based violence is represented in mainstream media, the intersections between the exercise of violence and the performance of masculinity, and a description of what a performative and affective approach to the analysis of documentary cinema entails. The second and third sections present the analysis of our case studies. With hate and anger as our entry points, we close-read selected scenes from each film, incorporating opinions expressed by their directors and reactions from spectators. We conclude by summarising the modes in which our case studies set into motion ways of performing cultures of gender equality on both sides of the camera and the screen.

Over the last decade, gender equality measures like positive actions in public funding have been implemented in the Spanish film industry. This article discusses these measures by looking at both the gender order that has been embedded in the Spanish film governance regime since its origins and the ways in which such gender order re-emerges in the current context as expressed by women film workers. Two persistent prejudices that can be traced back to Franco's dictatorship are identified: Public funding as connected to censorship and/or lack of profitability, and the representation of women as incapable members of a so-called 'minority' that has to be assisted. Concrete measures including quotas are necessary for adjusting the unbalance in women's participation, but they are means towards an end that goes beyond quantitative changes, for the ultimate goal would entail transforming the structure of a patriarchal film governance regime from a bottom-up feminist approach.

This chapter aims to analyse feminist resistances to persuasion in visual discourse and to dissect several case studies in fiction and non-fiction Spanish films in order to highlight what we consider to be practices of feminist counter-visuality. Our theoretical genealogy starts with Adrienne Rich’s and Judith Fetterley’s claims for re-viewing and resisting readership. We then move from textual transgressions to the urge for visual transgressions expressed by feminist film theorists and practitioners. After discussing a classical example of persuasive visual discourse, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and two instances of transgressive gazing by well-known feminist filmmakers Sally Potter and Jane Campion, we bring our argument to recent Spanish fiction and non-fiction cinema and close-read scenes from seven case studies as a basis to exploring how the alternative film discourses represented within them can operate as technologies of social response-ability and accountability in face of the challenges present in the current feminist agenda in Spain.