Books by Dijana Jelača
Routledge, 2019
Film Feminisms offers a global and updated overview of the history, present-day concerns, and fut... more Film Feminisms offers a global and updated overview of the history, present-day concerns, and future of feminist film and theory. It introduces frameworks from phenomenology, affect theory, and psychoanalysis to reception studies, new media theories, and critical historiography, as well as engaging with key issues in documentary ethics, genre theory, and star studies.
This new textbook situates feminist film theory within the larger framework of transnational scholarly approaches, as well as decolonial, queer, disability studies, and critical race theories. It offers a much-needed update on pedagogical approaches to feminist film studies, providing discussions of filmmakers and films that have been overlooked in the field, or that are overdue for further analysis.
Each chapter is supported by a variety of pedagogical features including activities, key terms, and case studies. Many of the activities draw on contemporary digital media, such as social media and streaming platforms, to update the field to today's changing media landscape.
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Routledge, 2017
Comprised of 43 innovative contributions, this companion is both an overview of, and intervention... more Comprised of 43 innovative contributions, this companion is both an overview of, and intervention into the field of cinema and gender. The essays included here address a variety of geographical contexts, from an analysis of cinema. Islam and women and television under Eastern European socialism, to female audience reception in Nigeria, to changing class and race norms in Bollywood dance sequences. A special focus is on women directors in a global context that includes films and filmmakers from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North and South America. The collection also offers a solid overview of feminist contributions to thinking on genre from the "chick flick" to the action or Western film, to film noir and the slasher. Readers will find contributions on a variety of approaches to spectatorship, reception studies and fandom, as well as transnational approaches to star studies and essays addressing the relationship between feminist film theory and new media. Other topics include queer and trans* cinema, eco-cinema and the post-human. Finally, readers interested in the history of film will find essays addressing the methodological dimensions of feminist film history, essays on silent and studio era women in film, and histories of female filmmakers in a variety of non-Western contexts.
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The links between cinema and war machines have long been established. At the same time, cinema re... more The links between cinema and war machines have long been established. At the same time, cinema represents an often overlooked yet crucial channel of tackling the difficult themes of post-traumatic memory. This book explores the range, form, and valences of trauma narratives that permeate the most notable narrative films about the breakup of Yugoslavia. It examines how film plays a part in coming to terms with the traumatic effects that wars have on communities by way of forming an archive of publically circulated, mass-mediated cultural memories.
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Articles by Dijana Jelača
Affect's Social Lives: Post-Yugoslav Reflections, 2023
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Studies in World Cinema, 2021
The essay explores how two women filmmakers, each deploying her unique vision through the perspec... more The essay explores how two women filmmakers, each deploying her unique vision through the perspective of a female protagonist, stage a transformative encounter with the act of bearing witness to genocide. The Diary of Diana B. (Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević, 2019, Croatia) directed by Dana Budisavljević, and Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020, Bosnia-Herzegovina), directed by Jasmila Žbanić, both compel us to bear witness to mass atrocities while avoiding the pitfalls of turning suffering into a spectacle, and by sidestepping the predictable cinematic conventions of redemption and closure, both formally and narratively. In my analysis of the films as anti-spectacles through the framework of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s ‘speaking nearby’, I argue for the concept of ‘women’s world cinema’, a kind of cinema that is made by women, speaks to women’s experiences, and/or addresses the spectator as female while also speaking nearby instead of about its subjects in ways that eschew conventional spectatorial alignments and co-optations of traumatic experience.
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Wagadu: Transnational Journal of Women's and Gender Studies, 2020
This essay theorizes the concept of women's minor cinema in socialist Yugoslavia, conceptualized ... more This essay theorizes the concept of women's minor cinema in socialist Yugoslavia, conceptualized through examples of cultural texts that circulate within the so-called women's genres: romance films, "chick flicks," and TV soap operas. Women's cinema is here not defined solely as films made by women, but rather, films that address the spectator as a woman, regardless of the specator's sex or gender. I argue that, in the context of Yugoslavia, such works frequently articulated emancipatory, feminist stances that did not demarcate a dichotomous opposition to the socialist state as such, but rather called for the state to fulfill its original promise of gender equality as tied both to the class struggle and the annihilation of patriarchy. In the latter parts of the essay , I focus on the work of a pioneering Yugoslav woman director Soja Jovanović, and urge a rethinking of her oeuvre through the lens of socialist minor cinema that seemingly possesses low cultural capital yet frequently articulates poignant critiques along the intersections of sex, gender and social class. In focusing on the class-based critiques embedded in her television work in particular, the gender politics of socialist women's cinema are explored vis-àvis their distinction from the famed New Yugoslav Film. Jovanović has largely been left out of the historical accounts of socialist Yugoslav cinema, as well as out of the feminist accounts of the history of socialist women’s film in East- ern Europe more broadly. As a result, this essay seeks to perform a feminist historiography that writes Jovanović both into the history of Yugoslavia’s socialist film and into the history of women’s socialist minor cinema on an international scale.
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Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society , 2018
In this essay, I ask how we can chart new feminist epistemologies around the figure of the posthu... more In this essay, I ask how we can chart new feminist epistemologies around the figure of the posthuman woman. To explore how the posthuman female body is situated as a site of ontological and epistemological struggle around feminism, femininity, and subjectivity in contemporary screen culture, I examine two recent films about alien/cyborg posthuman female entities: Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 Under the Skin and Alex Garland’s 2015 Ex Machina. Both films illuminate the complex assemblages of subjectivity of the feminine posthuman. Moreover, they explore the sites of circular convergence—rather than fissures—between the human and posthuman form. I discuss how alien feminisms can respond to the new and emerging epistemologies across this nature–(techno)culture continuum without inadvertently upholding humanist anthropocentrism. I conclude that the posthuman condition is not (yet) a postgender condition. Rather, it is a becoming-gendered condition, where traditional gender features stubbornly persist but as a contingent process of perpetual assemblage and undoing rather than of continued stability and fixity. For the posthuman women discussed here, their posthumanness is concealed by the surface layer of skin, which peels off and can be put back on as an unstable barrier between the human and the posthuman, and between surface and depth.
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Contemporary Southeastern Europe, 2017
In recent post-Yugoslav cinema, trope of troubled youth in films as diverse as Skinning (Stevan F... more In recent post-Yugoslav cinema, trope of troubled youth in films as diverse as Skinning (Stevan Filipović, 2010, Serbia), Children of Sarajevo (Aida Begić, 2012, Bosnia-Herzegovina),Spots (Aldo Tardozzi, 2011, Croatia) and Quit Staring at My Plate (Hana Jušić, 2017) allows for an inspection of the links between youth rebellion, post-conflict trauma and social class. These cinematic depictions of youth-in-crisis, which I refer to as transitional films, offer insights into locally produced ethno-national identities as challenged by the proliferating transnational networks of connectivity. In this essay, I highlight one provocative example of transitional film – Clip (Maja Miloš, 2012, Serbia). I argue that the film's provocative approach to representing girls offers insightful commentary on the performative aspects of social class in transitional post-Socialist democracies of former Yugoslavia. Moreover, I examine how the film's graphic scenes of sex might point to what Berlant & Edelman call "sex without optimism" (2013), a term that focuses on “the ways in which sex undoes the subject” (4). In Clip, sex without optimism stages an encounter that destabilizes traditional identity structures rather than reintroducing feminine libido into the patriarchal regimes of control.
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In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013. Web. September 26, 2017. https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/marija-juric-zagorka/, 2017
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In The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, edited by Kristin Lené Hole, Dijana Jelača, E. Ann Kaplan and Patrice Petro. London: Routledge, 446-457. , 2017
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Jump Cut, 2016
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European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2016
This article analyses several notable examples of what the author calls the post-Yugoslav women’s... more This article analyses several notable examples of what the author calls the post-Yugoslav women’s cinema of trauma. These films made by women filmmakers challenge the standard tropes of war, as well as normative approaches to war cinema, by highlighting the intimate affective domain of experience, rather than large-scale narratives and collective emotions. The author focuses on the near-silent short and experimental works of Una Gunjak and Šejla Kamerić (both from Bosnia-Herzegovina), and suggests that they offer insightful formal and narrative ways of rethinking the question of what makes a war film, as well as what constitutes a woman’s experience of war. By arguing for a continued, strategic and locally specific use of the term women’s cinema, the author deploys feminist analytics towards inscribing these filmmakers’ work into the transnational flows of knowledge production about marginalized groups and non-Western geographies.
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Umjetnost riječi , 2016
This essay asks what happens to hegemonic discourses around gender, identity and subjectivity whe... more This essay asks what happens to hegemonic discourses around gender, identity and subjectivity when the stable frame of reference within which they typically operate shatters under the pressure of cinematic and narrative oversaturation. Through a close analysis of Nicholas Ray's film noir In a Lonely Place (1950), the article traces the representational undermining of post-WWII Western masculinity, which is revealed to be in a state of perpetual crisis. It shows how sexual difference is depicted as a key element informing the notion of agency, but with a surprising result: instead of the typical hierarchy of classic Hollywood films—in which the woman on the screen occupies a passive to-be-looked-at position (Mulvey 1975)—In a Lonely Place complicates the formula by giving its female protagonist more agency over the narrative than its male anti-hero, thereby marking the film as a provocative feminist text. In later parts of the essay, I focus on the film's noir features such as narrative loose ends and plot inconsistencies, and what they reveal about the inherent violence of normative forms of storytelling, both cinematic and otherwise.
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Feminist Media Studies, 2015
This essay examines the upward mobility appeal of Serbia's post-socialist feminine libidinal entr... more This essay examines the upward mobility appeal of Serbia's post-socialist feminine libidinal entrepreneurship rooted in the figure of the sponzoruša (“sponsored woman”), and closely tied to the aesthetics of turbo folk. Contrary to the dominant critical dismissal of the phenomenon as inherently anti-feminist, the sponzoruša figure has the potential to reveal deeply contradictory tendencies of popular culture: to both reaffirm and transgress some of society's most troubling hierarchies. Here I offer a reparative reading of the sponzoruša as a figure that deploys her very features of sexual difference towards an enactment of class mobility during precarious times. I examine how, within the performative domain of such technologically mediated, post-socialist femininity, a potentially transgressive challenge to traditional gender roles takes place. This challenge, embodied in what I call a cyborg-goddess, exposes both femininity and class identity as historically and economically contingent factors of women's material and cultural marginalization. I argue that turbo folk's sponzoruša has the potential—though not a guarantee—to short-circuit a clean boundary between nature and technology and the ways in which this binary constitutes womanhood as such.
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KinoKultura, 2015
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Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 2014
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Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2014
This article examines recent cinematic representations of male youth subcultures in two Serbian f... more This article examines recent cinematic representations of male youth subcultures in two Serbian films – Skinning (Stevan Filipović, 2010) and Tilva Ros (Nikola Ležaić, 2010) – and argues that subcultural belonging in these films performs an enactment of phantom pain which haunts youth in the wake of the turbulent times that their parent culture went through in recent history. By adopting the framework of ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 2008), I inspect how vicarious remembering of violence permeates the youth's subcultural activities, whether that violence is now directed at others (as is the case with the skinhead youth in Skinning), or towards one's own body (as is the case in Tilva Ros). These depictions of subcultural youth lives offer glimpses into the clandestine processes of coming to terms with the postmemory of a troubled inheritance of catastrophe. They also bring to the fore the classed implications of trauma, war, violence and memory, as in both films social class plays a pivotal role in the youth's proximity to phantom injury of recent decades. Utilising some of the key works of subcultural theory, I look at how youth cultures in the two Serbian films attempt (and ultimately fail) to resolve the contradictions of their parent culture's ambivalent relationship to the recent volatile past whose effects extend into the present. In my analysis, a virtually unexplored theme is brought forth – that of the relationship between social class, subcultural activity and traumatic memory. I ask how the relationship between youth's class-informed subcultural belonging is oriented with respect to its proximity to the consequences – social, economic, political, but also cultural – of recent wars and catastrophe left in their wake.
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Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, 2014
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Camera Obscura, 2013
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In Maša Kolanović, ed. Komparativni postsocijalizam: Slavenska iskustva. Zagreb: Zagrebačka slavistička škola, 2013
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Books by Dijana Jelača
This new textbook situates feminist film theory within the larger framework of transnational scholarly approaches, as well as decolonial, queer, disability studies, and critical race theories. It offers a much-needed update on pedagogical approaches to feminist film studies, providing discussions of filmmakers and films that have been overlooked in the field, or that are overdue for further analysis.
Each chapter is supported by a variety of pedagogical features including activities, key terms, and case studies. Many of the activities draw on contemporary digital media, such as social media and streaming platforms, to update the field to today's changing media landscape.
Articles by Dijana Jelača
This new textbook situates feminist film theory within the larger framework of transnational scholarly approaches, as well as decolonial, queer, disability studies, and critical race theories. It offers a much-needed update on pedagogical approaches to feminist film studies, providing discussions of filmmakers and films that have been overlooked in the field, or that are overdue for further analysis.
Each chapter is supported by a variety of pedagogical features including activities, key terms, and case studies. Many of the activities draw on contemporary digital media, such as social media and streaming platforms, to update the field to today's changing media landscape.
Fri, October 14, 12:30 to 2:15pm CDT (1:30 to 3:15pm EDT), ASEEES 2022 Virtual Convention, VR4
CHAIR: Adair Rounthwaite, U of Washington
Roundtable Participants:
Katalin Cseh-Varga, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria) / George Enescu National U of Arts (Romania)
Dijana Jelaca, Brooklyn College
Vladimir Kulic, Iowa State U
Jelena Petrovic, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria)
Jasmina Tumbas, University at Buffalo