The “scandalous female genre” has long had box-office value and cultural presence. This seminar explores the history of such women in films. We will first discuss genre conventions: how film style and storytelling present and comment on scandalous behavior. We then will explore how film-industry conditions permit and encourage portraying scandalous females. Each week we will engage a key question of interpretation: whether the character’s scandalous behavior is shameful, or whether it reveals and critiques gender norms and social-cultural conventions. This seminar covers: early film melodrama; the 1920s “new woman”; Production Code self-censorship (precode sexual-harassment films, code-era exploitation and containment of scandalous women, and postcode “adult-theme” women); how film promotion employs gender, genre, and star images; scandalous and unruly women of color; and second- and third-wave feminist icons.
