Harvey Weinstein, once one of the most powerful film producers and a titan of Hollywood, probably never anticipated such a disgraceful end to his career. On a chilly day in a New York City courtroom in March 2020 he looked puzzled and frail on a wheelchair while his final sentence was read out to him. The jury had found him guilty of two of the five charges he faced and sentenced him to 23 years in jail for sexual abuse. Six women who had testified against him were in tears holding one another tight. This was the kind of cathartic scene that we mostly see in movies.
This scene deeply resonated with us during the last stages of editing this book, the product of a long period of collaboration, the final two years of which coincided with a worldwide transformation in how female agency and subjectivity is perceived, especially in film and television. Our editorial team consists of four women academics in the fields of film, television, media, and transmedia storytelling, from different generations and backgrounds. Our paths have crossed at İstanbul Bilgi University over the last two decades, since the beginning of this century. When we first started out it was beyond our imagination that the period of our collaboration for organizing an international conference on Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television (April 10–13 2019, İstanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul) and editing the outcome of the conference in this book would be marked as a cathartic transformation highlighting our title.
Many things have indeed changed since October 5, 20171 when the New York Times first broke the story of high-profile actresses accusing Weinstein of sexual assault. With the help of social media and the #MeToo hashtag, women all around the world started to share their own experiences of harassment or assault. The floodgates had been thrown open. The culmination of similar cases fueled a global #MeToo movement and numerous revelations about many prominent men in media, journalism, and politics shook those sectors to its core. Accusations were almost identical: powerful men had used their influence to intimidate and coerce women into performing sexual acts or enduring sexual harassment against their will. With the Weinstein case, the mainstream media conveniently focused on the famous actresses who identified themselves as victims. Yet, the MeToo movement galvanized complaints in other industries as well, such as tech companies in Silicon Valley, auto-plants or service sectors like tourism. Many well-known women in the entertainment sector jumped on the bandwagon, as in Oprah Winfrey’s speech2 promising young women “that a new day is on the horizon” at the Golden Globe Awards in 2018. Time Magazine declared the MeToo Movement and “The Silence Breakers” its Person of the Year.
#MeToo definitely opened a new chapter in how scriptwriters of films and TV series began to challenge gender norms and focus on strong women character representations touching on controversial themes, stories of the margins, especially by those most vulnerable to sexual violence—women of color, Indigenous women, queer and trans youth. Those third-rail subjects not only inspired millions but unsettled them. While the Weinstein scandal was tarnishing the reputation of famous film and television celebrities (including Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Louis C. K., Ben Affleck, Brett Ratner, James Toback, Matt Lauer, and Charlie Rose) streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime added new productions of female-injected series to their watch lists. For instance, women-centric series such as Big Little Lies and The Handmaid’s Tale won big at the Golden Globes and Emmys. HBO had to equalize pay for men and women, and The Crown agreed to pay its male and female leads equally.
After Kevin Spacey was fired from the show House of Cards, Robin Wright stepped into the lead as a bigger success. In the midst of all the developments mandating women in the director’s chair, studios’ mentoring programs, and actresses’ demands on producing roles to have more control, the #MeToo movement revealed the continuing lack of women shaping female characters and storylines. Of the top 100 grossing films of 2017, women represented 8% of directors; 10% of writers; 2% of cinematographers; 24% of producers and 14% of editors, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.3
A New York Times analysis has found that, since the Weinstein scandal broke, at least 200 prominent men have lost their jobs after public allegations of sexual harassment, yet only forty-three percent of their replacements were women. Of those, one-third is in news media, one-quarter in government, and one-fifth in entertainment and the arts.4
Although no other nation has experienced anything close to the US, the impact of the #MeToo movement was nonetheless global in the media and entertainment sectors, yet at times complicated. For instance, in France where seduction is treated as cultural norm, actress Catherine Deneuve co-signed a letter depicting #MeToo accusers as puritanical. Scandinavia, long a bastion of gender equality, was not totally immune. In Norway, reports of harassment in media organizations were followed by a petition signed by almost 500 women complaining of harassment and abuse in the acting profession.5 Women in Italy, Spain and other European countries began to speak out, detailing how they were discriminated against and sexually exploited. According to United Nation Women Report estimates, between 2016 and 2019 #MeToo and its sister hashtags garnered 36 million social media impressions from many parts of the world across languages and beyond borders.6
This #MeToo explosion included Turkey (under the hashtag #SenDeAnlat), where domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment cases remain alarmingly high. According to the “We Will Stop Femicide” Platform, consisting of different women’s rights NGOs, 41% of women living in Turkey have suffered from sexual assault at least once in their lives, and 93% of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment.7 Similar to Hollywood, though, the #SenDeAnlat movement was spearheaded by celebrities such as Sıla Gençoğlu, one of the country’s most popular female singers, filing a legal complaint against her boyfriend, actor Ahmet Kural, accusing him of violence and revealing the details on social media in 2018.
Amidst this turmoil, our incentive to organize an international conference on Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television turned out to be a more timely intervention than any of us could have foreseen. The passing of Agnès Varda on March 29, 2019 put her on the agenda, even more than she had been during the previous years, due to her lifelong devotion to gender equality and her unique vision of filmer en femme. Just a month before her passing, her final film Varda par Agnès (2019) premiered at Berlin Film Festival. Her joy of life, resilience and intimacy was celebrated as an alternative to the masculinist policies poisoning the film industry in that final festival she attended with her daughter and producer, Rosalie Varda, and her entire crew. The global response to her passing manifested a deep love and appreciation of not only her work but her life in general and demonstrated how it was no longer possible to demarcate the personal lives from the works of artists. The tone of the consensual global obituary for Varda was starkly different from the controversial one for Bernardo Bertolucci, who had passed a few months earlier in November of the previous year. His oeuvre was no longer mentioned with the idoli...
