From hairdressers and caregivers to reproductive workers and power-suited executives, images of women's labor have powered a fascinating new movement within twenty-first-century European cinema. Social realist dramas capture precarious working conditions. Comedies exaggerate the habits of the global managerial class. Stories from countries battered by the global financial crisis emphasize the patriarchal family, debt, and unemployment.

Barbara Mennel delves into the ways these films about female labor capture the tension between feminist advances and their appropriation by capitalism in a time of ongoing transformation. Looking at independent and genre films from a cross-section of European nations, Mennel sees a focus on economics and work adapted to the continent's varied kinds of capitalism and influenced by concepts in second-wave feminism. More than ever, narratives of work put female characters front and center—and female directors behind the camera. Yet her analysis shows that each film remains a complex mix of progressive and retrogressive dynamics as it addresses the changing nature of work in Europe.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Specter of Domesticity 2. Precarious Work in Feminist Film 3. Heritage Cinema of Industrial Labor 4. Voice in the Cinema of Labor Migration 5. Care Work and the Suspicious Gesture 6. Reproductive Labor in the Age of Biotechnology 7. Crisis Cinema Conclusion Notes References Film Index General Index |"By zooming out to include multiple countries and contexts and by zooming in on individual films about women workers, Mennel makes a strong case that European cinema has something important to say about gender and the economy." —Feminist German Studies
"Women at Work offers us a rich archive of cinematic depictions of female labor . . . It is to the credit of Mennel's sweeping cinematic analysis of the present that we now have a better understanding of not only the work women do across the continent but also the variety of new images European cinema has been offering us." —German Studies Review
"Highly recommended." —Choice
|Barbara Mennel is an associate professor of film studies in the Departments of English and of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida. Her books include The Representation of Masochism and Queer Desire in Film and Literature and Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys.