Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema

"Reproducing Europe argues that current European films focus on female characters in order to negotiate the transformations of labor of the last decades. Based on an analysis of approximately two hundred European films made since 2000 that focus on the relationship of women to their work, the book analyzes a cross-section of national cinemas and film genres, clustered according to pertinent topics in the theories of gendered labor. As reproductive labor now also includes the "donation" of eggs and organs, and the possibility of outsourcing pregnancy, dystopian narratives tell stories of refugees and clones who become the raw materials for organ harvesting. Farces and comedies exaggerate the habits of the global managerial class, while social realist dramas capture precarious working conditions in narratives about unemployed women.