ABSTRACT
Within American cinema, the smart-chick film, as the most distinctive iteration of the new woman’s film in the twenty-first century, tends to be homogeneous and relatively narrow in terms of the socio-economic bracket that it represents, and from which its screenwriters, directors and audiences are all drawn. Notwithstanding, the evolution of the new woman’s film is a function of the way in which transnational feminism has generated an audience for films about women. The substantial number of female biopics produced by national cinemas—which, unlike the smart-chick film, do not shy away from national and international social issues such as “race,” religion, class, violence against women, among others (often as co-productions that include a number of funding sources)—offers a particularly salient example of how this narrow focus is augmented and diversified through an international production circuit. National female biopics, such as Amma Asante’s Belle (2013), thus provide a significant locus for interrogating the terms of contemporary transnational feminism, its legacy and its articulation of the Other. The goal, then, of this chapter is to understand this legacy as an integral dimension of the new woman’s film as an international phenomenon.
