Women at Work in Twenty-First Century European Cinema

by Barbara Mennel

2022 Honorable Mention in Humanities

Jury Statement

Ranging across both arthouse and popular films from nearly two dozen European countries, Barbara Mennel’s Women at Work illuminates the diverse representations of women’s labor in twenty-first century European cinema. This groundbreaking book embeds culture-specific approaches to working women within the broader contexts of global financial crises, neoliberal capitalism, precarity, migration and the ethics and economics of biotechnology. Admirably attentive to the diversity of European feminisms and cinematic idioms, Mennel explores both the transcending of female stereotypes and their durability. Many films she examines show how female economic empowerment often rests on the exploited domestic and reproductive labor of migrant women. A captivating overview of current European cinema, Women at Work offers timely and discerning insight into the evolving meanings of feminism in contemporary Europe on both sides of the former Iron Curtain.