Sarah Fine begins her response by calling Ayelet Shachar's lead essay "a Leviathan for the twenty-first century." We have become accustomed to a “traditional” picture of the modern state where sovereign authority is clearly delineated by borders lying at its territory’s edges, but as Shachar shows, this is an illusion. Just as Hobbes's Leviathan was a protean entity, capable of changing its form when required, so borders are transforming to suit the evolving legal and political landscape. Fine proceeds to outline Shachar's analysis of how borders function in practice. She then describes and assesses three possible responses to "living among monsters." The first of these is to admit defeat. The second—Shachar's preference—is to try to tame the monsters through legal methods: extending protections to follow the de-territorialized model, making available more safe, legal routes to places of protection. Fine observes that Shachar's preference for such methods derives from a “non-idealist” attitude to the shifting border that recognizes states’ sovereign authority to regulate movement. While agreeing that this response would be "much better than what we have now," Fine argues that it would leave many of the “dark corners” of migration control unlit. Her preference, the third response, is to fight back through grassroots political resistance. At the same time, she observes that the power of the shifting border is rooted in the belief that migration control is a fundamental sovereign right of states, and questions whether this belief is really justified.

This chapter investigates Catherine Deneuve's films of the 1970s; their role in shaping her star persona and the ways in which they position Deneuve in relation to French political culture. It argues that Deneuve's inconsistent approach to feminist issues during the 1970s can be seen as a metonymical of the wider contradictions inherent to France's political culture during this decade, specifically in terms of the conflict that existed between liberalism and conservatism. France and its government's contradictory approach towards the condition of women's lives during the 1970s will provide a contextual background to Deneuve's own engagement with feminist discourses during this decade. The chapter explores the diversity of Deneuve's 1970s filmography through three key films: A nous deux, Courage fuyons and Zig zig. It also considers how Deneuve's contradictory star persona manifests itself within these films, and how each text might signal varying degrees of anti-feminism.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the work of Hispanic and Lusophone female filmmakers. It concentrates on the issues of critical discourse and debates and filmic or cultural representation, thereby seeking new ways of approaching the complicated status of Hispanic and Lusophone female identities and subjectivities through filmic and theoretical analyses and offering critical interventions and theoretical interrogations in existing scholarship. The book traces the historical connections that can be mapped vis-à-vis the production of films made by women and the process of social emancipation of women in societies that have been historically associated with a patriarchal and even heteronormative ideology. It looks at certain cinematic practices to raise questions of alterity in subjective and intersubjective processes, thinking, thus, of the question of femininity beyond a patriarchal system of thought based on lack and castration.

This chapter explores the conflicted sexual space, considering the perspectives of men and women in turn, but starting somewhat unconventionally with women's art. The image women offer of heterosexual relations is a very particular one that provides a clear starting point for any analysis of the new pornographies. In the heterosexual erotic, women are represented as choosing masochistic submission while men are sexual parasites, feeding off their compulsion to sexual activity. There is an intriguing short story by Stéphane Zagdanski entitled 'La matrice d'art' that brings together some of the tropes that repeatedly occur in the representation of women in contemporary pornographic artworks by men. 'La matrice d'art' provides a contemporary view on the battle between the sexes from the male point of view, and reconsiders women in an updated version of a very old role; the artistic muse.

A principal contribution of this revisionary biography is that Gabriel Harvey’s relationship with Edmund Spenser is fully contextualized. This is the first close reading of Gabriel Harvey’s Gratulationes Valdinenses (1578), a work he intended to serve as his Shepheardes Calender. Harvey reprinted a number of poems by members of the Leicester circle, but nothing written by Edmund Spenser, suggesting that Spenser and Harvey were not especially close friends in 1578. In the tributes to Elizabeth and Leicester, he rejoices at the queen’s letting him kiss her hand and to the suggestion that he will be sent to Italy. He gloats about the queen’s comment that he already looks Italian (vultu Itali). In Book Four, he addresses a series of eulogies to Sir Christopher Hatton, the Earl of Oxford, and Sir Philip Sidney. In the eulogy to Philip Sidney, Harvey proclaims, ‘Sum iecur’ [I am all liver], a proclamation that suggests that he is consumed with lust for Sidney. The phrase ‘cogit amare iecur’ [the liver knows how to love] becomes a refrain in later satiric treatments of Harvey beginning with Pedantius (1581). Harvey’s own Gratulationes Valdinenses is the source for those taunts.

It is typical of Jacques Rivette's films that his characters choose to place themselves in situations whose outcome is unknown and for motives that are mixed and confused. Since Rivette's films are literally composed as they are being filmed, the situation of the actors mirrors the situation of the characters while the situation of the film mirrors the situation of the action that takes place within it. The actors are complicit in composing the roles that they play as are the characters in the fiction. Similarly, the film seems to be seeking itself as it is being made and goes along. Once Marianne becomes Frenhofer's model and he begins to sketch and then paint La Belle noiseuse, both are set on a course to discover things about themselves and about each other by means of their situation, similar to the situation of the film.

This chapter applies Lukácsian models of literary and cinematic realism to an analysis of Wajda's Danton and Visconti's Senso, arguing that, whilst Danton is at variance with Lukács's models of ‘classical’ and ‘democratic-humanist’ realism, Senso can be considered a work of ‘inverse democratic humanist realism’, rather than ‘classical realism’. Senso can also be regarded as closer to the Lukácsian model than Danton in the sense that, in Senso, ‘the great social-historical antagonisms’ are embodied within the guise of relatively commonplace figures, as opposed to the ‘world-historical’ figures of Danton. The Lukácsian cinema is categorized in two types: films that employ the focused naturalist orientation of the Novelle, and films that employ the more ‘mediated’ framework of the novel. Thus, the chapter concludes by arguing that Lukács's theory of filmic realism can be associated philosophically with a naturalist, phenomenological model of cinematic realism

Though Mathieu Kassovitz has never explicitly defined them as such, there are compelling reasons for identifying his first three feature films, Métisse, La Haine and Assassins as a trilogy. This chapter concerns two feature films - Metisse and La Haine - due to their unambiguous association with a popular youth-orientated audience and attempts to entertain their spectator in order to engage him or her with the social issues addressed in the film. Just as themes of racism, ethnicity and cultural identity are foregrounded in two of Kassovitz's earlier short films, Fierrot le pou and Cauchemar blanc, so they loom large in the narrative of his debut feature Métisse. Kassovitz shows that while the mass media may well be the 'symbolic battle ground' on which socio-political struggles take place, considerable inequalities exist in this struggle in relation to power and access to the means of production.