Maïwenn’s Pragmatisms: Cinematic Re-Symbolizations of the Feminine Negative ¹

This essay is motivated by a befuddlement as to why Maïwenn’s work has not received more critical attention even though she is one of the few female directors to successfully maintain a career in a still extremely male-dominated profession. While there has been doubt in the public sphere as to whether Maïwenn is or is not ‘feminist,’ we demonstrate that her œuvre eruditely, provocatively, even problematically engages the theoretical legacies of Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, and Hélène Cixous. Moreover, we argue that she engages the feminine negative as a feminist gesture. In so doing, Maïwenn’s work resists facile reception of feminist philosophy in film. Instead, she displays the contradictions of what it means to consider feminism in our contemporary moment, and for generations to come, especially through the child, a central figure in her work. In a close reading of her film Pardonnez-moi (Citation2006), we focus on how the consumption of food in the family setting becomes a means of negotiating both Maïwenn’s childhood trauma and the role that cinema has played throughout her life. Our objective is thus twofold: to “nuance” Maïwenn’s work as one that is attuned to discourses of the feminine while also working through a genealogy of gender and feminist studies. We conclude with a reflection in conversation with postfeminism, and what it means to teach Maïwenn’s early films in our present-day classrooms.