Since the mid-2000s, there has been a significant increase in female directors in Japan. Organized around the central feature of this emerging wave, this dissertation is a multifaceted project that combines historical research with reception studies, industry studies, gender studies, and formal analysis of films and marketing paratexts. In exploring the connections between film production, reception, exhibition, and auteur personas, I argue that the recent emergence of women into commercial cinema is fueled by gendered marketing tactics that seek to target contemporary female consumers. This focused gendering of auteur, product, exhibition space, and presumed spectator is changing the landscape of cinema in Japan, a process some refer to as "feminization." My dissertation rethinks the history of Japanese cinema with regards to the relationship between filmmakers as gendered bodies, distribution companies and marketing as patriarchal power structures, and the capital wielding demographic of female spectators as influential, but often neglected, consumers. / 2015-07-11

This study is part of the AHRC funded project “A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989”. The research is based upon the data gathered from interviews carried out with thirty geographically and generationally dispersed women about their memories of watching television in Britain between 1947 and 1989. I have used generation and gender as analytical categories, and have paid particular attention to the role of memory work in this type of historical research. This thesis aims to build upon previous work which has investigated the connection between generation and interaction with popular culture, but which has not theorised those relationships (Press, 1991; Moseley, 2002). The shifts and, indeed, continuities in the lives of different generations of British women are considered to gain a sense of the importance of generation in the production of identity. Significant differences arose between generations in terms of reflexivity and around questions of quality, value and taste as generations intersected with feminist and neoliberal cultures at different life stages. What was particularly interesting, however, was that despite the dramatic social change wrought by this post-war period, the narratives of women of different generations were surprisingly similar in terms of their everyday lives. Their memories largely centred around domestic relationships, and the women’s role as mother was often central to these. Following my investigation of the significance of motherhood to women’s production of gendered identity I consider the moments which disrupted that pattern and where women are enabled to conceive of an identity outside their familial role. Talk around pop music programming and desire had generational significance in the production of individual identities, again pointing to the importance of generation as an analytical category.