Abstract

The crisis of traditional images of manhood in Western cultures, the disruption of nation-state primacy, and the revival of self-determination movements in the aftermath of globalization and the rise of neoliberal policies have caused a rupture in the stability of such concepts as nation and masculinity. This dissertation investigates the impact of these ruptures on the representation of gendered subjects in the subnational cinemas of Flanders, Scotland, and Quebec—that is film industries and imaginaries located in geopolitical contexts that lack nation-state recognition, but operate along the lines of national-belonging principles. Combining the methodologies of production history, film, and cultural analysis, this work looks at subnational cinemas from the interconnected standpoints of their institutional and representational developments. One the one hand, it maps how film production and funding infrastructures emerged in recent subnational contexts at the convergence of national and transnational interests. On the other hand, it considers how performances of gender and national identity are renegotiated in such complex geopolitical and cinematic scenarios. It is the central contention of this dissertation that subnational contexts, by virtue of their cultural and geopolitical hybridity, offer a significant set of possibilities for revisiting monolithic paradigms of national cinemas, identities, and gender power structures in the globalized era.