Wandering Women in Cinema, from Julie to Star: Female Subjectivity and Female Spectatorship in Feminine Road Films

This paper serves to explore how female subjects are represented in films featuring a woman on the road in ways that can create a female gaze, as an alternative to the male gaze. It looks for answers in four films from the 1970s to 2016, all made by female filmmakers, which are Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), Vagabond (Sans Toit Ni Loi) (1978), Wendy and Lucy (2008) and American Honey (2016). All four films share approaches that reject objectification in the depiction of females, but each is distinctive in their filmi strategies. Focusing on each work individually while attempting to make comparisons with others, this paper also aims to connect the shift of strategies in these works to the related discussion in feminist film theories