Dinner Speech - Barbara Mennel

This lecture introduces my research project  ‘Women and Work in Contemporary European Cinema’ in the context of film studies and feminist theory about work, especially reproductive labor. I present an excerpt from my project on the cinematic representation of reproductive labor in the age of biotechnology with a reading of Mark Romanek’s 2010 film Never Let Me Go. I ask how cinema translates technological development into a filmic language, how it (mis)represents scientific knowledge, and what ethical questions it raises. As biotechnological advances transform our understanding of reproductive labor, I tease out their implications for rethinking  feminist theory.