All About Bette: The Cultural Legacies of Bette Davis
Northwestern University, October 5-6, 2018
Join us in a two-day conference about all things Bette Davis, from the industries that created her, to the actress herself as an industry. Davis remains emblematic of the historical era of Classical Hollywood Cinema (1929-1960), the aesthetic practices we describe as modernist, and the political practices we describe as feminist. What would it mean to read Bette Davis as modernist? How does Davis operate as a node that allows us to think about the reach of mass culture in shaping (and historicizing) early twentieth century conceptions of femininity, sexuality, embodiment, and agency?
An actress unafraid to play unlikeable women, Davis regularly wrested directorial and production power away from men, earning her the title of “the Fourth Warner brother” and transforming her from star to auteur. While there is a significant body of work on Davis in film and media scholarship, she has only made a few appearances in literary and cultural studies, primarily in feminist and queer discussions of this period, as in Lauren Berlant and Theresa de Lauretis’s readings of Now, Voyager. This conference seeks to build on that work, exploring the many ways in which Davis was central to mass and popular culture during Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Possible topics include
Smoking (as an industry/as an aesthetic/as a politic)
Melodrama and the woman’s film
Psychoanalysis
Modern femininity
Bitchiness
Davis and/as drag
Davis and literary adaptations (Maugham, Hellman, Strachey, Prouty)
Davis on Broadway (Ibsen, Williams, Sandburg)
The artist vs. the contract system
Gay iconicity
Material artifacts—publicity materials, costumes
Immaterial artifacts: the persistence of Davis in the internet age
Davis’s make up artists/costume designers (Perc Westmore, Orry-Kelly, Edith Head etc.)
Davis’s directors (William Wyler, King Vidor, Irving Rapper, Edmund Goulding, Joseph Mankiewicz, Robert Aldrich, etc.)
Davis and racial representation
Davis and whiteness
Davis and the historical imagination
Davis and WWII
Send proposals of approximately 150 words to Julia Stern (j-stern3@northwestern.edu) and Melissa Bradshaw (mbradshaw@luc.edu) by April 23, 2018.