Adaptation, Fidelity, and Gendered Discourses

Abstract

This article argues that despite the growing and articulate chorus of adaptation scholars who critique the language of fidelity and its consequential denigration of adaptation as an art form, some of these contemporary scholars continue to repeat reductive cultural hierarchies and the binary structure of fidelity criticism. I suggest that where this does happen, it does so because of a cultural binary that structures the language of fidelity: masculine/feminine. Consequently, critical discourses of adaptation often utilise a gendered language that constructs a masculine/feminine hierarchy between novel/film and frames the problems of fidelity and adaptation studies as feminine.

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