This paper derives from a research project concerned with how women’s mainstream filmmaking across a range of Hollywood genres has since the late 1980s challenged a number of existing paradigms of film engagement, feminist and beyond. After outlining the broad parameters of the research – which also takes in films by Amy Heckerling, Sofia Coppola, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Kimberly Peirce and Greta Gerwig – it will take the case study of Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit (2017) to illustrate some of its concerns. Specifically, the paper will draw on affect theory to argue that Detroit demonstrates the way in which socially constructed, individually experienced emotions engender material realities, at the levels of both content and form. In the first place, the film depicts graphically how violence is a consequence of (groundless) collective fear, by focusing on the true story of the murder of several African Americans in 1967 after one of them angrily shoots a toy gun that is mistaken for a real one. In the second, it relies heavily for its emotive power on a self-conscious engagement with various genres – in particular the war film and the sacrificial trauma film (King 2011) – and specific films, including from Bigelow’s own oeuvre. This approach invites a cerebrally engaged mode of spectatorship, yet one that is also viscerally affecting: in its impetus not only to claim but also to demonstrate how even the most collectively significant actions and events are rooted in personal experiences, feelings and mental states, the film works on individual, embodied viewers through collective structures of feeling negotiated by over-determined genre films. Thus echoing Steve Shaviro’s well-known analysis of Blue Steel (1990) to illustrate how “Bigelow affirms and celebrates visceral immediacy as an effect of simulation” (1993, my emphasis) through heightened genericity, this reading also gives the lie to old models of film theory that have sought to separate the (gendered) domains of thought and sentiment. In so doing it posits a ‘cine-fille’ female film author instantiated by a mode of address that is formally feminist and queer.