Lori Jo Marso examines a diverse group of feminist film and cinema to show how filmmakers scramble our senses to open up space for encountering and examining the political conditions of patriarchy, racism, and existential anxiety.
From popular films like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) to Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde classic Jeanne Dielman (1975), feminist cinema can provoke discomfort. Ambivalence, stasis, horror, cringe-these and other affects refuse the resolution of feeling good or bad, leaving viewers questioning and disoriented. In Feminism and the Cinema of Experience, Lori Jo Marso examines how filmmakers scramble our senses to open up space for encountering and examining the political conditions of patriarchy, racism, and existential anxiety. Building on Akerman’s cinematic lexicon and Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological attention to the lives of girls and women, Marso analyzes film and television by directors ranging from Akerman, Gerwig, Mati Diop, Catherine Breillat, and Joey Soloway to Emerald Fennell, Michaela Coel, Audrey Diwan, Alice Diop, and Julia Ducournau. Through their innovative and intentional uses of camera, sound, editing, and new forms of narrative, these directors use discomfort in order to invite viewers to feel like feminists and to sense the possibility of freedom.
“Camerawork is motherwork: beyond any opposition between activity and passivity, care and creation, singularity and commonality. Lori Jo Marso’s new book exhorts us to join in nothing less than the feminist project of transforming the world. In the meantime, it holds us, like the films it discusses, in a space where we can bear and explore our anxiety, ambivalence, even dread. A must-read for anybody who has access to a camera.” - Domietta Torlasco, author of (The Rhythm of Images: Cinema beyond Measure) “Lori Jo Marso’s contention that film has the ability to invite viewers to feel like feminists makes a significant intervention in feminist film theory. She shows that representing the experiences or struggles of women is less important than the creation of responses in the spectator that can be understood in feminist terms. Her claim that authentic representation is not central to feminist cinema, for example, is newly necessary in an age in which ‘representation’ has become once again central to popular feminism. An exciting, original, and beautifully argued book.” - Rosalind Galt, author of (Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization)
Lori Jo Marso is Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, Professor of Political Science, and Director of American Studies at Union College. She is author of Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter and coeditor of W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender, both also published by Duke University Press.
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