Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image -Edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg

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"As Donna Haraway famously put it, nurtured by the profoundly innovative work of British feminist anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, whose anthropology of Western feminism is a scrupulous, exemplary attempt to decolonize its concepts: "It matters what matters we use to think other matter with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what description describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. "Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene."

This book offers intersectional, intergenerational, and international perspectives on nonfiction film- and videomaking by and about women, examining practices that range from activist documentaries to avant-garde experiments. Concentrating primarily on the period between the 1970s and 1990s, the contributions revisit major figures, contexts, and debates across a polycentric, global geography. They explore how the moving image has been a crucial terrain of feminist struggle—a way of not only picturing the world but remaking it.

The contributors consider key decolonial filmmakers, including Trinh T. Minh-ha and Sarah Maldoror; explore collectively produced films with ties to women's liberation movements in different countries; and investigate the cinematic expressions of tensions and alliances between feminism and anti-imperialist struggles. They grapple with the need for a broader more inclusive definition of the term “feminism”; meditate on the figure of the grandmother; reflect on realist aesthetics; and ask what a feminist film historiography might look like.

The book, generously illustrated with film stills and other images, many in color, offers ten original texts, two conversations, and eight short essays composed in response to historical texts written by filmmakers. The historical texts, half of which are published in English for the first time, appear alongside the essays.

MIT Press, 2022
English
Softcover, 512 pages
320mm x17mm