Introduction: Feeling Like a Feminist
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Published:November 2024
A feminist cinema of experience uses visual language to depict the experiences of woman-identified characters, such that viewers are invited to mobilize, examine, and reassess the meanings we had previously assigned to our experiences. This discomforting process invites audiences to feel like feminists. The films and television shows explored in this book invite viewers to cinematically experience women’s experiences as an appeal to disorienting and uncomfortable feelings. They offer tastes, sounds, moods, fleeting images, durational focus, ambiance, atmosphere, or architecture that capture the “real” of lived experiences and help viewers sense what freedom (existential, relational, antiracist, nonhierarchical) might feel like. Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde cinematic style and Simone de Beauvoir’s emphasis on phenomenology guide the film choices and method of reading films that invite viewers to feel like feminists.