Raised Fists: Politics, Technology, and Embodiment in 1970s French Feminist Video Collectives

This article assesses the impact and import of 1970s French feminist video collectives, focusing on the relationship between technology, subjectivity, and embodiment. It investigates how early portable video technology provided the tools for an exploration of subjectivity as collective and political, focusing in particular on the work of French activist video collectives Vidéo Out, les Muses s'amusent, and les Insoumuses. Arguing for protoqueer, nomadic, dissident, and performative modes of expression, it demonstrates that collective subjectivity never follows a clear, linear pattern but rather emerges, so to speak, through the lines, much like the video image itself.