Feminist Documentary Cinema as a Diffraction Apparatus: A Diffractive Reading of the Spanish Films, Cuidado, resbala and Yes, We Fuck!

Orianna Calderon-Sandoval,Adelina Sanchez-Espinosa

doi:10.3390/socsci8070206

Abstract

Following Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology, we encounter feminist documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus: that is, as technologies that make part of the world intelligible to another part of the world in specific ways, by means of intra-actions between human and non-human agencies and objects of observation. We propose three analytical tools: materiality, emotionality, and performativity. In this article, we analyse two Spanish documentary films that render visible the potential of feminist documentary cinema for building alliances from and against precarity: Cuidado, resbala and Yes, We Fuck! Reading the insights and patterns raised in each case study through one another (i.e., diffractively), we discuss the intra-actions by which each of these films participates in co-creating the real. We end up describing three possible effects of feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema.

Highlights

We argue that feminist documentary films can be productively encountered as diffraction apparatuses: that is, as technologies that make part of the world intelligible to another part of the world in specific ways, by means of intra-actions between human and non-human agencies and objects of observation
Moscovici resorts to quantum-physics inspired metaphors to explain the active role of representations in co-creating the real: “Here and there we find a tendency to consider that social representations are the inner reflection of something external, the surface and ephemeral layer of something deeper and more permanent
We propose three tools for analysing documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus: materiality, emotionality and performativity

Summary

Introduction

This article explores Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology (Barad 2007) as a bridge between feminist documentary cinema and new materialist perspectives. We argue that feminist documentary films can be productively encountered as diffraction apparatuses: that is, as technologies that make part of the world intelligible to another part of the world in specific ways, by means of intra-actions between human and non-human agencies and objects of observation. The debate increasingly begins to be in favour of anti-realism, distinguishing two successive moments in feminist film production: Firstly, an effort to change the content of dominant cinema, by means of portraying women talking about their “real” experiences; secondly, a growing interest in film form. Theorists such as Julia Lesage have refused the sharp rejection of cinematic realism and have questioned this apparent succession. It is a year after, in 1973 that Claire Johnston talks about feminist cinema in terms of counter-cinema

From the Reflecting Mirror to the Diffraction Apparatus

Feminist Cinema

Three Effects of Feminist Material-Discursive Practices in Documentary Cinema