The “new” experimentalism? Women in/and/on film

This chapter deploys a range of feminist ethical philosophy and theory that embraces multiplicity and difference, to examine two contemporary art films by female artists Shirin Neshat and Gilliant Wearing. Including the work of French philosopher Marie-José Mondzain on the ethics of looking and Audre Lorde on the celebration of difference, the chapter combines close analysis of the films with these theoretical perspectives that specifically take up a plural, difference-based mode of feminist analysis. Deploying Mondzain's writing on visibility, affect and violence, it first contests spectatorial claims to universal affect by engaging with the bi-cultural positioning of Neshat's WOMEN WITHOUT MEN (2009) in relation to Euro-Western and diasporic/exilic Iranian conceptions of femininity and otherness (and the uneasiness of these cultural translations). Deploying Lorde's writing on difference and her attack on "universal' feminism, combined with Mondzain's approach to vision and imagination, the chapter then explores the active revisions of seeing and visibility, through moments of intense emotional creativity enacted in selected sequences from Wearing's film SELF MADE (2010). It concludes by suggesting that the engagements in this chapter offer a starting ground for what a restitution of difference in relation to contemporary experimental film (by women) might look like, particularly for contemporary tensions in feminist film studies