Overview

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender. Female Agency and Documentary Strategies centres on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth. The book examines the scope of authorship and agency open to women using these technologies as a form of activism, centring on notions of relationality, selfhood and subjectivity, and includes interviews with Hong Kong based activist filmmaker and scholar Vivian Wenli Lin and Spanish documentarist Mercedes Alvarez.

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9781474431743

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Reviews

That women are at the forefront of new documentary practices and forms should come as no surprise. Documentary, whether those writing its history have recognised it properly or not, has always had its female innovators, dating all the way back to Esfir Shub and Ruby Grierson. The focus on authorship, in relation to significant shifts, both technological and cultural, is useful and important especially considering how implicitly gendered discussions of authorship have been historically. But perhaps the most exciting contribution of this book is its feminist updating of activist media, another male dominated area of film/media studies, and one in which women's contribution has been nothing short of profound. This volume writes the history of the latest transformations in documentary with women filmmakers from all over the world, and not just the global north, at the center. It serves as a corrective and a model for future attempts to narrate that history going forward.--Dr Alisa Lebow, University of Sussex

Author Information

Boel Ulfsdotter is Reader in Film and Media Studies at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Ulfsdotter has recently published articles in International Journal of Fashion Studies (2021) and Journal of Film, Fashion & Consumption (2022). Additionally, she has published the twin volumes Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics, and Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity, and Activism (2018) with Edinburgh University Press. Ulfsdotter is a formally trained dressmaker, and freelance fashion and visual arts critic. Anna Backman Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Gothenberg, Sweden.

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