This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines current cinematic and media landscapes from the perspective of transnational feminist practices and methodologies. Focusing on film, media art, and video essays, the contributors chart innovative strategies for exploring contemporary visual cultures.

Film Feminisms offers a global and updated overview of the history, present-day concerns, and future of feminist film and theory. It introduces frameworks from phenomenology, affect theory, and psychoanalysis to reception studies, new media theories, and critical historiography, as well as engaging with key issues in documentary ethics, genre theory, and star studies. This new textbook situates feminist film theory within the larger framework of transnational scholarly approaches, as well as decolonial, queer, disability studies, and critical race theories. It offers a much-needed update on pedagogical approaches to feminist film studies, providing discussions of filmmakers and films that have been overlooked in the field, or that are overdue for further analysis. Each chapter is supported by a variety of pedagogical features including activities, key terms, and case studies. Many of the activities draw on contemporary digital media, such as social media and streaming platforms, to update the field to today's changing media landscape.

This ethnographic study examines the transnational relations among feminist movements at the end of the twentieth century, exploring two differently situated women’s organizations in the Northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco. The conventional narrative of globalization tells the story of inexorable forces beyond the capacity of individuals to mute or transcend. But this study tells a different story, one of social actors purposefully weaving cross-border relationships. From this vantage point, global social forces are not immaculately conceived. Instead, they are constituted by human actors with their own interests and identities, located in particular social contexts. Making Transnational Feminism takes what some have called "global civil society" as its object, moving beyond both dire predictions and euphoric celebrations to understand how transnational political relationships are constructed and sustained across social and geographical divides. It also provides a compelling case study for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in globalization, gender studies, and social movements.

Examines the exchanges within and through feminist film culture to expand critical horizons in film scholarship. Following in the footsteps of the filmmakers whose work it features--including Miranda July, Janie Geiser, Tracey Moffatt, Sally Potter, Cindy Sherman, Samira Makhmalbaf, Sadie Benning, Agnès Varda, Kim Longinotto, and Michelle Citron--There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond seeks to make trouble not only in the archives but also at the boundaries between artistic, industrial, political, critical, and disciplinary practices. Editors Corinn Columpar and Sophie Mayer have assembled scholarship that responds to women's work in the interstices between different branches of the film industry, modes of filmmaking, national or transnational contexts, exhibition media, and varieties of visual representation in order to assess the exchanges such work enables. Essays in the first three sections of There She Goes explore connections at the level of curation and exhibition, while the subsequent four consider local connections such as those between the film and the audience or between works within an oeuvre, down to those occurring on the surface of the film. Contributors reach beyond traditional screen cinema to interact with a larger field of artistic production, including still photography, music videos, installation art, digital media, performance art, and dance. Essays also pay particular attention to a variety of contextual factors that have shaped women's filmmaking, from the conditions of production and circulation to engagement with various social movements and critical traditions, including, but not limited to, feminism. By foregrounding fluidity, There She Goes presents a an exciting new appraisal of feminist film culture, as well as the intellectual and affective potential it holds for filmmakers and filmgoers alike. Scholars of film and television studies and gender studies will appreciate the fresh outlook of There She Goes.

In Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, Patricia White explores the dynamic intersection of feminism and film in the twenty-first century by highlighting the work of a new generation of women directors from around the world: Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf, Nadine Labaki, Zero Chou, Jasmila Zbanic, and Claudia Llosa, among others. The emergence of a globalized network of film festivals has enabled these young directors to make and circulate films that are changing the aesthetics and politics of art house cinema and challenging feminist genealogies. Extending formal analysis to the production and reception contexts of a variety of feature films, White explores how women filmmakers are both implicated in and critique gendered concepts of authorship, taste, genre, national identity, and human rights. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema revitalizes feminist film studies as it argues for an alternative vision of global media culture.

Investigates the theory and practice of transnational feminist approaches to scholarship and activism.

The Female Gaze in Documentary Film – an International Perspective makes a timely contribution to the recent rise in interest in the status, presence, achievements and issues for women in contemporary screen industries. It examines the works, contributions and participation of female documentary directors globally. The central preoccupation of the book is to consider what might constitute a ‘female gaze’, an inquiry that has had a long history in filmmaking, film theory and women’s art. It fills a gap in the literature which to date has not substantially examined the work of female documentary directors. Moreover, research on sex, gender and the gaze has infrequently been the subject of scholarship on documentary film, particularly in comparison to narrative film or television drama. A distinctive feature of the book is that it is based on interviews with significant female documentarians from Europe, Asia and North America.

The acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid global flows of people, culture, and information have intensified the importance of developing transnational understandings of contemporary issues. Transnational feminist perspectives have provided a unique outlook on women’s lives and have deepened our understanding of the gendered nature of global processes. Transnational Feminism in the United States examines how transnational perspectives shape the ways in which we create and disseminate knowledge about the world within the United States, and how the paradigm of transnational feminism is affected by national narratives and public discourses within the country itself. An innovative theoretical project that is both deconstructive and constructive, this bookinterrogates the limits of feminist thought, primarily through case studies that illustrate its power to create new fields of research out of traditionally interdisciplinary lines of inquiry. Leela Fernandes discusses ways to approach, analyze, and capture processes that exceed and unsettle the nation-state within the transnational feminist paradigm. Examining the links between power and knowledge that bind interdisciplinary theory and research, she shines new light on issues such as human rights as well as academic debates about transnational feminist perspectives on global issues. A thought-provoking analysis, Transnational Feminism in the United States powerfully contributes to the field of Women’s Studies and related cross-disciplinary scholarship on feminist theory and gender from a global perspective.

Decolonizing Universalism argues that feminism can respect cultural and religious differences and acknowledge the legacy of imperialism without surrendering its core ethical commitments. Transcending relativism/ universalism debates that reduce feminism to a Western notion, Serene J. Khader proposes a feminist vision that is sensitive to postcolonial and antiracist concerns. Khader criticizes the false universalism of what she calls 'Enlightenment liberalism, ' a worldview according to which the West is the one true exemplar of gender justice and moral progress is best achieved through economic independence and the abandonment of tradition. She argues that anti-imperialist feminists must rediscover the normative core of feminism and rethink the role of moral ideals in transnational feminist praxis. What emerges is a nonideal universalism that rejects missionary feminisms that treat Western intervention and the spread of Enlightenment liberalism as the path to global gender injustice. The book draws on evidence from transnational women's movements and development practice in addition to arguments from political philosophy and postcolonial and decolonial theory, offering a rich moral vision for twenty-first century feminism.

The first of its kind in English, this collection explores twenty one well established and lesser known female filmmakers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. Sixteen scholars illuminate these filmmakers' negotiations of local and global politics, cinematic representation, and issues of gender and sexuality, covering works from the 1920s to the present. Writing from the disciplines of Asian, women's, film, and auteur studies, contributors reclaim the work of Esther Eng, Tang Shu Shuen, Dong Kena, and Sylvia Chang, among others, who have transformed Chinese cinematic modernity. Chinese Women's Cinema is a unique, transcultural, interdisciplinary conversation on authorship, feminist cinema, transnational gender, and cinematic agency and representation. Lingzhen Wang's comprehensive introduction recounts the history and limitations of established feminist film theory, particularly its relationship with female cinematic authorship and agency. She also reviews critiques of classical feminist film theory, along with recent developments in feminist practice, altogether remapping feminist film discourse within transnational and interdisciplinary contexts. Wang's subsequent redefinition of women's cinema, and brief history of women's cinematic practices in modern China, encourage the reader to reposition gender and cinema within a transnational feminist configuration, such that power and knowledge are reexamined among and across cultures and nation-states.