Our bodies, our cameras: Women's experimental cinema in the U.S., 1964-1976

From the mid-nineteen sixties and into the mid-seventies, a significant number of women film and videomakers in the United States crafted experimental works that were simultaneously in dialogue with the concerns of the American avant-garde cinema and the (emergent) Second Wave feminist movement. Committed to both artistic innovation and political struggle, these women mediamakers often turned their cameras towards their own bodies in an attempt to perform both the female body and the experimental cinema as sites/sights of radical becoming. Their films and videos operate as convergences of these sites/sights: they invite interpretation, just as they resist easy categorization.;Our Bodies, Our Cameras takes up their invitation, and through the investigation of thirty of these film and video texts created by over twenty different women, it re-thinks the history of American experimental cinema. Explicitly representing the female body with (formal and thematic) complexity, women experimental mediamakers of the sixties and seventies established this period as a time marked by and through the body. My project's historical parameters are constituted by this type of textual production---from Schneemann's Fuses in 1964 to Lisa Steele's Birthday Suit---with scars and defects in 1976. Importantly, these years take us through the rise of women's experimental filmmaking from a small sub-group within the sixties avant-garde to a larger, independent feminist film culture by the mid-seventies.;Though my project sometimes draws from the personal histories of many of these women mediamakers, it is not an auteur study. Instead, it locates and interprets the strategies, pre-occupations, and themes that emerge across and among these women's texts. The individual chapters in Our Bodies, Our Cameras (1) flesh out the patterns of what I call "subjunctivity" in women's experimental "body" films and videos, (2) survey feminist mediamakers' on-screen negotiations of domesticity, (3) mine the intertextual relationships between women's avant-garde media projects and popular culture of the period, and (4) tune into and study the reverberations between Second and Third Wave feminist cinema.