Feminism and the Cinema of Experience, by Lori Jo Marso

For this first session of 2025, we are delighted to welcome Lori Jo Marso, author of Feminism and the Cinema of Experience (Duke University Press 2025).
She will be in conversation with feminist scholar Adèle Cassigneul (ENSAD Limoges) and cultural studies Professor Kelli Fuery (Chapman University).

Participants: 

Lori Jo Marso is Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, Professor of Political Science, and Director of American Studies at Union College (USA). She is member of the Board of Directors of The International Simone de Beauvoir Society. Lori Jo Marso has authored several books among which areFeminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women (Routledge 2006; 2025)and Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (Duke University Press 2017). She is coeditor of Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (OUP 2016) and W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (Duke University Press 2007). Feminism and the Cinema of Experience is her latest one. 

Adèle Cassigneul is a feminist scholar teaching at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Limoges (France). She holds a PhD in British Literature from the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France) and specializes in 20th and 21st century English literature, visual culture and queer and gender studies. She published several articles, poems, critical essays. She is also the author of several books including Voir, observer, penser. Virgina Woolf et la photo-cinématographie (PUM 2018) and Woolf, à l'oblique (Peregrines 2025), released the same day as this webinar. She is also the co-creator of Outsider, a journal of creative critique in literature and visual arts.

Kelli Fuery is a cultural studies and visual cultures Professor at Chapman University (USA). She is the author of several books including New Media: Culture and Image (Bloomsbury 2009), The Gift and Visual Culture: Doubles, Disruption and Exchange (VDM Verlag 2008), Wilfred Bion, Thinking and Emotional Experience with Moving Images (Routledge 2018), and Ambiguous Cinema: From Simone de Beauvoir to Feminist Film-Phenomenology (Edinburgh University Press 2022). Her research explores why we mediate the world around us in the ways that we do, examining how our inner worlds influence the social and cultural contexts which influence our choices. 

The book (presentation from the editor) : 

"From popular films like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) to Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde classic Jeanne Dielman (1975), feminist cinema can provoke discomfort. Ambivalence, stasis, horror, cringe—these and other affects refuse the resolution of feeling good or bad, leaving viewers questioning and disoriented. In Feminism and the Cinema of Experience, Lori Jo Marso examines how filmmakers scramble our senses to open up space for encountering and examining the political conditions of patriarchy, racism, and existential anxiety. Building on Akerman’s cinematic lexicon and Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological attention to the lives of girls and women, Marso analyzes film and television by directors ranging from Akerman, Gerwig, Mati Diop, Catherine Breillat, and Joey Soloway to Emerald Fennell, Michaela Coel, Audrey Diwan, Alice Diop, and Julia Ducournau. Through their innovative and intentional uses of camera, sound, editing, and new forms of narrative, these directors use discomfort in order to invite viewers to feel like feminists and to sense the possibility of freedom." https://www.dukeupress.edu/feminism-and-the-cinema-of-experience