Female Agency and Documentary Strategies ― Subjectivities, Identity and Activism

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.

Boel Ulfsdotter is an independent scholar of Media Aesthetics and Visual Culture, currently affiliated with the Department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Anna Backman Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in Feminist Philosophy and Visual Culture at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.