Author Event! Lori Jo Marso's "Feminism and the Cinema of Experience"

Join us on Wednesday, March 19th at 4:30pm as we host author and critic Lori Jo Marso, who will be discussing her latest, Feminism and the Cinema of Experience. Joining her in discussion will be Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University Veronica Fitzpatrick.

About the book:

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.

About the author(s):

Lori Marso is the author or editor of nine books, most recently Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers; Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter; Politics, Theory, and Film: Encounters with Lars von Trier; and Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women which will be released in May 2025 in a second edition. She also regularly writes film criticism for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Marso has received the National Endowment for the Humanities Writing Grant, and several prizes and honors for her books and articles. At Union College in Schenectady, NY, she is the Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies. She lives in both Schenectady and New York City.

Veronica Fitzpatrick was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities from 2021-2023. She earned her Ph.D. in English and Film & Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh with a dissertation on representational and epistemological instability in modern horror and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. Her current book project draws on etymology, film theory, affect studies, and ordinary language philosophy to diagram precisely how, under the guise of “reality,” the hyper-produced fantasy phenomena of reality dating series register and refine our working definitions of intimacy and authenticity. In addition to her scholarship and teaching, she is a co-editor of and editor-at-large/podcast cohost at , where she regularly contributes criticism.

As always, signed copies will be available for audience members.

We can't wait to see you there!

Host or Publisher Symposium Books Staff