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Abstract:
This project is an analysis of the multi-vocality of images and voices presented by transnational feminist documentary filmmakers in their films about migrant women and the current women's diaspora that began in the late 20th century. Using an interdisciplinary framework, this project fuses feminist theories and rhetorical analysis to analyze the director's visual rhetorics and cinefeminist practices in the following films: Ursula Biemann's Remote Sensing (2001); Nilita Vachani's When Mother Comes Home for Christmas... (1996); and Lourdes Portillo's Senorita Extraviada: Missing Young Woman (2001). There are two overlapping questions that inform this project. Considering the powerful operational global economic shifts and emerging social practices within the language of mass media images, how do women documentary filmmakers challenge the social practices of dominant visual rhetorics without reinscribing them? And how do they account for the global flow of women migrants as nannies, factory workers, and sex workers in a way that acknowledges both their agency and the influence of global capital on their movements and lifestyle? The transnational feminist directors in this study challenge nationalistic as well as international social policies that determine women's identities and also question shifting economic trends that create new but often dangerous and illicit opportunities for migrant women. These three films offer insight into the condition of women migrants and women workers in the last ten years and discuss trends in global economics that sexualize women's work. Informed by a nonessentialist feminist approach to their women subjects, the feminist documentarians here can be defined by their self-reflexivity, challenge to binary terms embedded in global capital, alternative aesthetic practices, participation in transnational feminist networks, and counters to victimization narratives. Ursula Biemann, Nilita Vachani, and Lourdes Portillo's work simultaneously critiques the gendering of both global capitalism and documentary, and challenges the disciplinary bounds of film practices by utilizing political filmmaking practices to visualize women subjectivities in opposition to the overdetermination of women's bodies in Western media. The framework for close readings presented here is mainly a film/art historical approach. The chosen elements analyzed are voice and sound, narrative, editing sequences, and cinematography. This project redresses how overmediation invisibilizes women subjects and demonstrates some of the complex meaning(s) of migrant women's lives.
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