Embodied Worlds and Situated Bodies: Feminism, Phenomenology, Film Theory

This article provides an overview of the emerging field of film phenomenology. It argues that the field is a different “scratching of the philosophical itch” that is created by an interrogation of film’s relationship to embodied and situated experience. Film phenomenology is not a movement as such, and yet in the past decade, a wave of scholarship, often written by female scholars and often feminist, has emerged in this field, and in the associated fields of cultural studies, political theory, and sense theory. Contrary to the supposed rigor of philosophical traditions (though this term is questionable in the context of phenomenology’s antiphilosophical stance), film phenomenologies retain a looseness and lightness of foot. This characteristic is often described as a lack of rigor under standardized disciplinary modes, where rigor stands in as a means of summarily dismissing methods that resist disciplinary singularity. In this context, the essay presents a plural, flexible notion of feminist film phenomenologies rather than a singular methodological enterprise, in examples of recent research in this field from the United States and United Kingdom.