The “Whatness” of Ms. Magazine and 1970s Feminist Film Criticism Available to Purchase

This essay explores the breadth of feminist writing on film in Ms. magazine in the 1970s. It begins by analyzing and demonstrating the potential reading practices that this archive of writing invites and then turns to recurrent points of focus in the magazine regarding women's emerging attempts to author or authorize film production. It concludes by considering both the magazine's ruptures and intersections with academic feminist writings on film in the same period, with a focus on brief samples of work in the journals Screen and Camera Obscura. Overall, the author takes the position of a feminist historian in the not-so-distant future who turns to Ms. as the material evidence of 1970s film culture in order to query: What does this archive reveal about the history of feminist cultural production? What does it say about historical and contemporary blind spots in the feminist academy? And how might our understanding of this archive direct historical and theoretical work for feminist media scholars today?