In 1939, at the height of her stardom, the actress Shanta Apte went on a spectacular hunger strike in protest against her employers at Prabhat Studios in Poona, India. The following year, Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the extractive nature of the film industry. In Jaau Mi Cinemaat? (Should I Join the Movies?, 1940), she highlighted the durational depletion of the human body that is specific to acting work. This article interrogates these two unprecedented cultural events—a strike and a book—opening them up toward a history of embodiment as production experience. It embeds Apte's emphasis on exhaustion within contemporaneous debates on female stardom, industrial fatigue, and the status of cinema as work. Reading Apte's remarkable activism as theory from the South helps us rethink the meanings of embodiment, labor, materiality, inequality, resistance, and human-object relations in cinema.

Through the lens of women's tennis legend Serena Williams, this article examines the roles of masculinization and feminization as they relate to Black womanhood in sport. Over the course of much of her career, Williams was characterized as “aggressive,” someone who “bludgeoned her way” to success. But after the 2016 and 2017 announcements of her engagement and pregnancy, respectively, media characterizations shifted toward narratives traditionally aligned with femininity. Throughout, media discussion of Williams has been rooted in surveillance of her body, behavior, and closest relationships. Using feminist critical discourse analysis, this article argues that the noted shift in characterization was linked to Williams's strategic performance of docility and engagement with respectability politics, tied closely to her 2015 return to the Indian Wells Masters tennis tournament as well as her adoption of the traditionally feminized roles of wife and mother.

This article analyzes Black feminist performance through two recently released live performance films. Set a generation apart, Amazing Grace (recorded 1972, released 2018), featuring Aretha Franklin, and Homecoming (2019), featuring Beyoncé, are artful and personal—both inspired by Black culture and the artists' personal histories, and offer virtuoso performances. The article operates in three modes: scholarly, personal, and remembered. The scholarship draws on the work of Hortense Spillers, bell hooks, Daphne Brooks, and others, while the personal and remembered portions consider significant sites of feminist formation that have shaped the author's perceptions and analyses of Black feminist performance in the present. These, along with close readings of the films, tap into Black women's ways of knowing and performing subjectivity.

This article explores the contradictions that surrounded evocations of the clean, hygienic, healthy body in 1920s and 1930s Manila film culture, where moviegoing ephemera such as advertisements, exhibition artifacts, and popular media interfaced with other systems of knowledge implicated within the colonial project, such as bodily piety and public health. This juncture between consumer culture, cinema, and discourses of cleanliness places the cinema within an uncanny archive of aspirational embodiment that evokes older orders of power: accounts of cinemagoing measured theaters' worth in terms of sanitation and cleanliness; and in both English and Tagalog popular film magazines, advertisements for doctors, medicines, cleaning agents, and beauty products sat beside images of local and foreign stars. Circulating within a context of impending independence and cultural transition, this archive not only bolstered US colonial regimes of hygiene, sanitation, cleanliness, gender, and race, but also evoked residual formations of religious piety and Catholicism.

Automatic writing, or spirit writing, introduces a hidden feminist media history that puts into question the role of the author, divisions between automaticity and creativity, and the porosity of the (writing) body. In the nineteenth century, a predominantly female labor force began channeling spirits and producing scripts that were either entirely authorless or profoundly collaborative, a practice not so much about inscribing as de-inscribing. This article focuses on medium Geraldine Cummins, who brought her ghosts and guides into a court of law, revealing how the most ordinary tools of writing can be encountered as uncanny and talismanic presences. Her techniques of radical listening invite explorations of live-ness, presence, able-ness, and receptivity—themes that the article extends to the work of contemporary feminist artists and the illegible scripts of AI. How does automatic writing complicate the role of bodies who write as well as bodies of writing?

In January 2019, New York's Museo del Barrio canceled a retrospective of the Chilean multimedia artist Alejandro Jodorowsky due to public protest over his claim that he raped the lead actress in his 1970 film El Topo (The Mole). For decades, Jodorowsky's film was synonymous with the cult spectatorship it inspired among its New York audiences, who attended screenings ritualistically. This paper argues for a feminist critique of cult spectatorship that considers Jodorowsky's violence against women as central to the category of cult. By tracing Jodorowsky's evisceration of women's flesh from his early performance practices through his midnight movies, I show how the advent of cult spectatorship marked a historical transition away from classical spectatorship, characterized by absorption and linked to a rational public sphere, toward postmodern spectatorship, characterized by distracted consumption and linked to cybernetic control.