Critical Reflection

Always radical, always engaged, always personal. Either scholarly or polemic writing that engages with feminist visual culture and feminist theory and history from a contemporary perspective. Our authors provide ground for reassessment of existing paradigms or subversive recuperation and reinterpretation.

Revisiting her connection with Saint Rosalia, Jay offers a new materialist reflection on religion, femininity and screen technology.

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Applying philosophical analysis to Arrival (2016), the authors show it as a unique and groundbreaking female driven sci-fi narrative.

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Using the title film as a case study to promote ‘prolapse awareness’, Mulraney argues for animation as a powerful feminist tool.

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Examining how Varda confronts biological time with cinematic time, Tuan explores her feminist use of the essayistic form as self-portraiture.

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Stob analyses Varda’s short 7P., Cuis. S. de b… (à saisir) to demonstrate its radically original take on care, its time, and its cost.

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Kaufman considers Varda’s formulation of memory by following a recurring photograph from Ulysse to Les plages d’Agnès and Visages Villages.

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Oliver-Powell considers practices of care in the personal, artistic, and working relationships between filmmakers and their subjects.

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Palmer’s analysis of Varda’s entropic, applied cinephilia broadens our grasp of her overlooked formative years in post-war France.

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Kennedy-Karpat proposes that Varda’s commentary on gendered violence is structured by formal elements that complicate viewer engagement.

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Barkhausen shows Varda’s Los Angeles films as ‘two sides of the same coin’ in an insightful exploration of the poetics of fiction and documentary.

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WHO SUPPORTS US

The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.

However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:


Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers

Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey