UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Since the 1960s, independent women filmmakers like Chick Strand, Peggy Ahwesh, Abigail Child, Su Friedrich, and Leslie Thornton have been appropriating film footage, sometimes using appropriation to critique dominant representations of women. Leslie Thornton’s Adynata, for instance, appropriates as well as reenacts instances of the subjugation of women and their bodies by men, and her later film Another Worldy similarly uses found footage to reveal the ways in which women’s bodies are placed under the control of the male gaze in a range of historical and cultural contexts. Since these influential critiques, however, a new generation of critical appropriation filmmakers has emerged in order to challenge the persistent tropes of femininity.