UC Riverside

This dissertation examines self-reflexivity and (inter)subjectivity in autobiographical film and video by women directors and artists through the emerging lens of autotheory. Through close readings of works by French directors Laetitia Masson and Agnès Varda, Argentine director Albertina Carri, Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo, and Latinx/Chicana performance artist Xandra Ibarra, I argue for the potential contributions of autotheoretical approaches in film and media studies by revisiting the question of the “I” in key debates on auteurism, spectatorship, and apparatus theory. I investigate how these artists engage in worldmaking projects by subverting formulaic narrative structures and generic expectations. In doing so, they disorient, obfuscate, and reorganize subjectivity, the “I,” and the gaze outlined by early debates in film and media studies. This dissertation introduces the palimpsext as a conceptual framework for analyzing autobiographical and intertextual media created by women and other marginalized subjects. Drawing on the image of the palimpsest—a manuscript effaced and written over multiple times—the palimpsext describes how meaning in these works is produced through layers of memory, cultural history, embodiment, and spectatorship. The palimpsext includes the text and histories referenced within a work, but also the experiences and interpretations of its viewers. Rather than treating autobiography as the expression of a singular, stable self, the palimpsext understands subjectivity as relational, fragmented, and collectively shaped. Through close readings of autobiographical films and videos, this dissertation argues that these works use the visual and affective capacities of cinema to create alternative forms of spectatorship grounded in critical engagement rather than passive identification. This dissertation demonstrates how autotheoretical film and video expand existing approaches to autobiography, feminist film theory and criticism by reimagining the relationship between self, image, and spectator.