CURRENT RESEARCH
Feeling Freedom in Feminist Film Belgian/French director Chantal Akerman’s films are my touchstone for highlighting the power of discomforting feelings in feminist film. Feminist film theorists and feminist directors have focused on increasing race and gender diversity, breaking harmful stereotypes, and creating a body of avant-garde alternative cinema. My book suggests instead that it is the solicitation of discomforting feelings, depicted in characters onscreen and felt by viewing spectators, that could trigger desire for political change. Bodily sensations of suffocation, boredom, shame, cringe, and ambivalence are feminist film’s most powerful tool for transforming women’s relationships to each other and to political action. Such feelings force us to examine attachments—to raced and colonial hierarchies, fantasized ideas of motherhood and romance, individualized and autonomous notions of freedom—that must be left behind in order to embrace a relational freedom that values care, connection, and equality. |
Books and Edited Collections
Description: In Politics with Beauvoir Lori Jo Marso treats Simone de Beauvoir's feminist theory and practice as part of her political theory, arguing that freedom is Beauvoir's central concern and that this is best apprehended through Marso's notion of the encounter. Starting with Beauvoir's political encounters with several of her key contemporaries including Hannah Arendt, Robert Brasillach, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Violette Leduc, Marso also moves beyond historical context to stage encounters between Beauvoir and others such as Chantal Akerman, Lars von Trier, Rahel Varnhagen, Alison Bechdel, the Marquis de Sade, and Margarethe von Trotta. From intimate to historical, always affective though often fraught and divisive, Beauvoir's encounters, Marso shows, exemplify freedom as a shared, relational, collective practice. Politics with Beauvoir gives us a new Beauvoir and a new way of thinking about politics—as embodied and coalitional. This book won the 2018 Pamela Jensen Award for the Best Book in Politics, Literature, and Film from the American Political Science Association Description:
Lars von Trier's intense, disturbing, and sometimes funny films have led many to condemn him as misogynist or misanthropic. The same films inspire this collection's reflections on how our fears and desires regarding gender, power, race, finitude, family, and fate often thwart -- and sometimes feed -- our best democratic aspirations. The essays in this volume attend to von Trier's role as provocateur, as well as to his films' techniques, topics, and storytelling. Where others accuse von Trier of being clichéd, the editors argue that he intensifies the "clichés of our times" in ways that direct our political energies towards apprehending and repairing a shattered world. Reviews: Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2017. Review of Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier. Contemporary Political Theory. 20 February. (link) Description:
In (Un)Manly Citizens, political theorist Lori Jo Marso explores an alternative vision of citizenship in the writings of French Enlightenment Figures Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Germain de Staël. This critique transgresses the boundary between political philosophy and literature in turning explicitly to fictional texts as the site of an alternative conception of the self, citizenship, and democratic politics. Reviews: Johnston, Steven. "Redeeming Rousseau, Reclaiming Tragedy." Theory and Event. Vol. 5, Issue 2, 2001. (link) Gutwirth, M. "Perplexities of Female Personhood." Eighteenth- Century Studies. Vol. 34, No. 2, 2001. (link) Description:
Examining the lives and work of historical and contemporary feminist intellectuals, Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity explores the feminist struggle to "have it all." This fascinating interdisciplinary study focuses on how feminist thinkers throughout history have long striven to balance politics, intellectual work, and the material conditions of femininity. Taking a close look at this quest for an integrated life in the autobiographical and theoretical writings of well-known feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldman, and Simone de Beauvoir, alongside contemporary counterparts, like Azar Nafisi, Audre Lorde, and Ana Castillo, Marso moves beyond questions of who women are and what women want, adding an innovative personal dimension to feminist theory, showing how changing conceptions of femininity manifest themselves within all women’s lives. Reviews: Coole, Diana. "Book in Review." Political Theory. Vol. 35, Issue 2, 2007. (link) Titunik, R. "Book review: Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity," Perspectives on Politics. Vol. 5, No. 2, 2007. (link) ; |
Description:
The feminist thinkers in this collection are the designated "fifty-one key feminist thinkers," historical and contemporary, and also the authors of the entries. Collected here are fifty-one key thinkers and fifty-one authors, recognizing that women are fifty-one percent of the population. There are actually one hundred and two thinkers collected in these pages, as each author is a feminist thinker, too: scholars, writers, poets, and activists, well-established and emerging, old and young and in-between. These feminists speak the languages of art, politics, literature, education, classics, gender studies, film, queer theory, global affairs, political theory, science fiction, African American studies, sociology, American studies, geography, history, philosophy, poetry, and psychoanalysis. Speaking in all these diverse tongues, conversations made possible by feminist thinking are introduced and engaged. Reviews: Bibby, Leanne. 2015. The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 23 (1): 83–107. (link) Description:
By exploring the life and work of the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, this book shows how each of us lives within political and social structures that we can--and must--play a part in transforming. It argues that Beauvoir’s careful examination of her own existence can also be understood as a dynamic method for political thinking. As the contributors illustrate, Beauvoir's political thinking proceeds from the bottom up, using examples from individual lives as the basis for understanding and transforming our collective existence. This volume’s six tightly connected essays home in on the individual’s relationship to community, and how one’s freedom interacts with the freedom of other people. Reviews: Hawkesworth, M. "Review: Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking." Perspectives on Politics. Vol. 5, No. 3, 2007. (link) Ward, Julie. "Review: Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking by Lori Jo Marso; Patricia Moynagh." JAC. Vol. 27, No. 3/4, 2007. (link) Description:
Taking seriously the “W Stands for Women” rhetoric of the 2004 Bush–Cheney campaign, the contributors to this collection investigate how “W” stands for women. They argue that George W. Bush has hijacked feminist language toward decidedly antifeminist ends; his use of feminist rhetoric is deeply and problematically connected to a conservative gender ideology. While it is not surprising that conservative views about gender motivate Bush’s stance on so-called “women’s issues” such as abortion, what is surprising—and what this collection demonstrates—is that a conservative gender ideology also underlies a range of policies that do not appear explicitly related to gender, most notably foreign and domestic policies associated with the post-9/11 security state. Any assessment of the lasting consequences of the Bush presidency requires an understanding of the gender conservatism at its core. Reviews: Marso, Lori. "Book Review: George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)." New Political Science, 2008. (link) "Book Review: Michaele L. Ferguson and Lori Jo Marso, eds, W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency University Press, 2007." Feminist Theory. Vol. 9, 2008. (link) Sylvester, Dar. "Book Reviews." Politics and Gender. Vol. 4, Issue 3, 2008. (link) |
Selected Articles, Symposia, and Essays
Articles
“Feminist Cringe Comedy: Dear Dick, The Joke is On You,” Politics and Gender, March 2019. Winner of the Wilson Carey McWilliams Prize for Best Paper on Politics, Literature, and Film, American Political Science Association.
“Freedom’s Poses,” Political Research Quarterly 70 (4), 2017.
"Perverse Protests: Simone de Beauvoir on Pleasure and Danger, Resistance, and Female Violence in Film," SIGNS, June 2016.
“Solidarity Sans Identity: Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir Theorize Political Subjectivity,” Contemporary Political Theory, 13:3, August 2014. (link) Winner of the best article published in Contemporary Political Theory for 2014.
“Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt: Judgments in Dark Times,” Political Theory 40 (2): 165-193, April 2012. (link) Winner of the Susan Okin and Iris Marion Young Award--APSA 2013.
“H. Mark Roelofs: Prophecy, Existentialism, and Transformation,” New Political Science, 32:3, September 2010. (link)
“Feminism’s Quest for Common Desires,” Perspectives on Politics, 8:1, 263-269, March 2010. (link)
“Marriage and Bourgeois Respectability,” Symposium on Whatever Happened to Feminist Critiques of Marriage?, Politics and Gender, 6:1, 145-153, March 2010. (link)
“The Poverty of American Politics,” Special Symposium on the 2012 Election, Edited by Steven Johnston, Theory and Event 16 (1), February 2013. (link)
“Thinking Politically with Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex,” Theory and Event, 15(2), June 2012. (link)
Articles
“Feminist Cringe Comedy: Dear Dick, The Joke is On You,” Politics and Gender, March 2019. Winner of the Wilson Carey McWilliams Prize for Best Paper on Politics, Literature, and Film, American Political Science Association.
“Freedom’s Poses,” Political Research Quarterly 70 (4), 2017.
"Perverse Protests: Simone de Beauvoir on Pleasure and Danger, Resistance, and Female Violence in Film," SIGNS, June 2016.
“Solidarity Sans Identity: Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir Theorize Political Subjectivity,” Contemporary Political Theory, 13:3, August 2014. (link) Winner of the best article published in Contemporary Political Theory for 2014.
“Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt: Judgments in Dark Times,” Political Theory 40 (2): 165-193, April 2012. (link) Winner of the Susan Okin and Iris Marion Young Award--APSA 2013.
“H. Mark Roelofs: Prophecy, Existentialism, and Transformation,” New Political Science, 32:3, September 2010. (link)
“Feminism’s Quest for Common Desires,” Perspectives on Politics, 8:1, 263-269, March 2010. (link)
“Marriage and Bourgeois Respectability,” Symposium on Whatever Happened to Feminist Critiques of Marriage?, Politics and Gender, 6:1, 145-153, March 2010. (link)
“The Poverty of American Politics,” Special Symposium on the 2012 Election, Edited by Steven Johnston, Theory and Event 16 (1), February 2013. (link)
“Thinking Politically with Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex,” Theory and Event, 15(2), June 2012. (link)