Negotiating the feminist group: Lizzie Borden’s Regrouping (1976)

Abstract

This article considers Regrouping, a ‘failed’ film by Lizzie Borden, to think about the dynamics of feminist group-work in the Women’s Liberation Movement. I argue that the film, both in its subject and in the film project, explores conflict in sisterhood through its experimental collaborative approach as well as in its filmic qualities. Using literature surrounding feminist organizational practices, I explore group behaviours present in the film project through the tensions between Borden’s portrait of feminist collective practice and the group’s representation and agency within the process. I also consider the need to reinstate Regrouping, largely unknown and withdrawn from circulation, as an important feminist document that works through the complex negotiations of feminist collaboration that took place in the 1970s.