The politics of video intimacy: Julie Gustafson’s feminist documentary practice

ABSTRACT This article historicizes and theorizes the feminist documentary practice of Julie Gustafson, focusing on The Politics of Intimacy: Ten Women Talk About Orgasm and Sexuality (US, 1973) and Desire (US, 2005). Employing archival research and original interviews with Gustafson, it argues that both works interrogate intimacy’s use value for navigating new modes of documentary witnessing afforded by video. It begins by contextualizing The Politics of Intimacy’s modes of ‘intimate witnessing’ in relation to 1970s guerrilla TV movements, feminist documentary filmmaking, and women’s video art, as well as in terms of Gustafson’s involvement in the Manhattan-based Global Village Video Resource Center. It then analyzes how The Politics of Intimacy utilizes a ‘voice-centered’ feminist documentary method, which foregrounds video’s intimate appeals and polyvocal modes of address to create a multilayered account of women’s sexual experiences. Finally, the article contends that The Politics of Intimacy’s voice-centered approach crucially informs the interplay of generational voices in Desire, which documents Gustafson’s long-term collaboration with the Teenage Girls’ Documentary Project. Gustafson’s documentary practice takes on added complexity in Desire, as it maps emergent solidarities across generations of women video makers to reveal feminist voicing to be a complex, at-times contradictory expression of the self-in-relation.