Sexuality and Discourses of Care in Feminist Documentary

This essay explores forms of feminist screen media that produce political desires about sexual liberation. I focus on key works, especially from the 1970s, that visualize women’s pleasure in conversation with the language of documentary, that is, on projects committed to matters of truth, agency, education, autonomy, and self-care—terms that began to shape sexual politics in the context of 1970s feminism. Political claims about sex and pleasure exist in a range of nonfiction films from the period, including experimental and realist documentaries, although there is as much to learn from what is clearly absent from the history of women’s documentaries about sexuality. I conclude with rare examples of feminist media projects about sexuality and orgasm that explore the connective tissue between the orgasmically radical as well as the social and the material conditions of women’s lives that affect their access to, and even need for, care and pleasure.