Lori Jo Marso

Research interests

Political theory : feminist, postcolonial, African American political thought; and Film

Recent Books:

Feminism and the Cinema of Experience (Duke U Press, 2024)

From popular films like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) to Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde classic Jeanne Dielman (1975), feminist cinema can provoke discomfort. Ambivalence, stasis, horror, cringe—these and other affects refuse the resolution of feeling good or bad, leaving viewers questioning and disoriented. In Feminism and the Cinema of Experience, Lori Jo Marso examines how filmmakers scramble our senses to open up space for encountering and examining the political conditions of patriarchy, racism, and existential anxiety. Building on Akerman’s cinematic lexicon and Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological attention to the lives of girls and women, Marso analyzes film and television by directors ranging from Akerman, Gerwig, Mati Diop, Catherine Breillat, and Joey Soloway to Emerald Fennell, Michaela Coel, Audrey Diwan, Alice Diop, and Julia Ducournau. Through their innovative and intentional uses of camera, sound, editing, and new forms of narrative, these directors use discomfort in order to invite viewers to feel like feminists and to sense the possibility of freedom.

2nd Edition of Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity (Routledge 2025)

Examining the lives and work of feminist thinkers throughout history, this book explores their struggles with politics, intellectual work, and material and existential conditions of femininity. A new introduction to this second edition resituates these themes in contemporary feminist literature and theory.