Feminist Sensory Ethnography: Embodied Filmmaking as a Politic of Necessity

Abstract

In this article, we call for a feminist sensory ethnography that centers relations of care, subjectivity, and power between filmmakers, film "subjects," and audiences. Through in-depth discussion of two films, Smile4Kime (Guzman 2023) and Nobel Nok Dah (Hong, Lai, and Mihai 2015) we explore three techniques of feminist sensory ethnography—a multisensorial theory of the flesh, sensory accompaniment, and narrative intimacy—that draw on feminist and non-Western genealogies of sensory knowledge production. We see this move away from observational filmmaking as a “politic of necessity” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015) through which the sensory is imbued with embodied knowledge.