Palimpsexts and Body Doubles: Autotheory in the Films of Agnès Varda, Albertina Carri, Laetitia Masson, and Lina Rodriguez

Iliana Cuellar
Comparative Literature
UC Riverside

“Palimpsexts and Body Doubles” examines self-reflexivity and intersubjectivity in the autobiographical films of feminist directors from Latin America and France. My project breathes new life into scholarship on Agnès Varda and Laetitia Masson while also putting them in dialogue with Albertina Carri and Lina Rodriguez, filmmakers from Latin America, an often-marginalized region in film production and scholarship. I organize the dissertation through the recurring motifs of palimpsexts to show the intricacies of their playful resignifying film practices. Palimpsext is a term that I have coined drawing together the words, “palimpsest” and “sext.” The latter word is used in the spirit of the feminist theorist, Hélène Cixous, and her seminal 1975 treatise on women’s writing, “The Laugh of the Medusa” where she declares, “Let the priests tremble, we are going to show them our sexts” (885). The palimpsext refers to a network of feminist cultural productions that directly counter the male-gaze by engaging the viewer in their world-making endeavor. My canon-rectifying dissertation makes significant contributions to film studies, media and cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, performance studies, as well as the area studies of French & Francophone and Latin America by reexamining the work of these filmmakers through autotheory.