The difference in figuring women now

This article explores the feminism of contemporary women’s film, video and installation art through an analysis of the documentary evidential and the imagined in works by Emma Hart, Hala Elkoussy and Sarah Turner. These works are not about feminist issues as such, but each figures a woman, or women, in ways that, I argue, engage questions of sexual difference. I draw on Jacques Rancière’s characterization of politics to understand feminism as a politics of sexual difference, but also an ethics in relation to living, that is, as being and doing as a woman. At the same time, feminism is an aesthetic project in relation to the understanding of, and intervening in, the representation of woman and her imagining, her difference, so what is involved here, as well, is the politics of aesthetics. In examining the feminist politics of aesthetics, this article also considers how art engages us cognitively as affect as well as the thought, and asks the question: how should we think the affectual?