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Reading through one another insights raised by Teresa de Lauretis (1987; 1990), Donna Haraway (1988; 1992), Annette Kuhn (1994) and Karen Barad (2007), this article approaches feminist documentary cinema as diffraction apparatus and eccentric technology of gender. The article is divided into four sections. The first section follows Kuhn’s and de Lauretis’s definitions of cinema as technology of gender and of the subject of feminism as eccentric. We bring these ideas together with Barad’s and Haraway’s proposal of diffraction as an optical metaphor for the production of knowledges. In the second section we elaborate on what the application of a diffractive methodology to the analysis of documentary cinema would entail. We do so by putting forward three methodological tools: emotionality (Ahmed 2014), materiality (Olivieri, 2012), and performativity (Bruzzi, 2000; Butler, 1990, 1993, 2015; Barad, 2007). In the third section we apply this to the discussion of Spanish documentary No Existimos (Solano, 2014). We conclude by summarising how the diffractive and eccentric paradigms can contribute to a better understanding of the possibilities of feminist documentary cinema for co-creating and re-making the world.

Following Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology, we encounter feminist documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus: that is, as technologies that make part of the world intelligible to another part of the world in specific ways, by means of intra-actions between human and non-human agencies and objects of observation. We propose three analytical tools: materiality, emotionality, and performativity. In this article, we analyse two Spanish documentary films that render visible the potential of feminist documentary cinema for building alliances from and against precarity: Cuidado, resbala and Yes, We Fuck! Reading the insights and patterns raised in each case study through one another (i.e., diffractively), we discuss the intra-actions by which each of these films participates in co-creating the real. We end up describing three possible effects of feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema.

The author has spent nearly five decades working on the molecular structure of gaseous molecules using principally the method of electron diffraction. During this time he has seen and participated in the development of the method from its crude beginning in which the diffraction patterns were measured by hand and interpreted by eye, to the powerful, nearly automatic instrument-based methods of today. Accompanying this evolution in the method is a similar evolution in the complexity of the scientific problems. Whereas in the early days the molecules studied were necessarily simple and the parameter determinations accurate to a few hundredths of an Ångström, electron diffraction today is routinely applied to molecules with a 10-fold greater numbers of parameters and yields results 10 times more accurate. This article summarizes some of the many recollections accumulated by the author during that professional journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Karen Barad's diffractive methodology, we encounter feminist documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus: that is, as technologies that make part of the world intelligible to another part of the world in specific ways, by means of intra-actions between human and non-human agencies and objects of observation. We propose three analytical tools: materiality, emotionality, and performativity. In this article, we analyse two Spanish documentary films that render visible the potential of feminist documentary cinema for building alliances from and against precarity: Cuidado, resbala and Yes, We Fuck! Reading the insights and patterns raised in each case study through one another (i.e., diffractively), we discuss the intra-actions by which each of these films participates in co-creating the real. We end up describing three possible effects of feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]