Gesture, Revolt, and 1970s Feminism in John Cassavetes's A Woman under the Influence

This essay turns to John Cassavetes's 1974 film, A Woman under the Influence, in order to explore what remains unrepresentable about the complex eventfulness of 1970s US feminism. By reading the film through its emphasis on performance and gesture, I look to A Woman under the Influence both as an artifact of the shifting political and cultural logics of "women" as a category of collective experience in the 1970s and also as a generator of affect that tells us something about the historical complexity of 1970s feminism beyond its material, ideological, or directly political manifestations. The focus of the essay is on how we might historicize the production of 1970s US feminism as a mass-mediated event that exceeds our ability to fully represent it. That is, the essay looks to cinema as a means for making the polytemporal multiplicity of 1970s US feminism available as a historiographical question for feminist studies in the present.