Hali Autumn 2025

Abstract

This thesis sits at the intersection of feminist visual studies and phenomenological approaches to art, examining the conventions through which femininity is expressed and remembered within analog filmic media. Focusing on both still and moving, super 8, images, the project traces a lineage of spectral femininity: a mode of being articulated through visual languages of absence, ephemerality, and spectral presence. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theories of trace and hauntology, the research conceives femininity not as a stable visual entity but as an apparition that emerges through deferral, disappearance, and the material contingencies of experimental darkroom processes. Working through analog methodologies, the project explores presence as a condition constituted by residue and haunting. This archive is understood not as documentation of facts but as an index that is shaped and measured by erasure, affect, and embodied memory. The thesis follows a palpable lineage of women artists: singular figures such as Alix Cléo Roubaud, whose photographs stage a self between visibility and vanishing. Alongside these visual practices, Hélène Cixous’s writing provides a theoretical and poetic grounding for understanding the feminine as a force. Her call for a writing of the body resonates with image-making as a tactile inscription of vulnerability and desire. Through the tracing of this spectral lineage, artistic production is reconceived as a dialogic encounter across time. The project proposes new configurations of visibility within imagery. It argues that feminine presence, when approached as spectral and phenomenological , destabilizes normative visual paradigms and opens avant-garde modes of attunement to absence, vulnerability, and persistence. Through the interplay of material process, embodied knowledge, and affective resonance, the thesis offers a framework for understanding how femininity endures within and beyond the frame as an ongoing, relational, and haunting energy.