In centering Audre Lorde’s work on the erotic, Lida Maxwell’s generous and insightful review of my book captures key points I hoped to convey regarding how feminist cinema’s most antipatriarchal political intervention consists of engaging and reorienting our senses to invite feelings of discomfort with expected (and too-often desired) norms of femininity, happiness, and future promise for woman-identified viewers. I argue in the book that feelings of discomfort, the creation of holding spaces where they are able to exist, and the new orientation to the world that these feelings create, invite individual viewers to “feel like a feminist.”

Charting examples of feminist cinema and television’s brilliant stagings of woman-identified subjects’ experiences, I argue that these experiences are created and intensified by cinematic mechanisms such as sound, image, montage, durational shots, color, and so on. Thus, these experiences and the feelings they might generate are always and necessarily mediated and artificial—as artificial, we might say, as the feelings patriarchy maps onto the deadening and life-denying path of what Simone de Beauvoir called “becoming a woman.”

I appreciate that Maxwell notices that my book’s attention to difficult and discomforting feelings is indebted to what Audre Lorde calls “true” feeling, but I deliberately do not use Lorde’s language of authenticity, truth, or knowledge to describe the feelings I find politically valuable. Instead, I draw attention to the fact that Chantal Akerman’s films (my touchstone in the book) constantly alert us to the fact that our experiences are always manufactured, but that we can nevertheless (together) create something new.

Maxwell reminds us that Lorde told Adrienne Rich about hearing a bird call in Mexico that suddenly made her feel everything was possible. I love this small fact that links Maxwell’s own lovely book on Rachel Carson to the moment I identify in I May Destroy You where Arabella hears a bird call and is able to pull herself out from a cycle of vengeance and despair to somewhere more hopeful and constructive. For me, the bird call need not be natural or authentic—the important thing is that it helps us notice something odd and disorienting, taking us out of our well-worn habits and feelings. This new experience, a scrambling of our senses, inspires us to connect to others, asking “Do you hear what I hear?”

My political “style” (or commitment) in the book is to treat characters in film and television as if they are “real” women with “true” feelings (knowing full well that they are not) and to connect them with the feelings viewers may (or may not) also be having as they “experience” the “experiences” of the characters on screen. Here I build on the phrasing of film scholar Vivian Sobchack who, in her 1992 book, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, theorizes cinema as “an expression of experience by experience” (p. 3).

My attempt to connect subjects and create new collectivities in shared spaces of disorienting feeling rests with the deliberately manufactured and creatively imagined aesthetic interventions that I study. I insist that these films and television shows help us notice that what we accept as ordinary can become newly unfamiliar, or enlivening, even as these scenes engender feelings such as ambivalence, stasis, horror, and cringe. In these new spaces, individual desires trained by racism, capitalism, and patriarchy are disrupted and maybe dislodged. Feeling like a feminist, an uncomfortable and difficult feeling, invites us to bond with characters on screen, or to refuse empathy and identification. Regardless, we begin to feel differently in these encounters. And in the best-case scenario, these feelings inspire us to reach out to others to collectively imagine and create better ways of living together.