Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Sophie Cook Successfully Defends Thesis

On January 15^th, 2021 Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Candidate Sophie Cook successfully defended her thesis. Cook’s thesis, Avant-Folk Experiments in Late Twentieth-Century American Feminist Moving Image and Literary Self-Representation was supervised by Film Studies Professor Dr. Catherine Russell.

Cook’s thesis explores the unique intersections of folk traditions with radical formal and political experimentation in feminist self-representational art made by queer and BIPOC women between the 1970s and the early 2000s. Representing a wide range of intersecting identities, this thesis confronts the limited and limiting patriarchal conventions of personal narrative and narrative “truth,” challenging mainstream American feminism’s often exclusionary politics by exploring paradigms of sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity in addition to gender. Centred in an examination of artistic interventions, Cook explores why and how personal storytelling became a privileged means of counter-discourse and rebellion for women across a diversity of subject positions and a range of media.

Congratulates to Sophie on her successful defense!