Beyond the Public Sphere. Film and the Feminist Imaginary. A Conversation with Zenia Yébenes and Nora Rabotnikof

Abstract

This article deals with how the feminist concept of the imaginary should be thematized as a topography of space and time. It also calls attention to two anthropological categories relating experience and expectations. Imaginaries are not material spaces but places that make us aware that we actually have an image of ourselves. On the other hand, films and our self-representations are analogous to our imaginaries inasmuch as we are permanently interpreting ourselves and our projects of social transformation. Thus, imagination is the mediating space in which we link action to our practices of instituting and creating our political and social spaces. This essay also claims that feminism must go beyond the public sphere as a means to enlarge the political domain