This thesis sits at the intersection of feminist visual studies and phenomenological approaches to art, examining the conventions through which femininity is expressed, estranged, and re-perceived within analog filmic media. Focusing on both still and moving images, the project traces a lineage of spectral femininity: a mode of being articulated through visual languages of absence, ephemerality, and ghostly presence. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theories of the trace and hauntology, the research conceives the feminine as an apparition that emerges through deferral, disappearance, and the material contingencies of analog processes.
Working through analog methods, celluloid materials, and experimental darkroom practices, the project explores presence as a condition constituted by residue and haunting. This ongoing archive is not a fixed repository of facts. This site is shaped by embodied memory, erasure, and affect. It follows an often invisible yet perceptible lineage of women artists who engage similar strategies of estrangement and spectrality: singular figures such as Alix Cléo Roubaud, Francesca Woodman, and Maya Deren.
Alongside these visual practices, the writing of Hélène Cixous provides a theoretical and poetic foundation for understanding the feminine as force. Her call for a writing of the body resonates with analog image-making as a tactile inscription of desire and vulnerability. Through this tracing, artistic production is reconceived as a dialogic encounter across time, where sensibilities and dispositions reverberate through a chosen lineage of spectrality.
Ultimately, the project proposes new configurations of visibility within image-making. It argues that feminine presence, when approached as spectral, phenomenological, and formally estranged, reorients perception by disrupting normative visual epistemologies. By interplaying material processes with embodied knowledge and affective resonance, the thesis offers a framework for understanding how the feminine endures as an ongoing, relational, and haunting force, a space in which absence, vulnerability, and persistence are continually re-seen and re-felt.