Whose Identification? A Brief Meditation on the Relevance of Jean-Pierre Meunier's The Structures of the Film Experience to Contemporary Feminist Film Phenomenology

This essay responds to Meunier’s The Structures of the Film Experience from the perspective of feminist phenomenological film theory, whose development from the early 1990s onward it begins by tracing. It argues that Meunier’s employment of Angelo Hesnard’s phenomenological understanding of identification in Psychanalyse du lien interhumain (1957) offers a more promising way for historical film phenomenology to engage with current queer and feminist work in the field than does the scientifically skeptical response to queer and feminist film phenomenologies outlined by Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich in their 2016 essay “What is Film Phenomenology?” It draws on feminist phenomenologist Sandra Bartky’s essay “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness” (1975) in support of this claim.