Gender and the Nasty Women of history

For the past two years, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi have been curating Cinema’s First Nasty Women: a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set that features 99 archival silent films and will be released by Kino Lorber in August 2022 (see https://wfpp.columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women/). In this co-written archive piece, they put theory into action and share tantalizing snippets from the collection. Women combust out of the chimney, cross-dress as men, take over the government, and exhibit their outsized desires in ways that only cinema could make visible–and that remain visible due to the passionate labor of feminist scholars, researchers, archivists, and cinephiles.