Posthuman feminism and the rhetoric of silent cinema: Distributed agency,ontic media,and the possibility of a networked historiography

This essay pursues a pressing question in the study of posthuman rhetoric: Now that distributed agency has, to a degree, been theorized, to what use can it be put by feminists? In attempting one provisional response, the essay argues on behalf of the importance of a posthuman conception of ontic media, recuperating feminist agency not within a particular historical individual but, instead, in the relationships between her mediational networks and their nodes. Taking as its primary artifact Anita Loos’s groundbreaking 1916 film His Picture in the Papers, the essay historicizes and articulates Loos’s particular brand of indirect-qua-distributed feminist agency. In doing so, the essay gestures more broadly toward the role of such networks in the recovery of feminist critiques previously resistant to historicization due to their distributed nature.