ReFocus: The Films of Doris Wishman

Alicia Kozma is an educator, writer, and researcher who specializes in the everyday work of the media, including a dual focus on how the film industry runs, the composition of industry employees, and the form and function of their labor; and the industrial, financial, and technological evolutions of film exhibition and its impacts on independent film. She is the author of The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman: Radical Acts in Filmmaking, and co-editor of Refocus: The Films of Doris Wishman and Mobilized Identities: Mediated Subjectivity and Cultural Crisis in the Neoliberal Era. Her work has been published widely, including in Media Industries, Film Comment, Camera Obscura, Television and New Media, and other venues. Kozma is the Director of the Indiana University Cinema, where she oversees programming, operations, and academic and industry initiatives. She is affiliate faculty in IU's Media School and the IU Wells Scholar Professor for 2025. Dr. Kozma holds a PhD in communication and media studies from the Institute of Communication Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Farrah Freibert is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the School of Media Arts at Southern Illinois University. With research that spans media history and industry studies, global media circulations and LGBTQ+ history, she has published widely in peer-reviewed scholarly venues such as Film Criticism, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, Monstrum, Porn Studies, the Journal of Homosexuality, Spectator, Synoptique, and Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture. Dr. Freibert is coeditor with Alicia Kozma of Refocus: The Films of Doris Wishman (2021).

This book is a must for scholars in a range of different areas. The collection explores the sexual politics of Wishman’s films and provoke fascinating questions about our understanding of genre. It also explores what it means to consider Wishman an "artist" and, in the process, explores her relationship to other filmmakers and film movements. In short, this book is much more than a study of a fascinating figure: it provides a fascinating take on film history in particular, and cultural history more generally, that demands to be read by those who have never heard of Wishman and who may consider themselves uninterested in lowbrow culture more generally.

• Notes on Contributors ixAcknowledgements xiForeword xiiJoan HawkinsIntroduction: Making Films in Hell 1Alicia Kozma and Finley Freibert 　PART 1 Gender and Genre1 The Body as Apparatus: Doris Wishman’s Double Agent 73 18Elena Gorfinkel2 The Girls in the Mirror: Women’s Horror Filmmaking and Doris 43Wishman’s Each Time I Kill (2007)Alexandra Heller-Nicholas3 Trans/sexual negativity and the ethics of (s)exploitation in 64Let Me Die a Woman Harper ShalloePART 2 Cultural History and Adult Film Studies4 Hardcore Wishman 94Whitney Strub5 Bad Bis Go to Hell: Bisexuality as Transgressive and Lucrative in 112Doris Wishman’s Roughies Finley Freibert6 "It’s Strange, but It’s Wonderful": Doris Wishman’s Nude on the Moon 147Karen Joan KohoutekPART 3 Comparative Approaches to Authorship7 Depicting Female Bodies: Doris Wishman, Carolee Schneemann, and 172Legacies of Subversion Hannah Greenberg8 Revolutionization of the Erotic Screen: The Films and Doris Wishman 203and Wakamatsu Koji Molly Kim9 "You can’t say you’re not getting a horror film here!": Authorship, 224Genre, and the Accidental Avant-Garde in Doris Wishman’s A Night to Dismember"Jamie Hook10 My Teenage Cinematic Love Affair with Doris Wishman 252Rebekah McKendry