Seeing with others: Participatory media,spectatorship,and the afterlife of representation

Abstract

This article examines the cross-cultural reception of Women of the Sun: A Chronology of Seeing (2020), a participatory film produced by rural women in South-Central Iran, to interrogate how meaning is made as participatory media circulates through transnational exhibition contexts. Drawing on participant observation and focus group discussions conducted between 2020 and 2024 in Iran and the United States, the study analyzes how spectators interpret the film’s representations of gendered labor, collective organizing, and public visibility. It argues that audience responses—ranging from affinity and care to skepticism, distancing, and Orientalist suspicion—reveal spectatorship as a performative and relational process shaped by viewers’ positionalities, political imaginaries, and exposure to global media regimes. Situating these dynamics within the political economy of documentary funding and festival circulation, the article shows how colonial legacies and Orientalist frameworks continue to structure interpretive expectations, even when films are produced through participatory and reflexive practices. By foregrounding spectatorship as an ethical encounter, this study extends debates on participatory media, visual sovereignty, and transnational cinema, demonstrating how reception itself becomes a critical site for examining power, credibility, and the afterlife of representation.