| Abstract: | Currently, scholars grapple with media that depict Third World women as either victims of unchanging contexts or agents of liberation. To explore how a widely distributed and popular documentary film can destabilize a First World gaze, this essay examines Iron Ladies of Liberia (ILL), which traced Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's first year as president of Liberia. ILL foregrounded women's rhetorical and political agencies to alter a postwar context, while it also situated their agencies within an enabling and constraining constellation of power relationships. Through its unique relationships between filmmaker and subject, ILL suggested a transnational feminist perspective on women in media. |
