In this article, we call for a feminist sensory ethnography that centers relations of care, subjectivity, and power between filmmakers, film "subjects," and audiences. Through in‐depth discussion of two films, Smile4Kime (Guzman 2023) and Nobel Nok Dah (Hong, Lai, and Mihai 2015) we explore three techniques of feminist sensory ethnography—a multisensorial theory of the flesh, sensory accompaniment, and narrative intimacy—that draw on feminist and non‐Western genealogies of sensory knowledge production. We see this move away from observational filmmaking as a “politic of necessity” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015) through which the sensory is imbued with embodied knowledge.

Every year in Haiti and its diaspora, the Lenten and Vodou festivals of Rara occur through Easter Sunday. In this article, I argue that religious performances, such as Rara, are critical sites of Black women's social and economic empowerment. In particular, the women performers of Rara or the queens use Rara to empower themselves. Based on long‐term ethnographic research in Haiti, I attend to the way Black women transform play and Black religious expression into labor or what I call spiritual play‐labor. This concept builds on the works of Robin D.G. Kelley's (1997) and Oneka LaBennett's (2011) in which they attend to the ways that Black youth turn play and Black cultural expression into labor. I use Spiritual play‐labor as an analytic to explore the ways that Haitian women turn spiritual performances and Rara's carnivalesque play into labor that is compensated. The queen's reframing of their performance as labor relies upon their understanding of chalè or heat in which Black women's beauty and bodily work are central. Situating myself within the field of Black feminist anthropology, I explore my role as a feminist ethnographer in advocating with the queens to reframe their spiritual play into labor.