Following Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology, we encounter feminist documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus: that is, as technologies that make part of the world intelligible to another part of the world in specific ways, by means of intra-actions between human and non-human agencies and objects of observation. We propose three analytical tools: materiality, emotionality, and performativity. In this article, we analyse two Spanish documentary films that render visible the potential of feminist documentary cinema for building alliances from and against precarity: Cuidado, resbala and Yes, We Fuck! Reading the insights and patterns raised in each case study through one another (i.e., diffractively), we discuss the intra-actions by which each of these films participates in co-creating the real. We end up describing three possible effects of feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema.

Over the last decade, gender equality measures like positive actions in public funding have been implemented in the Spanish film industry. This article discusses these measures by looking at both the gender order that has been embedded in the Spanish film governance regime since its origins and the ways in which such gender order re-emerges in the current context as expressed by women film workers. Two persistent prejudices that can be traced back to Franco's dictatorship are identified: Public funding as connected to censorship and/or lack of profitability, and the representation of women as incapable members of a so-called 'minority' that has to be assisted. Concrete measures including quotas are necessary for adjusting the unbalance in women's participation, but they are means towards an end that goes beyond quantitative changes, for the ultimate goal would entail transforming the structure of a patriarchal film governance regime from a bottom-up feminist approach.

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