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This article explores the documentation of trans activism in France and Spain since the 2000s. The first part addresses questions surrounding the place of affect and narrative in documentary film, particularly in relation to trans issues. The second part of the article analyses an audience case study from a screening at the International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Barcelona of Valérie Mitteaux's Girl or Boy, My Sex is not my Gender (2011), considering how different viewers respond to the representation of trans identities. The article builds on qualitative research whilst extending the exploration of sexuality and gender in previous audience studies to a consideration of documentary film, seeking to provide a more nuanced understanding of what audience claims for identification in politicised contexts mean.

This article revisits Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), seeking to map its nomadic trajectories through different media. I elaborate on Akerman’s notion of a ‘cinéma de ressassement’, a cinema of mulling over or chipping away. Rather than focusing on the film itself, I concentrate on two lesserknown works that explicitly return to Jeanne Dielman, functioning both as works in their own right and as paratexts, revealing the film’s processes in different but corresponding ways: the installation Woman Sitting After Killing, made for the 2001 Venice Biennale, and Autour de Jeanne Dielman, a making-of documentary shot on Portapak by Sami Frey in 1975, edited by Akerman and Agnès Ravez in 2004, and released as a special feature on the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film. The article contends that these two ‘returns’ to Jeanne Dielman rework the complex temporalities of the film in addition to revisiting its political concerns. Autour de Jeanne Dielman places Jeanne Dielman squarely within a feminist framework through its central positioning of Delphine Seyrig’s feminist discourse. I map the ways in which ressassement exposes the processes of a feminist filmmaking concerned with disrupting ‘chrononormative’ (Elizabeth Freeman) narratives. Building on B. Ruby Rich’s characterization of Akerman’s work as a ‘cinema of correspondence’, ultimately the article asks what counts as productive labour, suggesting that Akerman’s returns to Jeanne Dielman highlight its commitment to feminist and queer failure as a productive working method.