Feminist geopolitics, cinema, and the sensible encounter in American Sniper

This article employs a critical feminist geopolitical frame to analyze American Sniper, a film focused on US military intervention. This approach is especially useful to unpack the spatial, temporal, and political nuances that shape and are shaped by power relations, intimate domains, and discursive and ontological fields beyond the rigid demarcation of sovereign states. American Sniper allows us to situate the nexus of US foreign policy and public perceptions of political events within and beyond US borders. We counter dominant, masculine representational systems within this film through an exploration of the film’s presentation of military and humanitarian interventions vis-à-vis racialized tropes, Orientalist assumptions, and differing scales of difference between viewers and events onscreen. In particular, we define and deploy a type of critical feminist geopolitical frame, the sensible encounter—an active exchange of knowledge and affect between viewer and film—as a way to explore agency and decolonize the politics represented onscreen.