A woman in a vinyl dress ascends an escalator. Against fluorescent white metro tiles, she rises out of the underground like a phoenix. A scarlet light. As she adjusts her stilettoed footing, she turns to glance at the camera behind her. The frame, almost in tandem, pans down her body, as if averting its eye from her own furtive stare. Later, after the camera follows the woman down a dark New York City street, she regards the camera’s gaze without expression as she lights a Nat Sherman Black and Gold cigarette in close-up. Captured on Super8, the grainy stop lights and neon signs further accentuate her red dress: a costume that catches our attention – and holds it tight. And yet. Has our attention been solicited? Or endured? Is her look an invitation? Or a warning? What possibilities of violence lie both within – and beyond – the frame?

“I think intimacy is very political,” artist and writer Ayanna Dozier said last year at the 2024 Prismatic Ground Festival while in conversation with critic Amy Taubin and scholar Genevieve Yue. Dozier’s sentiments on intimacy recall bell hooks’s assertion, “The ‘gaze’ has always been political in my life” (Black Looks: Race and Representation 115). Themes of both intimacy and looking recur throughout Dozier’s filmography, not just in her aforementioned 2022 short film Nightwalker which she directed, edited, produced, and also starred in as the titular woman walking alone at night.

While one might be tempted to evoke apparatus theory when watching Dozier’s films, such an impulse would not be wholly accurate. While Dozier is interested in “the all-powerful gaze of the camera” (Sue Thornham 54) and the cinematic apparatus, she’s equally interested in subverting that power. Dozier’s filmography celebrates Black Femmes and queer desire, while also interrogating the politics of the gaze and the transactional intimacy inherent to most sex work. As a result, her films are less interested in a nameless, faceless spectator, than in an embodied and social audience. Filmed almost exclusively on Super 8 (with the exceptions of Softer (2020) and A Whore in the House of the Lord (2025) on 16mm) Dozier’s films underscore the physical materiality of bodies, capital, and celluloid.

Unlike Classical Hollywood films that historically render (white) women as passive objects to be-looked-at, in Dozier’s films some actors look back. In Bounded Intimacy (2024), the camera scans the New York City skyline in an aerial shot before zooming in on a woman idling on the sidewalk. The camera subsequently follows her as she crosses the street out of sight. The camera’s movements accelerate, attempting to see where she’s gone before settling on another woman (or the same one?) donning a red tube top. While the camera positions us as voyeurs in this opening aerial sequence, Dozier then cuts to street level. The handheld camera and the woman approach one another. She stops, captured in a long shot, and poses. She knows she’s being watched. The pageantry she performs is that she likes it, as much as she likes exchanging that gaze in return. The look becomes a kind of currency passed back and forth. Whether the enjoyment is authentic is ambiguous, but nonetheless, her labor is clear.

In the silent Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above (2023), the camera pans across what appears to be a loading dock, the black and white footage grainy and flecked. A pair of legs come into view, as two frantic hands clutch each other’s bodies. The camera zooms in on their scuffed sneakers, their jean clad calves. Watching this sequence, I’m reminded of Thomas Edison’s The Kiss (1896) or the Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion project, reminded of how early cinema animated the magical possibilities, to quote Spinoza, “of what a body can do.” But while Muybridge’s ethnographic eye had an, at times, prurient (and exploitive) interest in human activity, Dozier’s actors revel in their erotic hunger. The camera pans up the men’s bodies to a close up of their overexposed faces under a lone lightbulb. They put their fingers in each other’s mouths. They suck face. They grope.

In a white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist society, witnessing the delight of queer cruising feels like one version of utopia. Public sex in a surveilled state feels like another – or, at least, an ebullient ‘fuck you’ to the Man. To return to Dozier’s earlier sentiments, intimacy is indeed politically defined and understood within these films. In It’s Just Business Baby (2023) a client and working woman swap roles – and spit – halfway through the film, complicating the exchange, or boundaries, of power. In Forever Your Girl (2022), Dozier, clad in PVC heels and a blond wig, approaches a carousel kiddie ride. Her glittering gold nails caress the animal’s heads, a gesture that feels at once erotic and plaintive. She then rides the small machine, as if a child, in an act that feels private, personal, and, above all, moving.

If we return to Nightwalker as a film that exemplifies these themes and motifs of intimacy, the gaze, and power, Dozier’s voice over midway through states, “In New York, prostitution is a class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to three months in jail and a fine of $500.” Dozier’s voice over then reads aloud the state’s definition of prostitution, an edict that disproportionately targets Black Femmes and, therefore, perpetuates a racialized criminal stereotype. Onscreen, Dozier and the camera consider one another with passive curiosity, neither affirming nor denying whatever assumptions the audience might be making of her character in real time.

How do we construct desire (and where does that construction crumble?) when two bodies come face to face, trading currency and fantasies in an iterative loop? Dozier’s films complicate our understanding of sex and sex work, the oldest act and profession of all time. In her films, bodies are objects of desire, as well as subjects with their own desires and oppositional gaze. These films, returning to bell hooks, “imagine new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity” (130). For now, these identities still exist within systems of institutional violence, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also experience ecstatic abandon, longing, or play. The pleasure of Dozier’s work is how she displays, then subverts, various relationships of power, thus activating new potentials for intimacy amongst her actors, and her audience.

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Hannah Bonner is a writer, film programmer, and educator. She has been National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow (2023-2024), is Creative Nonfiction Editor for Brink, Film Editor for TriQuarterly, and a CLAS Postgraduate Visiting Writer in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Iowa. Another Woman (EastOver Press 2024) is her first book.