Figures of resistance: Revisiting cinema and poetry with hospit(able)ness and response-ability

When it comes to response-able feminist research, it is key to look back at the past to find those voices that have been historically subjugated by patriarchy. For this purpose, in this chapter the concept “hospitable archive” is used in an attempt to reconstruct an alternative archive that contains voices of feminist resistance. Multidisciplinary cultural productions from the United States are revisited in this work: in a first stance, the film These Three by William Wyler in 1936 is examined as an example in which the forms of sociability and sisterhood are determined by the spaces where women are grouped, specifically in a boarding school for young ladies. This film defies certain limits imposed by a heterosexual passion that operates, in most cases, as a narrative motor for the films of the period and stresses the established gender roles. In a second stance, moving forward to the late 1950s and ‘60s, the poetic expression of Diane di Prima, who was part of the so-called Beat Generation, is analyzed as an illustration of Beat innovative poetics, as well as an example of her dissidence against a highly patriarchal society that tended to overlook her literary work.