Feminism Has No Single Vision - Essay Example

Feminism has no single vision, although it is a visionary way of seeing. Film, on the other hand, often and anxiously envisions women stereotypicallyas 'good' mothers or 'bad', hysterical careerists. From Jane Fonda's brief flirtation with independence and inevitable marriage to Klute in the 1970s, to Dead Ringers' masculine appropriation of reproduction in the 1980s, to today, every Hollywood woman 'is someone else's Other' ( Cavell, 1981). Films' powerful mis-figuring of the female is what feminism seeks to disempower. The visual is therefore a crucial visible part of any feminist theory. This is for two reasons: first because the visual is epistemologically privileged in Western knowledge and second because cultural images often subtly, or not so subtly, codify and articulate 'backlash' misogyny ( DuPlessis, 1985).It is hard not to sense that the ostentatious display in Fatal Attraction of a hysterical career woman and the audience delight in her murder reflects an ineffable feeling of a more deep-rooted hatred. The goal of feminist aesthetics is to appropriate the power, if not the privilege, of such dominant images. Yet feminist film theory, although a sophisticated body of work, often places mainstream cinema in a space of pure difference. Over the past two decades, since Laura Mulvey's germinal vision of Douglas Sirk's films, theorists drawing on psychoanalysis argue that mainstream cinema encourages an inevitably voyeuristic male gaze and reproduces fetishistic stereotypes of women. By the late 1980s, feminist film theorists' insistent heterosexual model of fetishised female/mainstream male began to crumble and broadened to include issues of lesbian representation ( Hirshman, 1995). But while this newer feminist agenda, its conceptualisations are often still binary: lesbian spectator/woman subject Jacqui and Albrecht, 1988). This concept is certainly at odds with my adolescent memories of The Globe Cinema,Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the late 1950s. A fetishising screen is not what I paid my half crown to see or saw, in Calamity Jane, Adam's Rib and my other favourite teenage movies. I saw an altogether livelier and less coherent story. And much later, as a young academic in Britain in the early 1970s, my memories of the historical moment of Laura Mulvey's essay( Echols, 1975) are very much at odds with the later circumscriptions of film theorists. Mulvey's essay is, to me, a more original and creative engagement with that protean Zeitgeist moment of emerging visual studies than feminist scripts currently allow. Feminism and Film comes from women's studies where media representations are the daily visual vocabulary of women's social, political and economic disadvantages. Perspectives from literary criticism, psychoanalysis, reproductive theory, postmodernism and Black feminism and feminist practice, jostle together in the more diverse tool bag which women's studies teachers need to carry (Kampwirth, 2004). Women's Studies attends to multiple differences of race, social construction and sexual preference. It would be very inaccurate to reduce feminist film theory crudely to 'spectator theory' but to juxtapose other possible approaches. As well as utilising more novel approaches for film study, a fundamental concern of Feminism and Film is to match feminism with film. In the last decade feminist studies, both inside and outside the academy has moved on from believing that gender discriminations are always determined to not understating the different perceptions of racial and sexual identities. These perceptions visualise a wider range of cultural processes. This 'turn to culture', as Lerner argues, needs a kind of feminist film analysis which can draw eclectically on feminist theories hitherto tangential to film theory, for example reproductive theory, and connect these ideas with film styles ( Lerner, 1994). Gender profoundly shapes cinema, at the same time to emphasise how little this process can be understood without the gravitas, the tangible vision of feminism. A major rethinking of symbolic and social structures of gender difference was undertaken by French feminists (criture fminine). They claimed that the cultural and gendered binaries man/woman, culture/ nature, always made 'woman' inferior (Silverman, 1992). Binaries ignore women's fluid identity and the semiotic world of mother/infant bonding. American feminists drew on object relations psychoanalysis to locate the source of male power and fear of women in men's early experience of learning to be 'not the mother' (Thomas, 2000). These accounts of gender identity and objectification greatly enriched feminist film and media study. The notion that there is a distinctive and gendered perception (the male 'gaze') is matched by the feminist standpoint theorists who challenge false notions of rationality and universalism in the social sciences (Seibert and Roslaniec, 1998). The 1980s saw a crucial shift in feminist theory when Black feminist writers directed attention to ethnic differences. Criticising the threeform, or three-phase, typology (liberal/Marxist/cultural) as a white women's mental map which ignored the experiences of Black women, they describe discrimination as an interlocking system based on race, class and gender ( Ali, 1996). They also introduced fresh theoretical arguments, suggesting, for example, that the family was not necessarily patriarchal but could be a site of resistance. Black theory derives from Afracentric history, as well as from a 'both/or' reality (the act of being simultaneously inside and outside society) and has a particular view of mothering experience (Parpart, 2000). These critiques of white essentialism were paralleled by feminist poststructuralist and postmodern critiques of structured systems of subjectivity. Drawing on ideas from deconstruction and discourse analysis, feminists argued that gender structures are historically variable and not predetermined. This led, as I have argued, to what Barrett calls 'the turn to culture' and a renewed interest in cultural symbols (Crush, 1995). Italian feminists, for example, created the term autocoscienza or the collective construction of new identities. Through cultural study many of these themes were brought together in feminist peace theory which argues that violence stems from traditional gender socialisation. In opposition, pacifists created women-centred symbolic models of environmental action. In short, feminism has a long term investment in cultural critiques. From Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique with its luxuriant plunge into the world of backlash media to the equally popular and fundamental texts of younger feminists -- Naomi Wolf The Beauty Myth and Susan Faludi Backlash -- feminists attack overvalued media myths like, for example 'infertility epidemics' and 'burnt out superwomen' ( Hirshman, 1995). It is not surprising that the turn from deterministic models of gender discrimination would inevitably involve Barrett's 'turn to culture'. Films are conspicuous sites of social misogyny but 'women's pictures' are not necessarily symmetrically opposite to those of men. What spectatorship theory acknowledges is that media stereotypes are inextricably caught up in gendered pleasures. What feminist theory argues in addition is that the masculinity or femininity of viewing pleasures are historical, rhetorical and authored. Film and video are not isolated from this cultural malleability, Annette Kuhn' Dear Linda', an account of the making of the British television series Pictures of Women,is written in an engaging feminist epistolary form and describes how feminist aesthetic processes battled with traditional production 'aesthetics' which in one instance, demanded the acceptance of adversarial formats in studio discussions (Sen and Grown, 1985). The interruption of this seemingly interminable gender binary by Black and indigenous feminist art is excitingly productive as when the American Women's Caucus for Art and feminist artists Faith Ringgold and Ramona Sakiestewa, broaden the scope of feminist aesthetics to include rituals in which the spiritual and healing qualities of art constitute equal grounds for value judgements alongside the formal appearance of art objects ( Young, 1993). It seems logically clear from these developments that the co-dependency of feminist theory and aesthetics is a productive partnership. By the middle of the 1970s psychoanalytic theory grew generically distinct. Laura Mulvey germinal essay ' Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'( Hirshman, 1995) describes a psychic context in which voyeurism, fetishism and narcissism all structure film viewing. Mulvey's essay is cited and reprinted (by myself among others), more often than any other film theory ( Echols, 1975). This is perhaps because Mulvey, in a hugely original gesture welds Althusserian theory, feminist aesthetics and feminist theory together with psychoanalysis. Since I discuss her writings in some detail below let me quickly here summarise her main themes and point to her impact. Mulvey's insight, derived from study of the relationship between film techniques, spectators and viewing pleasures, is that films deliberately create masculine structures of 'looking. It is 'the gaze', Mulvey argues, which is the main mechanism of filmic control. According to Mulvey, mainstream cinema appeals to the scopophilic instinct (a term Freud chose for the activity of looking at another as an erotic object). Mulvey concludes that this gaze is male and that cinema relies on three kinds of gaze: the camera, usually operated by a man, looking at women as objects; the look of male actors within the film which is structured to make their gaze powerful; and the gaze of the spectator, who is presumed to be male, voyeuristically identifying with the camera/actor gazing at women represented in fetishistic and stereotypical ways. Other critics married deconstructive insights with psychoanalysis in order to explain identification and resistances. For example, Joan Copjec introduces the concept of suture, or the process of 'stitching' the spectator to the image, in her account of Marguerite Duras's films ( Cavell, 1981), while Kaja Silverman, in her highly original and stimulating account of identifications and subjectivity in the films of Yvonne Rainer and Liliana Cavani, adds aural signifiers to those of spectatorship. Finally, Constance Penley's major work on enunciation, the imaginary and spectatorship, contextualizes many of these psychoanalytic concerns of feminist film theory. The dialogue between feminism and psychoanalysis has been hugely rewarding. Both share particular concerns: the relation between gender and identifications and issues of repression and the instability of identity. Second, both share key methods: analyzing texts, whether these are films or the unconscious, in terms of codes and as if texts can represent the 'unsaid' in everyday life. What psychoanalysis offers is a reading of the feminine rooted neither entirely in the social construction of femininity which nevertheless organizes the feminine nor entirely in biology, but, rather, seen through language and subjectivity. Psychoanalytic cases, like many films, tend to be written as narratives. Psychoanalysis tries to read the 'narrative' of each subject in terms of her or his codes of speech among other things. To do this it must focus, in particular, on syntactical forms on distortions and on a lack of suture between subjectivity and image which may provide access to hidden parts of a subject's personality. Film theory, similarly, confronts 'defensive' features in films. By examining condensations, ruptures and excess stereotypes in the filmic text, critics aim to reveal a hidden sub-text which may structure a film 'identity'. Mulvey very precisely adds to Althusser a psychoanalytic theory of the subject and signifying practices. What Althusser lacks and what Mulvey jumps in leaps and bounds to supply is a sense of dialogue between the subject/spectator and the mechanistic apparatus 'the Althusserian Orrery' (Crush, 1995). Mulvey talks about men and about women and about experience and feeling where Althusser reifies process over subject. No one who has not experienced the freezing Russian snowstorms of British left wing class debates before 1975 can truly appreciate the sheer warmth of Mulvey's essay. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' had great and cumulative effect and I think some significant consequences. One very good example is its impact on Ideology and Consciousness, a journal whose influence on British intellectual thinking in the 1970s went far beyond its seven issues ( Jacqui and Albrecht, 1988). The journal's very title betrays an indebtedness to Mulvey's linkages while the first editorial follows Mulvey's style of uncontestable sentences and paragraphs in its account of fetishism and phallocentric power ( Kampwirth, 1994). By laying a cloak of materialist psychology over the last puddles of the left, Mulvey established that the subject is always constituted within a set of psychical relations. To explain what precisely these relations might mean in terms of cinema Mulvey turned to Lacan. For Lacan, the difference between the sexes is not simply biological, but takes shape in discourse and signification, for example, in cinema ( Lerner, 1994). Lacan develops his account of subjectivity with reference to the idea of a fiction. The acquisition of identity and hence subjectivity occurs only as we enter into the symbolic (or social production of meaning). According to Lacan, we are not born as subjects but begin by making imaginary identifications. Such identifications will always be difficult and will often be fictive. Works Cited Ali P. Crown 'Choice is the Power of Feminism: Feminism and Women's Studies', London:Routledge, 1996. Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. Crush, J. 'Power of Development', London: Routledge, 1995. Crush, J. Power of Development. London: Routledge,1995. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. "For the Etruscans." The New Feminist Criticism. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Echols, A. Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1975. Hirshman, M. 'Women and Development a critique InFeminism/ Postmodernism/Development', edited by M. Marchand and Parpart J. London: Routledge, 1995. Hirshman, M. Women and Development a critique InFeminism/ Postmodernism/Development, London: Routledge, 1995. Jacqui A and Albrecht L, The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1988. Kampwirth, K. Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas. Ohio, 2004. Lerner, G. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. Oxford University Press, 1994. Parpart J. 'The Participatory Empowerment Approach to Gender and Development in Africa: Panacea or Illusion' Centre of African Studies University of Copenhagen, 2000. Seibert A & Roslaniec D 'Women, Power and the Public Sphere' The Maquarie Dictionary 1998 edition Sen, G. and Grown, C. 'Development, Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World women's perspectives', New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985. Silverman, K. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. Thomas, C. (ed.). Introduction: Identification, Appropriation, Proliferation. Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Homosexuality, University of Illinois Press, pp. 39n, 2000. Young, K. 'Planning Development with Women: making a world of difference', London: Macmillan, 1993. Read More