labrys, estudos feministas / études féministes
janeiro / julho 2005 - janvier /juillet 2005

            Global Feminisms and the State of Feminist Film Theory

                                   E. Ann Kaplan

Abstract

This paper explores the challenges facing feminisms and feminist studies in the millennium. After nearly thirty years, the Women’s Movement and Women’s Studies face a new global era, which includes terrorism as a specific threat. The prior 1970s focus on the oppressions of white western women now needs to include the traumatic situations that women globally have often confronted in the past and continue to confront today. Academic discursive fields, such as feminist film theory, may continue to focus on images as material evidence of cultural fantasies, discourses and realities, but should  explore European and postcolonial traumatic situations in films by and about minority and indigenous women. Issues of the male “gaze” and cinepsychoanalysis remain important but the focus now is less on sexual difference than on the cultural differences racialized by national discourses and historical traditions (institutions, policies and power relations). The introduction of new fields related to Film and Media Studies, such as Cultural Studies, Postmodern and Postcolonial Studies, and, more recently, Visual Culture Studies, made clear that the old secure binaries of feminist film theories were solidly modernist and Western, and offered an opportunity for building on this research. Yet most women, no matter where in the world, still live in heavily misogynist and racist cultures, and this fact still needs to be explained. The persistence of men in power and the persistence of racism suggests that the psychoanalytic underpinning of male white dominance remains an issue to keep on studying.

Key-words:feminisms and feminist studies,Women’s Movement and Women’s Studies,feminist film theory

In 2004, after approximately four decades of struggle, it seems that the futures of feminisms are (and have been) at stake across of number of arenas, including the academy, social and political policies, medicine, law, and other multi-cultural and  multi-national sites. But challenges in the wake of 9/11 seem greater than those of recent years.  And it is the possible traumatic impact of world-wide catastrophes as they may affect future feminist agendas that I will shortly address. How does living with terror (as people in different parts of the world have been doing for decades) influence women's lives especially? How does it affect feminist ideas, research, and specific feminist agendas? How has 9/11 (within the US context at least) destabilized prior apparently certain political affiliations, including feminist ones?

Can feminists (and women more generally) within and beyond academia contribute fruitfully in this situation by virtue of our socialization? Indeed, have we arrived at the need for a "Fourth" feminism in a so-called era of “terror”? For even if the era of terror is largely a US media construction, this construction is already having profound effects on consciousness: It is having an impact on local and national policies as well as on economics (e.g. on jobs for women globally), and it is affecting social practices and ways of being in daily life, things that have always concerned feminists.In another context, I have discussed four kinds of challenge future feminisms face because of feminist histories, leading up to a discussion of trauma.[1]

I noted first the challenge of achieving some modest feminist goals; second, the challenge of what new directions past knowledge makes possible; third, the challenges that globalization and new technologies produce; and finally, the possible impact of trauma on feminist futures. The relevance of this framework to the present task of thinking about feminist film theory will, I hope, become clear. For, speaking personally, my own research has moved from a narrow (if pioneering, I suppose) focus in the late 1970s on the oppressions of white western women as evidenced in cinematic images to sensing a need to address the traumatic situations that women globally have often confronted in the past and continue to confront today. It's as if, even before 9/11 and the recent era of international terror, Eurocentric cultures were unable any longer to keep at bay collective memories of harm done to minority groups, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised.

Repressed for many years, memories now return, forcing their way into public consciousness in different nations. While this is not the place to debate the vexed issue of the literal "truth" of such memories, it is important that there is new focus in academic research on the violence done to the Other in the context of reconciliation and redress.

We don't need to reference Thomas Kuhn or Michel Foucault to note that cultures exist within discursive frameworks that it are very hard to think beyond at any specific time. The same is true for academic discursive fields, such as feminist film theory. While continuing to focus on images as material evidence of cultural fantasies, discourses and realities, my new work looks at European and postcolonial traumatic situations in films by and about women, partly because there is now a discursive field to enable such research---a field missing when I began my feminism and film work.  As Betty Joseph has pointed out, scholars who have focused on literary, art and media texts often feel they are out of touch with the large global events addressed by social scientists and ethnographers.[2]

But following Raymond  Williams and Aihwa Ong, Joseph argues that the literary too may yet have an important role to play. Indeed, she suggests that while art is apparently unique and individualistic, it is deeply communal in its implications. In art, subjectivity, including its unconscious aspects, becomes visible as social practice. In this way, art can address the politics of trauma, including the trauma of cross-cultural conflict that I have chosen to include in my new research on women and film.

As my title indicates, my new work and its methods respond to the new international, intellectual and political conditions of the millennium. But a brief detour into the history of the intersection of feminisms and film will help readers understand the links among intellectual work, discursive frameworks and socio-political realities (institutions, policies, demography, law, for example), as well as the evolution of my own work. In this short piece, I am not going to rehearse the “histories” of the sometimes intense debates in the 1980s around cinepsychoanalysis, since they are by now well-known, and have been discussed in anthologies of feminism and film.[3]

Rather, what I want to do is to situate these theories within their specific historical moment and to contrast that moment with today.Feminist film theory was always "beyond the gaze,” even if gaze theories evidently intimidated 1980s graduate students and seemed to dominate the field.[4]  Due in part to their deliberate polemical nature, the impact of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975, along with Claire Johnston’s 1973 “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema”[5] was indeed dramatic: Something about these interventions in their specific historical (political, intellectual, social) moment met needs within the then developing area of women and film, and captured scholars’ interest But if cinepsychoanalysis (as it came to be called) was perceived as “dominant,” this was in part because scholars were choosing not to attend to already ongoing alternate theories and methods. Nor, perhaps, was it evident how much the field was itself developing through resistances and objections, corrections and qualifications to the original polemical forays. Indeed, the purpose of polemics is precisely to provoke.

Their use is in structuring an arena for discussion and debate and in so doing to create something new. The basis of 1970s and 1980s US and British feminist film theory, whether "gaze" theories or not, was a strong passion to understand the specific oppressions women suffered, including their secondary status socially and politically. Woman's objectification, with its related limitations on her desires and ambitions, seemed to be a root cause of her negative position in western culture and on its cinema screens. Feminist film theory, then, originally involved a passionately ideological feminism.

The turn to metaphysics, language and psychoanalysis arguably emerged through frustration with prior US sociological role analyses that seemed simply to expand the current gendered organization (insisting on more male involvement in domesticity for instance) instead of getting to the root cause of why women were given secondary status in the first place. Certain tropes and conventions, common in academic fields, began to develop in relation to a "male" gaze (itself premised on psychoanalytic theories regarding identification with the so-called mirror/screen), and the “silencing of women” (especially their objectification and relegation to secondary status in the Symbolic order).

But these theories did not emerge in a vacuum: Psychoanalytic, semiotic and Althusserian film theories were appropriate to the Cold War era in that they looked back to Europe's 19^th century---the moment when cinema and psychoanalysis emerged as part of a common discursive field linked to socialism, modernity and its “shocks”—and reflected a world in which Communism and Capitalism were pitted against one another. In this light, a critique of capitalist ideology in a narrow sense (including its sexism) and studying the deployment of this ideology in Hollywood cinema made sense.

Obviously, from today’s perspective the field had enormous gaps, such as its construction of an apparently monolithic "woman" who was really a white western woman; its neglect of the specificity of minority and other marginalized women;  its generally heterosexual and Eurocentric focus, and so on. In addition, there were objections to psychoanalytic film theory and criticism's apparent exclusion of the body; its equally apparent pessimism about social change because of its investment in linguistic theories; its incipient "whiteness," as noted; its ahistorical or even anti-historical bias. Scholars critiquing psychoanalytic theories refused the inherently Cartesian mind/body split, denied that language was totally determining, turned attention to cinematic practices and representations of minority and gay women, and finally, filled in gaps in basic historical information by seeking to find out what women were actually accomplishing in Hollywood from its earliest days. In addition, British and US TV studies had an impact on psychoanalytic feminist film theory: as Tania Modleski and Charlotte Brunsdon persuasively argued,[6] the different medium of TV necessitated different theories of the spectator/screen relationship.

These theories, in turn, were seen to have some application to film, shifting the rather rigid theory of there being just one "male" gaze. [7]Negative reactions to cinepsychoanalysis also arose from the difficulty of Lacanian/semiotic terminology and concepts. Indeed, perhaps because of this very problem there was a tendency to reduce the theories to manageable concepts (which I tried to do). This provoked further splits among scholars sympathetic to these theories (as I was) but realizing much of the work as it stood was difficult to teach to undergraduates, and those continuing to read Lacan and Freud closely so as to give thorough and informed interpretations relevant to feminist film theory.[8]

In the many years between my two related books on feminist film theory --Women and Film, 1983 and Looking for the Other 1997-- US culture and society had changed dramatically, as had international relations. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union to open space for rethinking imperialism and it took the increased flows of peoples across borders and into the academy to encourage new perspectives, such as postmodernism and its related postcolonialism. Research by various minority groups in the US challenged cinepsychoanalysis even more than it had already early on been problematized by gay/lesbian scholars (e.g., Richard Dyer, Caroline Sheldon, Gayle Arbuthnot) and by white scholars like Jane Gaines and Yvonne Rainer following the leads of postcolonialists (e.g. Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak).[9] Minority feminists such as Michele Wallace, bell hooks and many others, built out from feminist film theory and took it in new directions.[10]

Finally, so-called “Third World” women developed critiques, furthering the issue of positionality already addressed by US minority women, and to which I will return below.[11]

The discursive field encompassing feminism and film grew and changed as cinepsychoanalysis was destabilized in the context of questions raised by minority, gay, and Third World women, as well as by feminist historians who challenged the relative neglect of history in the field, by scholars urging work on issues of class and power relations, and by expanding interest in Media Studies (especially Television) which soon drew attention to digital technologies and Visual Culture more generally.[12] But the new directions were also determined by yet more dramatic changes in the world outside the academy.

The legacies of European imperialism moved into view in the 1990s, and Postcolonial Studies developed. New technologies have also caused the world to shrink. In light of this, and the emergence of many new kinds of women's movements globally, there is no monolithic feminism of the kind our language in the 1970s assumed. What we now see as a range of global feminisms is further destabilizing Film and Media Studies in general and feminist film theory in particular. Trauma and Feminist Film Theory

The sudden end of the Cold War altered international relations in unpredictable ways: Old constructs, such as “East” versus “West,” or “Communism” versus “Capitalism” merge into new constructions, such as the recent “Islam” versus “West.” The burgeoning conflict between the Arab nations and the US came to a sudden head with the 9/11 attacks, but even before that, it seemed that a space had been opened for European nations and the US to deal with the devastating legacies of imperialism, slavery and destruction of indigenous cultures and languages.

In this work, I explore issues of trauma and problematize the transmission of cultural differences between women. While I continue to struggle with issues of the gaze and psychoanalysis, my focus now is less on sexual difference than on the cultural differences racialized by national discourses and historical traditions (institutions, policies and power relations).

I focus on so-called "quiet" family traumas---those of loss, abandonment, rejection---across a range of situations from women in World War II to the forced separation of Aboriginal children from their parents in post-colonial Australia. I study films by and about women, but deal also with written memoirs. Although psychoanalysis provides one of the most important theories of what happens in trauma, here I also look at neuroscience research on brain circuitry under stressful conditions. [The interface of psychoanalysis and brain research remains a fascinating field for further study and offers insight into how interdisciplinarity moves fields forward.] The aim of the work is ultimately to offer a model of ethical "witnessing" in select visual media, and to distinguish this from the voyeurism and sensationalism of much live reporting of catastrophes.[13]

This new work is problematic in regard to my address of traumatic situations of indigenous and other women in the second part of the book. In the earlier multicultural research, I didn't confront the really tough questions of my own positionality, although I had glossed those issues in an essay on "Problematizing Cross-Cultural Research on Film: The Case of China.”[14] In her essay, "Third World Women's Cinema: If the Subaltern Speaks, Will We Listen?," Gwendolyn Audrey Foster elegantly summarizes the dilemmas of Third World women film makers and theorists inevitably placed within Western feminist critical and representational discourses (Foster, 1997). She glosses many different suggestions by non-Western and Western women about how to deal with what often seemed (and still seems) like a catch 22 situation. As Foster notes, "Approaches to decolonizing the subject positionality of the critical power relationship is by no means a simple or straightforward task" (215).

One of my strategies in this context is to see my work on indigenous film as one act of translation among many. I explore texts representing other acts of translation already underway or imagined. I  distinguish three separate acts of translation: First, those undertaken by Western and indigenous artists depicting transcultural contact from  postcolonial perspectives; second, those produced by indigenous peoples examining intra-cultural conflict and difference; and finally the acts of those working between cultures whom I call "embodied translators." [15]

Conclusion

The introduction of new fields related to Film and Media Studies, such as Cultural Studies, Postmodern and Postcolonial Studies, and, more recently, Visual Culture Studies, has clearly influenced the quite dramatic change in feminism and film research—my own and that of others. It soon became clear that old secure binaries of feminist film theories were solidly modernist and Western, and they began to erode. In this way, the "Center" could not hold, and psychoanalytic theories and issues of the gaze began to be muted to the minor key.

The new work on memory and trauma (such as that by Susannah Radstone (2000), is also reviving debates about the need for a return to Freudian psychoanalysis, and is very much central to my published work in Trauma and Cinema (2004) and to my just published volume, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature.[17]

Despite its being true that psychoanalytic theories are no longer central, despite my not arguing that they should be, and because of the questions raised in research by minority and Third World women, we now face the challenge of seeing to what degree psychoanalytic insights make sense for women in non-western cultures. Working over classical feminist film theories and the reactions/resistances/ corrections in compiling my recent  Feminism and Film anthology, I felt even more strongly than at the time how important this work was not only for understanding sexual difference but as a lasting contribution to illuminating the root mechanisms of social, political and interpersonal difference.[19]

The solid scholarly underpinning of cinepsychoanalysis reveals itself everywhere, in ways current research does not necessarily do. Scholars need to keep on returning to these roots, to study the cross-cultural relevance of psychoanalysis, and to study ways in which different cultures deal with psychic life so as to better understand the workings of the unconscious and fantasy in discrete cultures.

   Finally, I don’t think at all that we are "beyond the gaze" (either male or imperial) as a fact of life, even if feminist film scholars are taking up issues they deem more urgent given today's new global concerns, the proliferation of subjects with agency and stories to tell, and the proliferation of digital technologies. Most women, no matter where in the world, still live in heavily misogynist and racist cultures, and this fact still needs to be explained. It needs to be explained even more just because many women have won the right to positions of power and are exercising that right as best they can. We have had to accommodate ourselves to the fact of male dominance; and we have retaliated by instituting our own local "gaze," by accruing certain institutional powers, or by simply ignoring what we used to call the "male gaze." We also see that many men are as powerless as we are, thus opening up what may have seemed like an anti-male position to a question of power--and how it seems more men than women are able to gain such power.

The persistence of men in power and the persistence of racism suggest to me that the psychoanalytic underpinning of male white dominance remains an issue to keep on studying. Indeed, the tendency to exclude psychoanalytic perspectives seems to me dangerous. The more the unconscious is allowed free reign, not studied, not acknowledged, the more it will control us without paradoxically our "knowing."