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http://sexualities.sagepub.com Re-assessing the Past and Future of Feminist Film Theory


Jeffrey Geiger Sexualities 2001; 4; 246 DOI: 10.1177/136346001004002008 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sexualities.sagepub.com

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Review Essay

Jeffrey Geiger
University of Essex

Re-assessing the Past and Future of Feminist Film Theory


Tania Modleski, Old Wives Tales: Feminist Re-Visions of Film and Other Fictions. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999, 264 pp., ISBN 1860643868 (pbk) 14.95. Sue Thornham, ed., Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, 320 pp., ISBN 0748608907 (pbk) 16.95. E. Ann Kaplan, Feminism and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 580 pp., ISBN 0198782349 (pbk) 18.99.
A decade ago, in Feminism Without Women, Tania Modleski wrote a postmortem on postfeminism, in which she stated her concerns over the rising popularity of anti-essentialist theories among her feminist colleagues. Modleski worried that only women who had vastly wider options than most women living in the world today could play with the option of placing scare quotes around the signier woman (1991: 22). She wondered if the dismissal of any sense of sex as essence could actually leave feminists at a disadvantage, arguing that the hard-fought successes of feminist resistance risked being re-absorbed into a hegemonic system designed to protect masculine dominance. At times this system offered the promise of change like the concept of male motherhood incorporated into the mainstream lm Three Men and a Baby suggesting that notions of biological sex could be destabilized. Yet, even while the men in the lm appeared to be exploring their feminine sides, patriarchy had an uncanny ability to ridicule and discard these new challenges while reafrming its traditional structures. In Three Men and a Baby, male motherhood was presented as a farce, and any feminist challenges to traditional images of biology as destiny were swiftly appropriated and negated. Yet the appearance of these books one, a collection of Modleskis recent essays, the others, anthologies designed to highlight the achievements of nearly 30 years of feminist lm theory suggests that feminism is still in good health, having survived not only anti-essentialism, but also a number of other signicant cultural and conceptual shifts in the discourses of sex, gender, sexuality and subjectivity more

Sexualities Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 4(2): 246251[1363-4607(200105)4:2; 246251; 017389]

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generally. Feminist scholarship has shown an ability to adjust, to re-adapt, to reappropriate and even to generate many of these challenges from within its own ranks. And Modleski remains one of the sharpest critics of this process: skilfully mapping and synthesizing the various debates in popular culture and womens studies. When Feminism Without Women was published, for example, Feminist resistance with a capital F had been for some time experiencing a radical shift in thinking that was also taking place in other disciplines. Universalizing tendencies were giving way to more broad-based concepts of feminisms in the plural: a more subtle and diverse understanding of the multiple subject positions that women inhabit. Collections like Gloria Anzaldas and Cherrie Moragas This Bridge Called My Back, and essays such as Audre Lordes Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redening Difference, had been able to articulate the limits of the socalled white feminist project while attempting to recongure and expand its parameters. In its own way, Modleskis Cinema and the Dark Continent, now reprinted in Thornhams collection, showed that the rumblings at the core of white feminism need not mean a complete renunciation of a collective project. Looking at lms like King Kong and Gorillas in the Mist, Modleski highlighted the links between psychological and cultural fears of difference that related to both race and gender. Her essay suggested that feminist criticism could remain highly vigilant to the ways that race, sexuality, ethnicity and identity co-exist within a uctuating eld of power relations. Feminist criticism has since, in certain circles, become acceptable shorthand for a range of practices ranging from cultural studies, to studies of race, ethnicity or gender, to queer studies. Perhaps ironically for some, it is now common for womens studies centres to act as umbrella organizations for the study of men and masculinities. It is no longer simply a question of us versus them, or even homogeneity versus heterogeneity, though the complexity of the feminist dilemma has not completely gone away. It is still often unclear how the endlessly unravelling construct of woman can continue to govern a common cultural or critical identity. Modleski confronts this issue in her latest book, Old Wives Tales, raising the question of how to negotiate differences among women while theorizing a way to hold on to ties that bind women to one another (1999: 6). Old Wives Tales was conceived as a response to her own sense that her previous book did not, in fact, focus clearly enough on the notion of women as cultural producers, but had spent the bulk of its time teasing feminist arguments out of popular cultures (patriarchal) dream machine. Her project was going to be a celebration of women who could now risk even politically incorrect creative production, thanks to the assumptions gained from years of feminist work: ideas that had nally begun to permeate popular culture. Though many of these postfeminist practitioners are not specically named here, one would assume that Modleski is talking about artists, performers and celebrities like Annie Sprinkle or Madonna neither of whom appear in this book or Sandra Bernhard and Anna Deavere Smith both of whom do. All of these women have, in one way or another, used performance to mock or appropriate conventional images of femininity while denaturing its basis in patriarchal norms. Modleski, in the end, did not write the book that she at rst intended. Before setting out on the project, she found herself in the midst of a dilemma, hesitant

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to engage in a postfeminist critical project when, all around her, it seemed as if younger feminist scholars were rejecting the once-nearly-sacred idea of thinking through their mothers, and were instead building careers out of, in effect, killing off their mothers. Perhaps the chief irony of this situation was that Modleski discovered herself to be an object of what she refers to as the sororophobia paradigm: relegated to the status of a distant and slightly outmoded mother gure. Modleski thus begins by revisiting the past, reminding us that academic memory can sometimes be painfully short. She defends the ongoing relevance of past and current contributions of 1970s feminism, uncovering the ways in which this fossilized or homogeneous collective movement actually constituted a diverse, contentious and constantly mobile exchange of ideas. Though these essays cover a broad range of topics, many are linked in their investigation of female performance and, in many cases, suggestions of female masochism found within these performances. An essay discussing the Anita HillClarence Thomas sexual harassment hearings emphasizes the ways that the legal process fails to allow for the metaphorical and deferred nature of language in testimonial. Thus the law also fails, paradoxically, to recognize the actual nature of traumatic events and how they are brought into language even while it endlessly seeks the truth. In two later essays, one dealing with Sandra Bernhards onewomen show, Without You Im Nothing, the other discussing the stunning, yet at times problematic, Twilight: Los Angeles by Anna Deveare Smith, Modleski explores the ideas of embodiment and masquerade, and considers what happens when womens performance self-consciously crosses the boundaries of race, class and gender. An illuminating essay on Jane Campions The Piano demonstrates the dynamics of the female-centred family romance, which then moves into an account of Modleskis own long-term relationship with romance novels. In two interrelated essays, she delves not only into why women are attracted to the romance genre, but also relates some lively anecdotes from her own early academic career at Albany, and then at Stanford, where her forays into womens studies and popular culture were often met with a lukewarm reception, at best. By drawing on the now-generally unfashionable experiential mode of criticism, Modleski manages to indirectly remind us, once again, of the usefulness of previous feminist approaches. This practice returns, and with force, in her closing essay, which meditates upon the death of her mother, and upon her verbal and written exchanges with her father prior to his death a complex, poignant relationship marked by implicit tensions and sedimented anxieties. This kind of work is basically suis generis, setting Modleski apart from most other critics now writing on gender, ideology and popular culture. Modleski has an ability to mix theory and experience in fresh and surprising ways, while her approach is always sceptical, honest and deeply reective. Though a number of academic disciplines seem close to abandoning feminism (in word, if not in deed), lm studies is an area where feminist scholarship has continued to produce some of the most transformative and lasting work. Even so, this seems to have had relatively little impact on practice: there is still an unbelievable dearth of high-prole women directors in Hollywood, and an enormous gender gap among actors and technicians. It seems certain that mainstream cinema will, for some time to come, offer the crudest examples of sexism around, even in the post-feminist, anti-essentialist, post-Sharon Stone age. That said, Hollywood has

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also served as the basis for some of the most inuential counter-hegemonic arguments, such as Laura Mulveys widely read essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, on Hitchcock and the male gaze. Two collections of feminist lm theory, Sue Thornhams Feminist Film Theory: A Reader and E. Ann Kaplans Feminism and Film, arrive to ll a gap that has developed since Constance Penleys Feminism and Film Theory appeared in 1989 (partly bridged in 1990 by Kaplans collection Psychoanalysis and Cinema and Patricia Erenss Issues in Feminist Film Criticism). If Penleys collection summed up the critical vanguard when it appeared, its primary focus psychoanalysis seems less and less at the heart of feminist lm theory, and is becoming just one aspect of a range of critical practices. For a current collection to make any claims to being comprehensive, it needs to acknowledge the heterogeneity of multiple feminist positions that have found voice in the past decade. Both of these collections work towards this goal, and may even appear, at rst glance, to cover quite a bit of the same material. Both books contain the same ground-breaking essays by Claire Johnston, Laura Mulvey, Annette Kuhn, and Jane Gaines, while a number of other writers, such as Christine Gledhill, Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, Linda Williams and Teresa de Lauretis, to name only a few, appear in both collections. Both are structured more or less chronologically, and both trace a trajectory from Johnstons feminism of resistance, or counter-cinema, through feminism and psychoanalysis, postmodernism and nally to more recent feminist readings that incorporate issues of race, ethnicity and sexuality. But it would be far too easy to dismiss this as a sudden surplus of feminist lm readers. Both collections follow similar paths, while each tells a rather different story. Thornham begins her survey with a historical summary of the roots of feminist lm criticism in her rst section, entitled Taking Up the Struggle, which offers essays that reect what she calls the sense of urgency typied by early efforts such as the short-lived American journal, Women and Film. Sharon Smiths article addresses the (still extant) dearth of women behind the scenes in the lm industry, and also addresses issues such as marginalization, cultural devaluation and stereotyping: issues which are taken up in more detail in Molly Haskells work, also included here. Claire Johnstons inuential Womens Cinema as CounterCinema, then considers the role of counter-hegemonic images in changing culture from the margins by producing alternative ways of seeing, but also calls for a more popular collective movement in womens lm: In order to counter our objectication in the cinema, our collective fantasies must be released . . . such an objective demands the use of the entertainment lm (1999: 3940). Johnston hoped to counter the powerful myth-making of Hollywood, evident in such genres as the Western, and to harness this power in order to produce an alternative feminist mythology. Johnstons claims seem to pregure the cultural work of a lm like Jane Campions The Piano, but the limited inuence of even this popular and critical success shows how far mainstream cinema still needs to go. Thornhams second section traces the evolution of cine-psychoanalysis in the feminist context, beginning logically with Mulvey and moving into the more specialized approaches of de Lauretis and Silverman. A very well thought out third section considering theories of female spectatorship includes the work of Mary Ann Doane and Annette Kuhn, moving into notions of spectatorial appropriation, textual fantasy and collective

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cathexis in the work of Gledhill, Valerie Walkerdine, Jackie Stacey and Janet Staiger. A separate section on fantasy, horror and the body constitutes a useful move into a more genre-based application of some of the issues raised in the previous sections, and includes the much-cited work of Barbara Creed on Alien. Creed draws on Julia Kristevas notion of the object as both desired and reviled, a theme which is followed up in the next essay, Film Bodies by Linda Williams, in which the womans body is gured as social embodiment: the human object upon which cultural fears, desires and transgressions are projected and enacted. Thornhams nal section, called Re-thinking Differences, gestures towards the more recent considerations of race, ethnicity and sexuality that have come to dominate feminist approaches to lm. This is a key section, and it begins to suggest where the books previous essays might link up with current and future directions in feminist lm theory. bell hookss The Oppositional Gaze, for example, immediately gestures both towards, and beyond, the work of Mulvey, Doane and others, while also pointing to the crucial need to sustain the current critical interest in theorizing the responses of African American, Asian, Latino/a, queer and other audiences. The collection ends with Judith Butlers incisive reading of Paris is Burning, a lm which appears, as Butler argues, to represent the resignication, reworking and liberation of gendered and racial norms, even while threatening to cancel this liberating potential through the inequalities of the lms looking relations. Butler contends that there is an ambivalence at the heart of both the acting and viewing of these racial, gendered and class transgressions, which is not reducible to readings of the lm as exploitative, on the one hand, or liberating, on the other. It is a complex and suggestive essay that leaves the collection, which began with a sense of political urgency, on a note of textual ambivalence and indeterminacy. Throughout this collection, one can thus witness both the evolution and diversication of feminist approaches to lm. Kaplans collection is somewhat longer than Thornhams, and is therefore able to include a greater number of more recent essays. It also manages to nd space for theories of masculinity (here represented by Steve Neale and Tania Modleski) that have been generated through earlier feminist investigations into identity and difference. Kaplan divides the collection into four phases of feminist lm theory, beginning with some of the earlier essays also included by Thornham, which Kaplan here refers to as the modernist mode. Feminism and Film then moves rapidly through the psychoanalytic perspective to arrive at phase II, where it begins to engage theories of difference and identication in the work of Judith Mayne, Gaylyn Studlar and de Lauretis. Quickly setting up the notion of difference as a key theoretical trope, this collection then places at its core some of the more recent work on viewing relations in the context of racial, ethnic and sexual differences. The work of critics and practitioners like Trinh T. Minh-ha, Nancy Chen and Pratibha Parmar thus appear as phase III of the feminist project, more or less at the collections centre. Kaplans case study, melodrama, appears in the nal phase, and this last section carefully brings together traditional notions of genre with more diverse approaches related to ethnicity, sexuality and gender. These two collections do, in the end, offer rather different images of feminism since the 1970s. Thornhams book presents a very useful historical narrative, which begins with theories of resistance and moves towards scholarship that embraces

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difference and diversity, while Kaplans book meditates upon the concept of difference as a binding trope that runs beneath various scholarly practices that are aligned with the feminist discursive tradition. Feminist lm theory here becomes a critical lens through which one can view the cultural production of femininity, masculinity, ethnicity and sexuality. Both collections reveal, at the same time, the very real limitations of the collecting process, which Kaplan here calls an all but impossible task. One can glimpse certain canon formations that are inevitably taking place. Yet, with Modleskis recent work also taken into account, these collections suggest that an important process of re-assessing the feminist legacy is going on. They also conrm that the groundwork of feminist lm scholarship will continue to nd an audience, and hopefully will continue to inuence new scholars coming into the eld.

Reference
Modleski, Tania (1991) Feminism Without Women. New York: Routledge.

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