#spectatorship

“If, as Catharine MacKinnon states in the essay cited earlier on, ‘sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away’ (p. 515), that which is most personal and at the same time most socially determined, most defining of the self and most exploited or controlled, then to ask the question of what constitutes female sexuality, for women and for feminism (the emphasis is important), is to come to know things in a different way, and to come to know them as political. Since one ‘becomes a woman’ through the experience of sexuality, issues such as lesbianism, contraception, abortion, incest, sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, and pornography are not merely social (a problem for society as a whole) or merely sexual (a private affair between ‘consenting adults’ or within the privacy of the family); for women, they are political and epistemological. ‘To feminism, the personal is epistemologically the political, and its epistemology is its politics’ (p. 535). This is the sense in which it is possible to argue as MacKinnon does, that consciousness raising is a ‘critical method,’ a specific mode of apprehension or ‘appropriation’ of reality. The fact that today the expression ‘consciousness raising’ has become dated and more than slightly unpleasant, as any word will that has been appropriated, diluted, digested and spewed out by the media, does not diminish the social and subjective impact of a practice—the collective articulation of one's experience of sexuality and gender—which has produced, and continues to elaborate, a radically new mode of understanding the subject’s relation to social-historical reality. Consciousness raising is the original critical instrument that women have developed toward such understanding, the analysis of social reality, and its critical revision. The Italian feminists call it ‘autocoscienza,’ selfconsciousness, and better still, self consciousness. For example, Manuela Fraire: ‘the practice of self consciousness is the way in which women reflect politically on their own condition.’”[33]

"The special appeal and significance of cinema for many gay men is evident in the way film has developed as a particularly privileged source of and for gay subcultural production. In his pioneering study of subcultural logic, Dick Hebdige contends that subcultures turn on a constitutive process of stylistic bricolage in which they appropriate various objects, texts, and signs from the ‘‘dominant’’ culture and refigure them so as to produce alternative, ‘‘subcultural’’ meanings. As Hebdige sees it, this constitutive process of social articulation allows subcultures to produce and reproduce themselves as ‘‘different’’ from the dominant or ‘‘parent’’ culture through their aberrant modes of cultural consumption.The varied practices of bricolage in subcultures become both the site and the currency of subcultural definition, the space for and tools with which a subculture produces and displays its cultural difference(s). Developing this reading further, Sarah Thornton coins the term‘ ‘subcultural capital’’ to refer to the extensive and often highly developed systems of tastes, knowledges, and competences developed and used by subcultures as marks of distinction and group affiliation. By possessing and exhibiting the requisite forms of subcultural capital, a given subject expresses and ratifies his or her membership in a subcultural group.

On being a Black cynic when the laughter is so loud

“Illusions, Daughters of the Dust, and A Passion of Remembrance employ a deconstructive filmic practice to undermine existing grand cinematic narratives even as they retheorize subjectivity in the realm of the visual. Without providing ‘realistic’ positive representations that emerge only as a response to the totalizing nature of existing narratives, they offer points of radical departure. Opening up a space for the assertion of a critical black female spectatorship, they do not simply offer diverse representations, they imagine new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity.”

“Constructing feminist film theory along these lines enables the production of a discursive practice that need never theorize any aspect of black female representation or spectatorship. Yet the existence of black women within white supremacist culture problematizes, and makes complex, the overall issue of female identity, representation, and spectatorship. If, as [Anne] Friedberg suggests, ‘identification is a process which commands the subject to be displaced by an other; it is a procedure which breeches the separation between self and other, and, in this way, replicates the very structure of patriarchy.’ If identification ‘demands sameness, necessitates similarity, disallows difference’—must we then surmise that many feminist film critics who are ‘over-identified’ with the mainstream cinematic apparatus produce theories that replicate its totalizing agenda? Why is it that feminist film criticism, which has most claimed the terrain of woman's identity, representation, and subjectivity as its field of analysis, remains aggressively silent on the subject of blackness and specifically representations of black womanhood? Just as mainstream cinema has historically forced aware black female spectators not to look, much feminist film criticism disallows the possibility of a theoretical dialogue that might include black women's voices. It is difficult to talk when you feel no one is listening, when you feel as though a special jargon or narrative has been created that only the chosen can understand. No wonder then that black women have for the most part confined our critical commentary on film to conversations. And it must be reiterated that this gesture is a strategy that protects us from the violence perpetuated and advocated by discourses of mass media. A new focus on issues of race and representation in the field of film theory could critically intervene on the historical repression reproduced in some arenas of contemporary critical practice, making a discursive space for discussion of black female spectatorship possible.”