Screening Feminism: Roles of a Feminist Media Researcher
- amandagreer22
- Mar 26, 2016
- 6 min read
I spend my days watching women perform on screen.
As a Film Studies student and feminist researcher, I deconstruct how women are represented through different media, and how these representations might be challenged.
Feminist media research has always been a central component of feminism. Perhaps, feminist researchers think, if we can change how women are represented in texts, we can change how women are treated within society.
Even though this might seem obvious, feminist media research is often downplayed as a self-contained branch of the wider field of media studies. This is not the case: feminist media studies is media studies.
It is refreshing to read articles addressing the feminist media researcher’s ever-shifting role. While some researchers, like Heather McIntosh and Lisa Cuklanz, attempt to reduce feminist media research to an objective approach, others, such as Shakhsari, Leurs, and Ponzanesi, celebrate feminist media research’s transformative potential. Still others, such as Vervoort, Kok, Lammeren, and Veldkamp’s study, explore how digital media platforms can democratize research in ground-breaking ways. Together, these studies draw attention to the ways in which digital platforms can both interpret and produce data, while serving as effective, and socially transformative, channels of feminist media research.
In McIntosh and Cuklanz’s chapter on feminist media research, they emphasize the field’s interdisciplinary nature (265), but contradictorily reject texts that don’t deal with feminism explicitly. Though they emphasize that “ideas about gender in mainstream mass mediated texts can tell us something about the dominant ideologies of their culture of origin” (267), Cuklanz and McIntosh only deem texts focusing explicitly on women’s issues as worthy of analysis. This is a problematic argument. As many film theorists have argued, dominant media is just as important a source of data as radical texts. In “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic,” Robin Wood argues that focusing only on films that explicitly address gay issues actually propagates stereotypes and prevents dominant media’s restructuring (390). He himself studied many of Howard Hawks’s films, which appear, superficially, as misogynist works, but actually address many deep-seated anxieties surrounding gender and sexuality. This is easily applied to feminist research: focusing solely on explicitly feminist texts offers a restricted and restrictive data pool. We cannot change how women are represented if we do not examine the fissures within mainstream texts where resistance can occur by breaking down dominant structures from the inside.
Shakhsari and Puentes’s research employs Cuklanz and McIntosh’s methods and observes how feminist media research can be used to highlight media’s socially transformative potential. Shakhsari’s article looks at how Iranians’ blogs allow for communication between the Iranian diaspora and those still living in Iran. Though Shakhsari celebrates this medium’s ability to provide alternative modes of communication, the article does emphasize that the popularity of these blogs is usually positioned in a West vs. East dichotomy (Shakhsari 7). The article goes on to find that Western texts are primarily interested in Iranian women’s discussions about sex in their blogs—a category that only makes up a small portion of these publications. This stems from the Western feminist idea that Iranian women are inherently oppressed because they are not Western. In reading this, I found myself thinking about Iranian cinema. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, many codes were put in place to prevent women from being sexualized in cinema. While many in the West might see this as sexual oppression, feminist theorist Laura Mulvey finds that these codes actually forced cinema to develop alternative ways of viewing women; fetishizing the female body was no longer acceptable. As Mulvey writes, “the taboos imposed erase many established conventions and ways of seeing, and create a new challenge for the cinema…A new cinema needs to be built with women behind the cameras, figuring out…new representations of women which would not be…those of chaste or unchaste dolls” (Mulvey 259). Films like Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple (1998) use these new ways of seeing to complicate the dichotomy of Western women as liberated, Eastern women as oppressed. Similarly, Shakhsari emphasizes that researching digital spaces also problematizes such simplistic binaries.
Samira Makhmalbaf Taking Control from Behind the Camera and Changing the Way We Frame Women on Film
Puentes explores this even further in her article on feminist cyberactivism in Spain. She finds that online collectives demonstrate “possibilities for agency” when conjoined with offline groups (333). Certain portals, like Red feminista, have actually managed to contribute to policy changes in Spain (334). This article, importantly, demonstrates that online activities have real-world consequences, and that feminist media research can highlight these consequences. Though her essay is an important step in the academic acknowledgement of digital media’s importance, Puentes unfortunately universalizes the experiences of abused women by neglecting alternative narratives of femaleness, such as experiences of trans women, thereby offering a narrow perspective.
Unlike Puentes, Leurs & Ponzanesi do take an intersectional approach in their research on Moroccan-Dutch youths’ instant messaging spaces as portals of identity construction. Through their research, they discover that these youths become “gendered political subjects” through their participation in online communities (21). They see that, specifically for female members of the diaspora, these online chat rooms allow women to “circulate self-narratives and appreciate their cultural trajectories” (75). These researchers are slightly opposed to Shakhsari, as they position Moroccan-Dutch girls as needing to break free of oppression, reaffirming (even if very slightly) the West vs. East dichotomy. Even so, these researchers’ aims are admirable, celebrating the positive potential of social media rather than constructing apocalyptic visions of a world without face-to-face communication.
What all of these articles miss, however, is a discussion of feminist media research’s own transformative potential. Though these articles discuss how media can be used as a channel of resistance and identity formation, they do not explore how research done on these subjects can also be used in acts of resistance. Though they do not address it explicitly, Vervoort, Kok, van Lammeren, and Veldkamp’s article on the potential of digitalizing data looks at visual information’s impact compared to more traditional data representations. “Firstly,” they find, “visual representation can increase the information available to a user at any one time,” and can actually increase memory retention (606). Additionally, “live participation” and “on-line participation” can be used to complement each other (614); they are much more effective together than alone. If we apply this to feminist media research, we can find that, by combining offline and online participation, exploring how women interact with online platforms, and representing data in a visually engaging way, we can start to see feminist media research’s potential for social transformation become reality. We can take this data and represent it in such a way that it might inspire viewers to take action and transform their environments.
With this shift to the digital age, we finally have the potential to incorporate millions of people into the feminist cause. Due to these online spaces, community-building has never been so global. As feminist media researchers, it is our duty not only to analyze the impact of these digital platforms, but also to become active ourselves. Our research has the potential to become transformative in its own right.
I'll finish with a few words from Samira Makhmalbaf on cinema (and media's) powers:
Works Cited
The Apple. Dir. Samira Makhmalbaf. Perf. Ghorban Ali Naderi, Azizeh Mohamadi, Massoumah Naderi, Zahra Naderi, and Zahra Saghrisaz. New Yorker, 1998. Film.
Cuklanz, Lisa and McIntosh, Heather. “Feminist Media Research.” Feminist Research Practice: A Primer. Ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. California: SAGE Publications, 2013. 265- 290. Print.
Leurs, Koen and Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Communicative spaces of their own: migrant girls performing selves using instant messaging software.” Feminist Review 99.99 (2011): 55-78. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Afterword.” New Iranian Cinema. Ed. Richard Tapper. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002. 254- 261. Print.
Puente, Sonia Nunez. “Feminist cyberactivism: Violence against women, interent politics, and Spanish feminist praxis online.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25.3 (2011): 333-346. Print.
“Samira Makhmalbaf.” Alchetron.com. Alchetron.com, n.d. 22 March 2016.
Shaksari, Sima. “Weblogistan goes to war: representational strategies, practices, gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in diaspora.” Feminist Review 99.99 (2011): 6- 24. Print.
Veronese, Alberto. “Samira Makhmalbaf.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 6 October 2007. Web. 22 March 2016.
Vervoort, Joost M., Kok, Kasper., van Lammeren, Ron., and Veldkamp, Tom. Futures 42 (2010): 604-616. Print.
Wood, Robin. “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic.” Personal views: explorations in film. Ed.Robin Wood. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. 387-405. Print.
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