clit2014, jan 2, 晚交了20天，我再也不想上gender studies了我要吐了，写这篇paper不知道经历了多少mental breakdown

Women’s Experience Matters: Redefining Feminist Cinema through Claire’s Camera

As Laura Mulvey points out in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, traditional narrative cinema largely relies upon the practice of a gendered “gaze”, specifically, male’s unconscious objectification of female as erotic spectacle from which visual pleasure is derived. Her account draws attention to the prevailing feminist-unfriendly phenomena in contemporary cinema, one that resides in the language of patriarchy, privileging man’s experience while making woman the passive object deprived of autonomy. Many feminist filmmakers and theorists including Mulvey herself urge a radical strategy that dismantles patriarchal practice and frees woman from the state of being suppressed by the male-centered cinematic language.To conceptualize a mode of cinema that speakswoman’s language, or authentic feminist cinema, this essay interrogates the validity of Mulvey’s destruction approach in pursuing a feminist aesthetic. By making reference to Hong Sang-soo’s film, Claire’s Camera, I argue that feminist cinema needs to be redefined by neither the immediate rejection of gender hierarchy nor the postmodern notion of fluidity, but by perspectives that transcend the gendered metanarrative of subject vs. object, and that primarily represent and serve woman’s experience on both sides of the Camera.

Earlier waves of feminism strived to call attention to, if not, eliminate the unbalanced power relation between men and women in the society, namely the dichotomy between domination and submission, superiority and inferiority, and self and other (Lauretis 115). Feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir radically interrogated women’s rights in the political arena as well as women’s relative position to men in the society at large. However, the approaches of the earlier waves cannot prove themselves sufficient in pursuit of a female autonomy, owing to the fact that they are constantly caught in the power-oriented metalanguage which inherently privileges one over another. While it is argued that the objectification of the “second sex” is oppressive in nature, for example, the assertion already marks the subject-object dynamics between men and women by default. It fails to propose non-power based gender narratives, while obliquely acknowledging that the language spoken in this context is inevitably characterized by phallocentric symbols, ones that prioritize self over other, subject over object, male over female. In thisregard, rather than rendering a perspective that exposes and dismantles patriarchy, the outcome of earlier feminist approaches inclines towards “replicating male ideology” (Mackinnon 59), reifying the omnipresence of the patriarchal language and reproducing the effects of patriarchy.

A similar notion applies to defining feminist cinema. In terms of visual representation, feminist idealists encourage women to present their bodily spectacles, inviting interpretations free of erotic objectification. Despite the favorable receptions from the sex-positive side of the discourse, it is indiscernible as to whether these attempts truly free women from the dome of sex-negativism or reinforce the effect of the patriarchal language even more. This polarized debate, I believe, is due to the fact that the discourse is held captive by the language of patriarchy too powerful for one to extricate from, and that any rebellious gesture would appear to be an insufficient, passive rejection of the predominant ideology. To illustrate this point, Lauretis notes that Mulvey’s and other avant-garde filmmakers’ conceptualization of women’s cinema often associates with the prefix of “de-” with regards to “the destruction… of the very thing to be represented, …the deaestheticization of the female body, the desexualization of violence, the deoedipalization of narrative, and so forth” (175). The “de-” act does not necessarily configure a new set of attributes for feminist representation, but merely displays a negative reaction to a preexisting entity. It is important to be skeptical of its effectiveness in defining feminist cinema, as it implies certain extent of negotiation instead of spot-on confrontation with the previous value. A destructive feminist cinema can never provide a distinctive set of aesthetic attributes without having to seek to problematize and obscure the reality of a patriarchal cinema. In that regard, it is passive, dependent and depressed. More importantly, the question – how the destruction of visual and narrative pleasure immediately benefits women within the narrative and directly addresses female spectators – remains unanswered.

TakingClaire’s Cameraas an example, the film destructs the notion of a gendered visual pleasure by presenting the camera as a reinvented gazing apparatus, one that differs from the gendered gaze, and instead brings novel perception into being. Normally, when characters are being photographed, mainstream filmmakers tend to introduce a viewpoint in alignment with the photographer’s position, enabling spectator’s identification; that is, the shot usually shifts to a first-person perspective so that spectators identify with the photographer gazing at the object who is in front of the camera. Claire’s Camera, however, abandons this first-person perspective while generating new meanings of the gaze. Claire ambiguously explains to So and Yanghye the abstract idea that taking photographs of people changes the photographer’s perception of the photographed object, and that the object is not the same person before their photograph was taken. The spectacle, although objectifiable in nature, is not so passive as being the object constructed upon, but rather constructs new signification upon the subject. The notion of the gaze is therefore re-presented with alternative insights.

That being said, as I argued earlier, the destructive approach is not so sufficient an attempt at defining feminist cinema, because the way it functions nevertheless indulges feminist ideology in the role of passivity, deprived of autonomy and always a discourse dependent on and relative to the prepotency of patriarchy. In the conversation scene between So and Manhee, So, who is almost the age of Manhee’s father, criticizes her for wearing revealing shorts and heavy makeup. In a typically phallocentric manner, he insists that she has insulted her beautiful face and soul by self-sexualizing and turning into men’s erotic object. Despite the fact that the preceding scenes have no intention to eroticize the female body or sexualize her acts such that the visual pleasure is deliberately unfulfilled and almost completely excluded from the diegesis, So inevitably finds Manhee’s physical features provocative and without a second thought, naturally assumes that her bodily spectacle primarily serves man’s interest. This scene demonstrates that regardless of feminists’ radical destruction of visual pleasure, practitioners of patriarchal beliefs will not be affected at all; if any, the femininity enunciation only intensifies the social effects of patriarchy. The conversation between the two characters embodies the self-reflexive style of Hong Sang-soo’s filmmaking, in a sense that it fosters debates within the theoretical framework upon which it is constructed, and constantly counters itself in search of a deeper meaning, contemplating questions such as do we believe in what we practice, whether it is patriarchy or its opposite? And is anti-patriarchy feminism determined enough to prove itself a destructive force against patriarchy rather than a sub-deviant of a predominant ideology? The scene proves the drawback of a destructive strategy, that the way it operates nonetheless subscribes to a patriarchal manner, and that in order to escape the secondary position with respect to the phallocentric subject, more needs to be done other than problematizing the subject.

To supplement the insufficiency of destruction, postmodern feminists such as Judith Butler proposes theoretical alternative to approach the discourse. Butler argues that gender is performative and fluid instead of a set of essential attributes. The notion of performativity indeed precludes the social effects of essentialism by introducing the idea of an identity continuum into gender politics, in ways that empower the socially perceived non-normative. On top of that, Butler believes that the categorization of sex “maintain[s] reproductive sexuality as a compulsory order”, and that the category of woman is an exclusive and oppressive “material violence” (17). Acknowledging the harms that essentialist perception of gender and sexuality entails, Butler bluntly negates the very categorization of woman. This radical negation, however, evades the reality that our whole understanding of the human race is based on gender categories, despite the corresponding inequalities generated from the instinctual categorization. In fact, it is when women as a collective community have come to the realization that the female gender is socially suppressed, that they start to strive for equality through the apparatus of feminism. Butler’s rejection of the gender categorization withdraws the sense of collectivism in the feminist community, which is “an important source of unity” for the marginalized (Digeser 668). Moreover, it deprives the feminist cinema of the necessity of delineating an authentic female representation, because within the notion of performativity there is no such thing as a fixed set of female representations but only distinctive individuals that conform to gender fluidity. Since identifying with a certain form of representation means to live up to a socially perceived norm from which one deviates, a performative cinema does not encourage spectator’s identification. The failed identification will not only drastically shift the spectator’s self-understanding but also cause more identity crises. Therefore, performativity is too ideal a theoretical concept to have actual real-life applications.

Whether it is her body or her social function, woman has become the commodity of patriarchy. As Lauretis puts it, “she is the economic machine that reproduces the human species, and she is the Mother, an equivalent more universal than money, the most abstract measure ever invented by patriarchal ideology” (158). Woman’s experience has been portrayed in the cinematic realm nothing more than being the (m)other and the provocative body. Historical debates have proved that articulating the problematic tendencies within gender differences only results in skepticism rather than new solutions. Thus, in order to negotiate a feminist cinema, filmmakers need to abandon the patriarchal meta-language completely, and reconstruct new texts that represent and treasure woman’s experience more than just being the other, that “[address] its spectator as a woman, regardless of the gender of the viewers” (Lauretis 161).

Similarly, what needs to be done in feminist cinema is more than just interrogating the gender difference between woman and man, but interpreting such difference in unconventional ways that liberate women from being compared to men and invite them to possibilities of having narratives dedicated to themselves. One of the ways, Lauretis suggests, is to regard woman as the site of differences (168). This signifies that the cinema needs to stop generalizing woman’s role based on her universal functions; rather, it needs to articulate her unique features, what makes her herself but not other women, from the way she looks to the trivial details of her daily life. In Claire’s Camera, the function of the camera conveniently transcends the diegetic space. In the narrative, it demarcatesthe “site of differences”, that is, how someone changes right after their photograph is taken, as well as how Manhee is presented differently each of the three times being photographed. The camera also magnifies her experience as a woman for spectator’s identification, mundane as it could be. In the last scene, the camera smoothly tracks Manhee organizing her belongings, packing box after box, casually talking to a colleague passing by, and so forth. Long takes like this fulfill what Lauretis would call “the ‘pre-aesthetic’ [that] isaestheticrather than aestheticized” in feminist cinema (159). Without commodifying or fetishizing woman and her acts, the film authentically represents a woman’s vision, her perception, her routines, and all the insignificant daily events which female spectators can immediately relate to. When a film no longer solely portrays woman as the “economic machine” that labors, entices men, and commits to social roles, it has confidently overwritten the patriarchal narrative with a female language. It fully addresses its spectator as a woman, appreciating and celebrating the female sex, not for what she does as a woman but for what she experiences.

In conclusion, the essay first challenges the destructive approach in feminist cinema regarding its sufficiency in pursuit of woman’s autonomy and its indestructible destiny to fall back into patriarchy. The essay then argues that the rejection of gender categorization in performativity theory frustrates the mission of defining a female representation. Hong Sang-soo’s self-reflexive film, Claire’s Camera, offers an apparatus to delve into the drawbacks of destructive feminist cinema and simultaneously renders a new feminist code, abandoning the patriarchal metanarrative and constructing a new narrative that truly prioritizes woman’s experience.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. “Contingent Foundations: Feminist and the Questions of ‘Postmodernism.’”Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, Routledge, 1992, pp. 3–21.

Digeser, Peter. “Performativity Trouble: Postmodern Feminism and Essential Subjects.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3, 1994, pp. 655-673.

Lauretis, Teresa de. “Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women's Cinema.”New German Critique, no. 34, 1985, pp. 154–175.

Lauretis, Teresa de. “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness.”Feminist Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 1990, pp. 115–150.

Mackinnon, Catherine A. “Desire and Power.”Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 46–62.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”The Norton Anthology and Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B Leitch, W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 2181–2192.