Digital Platforms and Feminist Film Discourse

Women’s Cinema 2.0

Rosanna Maule

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319480411
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319480428
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This project offers a critical overview of how online activities and platforms are becoming an important source for the production and promotion of women's films. Inspired by a transnational feminist framework, Maule examines blogs, websites, online services and projects related to women's filmmaking in an interrogation of the very meaning of women's cinema at the complex intersection with digital technology and globalization. It discusses women's cinema 2.0 as a resistant type of cinematic expression and brings attention to the difficulties inherent in raising and expanding visibility for women's filmic expression within a global sphere dominated by neo-liberalism and post-feminism. The author pays close attention to the challenges and contradictions involved in bringing a niche area of filmmaking and feminist discourse to the broad and diverse communities of the Internet and global media market, while also highlighting the changing forms of media and feminism.

© The Author(s) 2016

Rosanna MauleDigital Platforms and Feminist Film Discoursehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48042-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. New Technologies of Gender: Women and Film in the Digital Era

Rosanna Maule¹

(1)

Concordia University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

Abstract

This chapter presents and contextualizes the book’s subject matter and content. Its purpose is to situate women’s cinema 2.0 within the uneven configuration of global media and Internet practices, to illustrate the content of each chapter, and to justify the selection of the case studies. The chapter also substantiates the use of key terms adopted such as women’s cinema, globalization, and neo-liberalism, stressing the difficulty to avoid Western-centred perspectives when dealing with the simultaneously democratic and geoculturally uneven context of the Internet.

Keywords

Global mediaWomen’s cinemaGlobalizationNeo-liberalism

End Abstract

The Geopolitics of Women’s Cinema 2.0

Various social actors (both individual and organizational) are using digital platforms to consolidate professional and cultural networks among women involved in film in different contexts and roles. The Internet is also becoming an important resource for the production, the promotion, and the discussion of films directed by women or with a strong interest for women, as well as for the development of feminist discourse outside of academic and specialized circuits. The focus of this book is on some of these platforms, monitored or administered by individual players, as well as groups or organizations within the film industry and in the larger context of media production and reception. The purpose is to verify if – and to what extent – these platforms may provide new venues for women in global cinema today, outside of specialized circuits of production and reception. Particular emphasis will be given to Web-based platforms such as websites, Facebook pages, blogs Web series, and other types on Internet-based projects or services, even though most case studies examined expand to several other applications.¹

This book advances a critical assessment of women’s film culture in its current digital forms from within a theoretical framework that encompasses feminist film theory, cyberfeminism, and new media studies. This small yet vibrant area of digital production and culture is still vastly unconsidered from a scholarly viewpoint and calls for further investigation. The set of practices here referred to as “women’s cinema 2.0” operates within a global film industry and a public sphere that still disparage women and wherein, as Rosi Braidotti puts it, “feminist activism is replaced by the less confrontational policy of gender mainstreaming” (Braidotti 2005: 3). For this reason, the underlying question in this book is the extent to which a feminist discourse on film may emerge within a historical period characterized by neo-liberal and post-feminist ideologies.² The growing presence of projects, articles, and discussions by and about women film-makers on the Internet signals the effort to counter or eschew the systems and channels available within a male-dominated media industry, market, and culture. Yet digital media do not automatically equal innovation or guarantee dissemination of feminist discourse: they can help create new spaces for women in cinematic contexts opened to diverse and broad communities, worldwide. Furthermore, the economic interests and the ideological manipulations embedded in network culture often blur the boundaries between entrepreneurial self-affirmation and grass-roots cooperation among women that adopt digital platforms as a means of cultural dissemination or professional advancement. For this reason, women’s cinema on digital platforms is a phenomenon important to detect in contemporary online culture and within a media context dominated by corporate capital and neo-liberal economy, even though the nature of its manifestations is difficult to discern as either a resistant or a co-opted form of cultural participation.³

The first step is to acknowledge the Internet’s implication in neoliberal ideology and economy.⁴ The boundaries between radical and conservative positions on the Web are difficult to identify. Cyberfeminism has been investigating these issues for over two decades, “track[ing] the ways in which gendered subject are produced and defined in transnationally networked, media-saturated environments” (Hedge 2011: 1).⁵ This scholarship examines the articulation of identity and agency in women’s use of the Internet. In contributing to this literature, this book scrutinizes women’s presence in digital culture less as consumers than as producers, thus implementing an aspect that within these studies has been only recently evaluated and mainly from the perspective of fandom creativity.⁶ From this perspective, the aim is less to distinguish between feminist and non-feminist positions in the digital generation of women’s cinema than to point at embedded actions of grass-roots counterculture and social resistance that Web-based practices, projects, and discussions by and about women generate.

While most case studies here observed do not make reference to feminism or women’s cinema as a category, they follow the mandate initiated forty years ago within the context of the women’s movement: to make space for women in film culture and society through aesthetic production, cultural activism, and critical theory. To be sure, Web 2.0 manifestations of women’s cinema are not always in opposition to a gender-blind culture industry or public sphere: instead, they document the shifting and dynamic positions of women within global cinema and mark new forms of resistance to gender discrimination within it.

Some of the recurring and key concepts in this book – such as women’s cinema, minor cinema, neo-liberal economy, globalization, and post-feminism – are among the most frequently evoked and problematized terms within the humanities and the social sciences. In the awareness of the inflated and often ambiguous status that these terms have within their own fields, their adoption comes with an effort to account for their specific occurance in different technological, socio-economic, and geopolitical circumstances. This intent underlie the next sections of this chapter, which illustrate the place of women’s cinema 2.0 in global media practices.

Women’s Cinema on the Web as Minor Cinema

Alison Butler, in her book Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (2002), stresses the difficulty in defining the concept of women’s cinema, which “suggests, without clarity, films that might be made, addressed to, or concerned with women, or all three” and does not indicate genre, lineage, or geocultural boundary (2002: 1). Women’s cinema is also a problematic term insofar as it subsumes two, almost oppositional types of films: those associated with women film-makers’ subjective and authorial work and those conceived in mainstream modes of production for female spectators. Hilary Radner stresses this dichotomy in the essay “‘In extremis’: Jane Campion and the woman’s film”, noting the “two competing definitions within women’s cinema: as a cinema for women or by women” (2009: 5).⁷ Women’s cinema is an unpopular category among many women film-makers, producers, and cultural promoters, who consider it either reductive or professionally counterproductive within a film industry notoriously biased against gender-specific genres or labels. Even film directors associated with feminist cinema have occasionally taken their distance from this category. At the 1987 edition of Festival de Films des femmes de Créteil, Chantal Akerman declared that women’s cinema was an “outdated” concept.⁸ Two decades later, Agnès Varda refused to present her film at the same festival to protest against its “all women” policy and accepted the invitation to an open debate with Jackie Buet – the festival’s founder and director – to discuss the matter.⁹ In 2003, the Spanish film director Icíar Bollaín (whose films often address women’s issues) wrote a short article entitled “Cine con tetas” (“Cinema with Tits”) in a special issue of the feminist journal Duoda, in which she defined sexual difference as a biological detail with no bearing on cinematic practices as a way to eschew general categorizations of women’s cinema (Bollaín 2003).

The concept of women’s cinema has been the object of critiques and debates even within feminist film discourse and since its emergence within the women’s movement. Some scholars have been rejecting its generalizing and essentialist undertones and some film-makers have taken their distance from it.¹⁰ The German feminist theorist Gertrud Koch, in the article “Ex-changing the gaze: re-visioning feminist film theory”, argues that differences within women’s cinema result from the juxtaposition between the pragmatic political orientation of the women’s movement and the claim to autonomy of feminist film-makers (1985: 150).¹¹ Teresa de Lauretis, in an essay published in the same issue of the journal New German Critique, proposes that women’s cinema subsumes a split between “two types of film work” within feminist cinema, one that “called for immediate documentation for purposes of political activism” and one that “insisted on rigorous work on the medium … understood as a social technology” (1987: 128).¹² More than twenty years later, Allison Butler goes back to de Lauretis’s observation in her aforementioned book about women’s cinema to conclude that “the influence of this division has been formative, insofar as the need for these two tendencies to re-join has shaped theoretical and critical debate around women’s cinema even since” (2002: 3).

The concept of women’s cinema will provide the conceptual framework for the practices and projects here considered. The vague contours of this unclassifiable film category complement the generalized endorsement of women in the cinematic realm often found in digital platforms. Even though some of these platforms do not align with a feminist tradition or invoke women’s cinema as an operational concept, their intent to produce, distribute, and circulate women’s films and to open ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. New Technologies of Gender: Women and Film in the Digital Era
• 2. Women Make Movies on the Web: Digital Platforms as Alternative Circuits
• 3. Engendering the Global Market: Women’s Cinema as a Creative Industry
• 4. Women and Online Porn in North America: New Media, Old Debates
• 5. Conclusions: Women Film Scholars Online
• Erratum to: Women Make Movies on the Web: Digital Platforms as Alternative Circuits
• Backmatter