ABSTRACT
Assessments-particularly of a work in progress-are always troublesome. To reflect on a field that is as amorphous as “feminist media studies” is akin to trying to pin down the truth in a Republican Party convention. Slippery business indeed. In addition, sometimes periods of enormous intellectual ferment are followed by periods of stasis or at least less explosive and reverberating innovations. For roughly twenty years-from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s-the production of feminist media scholarship was both prodigious and pioneering. Many-myself included-have written about the (nonlinear, overlapping) heady shifts in this scholarship from a largely quantitative “images of women” approach through the many challenges and revisions wrought by psychoanalytic film theory, spectatorship studies, audience work, theories of the gaze, institutional and political economic framings, and beyond. Many of these histories frame the trajectory of the field through disciplinary logics, as humanities-based film studies debated/contested the more social-science oriented TV studies, or through logics produced through theoretical allegiances (psychoanalytic work vs. social structural) or, yet again, logics derived from the specificity of the medium itself (film, television, advertising). As helpful as these histories can be, they never quite resonated for me, largely because the more overarching frame of cultural studies (rather than, say, film theory or sociology of culture) was my entrée into the field, cutting across disciplinary logics, genres, and media. For many of us, this was indeed the main draw of Birmingham-style cultural studies-its deep and wide range, and its refusal to be cornered in by the demands of allegiances other than that of critical, political analysis. Formed in the post-1960s milieu of new social movements and institutional reevaluations, cultural studies couldn’t afford the Marxist longue durée of avoidance; the barbarians were through the gate too quickly and the borders were too porous to begin with. Although in its early years cultural studies struggled mightily with the challenges posed by feminists and other others, I was surprised by how quickly the boys seemed to come around, or, at the very least, give ground so that cultural studies could begin to expand into something quite other than originally imagined (e.g. not just a working-class white boy’s own story). Cultural studies questions seemed tailor made for the new identity politics, focusing
on the intricacies and variabilities of cultural resistance while continuing to reckon with
the (older?) problems of commodification and cultural hegemony. Feminist cultural theorists seemed particularly astute. After moving quickly from the “images of women” approach that posited an “already there” meaning-filled with stereotype or rich with latent possibility-they produced some of the most challenging and explosive analyses to come out of the cultural studies tradition. From brazen inquiries into the pleasures of romance, to nuanced evidence of counter-reading in female fan culture, to sustained critiques of the persistence of masculinist ideologies in even the most avowedly progressive images, feminist media criticism ran wild and deep, taking male critics to task for their blithe refusal to reckon with sexual difference and offering up treatise after treatise that exposed the vexed intransigence of patriarchy while at the same time trumpeting the ever-present (or so we believed) possibilities of subversive readings and hidden feminist imagery. Questions of visibility were at the heart of early feminist concerns, and not simply
through the central concept of the gaze. For many a marginalized group, to simply be seen-to be part of the panorama of cultural vision-was at least part of the battle. But for all the complexities of cultural analysis, we often seemed to wind down to the conclusion “more and better.” More people of color less confined to limited and narrow roles. More women, less stereotypically depicted. A reasonable goal perhaps, but one that ran up against both right-wing resistance and cultural studies innovations. More and better seemed so narrow a goal, so self-limiting, so crassly empiricist. And, of course, who is to say what better is? One person’s feisty feminist warrior princess is another’s sexualized bimbo. One person’s subversive mainstreaming is another’s shallow assimilation. Surely the decisive and transformative innovations of spectatorship theory problematized the “more and better” approach and made it increasingly difficult to make overly broad statements about the certain meaning of images or cultural moments. Indeed, feminist cultural critics have always been wary of marking visibility as the easy
sign of liberatory imaginings. The very theorizing of the male gaze-and attendant rejections of narrative logics and representation itself-explicitly argued that vision was not all it was cracked up to be and that, sometimes, being seen was itself the act of violation, the imprimatur of power. To be captured by the gaze was to be subject to it and to the power of imagining that the gaze implied. In later years, of course, the theory of the gaze came under increased scrutiny (for its assumption of only heterosexual desire, for its insistence that identification was at the heart of viewing pleasure, and for so much else!), and thus pushed even further against the futuristic promises of visibility politics. So feminists have maintained a healthy distance from that too-easy delight in being part of a scene/seen in which one has traditionally been absent or secondary. Even the most assiduous headcounters or devout Freudians seemed to realize that Woman’s otherness could not be simply imaged away with a few healthy representations or revealed Oedipal moments. For gay theorists and activists, visibility always seemed to hold out more promise.
Perhaps we believed the illusion of visibility-as-transformation because our representational history has been so nasty, brutish, and short. Plagued by ugly stereotypes or crude indifference, we were the terrifying “others” of Hollywood’s darkest fears-preying perverts, stealthy spies, simpering esthetes, ridiculous glam boys, sinister prison matrons, troubled youth. It was either some such portrayal or the despair of invisibility. If they could only see us, we seemed to believe, in all our normal glory, in all our proud sameness, society would slowly shift. If we could only just edge out from behind the thick curtain of invisibility, we would emerge into the bright sunshine of acceptance.
But, just like the singular (white, hetero) spectator was revealed as a fantasy, this too fell into disrepute as both queer theory and transnational feminism challenged the politics of visibility and recognition. Concerns with visibility have not wholly disappeared, but have surely receded or at the very least been reformatted to fit the new era of spectacularized identities.
