ABSTRACT
National film production can represent a gauge of the social changes in the Third World and the evolving roles women assume to control the creation of their images. Exploring issues in national cinema such as post-World War II economic decline and geographic borderline changes, and redefining gender roles from a feminist perspective, leads to a complex formulation of the Third World and its relationship to the First World. Many Third World and minoritarian feminist film and video projects offer strategies for coping with the psychic violence inflicted by Eurocentric aesthetics, calling attention to the sexualized/racialist body as the site of both brutal oppression and creative resistance. The alternative spectatorship established by the kind of film and video works discussed in this chapter can mobilize desire, memory, and fantasy, where identities are not only the given of where one comes from but also the political identification with where one tries to go.
