cultural studies

White by Richard Dyer

by

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Dyer, Richard. 2017. White. 20th Anniversary Edition. New York City: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Richard Dyer’s purpose in White is to examine what had previously gone relatively unexamined in the realm of cultural criticism and identity-based investigations into the meanings and constructions of race, specifically whiteness. He conceives of whiteness as a cultural void, a non-identity which allows other aspects of identity (sexuality, gender, religion, (dis)ability, etc.) to come to the fore. Whiteness is seen as the norm, but a norm which has no real form such that anybody who falls outside of it is automatically and unrecoverably marked by their inability to meet its basic criteria. Whites are the basic humans, at least in the realm of visual representation that Dyer focuses on (and which he argues forms much of the basis for how we think about the world). That is, to be white is to be afforded a basic humanity while every other skin color must argue, fight, and try to retain their humanity via strategies that often depend upon them changing themselves to seem more white (either in skin tone or action).

Dyer doesn’t leave it at that, though, as he works in theories of embodiment, which allow him to show how whiteness is connected to religion (via Christianity’s concept of a body/spirit connection that transfers to whiteness), science (via biological and genealogical conceptions of race that have been used to create hierarchies of bodies), and enterprise/imperialism (via ideas about what kinds of bodies can perform the actions of empire because they are perceived as being more able to work and persevere). Dyer also notably describes whiteness as instable, because it must contain paradoxes of “a need to always be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, both alive and dead,” an instability which allows it to have great strength as an enticement (you too can be white if you conform to these ideals) and a promise of flexibility (if you’re on the lower levels of whiteness you can move up just by making these changes) (39).

Dyer next turns to three senses of the word “white” to examine how white as a hue, skin color, and symbol form three distinct meanings and ways of thinking about whiteness but between which slippages occur such that white, which is conceived of as the lack of color (the hue meaning) melds with the symbolic meaning of purity and transcendence to imbue white skin, and particularly the unblemished white woman’s skin, as the ultimate symbol of purity and goodness (and which must be used to reproduce, which brings heterosexuality into the picture as well). In the next section he looks at technologies of visual representation, from print (white blankness marked with black spots that create meaning) to painting, to photochemical technologies like film. Here whiteness is linked to translucency, especially from the magic lantern on, and that translucency is linked with the un/realness of the visual image. Whiteness is then both very real but also nothing much at all, as Dyer previously posited. This section contains the part of this book that I’ve read before, which looks at the way that film and lighting techniques for the cinema were developed to represent the white face first and foremost, with any deviance from that posing a “problem.”

In the next two chapters (which I admittedly skimmed), Dyer puts the ideas he developed in the first three chapters of his book to work in analyzing first the set of films which feature heavily muscled white men (usually in foreign locations as agents (stated or implied) of empire), then a tv show which looks at the concepts of whiteness and empire through a more woman-oriented lens. In both cases, Dyer goes deep into analysis to show the multifaceted, sometimes surprising ways that whiteness operates in these kinds of visual representations.

Finally, Dyer concludes with a look at whiteness and death, two concepts which are linked in the figures of androids (Blade Runner and Alien), vampires, and zombies. He notes that horror and sci-fi are the places where white filmmakers can reckon with the problems and fears associated with whiteness, primarily the connection between paleness and death. He wraps up the book by positing the concepts of “ordinary” and “extreme” whiteness, the latter of which only exists in these horror spaces and a few real-world instances (he points to the midcentury fascists who operated on explicit white supremacy) and to which “ordinary” whiteness can point and say, see, I’m not that, that’s extreme, I’m just regular me. Extreme whiteness, then, becomes the enabling symbol for the insidious normalcy implied by whiteness as a whole.

Ridley Scott’s Alien

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Dyer doesn’t seem to be calling out any particular scholars but rather a way of thinking that inform(s)(ed) much of the writings on race and whiteness before this. He notes in his introduction that whiteness is not often discussed precisely because it is perceived as the norm, and so his attention to it is in part a call for others to pay attention to what might have been ignored in their own writing. Dyer pulls from a large pool of scholarly discussions, including sociology, history,  and film, art, and literary theory to make intriguing and wide-ranging points throughout his book. Dyer’s conclusions ask us to be more aware of the role that culture has to play in our conceptions of ourselves and the world around us, including things like the way that our culture influences our ideas about technology (as in the example of what became normal and what was therefore conceived of as a deviation from that norm in lighting for photography). As (sections of) this book is/are taught in college courses, it must remain highly influential, and therefore central to how we continue to think about whiteness and race 20+ years after its initial publication.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Dyer explicitly draws attention to the representative strategies developed by humans to picture (literally) themselves for much of their history. Dyer pays special attention to film as the dominant media of the 20th century, but he doesn’t hesitate to look elsewhere as well. To drive his analysis, Dyer largely operates by making a large claim before breaking it down into several subclaims, each of which he backs up by analyzing at least one textual example or common daily life example (looking at, for example, clichés and idioms that use white to mean good and clean). As I said above, the first three chapters explain how whiteness works, while the next two look at specific instances of that work happening, before a coda that investigates the concept of death as linked to whiteness.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

In his introduction, Dyer explains his personal history with the concept of whiteness to explain why he feels he has a somewhat special attunement towards observing and understanding how it works. He links it to his homosexuality, a category which sets him off as an outsider (albeit not as much of an outsider as a person with a different skin color) to whiteness’ ideal. Throughout the text, Dyer takes great pains to explain his terminology and walk readers through his thought process as he decided upon which words to use in which situation. This deliberativeness endows Dyer’s work with an extra sense of completeness, a belief develops that Dyer has put in the work to really consider every aspect of his work here.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Dyer’s concept of whiteness as the default will be crucial to my work, as many of the movies I want to study are continuations of franchises that fall into this idea of whiteness. I didn’t really see any big problems with Dyer’s work here. It’s a well-developed and intriguing book.

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

whiteness, white, non-white, representation, visual culture, cultural studies, normal, norms, paradox, transparent, translucent, instability, power, symbol, technology

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Moreover, the position of speaking as a white person is one that white people now almost never acknowledge and this is part of the condition and power of whiteness: white people claim and achieve authority for what they say not by admitting, indeed not realizing, that for much of the time they speak only for whiteness. The impulse behind this book is to come to see that position of white authority in order to help undermine it. (xxxiv)

The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the iniquities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world. (2)

White people have power and believe that they think, feel and act like and for all people; white people, unable to see their particularity, cannot take account of other people’s; white people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail. (9)

To be able to think at all of bodies containing different spiritual qualities, or of some having such qualities and others not having them (a trope of white racism), of bodies containing that which controls them and then extends beyond them to the control of others and the environment (a trope of enterprise and imperialism), all this requires the first conceptual leap represented by the bodies of Christ and Mary, the sacraments, observances and theologies that rework them and the distinctive European culture founded upon all of this. (18)

White identity is founded on compelling paradoxes: a vividly corporeal cosmology that most values transcendence of the body; a notion of being at once a sort of race and the human race, an individual and a universal subject; a commitment to heterosexuality that, for whiteness to be affirmed, entails men fighting against sexual desires and women having none; a stress on the display of spirit while maintaining a position of invisibility; in short, a need always to be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, both alive and dead. Paradoxes are fascinating, endlessly drawing us back to them, either in awe at their unfathomability or else out of a wish to fathom them. Paradoxes provide the instabilities that generate stories, millions of engrossing attempts to find resolution. The dynamism of white instability, especially in its claims to universality, is also what entices those outside to seek to cross its borders and those inside to aspire ever upwards within it. Thus it is that the paradoxes and instabilities of whiteness also constitute its flexibility and productivity, in short, its representational power. (39-40)

Thus, white as a hue is, like all others, not as determinate as we tend to think, and we are not always sure that it is a hue anyways. This way of conceptualizing white as a hue, apparently the most objective aspect of color, provides a habit of perception that informs how we think and feel about its other aspects. The slippage between white as a color and white as colorlessness forms part of a system of thought and affect whereby white people are both particular and nothing in particular, are both something and non-existent. (47)

In sum, white as a skin color is just as unstable, unbounded a category as white as a hue, and therein lies its strength. It enables whiteness to be presented as an apparently attainable, flexible, varied category, while setting up an always movable criterion of inclusion, the ascribed whiteness of your skin. (57)

Any simple mapping of hue, skin and symbol onto one another is clearly not accurate. White people are far from being always represented as good, for instance. Yet I am now persuaded that the slippage between the three is more pervasive than I thought at first, to the extent that it does probably underlie all representation of white people. For a white person who is bad is failing to be ‘white’, whereas a black person who is good is a surprise, and one who is bad merely fulfills expectations. (63)

The extreme image of whiteness acts as a distraction. An image of what whites are like is set up, but can also be held at a distance. Extreme whiteness is, precisely, extreme. If in certain periods of derangement – the empires at their height, the Fascist eras – white people have seen themselves in these images, they can take comfort from the fact that for most of the time they haven’t. Whites can thus believe that they are nothing in particular, because the white particularities on offer are so obviously not them. Extreme whiteness thus leaves a residue, a way of being that is not marked as white, in which white people can see themselves. This residue is non-particularity, the space of ordinariness. The combination of extreme whiteness with plain, unwhite whiteness means that white people can both lay claim to the spirit that aspires to the heights of humanity and yet supposedly speak and act disinterestedly as humanities most average and unremarkable representatives. (223)

Framing Blackness by Ed Guerrero

by

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing

Guerrero, Ed. 1993. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Culture and the Moving Image. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Ed Guerrero makes it his priority in his book to trace the history of representation of black characters on film, and, here and there, television. He does so by contextualizing the struggle for non-harmful representation on screen within the struggle for equality that black people were fighting for throughout the 20th century. He also contextualizes the struggle in the book within the overdetermining system of film production, particularly in Hollywood but eventually expanding into the independent boom of the late 80s and early 90s (when the book was written and published). He notes that Hollywood tended to ignore the demands of black folx until it becomes desperate for their audiences to bolster flagging profits at the box office. There is then, in the 70s with Blaxploitation and then in the indie boom mentioned above, a brief period of pandering to the black audience (which also attracts a white audience looking for something new) until the black films become less novel and Hollywood turns to the next fad. Writing as Guerrero does in the middle of the second boom of black filmmaking makes the last chapter of this book, focused on the output of that generation of filmmakers (Julie Dash, Spike Lee, and John Singleton getting the most play here), gives the book an extra sense of urgency. In the end of the last chapter, Guerrero looks ahead with cautious optimism, hoping for his moment to be a portent of a real change in the way Hollywood treats its black members (in front of and behind the camera), but also knowing that it is very possible, based on Hollywood’s profit motive, that it will soon turn away from the people who are currently making it money.

The history Guerrero traces from Birth of a Nation to Malcolm X is a familiar one to film scholars. It is similar to how Hollywood treats marginalized groups of most varieties. First, there’s actively harmful depictions wrapped up in narratives that perpetuate white supremacy, then as it faces backlash, Hollywood cedes as little ground as it possibly can to appease what Guerrero calls a conservative mass audience. Guerrero does point out how Hollywood’s history with blackness is different from other marginalized communities given the way chattel slavery has shaped the nation and has never really been dealt with. He notes that race, and specifically the tension between the U.S.’s black and white population, has become a central part of Hollywood’s storytelling, first in the open during the first half of the 20th century, then subsumed into allegory and metaphor in genre movies like Blade Runner, then back in the open again in fits and spurts as Hollywood cycles through right-ward and left-ward turns which influence the depiction of black characters on screen in either recuperative or (mildly) liberatory directions. He notes, for example, in the post-Blaxploitation moment, influenced by Reaganism and the turn towards blockbuster production, how Hollywood would allow one black character in a film, who would be surrounded by white characters and striving to protect or restore order to a white world. He notes in this period the revival of the black-white buddy film and how this type of film rarely gave much attention to the inner lives or even outer lives of the black characters. He notes, also, that the black star would often have to be comedic in nature (Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Whoopi Goldberg, for example) to make them palatable for a white audience who was ok with seeing an updated minstrel performance but not serious black characters in their giant blockbuster films.

In the final chapter of the book, Guerrero traces the two(!) modes of production available to black filmmakers in the early 90s. There’s the independent route where filmmakers might have to wrangle their own financing and are therefore freer to experiment with style and substance (Dash’s Daughters of the Dust being the primary example here, but with early Lee joints also in the mix), and then there’s the mainstream route where filmmakers follow the (white) Hollywood style playbook and must cater to mass audiences in ways that might compromise the filmmaker’s vision or desire to put non-harmful representation on screen, though with the considerable tradeoff of people actually seeing your film in great numbers (later Lee, from Do the Right Thing on, and John Singleton are the exemplars here, demonstrating once again Hollywood’s hesitancy to give women (and particularly women of color) the reins on big budget films). He is sure to point out that these are not the only two possibilities offered to black filmmakers, that they are more ends of a spectrum upon which there are many points and shades of gray to accommodate the realities of filmmaking in such an expansive moment. Though you can also sense Guerrero’s fondness for the former, more underground category of films/filmmakers, he saves his last analysis for Lee’s Malcolm X, a big budget epic that Guerrero sees as a triumph of both glossy filmmaking and a strong black voice behind (and in front of) the camera.

Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Guerrero specifically calls out Althusser, from whom he takes the concept of overdetermination with its potential for subversion and liberation hidden amongst a knot of constraining influences, and Freud, from whom he takes Robin Wood’s variation on repression that leads to horror monsters and the concept of societal recuperation after periods of liberation. He also specifically mentions Houston Baker’s concepts of the “deformation of mastery” and the “mastery of form” to explain the indie vs. mainstream black filmmaking impulses in the final chapter.

I’m most interested, however, in the cultural moment Guerrero writes from. It’s clear that the book is driven by the enthusiasm he feels from the boom from within which he is writing, but that also leaves open grounds for further exploration and a more retrospective understanding that Guerrero can’t have. Noticeable in his final two chapters on the 80s and 90s respectively is a sense of excitement for films that have not stood the test of time, though he does hit on most of the movies that have lasted in the cultural lexicon. I don’t view this as a problem, just something to be aware of. I’m going to look up Guerrero’s later work to see if he ever revisits this era or writes about the same ideas in the following 30 years of films.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Guerrero takes a historical materialist perspective, which analyzes the history of black representation on screen through the cultural and economic influences while choosing certain exemplar films to analyze in depth. This allows him to chart trends as well as perform some good, old-fashioned film analysis. This is the kind of writing I prefer to read because it doesn’t overlook the specificity of the individual film while providing a broader understanding of what’s going on and how the film in question fits in with what else was happening at the time.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Guerrero definitely takes on a more argumentative angle than some other similar books I’ve read. He is not precious about sacred cows, and is happy to rip into, say, Do the Right Thing for its acquiescence to the dominant ideology both in style (which I don’t really agree with, but understand) and theme/message (which is persuasive to say the least) as he notes that the film discards the actual revolutionary politics of collective struggle for the white dominant norm of individual responsibility. I often latch on to the kind of aggressive re-writing of history that this project attempts to do because it makes for more compelling reading and usually opens a new perspective for me. This book is an excellent example of that clear-eyed revisionism.

Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Guerrero’s book has been influential, and I’ve read his name in the bibliographies of other books/essays I’ve read throughout my graduate career. That makes this book slightly less revolutionary that it might have felt upon publication. However, I still really enjoyed reading it, and I think it will intersect with my own areas of interest in some really interesting ways. The process he writes about of Hollywood’s slow acquiescence to cultural pressures is one that will be at the core of my study of the legacyquel, and he even writes about Rocky and Star Wars at some length, so I can definitely cite him for an understanding of what the original films of those series were engaged in culturally. I’m excited to explore what I can make of his ideas.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

“Overdetermined,” representation, cultural studies, recuperation, liberation, independent, mainstream, Blaxploitation, repression

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Unfortunately, relations of power, greed, and racism being more stubborn than the visionary hopes of genius, the idealistic projections of these two cinema giants [Sergei Eisenstein and Charles Chaplin] were never to fully develop in proportion to the vast commercial and cultural domination of the film industry. Instead of efforts to construct a truly universal system of communication that builds egalitarian understandings between diverse groups and cultures, what we have seen arise in commercial cinema is a monopolistic, capital-intensive film business. And in spite of some narrative innovation, dissenting artistic exploration, and political countercurrents, the industry has been formula bound and conservative in its vision in order to deliver commodified visual entertainments to the broadest possible consumer market. Instead of inspiring aesthetic, cultural, and political masterworks aimed at liberating the human potential, Hollywood, for the most part, has tended to focus narrowly it’s increasingly shallow product on escapism, sentiment, glamor, romance, and, more recently, spectacular orgies of violence and sexplotation, all in the service of feeding the dulled cravings and fantasies of the dominant social order. What all this means, specifically, for African Americans (and extrapolated to a wide range of other minorities) is that in almost every instance, the representation of black people on the commercial screen has amounted to one grand, multifaceted illusion. For blacks have been subordinated, marginalized, positioned, and devalued in every possible manner to glorify and relentlessly hold in place the white dominated symbolic order and racial hierarchy of American society. (2)

Fortunately, though, for African Americans and this discussion of the way Hollywood has gone about framing blackness, the ideology of racial domination and difference can never be permanently fixed in place as a complete or static “thing.” Instead, it is a dynamic, shifting “relation” defined and conditioned by social struggle, the demands of the historical moment, and the material imperative of an industry that privileges economics and short-term profit before all other human, aesthetic, or philosophic possibilities or concerns. Because the cinematic representation of blackness is the site of perpetual contestation, struggle, and consequently change, Hollywood’s unceasing efforts to frame blackness are constantly challenged by the cultural and political self-definitions of African Americans, who as a people have been determined since the inception of commercial cinema to militate against this limiting system of representation. So this book is concerned with African Americans not as mere victims of Hollywood’s conjurings. That is, I examine the dialectical push of Hollywood’s cultural construction and domination of the black image and the pull of an insistent black social consciousness and political activism that has recently generated waves of black focused and independent films into commercial cinemas trajectory. (2-3)

What would be desirable in future cinematic inscriptions of slavery would be the production of black and other independent features that artfully historicize and politicize the issue in a way that not only reveals slavery’s past but at the same time, by allegory, illusion, or otherwise, communicates its relevance to all Americans today. (35)

Given the ample evidence of its varied expressions, we must expect the sedimented thematics of slavery to continue to surface in commercial cinema. Whether slavery is constructed as a unified subtext in the form of allegory or sustained parody or is displaced into other historical periods, fantastical worlds, and different genres, or whether it surfaces in fleeting images or moments, the dynamic of slavery’s repression and return is too much a part of popular cinema and its codes and images to disappear completely from American cinema. Insofar as popular cinema is an integral part of the commodity system itself, vulnerable to economic ups and downs and the twists of right and left cycles, we should also expect the intermittent recuperation of some of the cruder hegemonic manipulations and stereotypes depicted in the older films of the plantation genre. (56)

In the beginning of the 1980s and under the political impulse of Reaganism, blacks on the screen, in front of and behind the camera, found themselves confronted with the “recuperation” of many of the subordinations and inequalities they had struggled so hard to eradicate during the years of the civil rights movement and the emergence of black power consciousness that followed it. Thus the caricatures and stereotypes of Hollywood’s openly racist past proved to be resilient demons as they were subtly refashioned and resurfaced in a broad range of films. Concurrently, the 1980s saw a steady reduction of films with black narratives and leading roles as black actors found themselves increasingly pushed into the margins or background of the cinematic frame. (113-114)

Despite the shrinking of a broad political base of support, protests centered on specific films and issues continue to challenge Hollywood on its blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic practices. And, if it did nothing else, the Blaxploitation bloom, so to speak, let the black audience out of the bag, by helping shape a politically self-conscious, critical black audience aware of its commercial power and hungry for new cinematic representations of a diverse range of African American subjects and issues on the big screen. Moreover, the “black independent cinema movement” inspired by the films of university-trained black filmmakers of the 1970s made a clear political, philosophical, and aesthetic foundation for an ongoing cinematic practice that challenges Hollywood’s hegemony over the black image. (137)

Following trends set in the 1980s, the commercial cinema system has continued to stock its productions with themes and formulas dealing with black issues and characters that are reassuring to the sensibilities and expectations of an uneasy white audience. These filmic images tend to mediate the dysfunctions and delusions of a society unable to deal honestly with its inequalities and racial conflicts, a society that operates in a profound state of racial denial on a daily basis. Thus images are polarized into celebrations of “Buppie” success and consumer-driven individualism that are consonant with a sense of black political quietism, tokenism, and accommodation, or condemnations of violent ghetto criminals, gangsters, and drug lords. (162)

If black independent filmmakers tend directly to resist or oppose cultural and political domination through their avant-garde languages, forms, socially urgent narratives, and insider depictions of the black world, then those black directors who work within the “mainstream” tend to be more concerned with learning and perfecting the conventions of dominant cinema language and addressing their projects to the colonized desires of the vast consumer audience encompassing blacks, other non-white minorities, and extend à la crossover marketing to whites. Most of the black directors who have had commercial successes argue that they work within the studio system in order to expand the definitions and possibilities of being black and to subvert the dominant norm by marketing a “black sensibility” to as broad an audience as possible. (180-181)

Only by weighing the many possible answers that arise in the riddle-like social transactions of “race” can black filmmakers create authentic humanized images and narratives of black life. Inevitably this decade will bring new spectacles and entertainments that celebrate black life and culture. The new insurgent cinema languages, films, and possibilities of the black movie boom are the primary means African Americans have to challenge the compromised, niggardly images designed to keep them in their media-constructed place. African Americans must continue to expand their influence over the production, distribution, and exhibition systems that make up the dominant cinema apparatus, while insisting that the emergent narratives of the black world’s be rendered from an honest, unco-oped, liberated perspective. (208)

New Queer Cinema by B. Ruby Rich

by

Derek Jarman’s Edward II

Rich, B. Ruby. 2013. New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. Durham: Duke UP.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

This one is different from most of the other texts on my reading list as it isn’t strictly a work of theory. Rather, it is a hybrid which mixes theory with reportage and mainstream (relatively) criticism. B. Ruby Rich is the person who invented the term New Queer Cinema, which describes the corpus of films from the late 80s through the mid 90s that worked to bring queer voices to audiences through independent cinema. Rich traces this era’s predecessors in one chapter, then spends much of the back half of the book exploring some new avenues that opened up outside of the relatively localized (in time and space) phenomenon of NQC, including sections on “Queering Latin American Cinema” and the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian stories in films like Brokeback Mountain and Milk. Rich’s primary contention is that NQC was a vibrant and exciting movement/moment, even if it was always somewhat compromised by audience and (therefore) capitalist desires.

Rich is keen to point out, from the beginning and throughout, the privilege given to white gay male voices in this movement, with people like Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes able to launch successful mainstream careers off of their NQC beginnings while creators of color and lesbians were less likely to break through in that way. She mostly also speaks of the filmic incarnation of the NQC, only deigning to write about television and the effects it had on the aims and financial viability of NQC via figures like Ellen Degeneres. She also mentions, briefly, what she calls a New Trans Cinema that she saw just beginning as she was compiling and adding to this text. It seems to me that the NQC and NTC are related if different movements/moments, and I’m curious as to what current and future scholarship will have to say on that front.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Rich doesn’t do much debating here, her aim is more historiographic/photographic, reporting her perspective on the films and filmmakers (and distribution venues like queer film festivals and museums) in the moment, and occasionally in retrospect, as in the opening and closing essays. The things Rich is most often in conversation with is the film itself, and sometimes the other popular press critics who perform the same kind of work that she does here. As such, there isn’t the rigorous thought that one expects from the theory-based monograph. What it lacks in that area is made up for in enthusiasm, advocacy (I added like 5 movies to my watchlist based on reading the sections I did alone), and a fascinating sense of a developing canon in process. Many of the essays contained herein feel of the moment and aware of that specificity, much to Rich’s benefit.

The essay on Brokeback Mountain is a bit different, as it takes as one of its main interests the reaction to the film’s success. Here Rich compiles and juxtaposes the way that mainstream media treated the film with “ambivalent snickering” while queer audiences tried to decide if the film was gay enough and audiences outside of the more accepting areas of the US sometimes were able to see themselves on screen for the first time given the film’s wide theatrical distribution (185). This essay was of the most interest to me, as it articulated the kind of event where an element of independent cinema (here queer representation as popularized by NQC) becomes coopted by mainstream filmmaking and creates a cultural moment out of it. I also appreciated Rich’s ability to both advocate for the film’s admirable qualities while giving its critics a proper hearing. Something to keep in mind.

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Depends on the essay. As I said, some are historical in nature, reaching back for antecedents and forbearers, while others operate as film reviews written concurrently with major releases of the NQC (Mysterious Skin, The Watermelon Woman). Still others are opinion pieces on where the movement is currently and where it might go, while others stake claims out for similar movements in other locations.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Rich lays out in the introduction a four-ingredient recipe for the historical context which gave birth to the NQC: “the arrival of AIDS, Reagan, camcorders, and cheap rent” to which she adds the mixing device of the newly-articulated conception of a queer community and label (xvi). She returns over and over again to these five elements, tracing their meaning and impact on the creators and audiences of the NQC as well as their development (for instance, the movement from 16mm film to video for cheapness and ease-of-use, which later changes again (for some) back to film as they are able to lure studios into financing their films).

She also argues that NQC enjoyed a brief time in the spotlight as the excitement of audiences to see either themselves or something new on screen led to a boom in money and attention, at least for the white men making these kinds of movies. But when that became less exciting and new, the money also quickly disappeared. However, she notes that the briefness of the NQC’s time in the sun did create lasting changes, with mainstream movies more likely to take on (versions of) the kind of stories and representation that drove the films of the NQC. Late 90s examples like Boys Don’t Cry and The Talented Mr. Ripley are decidedly not as vibrant or interested in advocacy as the films of the NQC proper are, but they also feel deeply indebted to those earlier films and filmmakers.

Finally, Rich argues in the closing lines of her conclusion that we are not living in a post-queer (or post-NQC) world, even though both concepts have gained mainstream acceptance, at least to a point. Instead, she puts the current (in 2013) moment as optimistically “pre-” something. Unsure exactly as to what that thing will be, Rich still powerfully posits not an end of queerness but a continuation in line with the kind of work she does throughout the text to show that NQC/queerness are not codified and ossified categories but fluid and expansive movements/moments.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I’ve already mentioned most of this here, I think the text works best as exactly what it is, a report/retrospective look at a cinematic movement and moment in time and place. Its greatest strengths are as history and advocacy, not theory, though Rich does offer some useful explanations for what NQC is and why/how it works.

It intersects with one of my major interests, the mainstreaming of independent aesthetics and topics, while also interacting with feminist and race-based theories of film and filmmaking politics.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

New Queer Cinema, queer, mainstream, independent, representation, aesthetics, cultural studies

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Emanating from a (mostly) new generation, the NQC embodied an evolution in thinking. It reinterpreted the link between the personal and the political envisioned by feminism, restaged the defiant activism pioneered at Stonewall, and recoded aesthetics to link the independent feature movement with the avant-garde and start afresh. (xv)

Newly invented camcorders enabled the easy production of electronic media at the personal level for the first time in history. A new generation emerging from art school seized the new tools to reimagine cinema with a video eye, revising the medium thrillingly from the bottom up. In the streets, the camcorder enabled the reversal of surveillance: police could now be recorded by the crowds. (xvii)

As urgency and rage began to collapse into despair and frustration for the ACT UP generation, the New Queer Cinema created a space of reflection, nourishment, and renewed engagement. The NQC quickly grew – embryonically at first, with its first steps in the years 1985-91, then bursting into full view in 1992-97 with formidable force. Its arrival was accompanied by the thrill of having enough queer videos and films to reach critical mass and tip over into visibility. An invention. A brand. A niche market. (xix)

That synergy of creative and critical impulses is one of the lessons of the NQC, or so I hope: the power that comes with inhabiting historical time, writing in sync with a moment of palpable importance, a synchrony that endows anyone lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with powers of prescience that might otherwise fall by the wayside. (xx)

Of course, the new queer films and videos aren’t all the same and don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary, strategy, or concern. Nonetheless they are united by a common style: call it “Homo Pomo.” In all of them, there are traces of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist, and excessive. Above all, they are full of pleasure. They’re here, they’re queer, get hip to them. (18)

Moments of origin always cast a long shadow. Today’s queer film and video still bear a birthright linked to the umbilical cord of post-Stonewall gestation. There’s a generation of elders that expect film and video to toe an eternally prescribed line of righteousness and legitimacy, while ever new and needy generations recycle the old and add their own requirements. These queer publics want films of validation and a culture of affirmation: work that can reinforce identity, visualize respectability, combat injustice, and bolster social status. They want a little something new, but not too new; sexy, sure, but with the emphasis on romance; stylish, but reliably realistic and not too demanding; nothing downbeat or too revelatory; and happy endings, of course. It’s an audience that wants, not difference or challenge, but rather a reflection up there on the screen of its collective best foot forward. Part of the audience also wants higher production values than the independence can deliver: a queer Hollywood, popcorn movies for a fun Saturday night out. (41)

If we limit ourselves to what we see in the mirror, we’re lost. If we’re scared of anything new or different, or made uneasy by films and videos that challenge our notions of the homonatural universe, we’ll be stuck with the status quo. If queer audiences stay away from controversial groundbreaking work, then the distributors and studios, those who watch the box office like a seismologist watches the Richter needle, will pull out completely. And the queer community will be abandoned, condemned to a static universe, comforted only by the sure knowledge that the earth, alas, won’t move under our feet. (45)

Such films could have signaled a moment of triumphant consolidation for the NQC, yet the opposite would seem to suggest itself: The NQC has become so successful that it has dispersed itself in any number of elsewheres. Lacking the concentrated creative presence and focused community responsiveness of its origin moment, NQC has become just another product line pitched at one particular type of discerning customer. At a time when casting has become essential to getting independent films financed and produced, it’s clear why actors have to be involved. On the other hand, it’s the runaway success of the NQC films that has turned them into such welcome vehicles for actors, reversing the trend that in the past saw actors turn away from films that in any way pushed sexual identity into a zone of ambiguity – a move, in other words, from career poison to career honeypot. (134)

I decided that it wasn’t trying to invent a new style exactly. It was trying to mobilize the most classic and accepted of styles in support of a grand love story, the scope of which we hadn’t seen before with a homosexual theme. In this reliance on familiar forms and mainstream affect, of course, Brokeback was virtually the opposite of the NQC that had come before it, and yet it was impossible to imagine Lee’s film ever being made, or even imagined, without that precedent. (190-1)

Brokeback Mountain was an event movie, one that sought with old-fashioned ambition to straddle marketplaces and move beyond self-identified audiences. That strategy is unlikely to appeal to all members of the LGBT community prepared to cast judgment on any such gesture. Universalism, for good reason, is suspect by now. But what takes its place, then? Limited releases? Mutually exclusive niches in our increasingly niche-fueled society? No-budget digital stories distributed by download? Brokeback Mountain was a mainstream release inspired by a widely read story by an established author, written by highly regarded screenwriters, directed by a name-brand heterosexual director. A post-identity politics epic. And a hit. Whether that’s a good or a bad development will have to be decided, as usual, in hindsight. (199)

Most important for this volume, new queer cinema changed: first it expanded into something, then nothing, and then everything – a relatively rapid transformation from the fringe to the center at the level of subjects and themes. Once taboo or titillating, queers were now the stuff of art films, crossover movies, and television series. Thank you, HBO. Thank you, Focus Features. Or, some might argue, No thanks. As decisively as the outlaw seemed to disappear from LGBT culture, so did the radical import of NQC disappear from the films that it had made possible. Yes, I’m happy to have more rights, but oh how I missed the outlawry of the old days. (262)

When I am asked yet again whether today’s films are postqueer, the kind of term usually intended to signal defeat or compromise or at best stasis, I opt for a different formulation altogether. Far from bereft, I remain optimistic, sure that we aren’t after the fact at all, not post-anything. We are surely and absolutely . . . pre-. (282-3)

Feminist Film Studies by Janet McCabe

by
McCabe, Janet. 2004. Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema. Short Cuts 23. New York: Wallflower Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In this book, Janet McCabe uses some broad themes and modes of thinking as ways of temporalizing the history of feminist film theory. Since, as she notes in her conclusion, each new way of practicing feminist film theory tended to criticize the way that came before it for its biggest failures, there is little (that I know of) left out, except for developments that have happened since the book’s publication in 2004 (one area that I know of being the further expansion of theorization surrounding gender with trans and non-binary identities becoming an increasingly popular area of study recently).

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

McCabe proposes very little in way of new theory or even a point of view on the scholars and ideas she writes about here. Only her conclusion has a real thesis to it, one which emphasizes the need to study feminist film theory as a discourse to fully understand what is going on with it both in its past and present configurations. This fits with how she structures the book, putting different authors in conversation with each other via either explicit or thematic connections between their works, with a roughly continuous temporal development.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

As McCabe moves from one method of performing feminist film theory to the next, she begins each chapter with a brief summary of what will be covered and how changing analytical and cultural trends influenced the direction of the writing done in that time period. Sometimes that change might be the introduction of a new kind of criticism (the introduction of cultural studies, for example) or a group of writers insisting that attention must also be paid to them and their representation/ways of seeing (black women, lesbians). This grounds McCabe’s historical project in material realities and creates a context for what will come in the chapter. Then each chapter proceeds by laying out the ground level theory (often originally written by men like Metz or, god help us, Freud) before showing how feminist film theorists used that theory to write about women, who were often ignored by the men who wrote the high theory. Finally, she concludes each chapter by recapping what major changes happened during the time period covered and looking a little bit at what was missing, to be filled in by scholars in the next chapter.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Here I’ll just list out the large thematic shifts and some representative scholars that McCabe capsulizes in each chapter.

1973-79 – Structuring a language of theory: In this period, feminist film theorists adopted theoretical approaches (psychoanalysis and semiotics, mostly) to talk about how women were conceived of as a symbol, specifically a symbol of lack such that they really only existed to be looked at on film. Prominent scholars: Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston

1985-1997 – Textual Negotiations: Female Spectatorship and Cultural Studies: In this period, feminist film theorists looked to cultural studies to see how real audiences engaged film in specific times and places. This allowed for a greater understanding of the various negotiations that happened between author, text, and audience as well as a pathway towards understanding how the makeup of an audience will influence how that audience responds to different texts. Feminist film theory here becomes more focused on context, history, and lived experience rather than the generalizing tendency of psychoanalysis. Prominent scholars: Christine Gledhill, Tania Modleski, Annette Kuhn, Jackie Stacey, bell hooks

1991-2000 – Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonialism/Modernism. In this period, which overlaps significantly with the previous period, scholars began to correct feminist film theory away from its singular focus on white female existence towards trying to understand what happens when gender isn’t the only way a character, creator, or audience member is othered from the dominant cis-white-het norm. Using Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic theory of race as a jumping off point, scholars of this era theorized that black women were doubly absent, doubly sexualized, doubly lacking on film. Some scholars also looked at the way colonialism created a gaze towards black and brown women that was wrapped up in an imperialist (as well as misogynist and racist) mindset. Finally, scholars and creators of this era also used ways of creating and documenting the previously overlooked history of people like them. Daughters of the Dust is the primary example here. Prominent scholars: Jane Gaines, Mary Anne Doane, Lola Young, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Tania Modleski

1987 – 2000 – Conceiving Subjectivity, Sexual Difference and Fantasy Differently: Psychoanalysis Revisited and Queering Theory: In this period, scholars returned to psychoanalysis to rethink female sexuality and how women might desire differently through film. Taking as their primary concern the ideas of desire and fantasy, scholars of this era tried to dig deeper into pscyhoanalysis through Freud’s ideas on female sexuality and masturbatory practices to understand what connection spectators had to the spectacle of women on film. Additionally, lesbian/gay and queer theorists questioned why we were even paying attention to Freud in the first place, positing instead an attention to how queer audiences opened a doorway to alternative spectator positions not theorizable in a film theory dominated by heterosexual norms. Prominent scholars: Mary Anne Doane, Elizabeth Cowie, Linda Williams, Carol Clover, Kaja Silverman, Judith Mayne, Judith Butler

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

This is most useful in to me in the above form, as a kind of overview of the different methodologies and conversations that have happened with regards to feminist film theory. I’m not sure much of the theorists individual ideas will stick with me for very long after reading them in this format, as there’s not enough to really grasp here. But it is useful as something to go back to when I need a refresher or a quick recap before diving into some related readings.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

psychoanalysis, spectator, desire, fantasy, race, ethnicity, cultural studies, historical materialism, queer theory, feminist film theory, discourse, postcolonialism, postmodernism

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Studying the field of knowledge known as feminist film studies allows us to read it as a set of statements about the institution of cinema and cultural production, about representational categories and gendered subjectivity, about identification and spectatorship practices, about cultural authority and historical (in)visibility, about desire and fantasy, and about the interaction between these areas. (1-2)

I suggest we may in fact have reached a point when it might be more important to gain knowledge about the features of feminist writings on film and cinema; for in understanding what feminist film theory wants us to know exposes the workings of a discourse as well as the difficulties that still remain in articulating it. (113)

I identify feminist film theory as a discourse; that is, a discursive formation made up from a series of statements within which, and by which, debates related to gendered representation, female subjectivity and spectatorship can be known. […] By analyzing the statements that constitute the making of a field of knowledge, we can see how the speakers and listeners, writers and readers come to know who they are within the social world. (118)

The more feminist film theory gains respectability within the academy, the more its methodological differences/difficulties are revealed as problems of legitimacy and credibility and speaking from inside the discipline. It is discourse about (rather than in) crisis, in which the female subject – as film protagonist, cinema spectator and academic scholar – continues to trouble. (120)