Sadanand Menon: Against ideologies of masculinity

CRITICALLY INCLINED

The Indo-Korean Centre's weeklong Women's Film Festival, the first of its kind in Chennai, which concluded on March 8, generated much discussion on women, cinema and representation. The debate remained confined to simplistic ideas of sexual identity rather than to the construction and negotiation of gender in the public sphere.

This is typical. We end up celebrating women filmmakers/technicians/scenarists or women's themes or plain 'realistic' representations as virtues in themselves. This leads us to all sorts of cul-de-sacs "" like the 1980, BR Chopra film, Insaaf Ka Tarazu, which used its claim of taking an activist position against rape to show three voyeuristically filmed rape scenes, leading to box-office dividends.

The largely patriarchal Indian cinema, in its 80-odd years, has projected the woman in diverse ways "" as a nationalist icon, goddess, saint-renouncer, upholder of moral order, a fetishised castrator, the ideal wife, the sultry enticer, the 'weak' sex, the perennially dependent or the mother of men.

Through all this, lurks a deep misogyny. Men as mother-lovers, transform into women-haters. Women are shown as passive, crying, teased, raped, beaten, abused, melancholy, morose, long-suffering, singing, being sung to, coy, slutty, obedient, subservient, being sex objects, sacrificing and so on in an infinite parade of 'evidences' of their being the 'second sex'.

Very few feature filmmakers here, men or women, have escaped this trap. I can recall only Ritwik Ghatak, Kumar Shahani and John Abraham, who at least made a political, artistic and theoretical attempt to refigure the representational traps of narrative cinema which, even while claiming to speak 'on behalf' of a specific exploited constituency through the device of 'realism', actually end up concealing their ideological slant on the side of patriarchy.

Which is why it is important to nuance such festivals with interventions of short and documentary films. In the Indian context at least, in the absence of a Chantal Ackerman or an Agnes Varda, much of the serious filming pertaining to gendered issues has been happening in the realm of short films. It has also spawned an extraordinary range of women filmmakers, many of whom have also contributed to pushing the theoretical debate out of the comfort zone. It is only a layering of such short films in the interstices of the feature films and creating liberal spaces for conversation, which can ignite the debate.

Chronologically, the first International Women's Film Festival was held in New York, in June 1972. Just two months later, British feminist academics Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey jointly organised a Women's Film Festival, in Edinburgh, to emphasise the need to develop an independent feminist film theory. They went on to become pre-eminent voices in the discipline. Johnston's essay, 'Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema', written for the occasion, became a historic manifesto.

Johnston challenged the mainstream 'reflectionist' view that films were to be treated as mirrors to life, reflecting a changing society. She proposed that cinema is an artificial construct, which mediates reality with its own signifying processes. In that sense cinema had to be understood as a complex method of communication.

Following up on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Juliet Mitchell, in the 1960s, which had laid the basis for critical inquiry into women's representation in the media, feminists first investigated film from a sociological point of view. However, into the mid-1970s, equipped with tools of psychoanalysis, the auteur theory, Althusserian Marxism and semiotics, feminist theorists sought to analyse the deeper codes and structures governing filmic representations of women.

Johnston's central argument that "woman as woman remains the unspoken absence of patriarchal discourse," paved the way for Laura Mulvey's hugely influential essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), where she proposes that narrative cinema produces the male as the agent of the 'look' and the female as the object of 'spectacle', through mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism. Narrative cinema, thus, imposes 'masculine' viewing strategies on its spectators, famously described by her as the 'male gaze'.

Mulvey modified her 'exclusionist' stance in 'Afterthoughts' (1981), where she concedes a distinct role to the female spectator. She argues that, in accepting the 'masculinised' subject position offered to her by narrative cinema, the female spectator can engage in a form of 'transvestite' identification, which involves "alternating between genders."

It was inevitable the debate would get down eventually to proposing masculinity itself as "being in crisis", as Kaja Silverman did in her 'Male Subjectivity at the Margins' (1992). She used the example of post-war films to indicate how the ideology of masculinity comes crashing down when a repertoire of images through which a 'dominant fiction' of male superiority has been built, undergoes a loss of faith and leads to themes of masochism, emasculation and alienation.

The works of the Canadian Teresa de Lauretis around 'Queer Theory' and the difference in gaze constituted by 'lesbian desire'; the interpretations of the Australian Barbara Creed of the 'monstrous-feminine' in horror films; the writings of the French Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, are all part of an 'intellectual history' and contribute to the idea of how it is politically necessary for women to assert 'difference' in order to combat a patriarchal order that devalues and marginalises them or subsumes them within male symbolic logic.

It is both a political and a creative task to find the language "" in word and in cinema "" to nuance this reality.