Renewing Feminisms

Radical Narratives, Fantasies and Futures in Media Studies

Helen Thornham, Elke Weissmann, Helen Thornham, Elke Weissmann

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857734075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The feminist movement, we have been told, is history. This lively book reveals that on the contrary the feminist movement is alive and kicking, still as engaged with the concerns and ways of seeing as it was in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, still demanding its political place. Renewing Feminisms sets out the claim for a feminism that is renewed, re-invigorated and re-imagined. Renewing Feminisms offers a timely contribution to current debates about lived and imagined feminism today. The contributors, both longstanding feminists and emerging feminist scholars, take a fresh look at feminist critiques and methodologies, recalling the power of past feminist interventions, as well as presenting a new call for future initiatives in media and cultural studies. Re-investigating the past facilitates a claim over the future, and all the contributions to this book make clear that feminism is not only far from over, it is lived and experienced in the everyday, and on personal and political levels.
Divided into four key sections, the book revisits major feminist areas, investigating representational issues, those of agency and narrative, media forms and formats, and the traditional boundaries of the public and the private. What emerges is a real intervention into media and cultural studies in terms of how we understand them today.

The BFI Women and Film Study Group 1976–?

Christine Geraghty

The Women and Film Study Group was generated by a letter, dated 23 February 1976, sent out by three women working at the British Film Institute (BFI) and the Editorial Assistant at the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT) to around 35 women whom they thought might be interested. This led to a meeting in London on 3 April 1976, which was attended by 20 women who agreed to set up the group, which would meet monthly. By early 1978, the group had a core membership of around 10 women; it seems to have petered out in 1979/80.

The paper I wrote about this group for the conference on which this book is based had a particular purpose, which is repeated in this chapter. Terry Bolas has commented that ‘it is surprising how little impact was felt at Screen during the 1970s as a result of the emergence of feminism’ (2009, 279), and in drawing attention to the workings of the Women and Film Study Group, I wanted to acknowledge its part in the histories that Bolas outlines.¹ But I did not only intend to draw attention to the role of feminist approaches in the history of film and media studies in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper also sought to be useful in another way. At a conference that had been specifically designed to bring different generations of feminist scholars together, I wanted to speak across the generational divide and to provide an historical account that would relate to the lived experience of those of us in the 1970 and 1980s who were beginning to analyse film and television while at the same time speak to those for whom second-wave feminism was indeed history. I wanted to avoid the dilemma which Lynne Segal identified when she wrote that ‘it is hard to avoid either idealizing or trashing the past, feeding the unruly envy between and within political generations’ (1999, 1).

In this chapter, then, I give an account of the Women and Film Group, which I was involved with in the late 1970s. My aim is to record something of the history of that group and to reflect on how the group saw itself and its work through the fragmented documents that provide a record of its work. In doing so, I want to open up a particular instance of second-wave feminism that was perhaps more difficult and more fractured than the usual accounts suggest. Second-wave feminism has been accused of leaving a legacy based on ‘a host of mystifications, imagistic idealizations and ingrained social definitions of what it means to be a feminist’ (Walker 1995, xxxii). There has been a tendency to homogenize 1970s feminism in a way which pained second-wavers who felt that ‘new narratives emerge as collective memories fade, writing over those which once incited our most passionate actions’ (Segal 1999, 9). But the version of 1970s feminism offered by second-wavers was also homogenized, prioritizing a feminism which was radical, passionate, politicized and collectively organized. In offering this very specific example in some detail, I want to demystify some of our activity and avoid idealizations while at the same time indicating that acknowledging the history and achievements of the Women and Film Study Group in the late 1970s might tell us, in more detail, how work was done in that period and more generally how histories get written. As collective memories indeed fade and official histories get written, it seemed important to offer this particular feminist narrative a more stable form of telling.

One obvious but important point is that, at the time, I had little idea that I was involved in second-wave feminism though, as we shall see, the group had many of the features of second-wave activity, and at one point, the minutes record an invitation from Sheila Rowbotham ‘to talk to her Sunday group about our work’ (18 December [1976]). Nevertheless the group needs also to be seen within a context of general activity when feminist consciousness-raising groups, political and trade union action groups and special interest groups were all part of the cultural and political context. Some of these were specifically concerned with the role of women in, for instance, political parties and the trade union movement.² But the Women and Film Group was also associated with groups which were not necessarily nor directly engaged in feminist work but which were trying to develop frameworks for the study of the media, including questions of representation and identity with which we were concerned. These included groups which were linked, however problematically, to formal institutions of education, such as the working groups set up by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University; groups set up through other types of institutions associated with the study of film, photography and television, such as SEFT, Screen and the British Film Institute; and even less formal groups, often based on friendship, which got together to undertake the work of viewing, reading and discussion on a basis which is now impossible to trace. Such groups interacted (and disagreed) through the circulation of photocopied or duplicated papers which got more and more illegible as they were passed on; through meeting up at weekend schools, evening classes and the annual BFI summer schools; and through formal events, such as the SEFT AGM. In this context, the Women and Film Study Group is typical of a whole range of group activity, informed by but not necessarily associated with feminism, and as we shall see, its activities criss-crossed with a number of different groups. This intertwining of feminist activity with work to establish film and television studies as a proper object of study is important. Those of us working in film and television studies are perhaps particularly prone to nostalgia for what is now seen as the period of second-wave feminism, since this was also the period of the struggle, in which feminists played a significant part, to establish new methods for studying film and other media throughout the UK educational system. New narratives are perhaps necessary to avoid an easy nostalgia for ‘those mythic times when people who were largely excluded from academic posts ... sought to unlock popular creativity by changing how texts are taught’ (Miller 2009, xi).

In this chapter, I adopt a particular approach to writing a short history of our group, but this writing has been informed by a number of other accounts. There have been a number of significant opportunities for feminists to reflect on the contribution of feminist thought and activity to the development of film studies, in particular two ‘round table’ discussions, hosted by two important feminist journals. In 1989 Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane asked feminist scholars to provide for Camera Obscura an account of their engagement with theories of the female spectator. Fifteen years later, in Signs, Kathleen McHugh and Vivian Sobchack asked pioneer feminist film and media scholars what feminism and feminist film theory meant to their current work. This second discussion offers a particularly good complement to what I am trying to do. In a reflective mode, these contributors take the opportunity to look back on their own pasts, comment on what was learnt and indicate how they have changed their views or positions. These are accounts based on knowledge and memory and offer a reflexive and thoughtful space which is in keeping with a feminist approach to the generation of knowledge. They reflect on the development of particular methods and approaches, sometimes suggesting ways in which feminist film theory has been or needs to be augmented in order to retain its capacity to generate new knowledge (Kuhn 2004, Doane 2004); sometimes admitting that it no longer informed their work (Spigel 2004, Williams 2004). A number of contributors start their essays by recording the difficulty they had getting going on their contribution; Doane records ‘procrastinating more than usual’ (2004, 1229) over writing and Williams entitles her contribution ‘Why I Did Not Want to Write This Essay’. This is in part a concern about retreading old ground, but Laura Mulvey relates her difficulties to ‘a break or fissure in the continuities of history [that] has come to separate a “then” of the 1970s, the moment of origin, at least in Britain, of feminist film theory and practice, from a “now”’ (1989, 1287).

Something similar, which relates specifically to the Women and Film Study Group, can be found in the interviews Terry Lovell and I gave to Charlotte Brunsdon in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which she used for her 2000 book. Brunsdon asked us separately to recall our involvement with the group, and Lovell provides an important counterbalance to my account here. In particular, Brunsdon draws attention to the contextualizing work that Lovell does in terms of broader traditions of socialism and Marxism which she and others brought to the group.

The essays in Signs and Lovell’s account both demonstrate the value of measured thinking about what can be learned, built on or acknowledged in the past. In developing this account, though, my sources led me to do something rather different. I recognize that it is not possible to bridge Mulvey’s gap, but I do want to address it, using an approach which also seems to be in accord with feminist writing on media texts. In work on soap opera and melodrama, feminists have placed an emphasis on the communication of feeling as part of the work of representation; in Women and Soap Opera (1991), I argued that, while soaps might not present a particularly non-stereotypical or wholly positive representation of women, they did offer women in the audience the possibility of identification on screen with the feelings generated in their day-to-day lives.³ In the same spirit, this essay does not aspire to the reflective mode described above but tries to give an account that is closer to the texture of the documentation I found, an account of what it felt like to be doing research on television in a feminist context in the late 1970s.

I have had access to the notes produced from 18 meetings of the group, along with some discussion papers, position papers, photocopies of articles to be read and correspondence.⁴ This was material produced at the time for the group, and the lack of attention to dating and the poor duplication (printed via a stencil) confirms that it was not intended to survive as a record; indeed it is something of an accident that any of it has. As a result, perhaps the material has an immediacy which is the product of functionality rather than reflection. Reading it again, over 30 years later, I experienced the feeling expressed by a feminist historian of the US Women’s Liberation movement: ‘even when rereading her own diaries and letters she is amazed at their failure to match her current recollections of the events recorded there’ (Segal 1999, 10, citing Margaret Strobel). This documentation reminded me of things I had forgotten, and it failed to record things I thought I remembered. In giving these fragments a context, I am also offering my interpretation of this material, although I hope the use of primary sources means that it is not entirely solipsistic. Other members of the group would have different accounts.⁵ In the rest of this essay, I will outline some of the aims of the group as expressed at the first meeting, highlight some of its working practices and look at how its public interventions were made problematic by those practices.

Aims and Intentions

The notes of the meeting on 3 April 1976 record an interest in setting up the group with the following aims:

•to investigate available film theories and their relationship to feminism and to offer suggestions for defining feminist film theory;

•the need to produce accessible texts for use within the movement and within education;

•the need to investigate the relationship between theory and film-making practice.

Although this was ambitious, it is not a surprising set of aims for the time, and the notes amplify some of our intentions. The emphasis on accessibility and a later comment in these notes that ‘theories are tools which should not be reified’ hint at debates about language and address that were taking place in SEFT in the midseventies. None of the papers, however, indicate a specific attempt to make an intervention in the manoeuvrings around SEFT AGMs or the journal boards which Bolas describes. In addition, the intention of investigating the relationship between theory and practice was a common theme at the time and was reflected in the fact that the invitation to set up a group had been sent to a wide range of women, many of whom were not formally involved in higher education, and some of whom were engaged in film practice. At least one member of the core group had worked in the industry, and there were some links with independent film groups.

The assumption was that this would be a women-only group, but it did not set itself the aim of focusing on film-making by women. Indeed, the notes of 3 April [1976] record

the danger of feminist film criticism being retrogressive by digging up forgotten women directors (do they necessarily make more feminist films than men) at a time when mainstream film theory is moving away from an auteurist approach.

Instead, the group decided, at least initially, that there was ‘the need for shared reading’, and members were asked to make suggestions about this.

A significant decision taken at the first meeting by this women and film group was to focus on television. This may have reflected difficulties in accessing film material in the days before the VCR became ubiquitous, but it linked also to the aspirations for accessibility and relevance. Later, a draft summary paper, written apparently for external use, explained the reasons for the choice:

Our reasons for choosing this series were: that we wanted to deal with a cultural product which was current, within ‘mass’ experience and with a visual medium available to most women; some feminist work had already been done on film and we did not want to work on something (e.g. an earlier Hollywood film) we would undoubtedly have been isolating from its own context and which would not have been available to women now. We were also interested in the possibilities for feminist practice within dominant cultural forms and institutions. (Untitled summary of group’s work [June/July 1978].)

Another summary paper, probably written earlier for the group and entitled ‘Problems Our Investigation Is Faced With’, puts it more succinctly: ‘we need to bear in mind why we are analysing CS [Coronation Street] i.e. to discover how sexist ideology is produced in entertainment and story forms in order to be in a better position to challenge it and change it’ (‘Problems Our Investigation Is Faced With’ [undated]).

Working Practices

The decision to study a popular television serial was not an easy or obvious move at this point. Television study had largely been concerned with serious television including the news (and football) and with authored single plays, although the BFI had published Richard Dyer’s influential Light Entertainment in 1973, and Screen Education would publish a special issue on the cop series The Sweeney later in 1976 which the group read. In the light of debates in cultural/television studies about academic fans, it is interesting that the choice of Coronation Street was not based on whether we liked the programme or not. This is indicated in notes of the meeting of 26 June 1976, which record a detailed discussion of episodes of the programme with the comment that ‘some of us realized that we enjoyed talking about CS although we didn’t enjoy watching it’. The decision to focus on Coronation Street did cause the group problems. As early as November 1976, it was noted that some people were ‘not especially interested in studying Coronation Street’, and while the core group persisted with it, the choice may have led to others opting not to commit themselves to the group. The decision to study popular television also meant that the aim of working on the ‘relationship between theory and film-making practice’ was effectively translated into a desire to change the practices of mainstream television, which was certainly ambitious.

Having made a quick decision to use a television programme to test out theoretical insights, the group struggled with finding reading which might help us with thinking about television. The texts chosen (and this continued to be typical of the group) drew on debates that were taking place elsewher...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: Renewing–Retooling Feminisms
• 1 The BFI Women and Film Study Group 1976–?
• Section 1: Relaying Feminism
• Section 2: Lived Feminist Identities
• Section 3: From Soap Opera to
• Section 4: Futuristic Feminisms
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright