Feminist Media Studies - Still Relevant
This class has helped to provoke me into thinking about the conventions of patriarchy within American cinema, and how these conventions can be challenged. The ways in which films utilize formal techniques in order to provide convey male subjectivity, with women being treated as objects of scopophilia, has been praticularly of interest to me in my analysis of patriarchal film texts. While the formal conventions that Laura Mulvey, for instance, maps out bear more significance in application to the films of Classic Hollywood, the overall picture that she paints of the ways in which narrative works within Hollywood cinema is still applicable to current media texts. The majority of films that are released are still male dominated, focusing on strong male characters who drive forward the narrative of a film, often times through violent action. Women today still dominantly play a supporting role within mainstream American productions.
I remain skeptical about a true alternative cinema being able to be developed today. While it is certainly true that many women have made important films that deal with questions of gender/sexuality in representation (The Watermellon Woman, for instance), as well as films that allow for women's stories of oppression to be broadcasted (No would be an example of this kind of film), I am still not sure if these kinds of films represent a real challenge to the hegemonic structure of patriarchy. While new media technologies, such as the proliferation of digital equipment, make it possible for a greater range of individuals to be able to share their own stories, I am skeptical of this kind of media technology enacting real change within society. New technologies, such as the internet, always have effects that are inherant to these technolgies, and while the internet does provide for a new space of communication, I am skeptical of this kind of communication as representing any kind of real social network, fearing that it leads more dominantly to a sense of generalized seperation. Any system that is this totalizing, however, is going to have inconsistancies which allow for room in order to enact social change, and it is through this change that hope may possibly exist for feminist media to present a challenge to patriarchal hegemony.