F06 :: Feminist Film Studies

What makes a piece of media a feminist media is if it looks through a theoretical lens of analysis at gender, race, class and sexuality of women and aims to re-establish roles of women in a social or political context. A feminist piece of media also must consider the impact of intersectionality such as religion, age, class, and gender experiences in order to more completely analyze the oppression of women not just in terms of gender. I found two women filmmakers that name themselves as feminists, one woman filmmaker who I believe uses the feminist perspective in one of her films, and one vlog done by a women who clearly holds the feminist perspective.

The first women is a woman named Barbara Hammer. Hammer was born in 1939 and names herself a lesbian feminist filmmaker. A few of her films are a short entitled Dyketactics (1974), and two films entitled Women’s Rites (1974) and Tender Fictions (1995). I believe that Hammer is a feminist because she in fact states that she is a feminist filmmaker and is popular for her feminist work.

Link to Hammer’s website: http://www.barbarahammerfilms.com/

The second women is Lizzie Borden. Borden was born in 1958 and refers to herself as a feminist filmmaker. Two of Borden’s films are Born In Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986). Borden writes and directs with feminist perspectives and aims to change women’s roles in prostitution in her film Working Girls. In the link below is an interview of Borden’s where she talks specifically about these two films and also in depth about why she herself is a feminist.

Link to Borden’s Interview: http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/review/lizzie_borden.html

The third women is the infamous Eve Ensler who wrote, directed and stared in the Vagina Monologues (2002). I could not find a document where Ensler states that she is a feminist but I believe that the Vagina Monologues are written from a feminist perspective in that she calls for political action in changing the sexual violence that is directed toward women and calls for the social change of the roles that these women find themselves in.

Link to Ensler’s website: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/ensler/

The vlog, which features Chelsea Steiner, is a vlog that I consider to be feminist. Steiner performs a spoken word poem at Stanford University and talks about the mix between women in pop culture and women of past political events and how meshed together create an uncertain future for feminism. Steiner further proves to speak from the feminist perspective when she at the end of her vlog asks the question “who will take feminism under their wing when I am gone?� Even though Steiner does not call herself a feminist I believe that her vlog still counts as a piece of feminist media because she talks about the social concepts of feminism.