Feminist Research

: exploring the interconnections of epistemology, methodology, and method. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy (2007). Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis (pp. 1-17). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hesse-Biber examines feminist research historically and across disciplines and addresses critical points of feminist research in the frameworks of critical theory grounded in the experience of the oppressed, postmodern theories, which commonly draw on difference.

Drawing on Sandra Harding (1993) and Lorrain Code (1991), Hesse-Biber defined reflexivity as a defining feature of feminist research:

"Through disclosing their values, attitudes, and biases in their approach to particular research questions and in engaging in strong reflexivity throughout the research process, feminist researchers can actually improve objectivity of the research." (p. 10)

More clearly, Hesse-Biber defined reflexivity as a "process, whereby researchers recognize, examine, and understand how their social background, location, and assumptions affect their research practice. Practicing reflexivity also includes paying attention to the specific ways in which our own agendas affect the research at all points in the process--from the selection of the research problem to the selection of method and ways in which we analyze and interpret our findings." (pp. 16-17).

REFLEXIVITY is defined as a process that researchers should take on. How is it related to participatory video? Participant researchers should be conscious of the methods they take, their subjective involvement at all? In PV, it aims to bring about participants' subjective involvement. It makes this explicit, while the predominant discourse of reflexivity calls for recognizing and consciously examining it within researchers. Reflexivity means different things in two different contexts. How should it be addressed and be more explicit? How researchers should think of this issue when they take on participatory research?

The Symbolism of video

: Exploring migrant mothers' experiences. Yolanda Hernandez-Albujar. (2007). in Gregory Stanczak (2007), Visual research methods: Image, society, and representation (pp, 281-306). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

The author discussed some ethical issues involved in visual ethnographic video approach in her study of the migratory experience among Latin American mothers in Italy. She argued that the conventional ethnographic videotaping was not feasible because it could disclose identities of the participants. Thus she reconfigured the video (the title is "Voices") by incorporating related images in an experimental way to convey emotions and situations that the participants described through in-depth interviews. She wrote the final video was a practical solution to the participants' refusal to be video-recorded, and writing, "I substituted the participants' faces and their gestures and actions in front of the camera by symbols that engages metaphors of the verbal and visual narratives" (p. 291)

Finally, she discussed some limitations of her work: Although the video should represent the finding, but screening the video itself potentially limit a generation of sociological knowledge. She admitted that the video should be presented alongside with the conventional text analysis of the project for the best understanding of the project. However, she pointed out, access to visual data in publication limits video methodology in the social sciences. Video is not streamlined in the publication unlike still images, she argued.

She quoted Ken Plummer (2001, Documents of life 2, An invitation to a critical humanism) in the delayed use of video for sociology:

"[I]ndeed a whole new generation of "video" experts seems to have emerged outside of sociology to do sociology's work! There are now several generations of "video workers" who have used video as radical means of transforming the orthodox visual image and of providing a whole library of "alternative video forms." (p. 71, cited p. 303)

Feminism and Film

Humm, Maggie. (1997). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Feminist Theory, Aesthetics and Film Theory: Mulvey, Kuhn, Kaplan and hooks (3-38)

Humm states that feminist aesthetics emphasizes the promotion of women as producers of art. However, ways in which feminist artists engaged with their audiences rejected the traditional concept of art creation, artistic individualism; they undertook performance, creating a moment for interacting with an audience. Another characteristic of feminist aesthetics is, Humm pointed out, a focus on women's social subjectivity on the basis that the personal is political. Thus, feminist art aims at transformation of traditional aesthetics built upon sexist oppression.

The author further examines feminist film theory focusing on Laura Mulvey (psychoanalytic), Annette Kuhn (materialism), E. Ann Kaplan (postmodernism), and bell hooks (Black feminism).

Reflexivity, Feminism, and Difference

Wasserfall, Rahel R. (1997). In Rosanna Hertz (Ed.), Reflexivity & Voice (pp. 150-168). Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Wasserfall finds the roots of reflexive methods in two interrelated research strands: (1) Reflexive methods were recognized as a reaction to conventional or colonial anthropology since the 1970s with emphasis on researchers' compassionate and nonexploitative relations with research subjects. [THIS IS RELATIONAL REFLEXIVITY] (2) Another strand is found with the "Interpretative Turn" (p. 151) in the social sciences. The objectivity is questioned and the researcher's own subjectivity and power in knowledge production is recognized . In this strand, researchers come under scrutiny, or are conceived as the instrument of their research. Here reflexivity becomes one of the most important research tools. [SELF-CRITICAL]

Wasserfall acknowledged that reflexivity was still ill defined. In her definition, reflexivity is monitoring a researcher's own subjectivity in relation to knowledge production as well as power difference between herself and her research subjects. According to her, feminist research and methodology generally include a reference to reflexivity, yet, she argues that reflexivity, although helpful to contextualize the study and having the potential for empathetic relationships with her subjects, thus empowering both researchers and subjects, has limits, in particular in the fields where conflicts of political beliefs, culture, class, ethnicity, etc. are strong between the two parties.

More specifically she calls attention to a tension between reflexive methods and the feminist approach that questions the commonality stemming from gender and emphasizes differences among women's experiences. She contends that the empathy between researchers and participants cannot be simply assumed, then asks whether it could create an exploitative situations. In this regard, she calls for a re-examination of reflexive methods to the extent that it will shed light on the debated issues of cultural difference and feminism.

On ideologies of reflexivity

in Contemporary Efforts to Remake the Human Sciences. Marcus, George E. (1994). Poetics Today, 15 (3), 383-404.

Marcus finds the root of reflexive academic writing in postmodernism. In his definition, a postmodern condition is the "world of established but unstable institutions rapidly generating emergent forms of diversity" (p. 384). He argues that postmodern writing in the attempt to reveal this condition and enact it has been radical contemporary cultural criticism. Within this context, he characterizes postmodernism as the 'sign' of reflexivity, and asks how much of reflexivity should appear in ethnographic writing.

Looking at self-critical reflexivity reflected on postmodern ethnography writing, Marcus points out that reflexivity is an ideological matter rather than a methodological one. In his account, there are two types of reflexivity: Essential reflexivity is inherent in the use of language, thus no one can choose to be reflexive or not. On the other hand, derived or ideological reflexivity responds to how to deal with it strategically. However, in academic, he criticizes, the polemic of "more reflexive than thou" is predominant when one does not follow a specific set of postmodern styles of writing "messy text".

Marcus defines as the basic form of reflexivity self-critique, personal quest, subjectivity and empathy. In anthropology, he criticizes, reflexivity opened the possibility for the polyphonic text, but in reality, it reinforced the researcher's own perspective without challenging the paradigm of ethnographic research at all.

He points out that the subjectivist kind of reflexivity is more weighted in feminism, as shown the prolific autobiography in the quest for identity issues. He notes that feminist reflexivity, revolving around subjectivity and experientiality, has been discussed as the practice of positioning, such as male/female, culture/nature. Yet, he argues:

"Yet the practice of positioning can easily get stuck in a sterile form of identity politics, reducing it to a formulaic incantation at the beginning of ethnographic papers in which one boldly "comes clean" and confesses one's positioned identity (e.g., "I am a white, Jewish, middleclass, heterosexual female"). This kind of reflexive "act of location," while potentially a practice of key importance, all too often becomes a gesture that is enforced by politically correct convention." (p. 401).

Marcus hints at objective knowledge as opposed to a postmodern way of writing "messy" ethnography and practicing reflexivity.

Majority Norms, Multiculturalism, and Gender Equality

Song, Sarah. (2005).American Political Science Review, 99 (4), 473-489.

Attentive to debate on multiculturalism and gender inequality, emphasized by Okin in particular, Song agrees with a general assumption—either defenders or critiques of multiculturalism—that problems of gender inequality in minority groups originate partially from internal struggles within the groups, but contests that this internal view overlooks how intercultural interactions shape gender status. In this regard, she rightly points out that the debate over gender and culture within the practice and theory of multiculturalism focuses on ways in which minority norms and practices threaten gender equality within majority culture. Instead she calls attention to the reverse influence. She states:

Majority norms and practices also pose obstacles to the pursuit of gender equality within minority cultures. What is of particular concern for the debate on multiculturalism is that the mainstream legal and normative frameworks within which minority claims for accommodation are evaluated have themselves been informed by patriarchal norms, which in turn have offered support for gender hierarchies within minority cultures. (p. 474)

Thus she calls for a critical examination of both minority and majority norms and practices in claiming minority cultures.

Song insinuates that the current debate is grounded in the view that culture is well-bounded and self-integrated, as Kymlicka suggests. She argues,

Cultures and cultural identities emerge, change, and are maintained through social interactions and political struggle…To get at cultural differences, we need to examine the processes by which cultural identities get constructed. This requires attention to historical context and to collective discussions and struggles within a community, as well as to interactions between members and outsiders—–in particular, to the role of states in shaping cultural identities. (p. 474)

In responding to Kymlicka’s influential view of multiculturalism and preservation of minority cultures, Song continues to stress looking at cultural interchange between majority and minority groups and how minority cultures are shaped and continuously developed through the interchange. In this way, she calls attention to the politics of cultural construction, conflicts and identities. (She notes that cultural interactions are further fueled by global economy, transnational communication network and migrations of people across borders.) She states:

“Cultures vary in the degree of fluidity, contestation, and permeability, but even in relatively closed groups the content of cultures is not determined purely “from the inside.” Rather, cultures have developed through interactions and struggles with other cultures. This suggests the need to examine more closely the role of interactive dynamics in shaping the identities and practices of majority and minority cultural communities.” (p. 476)

Song categorizes the interconnections between majority and minority cultures: congruence effect, boomerang effect and diversionary effect.

1) Congruence effect refers to the reinforcement of (gender) inequality in minority cultures through majority norms. In reviewing the case of Santa Clara Pueblo in 1975, Song argues that gender inequality inscribed in the case—a refusal to matrilineal heritage in the Indian community—reflected the norms of gender inequality of the majority culture: the State endorsed the Pueblo’s amendment of their membership in 1939 that restricts to a patrilineal kinship system and this endorsement, in fact, reflected the current mainstream gender bias. It is only in the 1930s that women attained a right to citizenship independent to her husband. Song writes:

“[T]he gender-biased membership rule of the Santa Clara Pueblo was not “frowned upon by federal policy” in part because the Pueblo rule was congruent with the dominant culture’s own gendered understandings of membership.” (p. 479)

Song examines the congruence effect in the cases of ‘cultural defense’, where cultural evidence is taken into consideration in court decisions in the expense of equal protection to all. After examining cases of rape and wife-murder by immigrants in the 1980s in comparison with the provocation defense in the majority culture—where emotionally provoked criminal charge in intimate relationships is reduced—Song stresses:

“[T]he problem raised by the “cultural defense” cases above has not only to do with minority practices but also with mainstream norms that offer support for those practices…So long as gender-biased norms pervade legal doctrine and practice, minority defendants can continue to find support for patriarchal practices within mainstream law.” (p. 482)

2) Song defines boomerang effect as a reverse influence from minority to majority culture to reinforce patriarchal orders within the wider/mainstream society. Song calls attention to wider practices of patriarchal behaviors among immigrants and mainstream defendants influenced by a growing number of cultural defense cases. She writes:

“In some locales, juries have allowed such defenses to serve as partial excuses for patriarchal behavior among immigrants, and mainstream defendants can and may well point to these “cultural” cases in raising their own criminal defense claims. Given the increasingly diverse immigrant presence in the United States and the increasing use of cultural defenses, it is important to be attentive to boomerang effects.” (p. 483)

3) Song refers to diversionary effect as deflecting attention from unequal gender practices in the mainstream culture by emphasizing special cases of gender inequality in minority cultures. She states:
“[C]ondemnation of various practices among immigrants may help divert attention from majority practices. Focusing on cases of domestic violence or rape in immigrant communities can serve to reinforce the false dichotomy of oppressive minority cultures and egalitarian majority cultures, deflecting attention from the reality of domestic violence and other patriarchal practices within majority cultures” (p. 485)

Thus Song insist on analyzing majority norms and practices alongside those of minority because overlooking the diversionary effect can reinforce gender hierarchies across cultures and fuel the maintenance of the superiority of the mainstream culture.

In conclusion, Song contests that an internal view that regards gender inequality as an intrinsic quality of a culture as a whole fails to capture a range of interactive dynamics that shape cultural conflicts with the sustenance of the state’s role in endorsing the accommodation of minority practices that are congruent with the dominant culture’s own norms and practices. In this way, she disrupts the dilemma of multiculturalism and gender inequality, writing:

If we take a social constructivist view of cultures as not only internally contested but also interactive and mutually constitutive, then the problem for feminists is not so much “multiculturalism versus gender equality” as “patriarchy versus gender equality.” (p. 486)

In so doing, Song insinuates the necessity of looking into non-cultural factors, such as race and class, which impede struggles toward gender equality.

Looking White People in the Eye

Razack, Shrene. (1998). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Razack criticizes that postcolonial discourse of cultural difference makes power relations invisible and keeps dominant cultural norms, white supremacy, in place by culturalizing social domination, in other words, replacing the domination of race, gender, and class with the language of culture. Thus, in the case of sexual violence involving Aboriginal women and immigrant women, both victims and attackers are often “culturalized, that is, understood as cultural and frozen in time, rather than as dynamic, historical, and social” (p. 19). Looking at sexual violence and the process of refugee determination, Razack asserts that women’s realities should be understood within the structures of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy.

Chapter 3. What is to Be Gained by Looking White People in the Eye? Race in Sexual Violence Cases

Razack states that culture talk is a double-edged sword, as “it packages difference as inferiority and obscures both gender-based and racial domination, yet cultural considerations are important for contexualizing oppressed groups’ claims for justice, for improving their access to services, and for requiring dominant groups to examine the invisible cultural advantages they enjoy” (p. 58).

Problems, however, arise from the fact is culture is often uttered as an unchangeable set of values and customs autonomous from historical and social contexts. Razack writes, “culture is taken to mean values, beliefs, knowledge, and customs that exist in a timeless and unchangeable vacuum outside of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and colonialism” (p. 58). Thus she calls attention to sexism interlocked with racism.

Razack contests that white society preempts racism and sexism by replacing the discoursesof racism and sexism with culture. Calling this process culturalization, Razack states:

In its modern form, overt racism, which rests on the notion of biologically based inferiority, coexists with a more covert practice of domination encoded in the assumption of cultural or acquired inferiority. This ‘culturalization of racism,’ whereby Black inferiority is attributed to ‘cultural deficiency, social inadequacy, and technological underdevelopment,’ thrives in a social climate that is officially pluralist. (p. 60)

Razack also points out the culturalization of sexism, writing that cultural consideration are used to defend male sexual violence offenders while also being used to intensify prejudices against minority, in particular Aboriginal, women. In this regard, Razack pays attention to the tendency that women of color distance themselves from the culturalization of violence, as seen in the statement, ‘No culture condones violence’ included in the report of the Coalition of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women of British Colombia.

Observing cross-cultural sensitivity training, Razack contests that such training is of little use unless it is pursued in the context of the greater empowerment of the subordinate group.

Chapter 4. Policing the Borders of Nation: The Imperial Gaze in Gender Persecution Cases (88-129)

Razack states that the guideline released by the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board in 1993 that recognized domestic violence as a form of persecution and legalized petitions of asylum based on gender-related persecution is one of the most remarkable achievement in Canadian legal history and the first guideline in the world to address gender-related persecution.

As Razack argues, a problem with this asylum structure, , is sexism interlocked with colonialsim, that is, the West "knows what is best for the Other" (p. 92). Thus Razack argues that refugees are viewed to the West as a mess that the Third World created and that the West must clean up. Women seeking asylum are seen also within this context. Razack states:

The successful asylum seeker must cast herself as c cultural Other, that is, as someone fleeing from a more primitive culture. That is to say, it is through various orientalist and imperialist lenses that women's gender-based persecution becomes visible in the West. Without the imperial or colonial component, claims of gender persecution are less likely to succeed and asylum is denied. (pp. 92-93)

Exalted Subjects

:Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada. Thobani, Sunera. (2007). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chapter 4. Multiculturalism and the Liberalizing Nation (143-175)

It is notable the mandate of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963: it is "to develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of equal participation between the two founding races, taking into account the contribution made by other ethnic groups" (p. 144). This mandate called for official recognition of various ethnic communities, leading to the adoption of multiculturalism as official state policy in 1971, Thonabi writes.

Thobani contests that official multiculturalism contributed to stabilizing white supremacy under the guise of tolerance to difference. In particular, it is pointed out that the elimination of overt Canadian immigration policy and citizenship in the 1970s was a pragmatic response to changing global economic condition and lack of labour and had less to do with idealistic commitments to c cultural utopia.

Thobani argues that Canadian multiculturalism contribute to recasting national identity by distinguishing Canada from other nation-states such as the United State and Europe in that Canada departed from colonial and imperialist histories and it had more embracing and pluralist, more tolerant, racially innocent, thus more adaptable to changing global conditions, which led to selling diversity in the field of international business interests. Thus, Thobani writes, "[Multiculturalism's] appeal for tolerance enabled a national amnesia regarding inconvenient histories" (p. 154).

Thobani argues that multiculturalism suppressed race and racism discursively, thus disrupting the potential of greater multiracial solidarity. Looking at multiculturalism policy proclaimed by the Trudeau Liberals, Thobani states that the policy, framed within bilingualism and biculturalism, is to allocate resources to cultural groups who committed to a national unity. Thus she writes, "How the desire to contribute to national unity demanded by the policy was to be measured was left unspecified. It was clear, however, that multiculturalism was intended to further the nation's unity, not its transformation" (p. 156).

As Sheren Razack astutely describes culturalization of racism as modern racism, according to Thobani, multiculturalism deflected attention from race and racism to cultural difference. Thobani writes:

The multiculturalism policy identified the national's lack of familiarity with the cultures of racial minorities, and these minorities' lack of English- and French-language skills, as the most salient factors excluding them from 'full participation' in society. It thus placed the onus for racial inequalities experienced by people of colour onto their own (collective) cultural inadequacies (that is, their differences) and (individual) lack of linguistic skills.(p. 156)

(Federal Multicultural Policy
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Robert L. Stanfield, David Lewis, Réal Caouette

House of Commons Debates, October 8, 1971, pp. 8545-8.
http://www.abheritage.ca/albertans/speeches/trudeau.html

)

Thus polemics around racism disappeared in the discourse of culturalization of multiculturalism and reframed the power relations of racial hierarchies as cultural ignorance and intolerance. Thobani states, "whereas in the pre-war period, racial character and culture were treated as synonymous in state practices, these new policies emphasized distinctions of culture while suppressing those of race" (p. 158)

Thobani argues that the discursive regulation of multiculturalism encouraged immigrants to see themselves and their communities through the eyes of the state. Among the techniques used by state multiculturalism, selective state funding was crucial to conditioning community organizations, activities, etc., thus shaping particular multiculturalism. Central to this drive, according to Thobani, is the state's emphasis on traditional values in ethnic cultures. Within this aspects, cultures, static and bound to pre-modern, are to be tolerated. Thobani writes:

Ethnic groups were presented as connected to tradition, not modernity, and they embodies 'human experience in various parts of the world' associated with a different temporal plane (different periods of time) than the one inhabited by the nation...The policy advocated that their strangeness was not only to be tolerated but also was to be preserved and made cannibalistically available for the nation's sustenance and enrichment. (p. 163-164)

Opposing to the view of the multiculturalist policy that "fossilize immigrants as living remnants of the past"(p. 164), Thobani shares a perspective with post-colonialists and emphasizes new hybrid forms of subjectivities of immigrants.

The forms of identity, consciousness, and social practices developed by immigrants within Canada were likewise shaped as much by the exigencies of their insertion into the new society, by their experiences of migratory dislocation and by their interactions with nationals as they were by the 'cultural baggage' they were assumed to bring with them from their traditional homelands. (p. 164)

Here is part of the speech of Prime Minister Trudeau to the House of Commons:

The government will support and encourage the various cultures and ethnic groups that give structure and vitality to our society. They will be encouraged to share their cultural expression and values with other Canadians and so contribute to a richer life for us all. (as cited on the page 164)

[This state's emphasis on the traditional aspects of immigrant communities or minority culture seems to ground a root cause of controversies over commensurability of feminism and multiculturalism.] Observe that minority group feminists' struggle over gender oppression that is confronted not only within the same community but also the pervasive discourse of (traditional) culture, Thobani argues that the hegemony of multiculturalism, which interlocks culture with tradition, support the maintenance of internal patriarchal order within cultural practices. [This also help the academic dispute that confronts feminism and multiculturalism, as seen Okin's argument. Culture, seen as tranditional aspects and pre-modern practices, could not be commensurable with a multiculturalism discourse.]

Thobani describes how the master narrative created by multicultural discourse control individual men and women's behaviors and identities:

Multicultural discourse marks non-western cultures as more patriarchal and backward than the west, while it simultaneously pressures immigrant men to conform to significantly strenghened masculist codes of behaviour in the name of cultural authenticity. As a consequence, immigrant women, whose consciousness is also shaped in interaction with the master narrative, approach the men of their communities with complex expectations and anxieties...Both women and men come to 'see' and experience their own culture through this frame, with its particular versions of femininities and masculinities. They learn to see themselves through the nation's eyes, even when they see to contest such damaging images of themselves. (p. 166)

Thus, Thobani states, "the gendered effects of multiculturalism undermine the possibilities for solidarity between 'cultured' women and men" (p. 167). Within this frame, Thobani asserts that immigrant women's modernization is signally by the level of their assimilation into Canadian society and its values, which exalts nationhood.

Thobani argues that, as Fanon saw racialization of colored people as critical to shaping their subjectiviy, "(multi)culturalizing process in Canada profoundly influence the subjectivity of immigrants, especially their racial and cultured sensibilities" (p. 171).

While immigrants have been 'overdetermined' culturally through multicultural state policy, Thobani argues, Aboriginal peoples were contemporaneously refused by the state. She asserts that responding to Aboriginal peoples' claim for self-determination, the state discredited their claims to special status as the original inhabitants of the land, thus devaluing Aboriginality as only one of several cultures to be harnessed for the cultural enrichment and to exalt the benevolent and inclusive qualities of nationals.

Chapter 5. Consultations and Nationalizations (179-213)

In examining Canada and Immigration: Facts and Issues (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 1994), Thobani calls attention to the phrase, "In 1991, the Economic Council of Canada found that immigration had a small but positive impact on our economy" (p. 3), as the beginning point for a discussion on the immigration program. Thobani criticizes the assumptions that base this statement: (1) it erases the history of European colonial migrations, thus neutralizing the nation's existence, (2) Referring to "our" economy, it identifies immigrants as strangers who contribute to our economy not their economy, and (3) it excludes Aboriginal Peoples from the discussion of immigration program by treating them as having no stake in the subject.

Thobani also sharply points out that the Canadian state, by defining immigrants as stranger, "legitimize and normalize unequal rights and entitlements for all immigrant, so that it appeared completely normal and natural that 'they' should not have the same rights as 'us'" (p. 212). What's more, this process of legitimization is performed through numerous public consultations, which not only condition a reality to perceive but also provide an illusion of public consensus collected and approved through participatory democracy.

Such discussion of immigration is often tied with economy. Family sponsored immigration, thus, became a target to criticism because of its lack of economic contribution to the state and its facilitation of virtually limitless immigration. In this circumstance, immigrant women and their families are more vulnerable to public angst.

Selling Diversity

Abu-Laban, Yasmeen., & Gabriel, Christina. (2002). Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.

Chapter 1. Diversity, Globalization and Public Policy in Canada. (11-35)
The authors finds the notion of selling diversity in three public policies--immigration, multiculturalism and employment. They note that multicultural policy, first articulated by the federal government of Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1971, has been a major means of official recognition of ethnic minorities in the Canadian nation. Recently, however, as they observe, policy-makers akin to neoliberal globalization, which emphasizes global markets and Canadian economic competitiveness, tend to turn certain notions of diversity pertaining to economic competitiveness into a selling point while muting diversity as a commitment to social justice and respect.

The authors affirm that the movement of peoples across national borders is one of the most evident forms of globalization today and a major source of greater diversity. Pointing out the lag of public policies that deal with the diversity, authors argue that some of the richest contributions to policy studies come from feminist scholarship in that while looking into thegendered/differential impact of policies on men and women, they open up space for a critical treatment of other forms of exclusion and marginalization. Yet, they rightly point out that gender analysis of Canadian public policy has not sufficiently interrogated the consequences of policy for ethnic minority and racialized women.

Chapter 4. Multiculturalism and Nation-Building (105-128)
In this chapter, the authors examine the Canadian state's multiculturalism historically. The Prime Minister Trudeau's announcement of a policy of multiculturalism is generally perceived as a state's response to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, Aboriginal claim and third force from other ethnic groups. As the authors point out, it is interesting to note that Trudeau stood for a policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework. The authors argue that this framework early on bears witness to the continued domination of British and to a lesser extent French-origin groups in Canada.

Between 1971 and 1993, the authors state that multiculturalism focused on the cultural maintenance of diverse ethnic heritage such that "song and dance" were much highlighted. They observe a burgeoning linkage between multiculturalism and business interests in the 1980s, as seen in the slogan, "Multiculturalism Means Business", in a conference organized by the Progessive Conservatives in Toronto in 1986. From then on, the Canadian state has made a strong tie between multiculturalism and its international business. The authors argue that now the policy of multiculturalism, which began as a domestic policy, is becoming a selling product with a strong affinity to neo-liberal ideals.

The authors note another type of criticism along with this neo-liberal impetus. Reform Party, in particular, hinged on their advocacy of individual rights and the formal equality of people and provinces--this party also refused a special recognition of Quebec in Canada on the basis of the equality of each province. They argue, according to the authors, that the preservation of cultural background is a matter of personal choice and the state should promote minorities to integrate into the national culture, thus calling for an end to funding of multicultural support.

This conservative and neo-liberal criticism continued after 1993 and the authors note that business value was much stressed while funding for multiculturalism were severely being cut. In particular the authors note popular criticism, particularly in English-Speaking Canada in this period. They draw on the division of private and public spheres in the criticism. They state:

Along with the argument that Canadian multiculturalism weakens national unity, criticisms have centered around the idea that, while the expression of minority languages and culture are acceptable in the private sphere, the state should have no part in upholding them in the public sphere. (p. 106)

The authors argue that the notion of private means the household on the one hand and market and business on the other hand. Thus, multiculturalism as a policy means business to the Canadian state. They write:

While multiculturalism has faced significant cutbacks at the federal government level, at the same time policy-makers have marshalled a globalization discourse to defend multiculturalism policy. Here, policy-makers maintain that "diversity" benefits Canada's international trade and global competitiveness. (p. 106)

Interestingly the authors connect the division of private and public spheres in the dispute on multiculturalism with an implication of gender in multiculturalism. The authors observe the tendency that in the policy discussion, minority/immigrant women are often portrayed within their ethnocultural community, rather than within the structures of racism, sexism and exclusion in Canada. This tendency is tied to the argument for multiculturalism confined to the private sphere. The authors argue: specially for those in favor of multiculturalism only in the private sector, the realm of culture, such as food, language, and customs, is typically associated with women. Positioned in this way, women are more excluded from the realm of the public spheres of politics and work.

The authors observe a similar tension among feminist scholarship, as Okin view that minority women are harmed by multiculturalism, which sustains group rights. In a response to such argument, the authors call for careful dialogue and exchange between men and women within ethnocultural communities as well as the broader Canadian society. The authors quote Sherene Razack's argument on this subject. Razack criticizes that few of feminist scholars have engaged in respectful First/Third dialogue and instead seen Third Women only as subjects, "exotic other females in need of their benevolent protection".

The Dark Side of Nation

Bannerji, Himai. (2000). Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press.

Introduction (1-13)

Describing globalization as an economic and cultural imperialism, Bannerji is keen to cultural politics and calls attention to culture of resistance, which she calls popular multiculturalism, in opposition to official or elite multiculturalism--each is represented by Kymlicka and Taylor. She asserts that it is antiracist and feminist class politics that would prevent the popular multiculturalism from falling prey to colonial, racist discourse and ethnic nationalism.

Bannerji examines Canadian state's adoption of multiculturalism historically: multiculturalism was a response of the Canadian federal government to rapid influx of third world immigrants to Canada as well as a growing intensity of the English-French rivalry and claims of Canada's aboriginal population. Within this situation, the proclamation of multiculturalism diffused the tensions and reduced the groups' demands to cultural ones, thereby helping the nationhood of Canada centered on the hegemonic Anglo-Canadian national culture, Bannerji notes.

Observing issues around multicultualism, Bannerji argues that no critique of hegemonic relations takes place and such debate ignores an understanding of socio-economic relations that constitutes a larger national and international political economy and their manifestations in our lives. Taking a critical stance, Bannerji calls attention to class, patriarchy and gender that construct relations and ideologies for exploitation under the name of community or nation. Bannerji states:

Thus a nexus is visible between the racialized class patriarchy of the Canadian state and its creations, the multicultural ethnic communities who come from equally sexist and class societies. There is a convergence of forms of ruling and exploitation when "the community" meets the multicultural state. (p. 11)

Bannerji maintains a stance of marxist feminism in looking at multiculturalism in Canada. Refusing official or elite multiculturalism, she calls for popular multiculturalism that is safeguarded by an antiracist and feminist marxist perspective.

Chap. 1. The Paradox of Diversity: The Construction of a Multicultural Canada and "Women of Colour" (15-61)

Bannerji notes that multiculturalism is a state sanctioned, state organized ideological affair in Canada. For Bannerji, a fundamental problem in the discourse of multiculturalism lies in the notion of difference is socially abstract and wipes away its historical implication. Bannerji argues that Deflecting from historical power relations, the deployment of diversity reduces to a managerial task outside of hegemony. Through depoliticizing culture and removing hegemony from it, Bannerji contests, the discourse of multiculturalism, after all, reduces political issues into a cultural artifice and converts culture into a private matter. Bannerji defines as a dispersion effect that the discourse of diversity occludes a process of homegenization that underpins the project of liberal pluralism. Thus, for Bannerji, the discourse of diversity is an ideology.

Claiming an antiracist and marxit feminist, Bannerji ultimately calls for collective political conscientization with others inhabiting similar social conditions produced through oppressive relations such as class, race, gender and sexuality.

Chap. 3. On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of "Canada" (87-124)
Bannerji examines the discourse of multiculturalism in the nation-making process: Canada, a capital state with the legacy of a white settler colonial economy along with aspirations of liberal democracy, needs an ideology to mediate tensions and ruptures around the historical Anglo-French rivalry. Within this context, Bennerji argues, "undesirable others" consisting non-white peoples with other kinds of cultures, are to be discursively inserted in the binary hegemonic conflict. Bennerji argues, therefore, that the discourse of multiculturalism serves as a culmination for the ideological construction of Canada. In this ideological process, difference becomes neutralized and perceived as diversity rather than racism and colonial ethnocentrism. (p. 96)

Chap. 4. Charles Taylor's Politics of Recognition: A Critique (125-150)

From the perspective of antiracist and marxist feminism, Bannerji criticizes that Taylor, who differentiates his approach from the Canadian state's official multicultural policy, demonstrates an elite multiculturalism by calling for the recognition of the incoming "their" cultures within "our" culture, the existing Anglo-European hegemony in Canada. According to Bannerji, it is condescension toward "other" people who bear witness to their complex history, culture, and value.

Bannerji notes that despite his sensitivity to alienation and individualism produced by an industrial society, Taylor does not take in account the history, social relations and politics that drive to such technological deployment; instead he slips into a metaphysics of the human conditions, thus obscuring history. (Thus, he dissociates culture from power/knowledge and politics. )

Bannerji explains Taylor's perspective on the liberal state's multiculturalism: for Taylor, the liberalism, which is based on the abstract universalism and individual rights and equality, now enters the cultural realm in the state's multiculturalism. By seeking to incorporating cultural difference into the procedural democracy of the state, the official multiculturalism inevitably encounters a dilemma because of the simultaneous demand for equality and difference and because of its reliance on a universal argument to validate the particular.

As the fundamental problem in Taylor's argument, Bannerji writes that Taylor sees difference only in culture, uninscribed with relations of power, such that Taylor quotes the attempt to connect culture with politics a half-baked neo-Nietzscheanism (in his book:70). Without consideration of class struggle, and even resisting to affirmative action (his book: 64), Bannerji criticizes, "his idea of difference invloves a combination of aesthetic resting in a sort of cultural genetics--as a phenomenon of ontology and taste" (p. 132).

For Bannerji, Taylor's use of the terms "us" and "them" reveals his hidden assumptions about his perspectives. Bannerji states:

Speaking in terms of a social dialogue, this "we" extends a gesture of communitarian hospitality--creates a space where the readers can come in if they feel themselves to be a part of this "we." But this is where a trouble arises when some readers, unable to claim an insider's status of the culture that Taylor sees as "our" culture, fall into the category of "they" about whose multiculture Taylor talks about...After all, the very need for recognition of some by others signals to relations of power and ties cultural recognition to power/knowledge. (134-136).

Bannerji states that, although Talyor turns into a philosophical role to arbitrate cultural differences, at the bottom lies his sens of cultural crisis from the influx of multicultures, as quoted on the page 63.

Another problem Bannerji points out in Taylor's theoretical horizon is that he essentializes third world culture as "traditional" and religious, which is contrasted with European post-Enlightenment. Thus, they are at most to be tolerated. After all, Taylor calls for voluntary recognition in responding to the identity needs of others, thus depoliticizing the context where parties with power differentials struggle for their rights. Therefore, For Taylor, "'they' are merely unable to know what 'they' really want, thus the politics of social justice needs to be displaced by the politics of charitable recognition" (p. 143). Bennerji contests that Taylor's elitism thus offers condescension in the name of community, where a struggle to end exploitation and injustice, not a plea for recognition, takes place. Thus, for Bannerji, what is necessary to deal with cultural contestation is not an accolade of worth or equal value but a political organization that sustains structural and legal conditions to wage such struggles.

Finally Bannerji briefs liberal theorists' disagreement with Taylor: For Habermas, specific and traditional group cultures are not significant. Important to him is to bring about a common liberal culture through debates and discussions in the public space at the spirit of modernity and liberal democracy. That is to say that non-Westerners can be absorbed into this secular, rational and public culture.

Bannerji places Kymlicka as the primary theorist of the liberal Canadian state's multiculturalism: in theorizing official multiculturalism, he links group rights with individual rights and consider the constitution of different cultural groups in Canada within definitions of multi-nationality and poly-ethnicity. He also propose cultural sovereignty and emphasizes affirmative actions.

Chap. 5. A Question of Silence: Reflection on Violence Against Women in Communities of Colour (151-174)

Reflecting on women of color within the context of cultural nationalism or multicultural community politics, Bannerji argues that these women must claim various political movement in Canada as their own. She states:

We cannot allow ourselves to be blackmailed in the name of cultural authenticity, identity, and community, any more than we can be duped by the mythologies of social democracy proffered by a racist and imperialist bourgeois state. (p. 173)

Feminism and multiculturalism: foes or companions?

Okin, S. M., Cohen, J., Howard, M., & Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Is multiculturalism bad for women? Princeton University Press Princeton, NJ.

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan M. Okin. 7-24
Liberalism's Sacred Cow. Homi K. Bhabha. 79-84.
A Plea for Difficulty. Martha C. Nussbaum. 105-114.

By questioning, “Is multiculturalism bad for women?” in Boston Review in 1997, Okin (1999) contests that multiculturalism in the name of group rights tends to provide rationales for perpetuating gender inequality in minority cultures. Examining the French accommodation of polygamy in minority groups while prohibiting Magrbin girls from wearing headscarves at school in the 1980s, Okin suggests intrinsic tensions between feminism and multiculturalism that commits to group rights for minority cultures.

She claims that most cultures are patriarchal and many of the cultural minorities calling for group rights are more patriarchal than the ‘surrounding culture’. This assumption of the nature of minority cultures stems partially from a view that regards a culture as a self-defined and well-bounded static entity. As Song rightly points out, Okin overlooks that cultures are interconnected and shaped by interactions between majority and minority cultures. What’s more, her approach to the issue of gender inequality in minority cultures is based on a biased view that Western societies are more liberal with respect to gender equality. This premise is observed in her clause us versus them:

Surely it is not enough, for one to be able to "question one's inherited social roles" and to have the capacity to make choices about the life one wants to lead, that one's culture be protected. At least as important to the development of self-respect and self-esteem is our place within our culture [sic]. And at least as important to our capacity to question our social roles is whether our culture instills in and enforces particular social roles on us [sic]. To the extent that their culture is patriarchal, in both these respects the healthy development of girls is endangered. (p. 22)

Okin supports her idea of the likely contention between multiculturalism and feminism on the two basis: (1) almost legal cases related to women’s rights are grounded in their individual rights were violated by the practices of their cultural groups and (2) As Amy Gutmann pointed out, the majority of challenges of multiculturalism has to do with gender inequality. Okin maintains that this multicultural commitment to cultural diversity/defense can violate individual rights to the equal protection of the laws. On the grounds that gender discrimination in minority cultures tends to remain private, she calls for special care in looking at the inequality issue within the cultures.

Okin’s forceful argument aroused debate among scholars. Bhabha responds to Okin’s argument by stating that Okin falls into monolithic, though gender-differentiated, characterization of minority cultures by focusing on patriarchal cultural defense for certain crimes, thus missing the liberal grounds where multiculturalism and feminism might negotiate. Bhabha insinuates that Okin’s pitfall stems partially from her view to evaluate minority cultures from a perspective of liberal Western culture. Instead, he insists on placing cultural defense or group rights in the context of the current lives of minorities in the Western cultures. In this regards, he states, “[w]hat is considerably more problematic than the inappropriate application of "external" norms is the way in which the norms of Western liberalism become at once the measure and mentor of minority cultures” (p. 83).

In contrast to Okin’s perspective, Bhabha maintains that a Western liberalism interacts with and is inscribed in the exclusionary division of post-colonial practices. Thus he writes, “[a]n awareness of the ambivalent and "unsatisfied" histories of the liberal persuasion allows "us"--postcolonial critics, multiculturalists, or feminists--to join in the unfinished work of creating a more viable, intra-cultural community of rights” (p. 84).

In responding to Okin's argument of sex discrimination in religion, Nussbaum states that it is a difficult task to define the complexity of the relationship between religion and feminism but Okin makes it sound too easy. In this regard, Nussbaum is attentive to civil movements, in particular feminist movement, grounded in religion. She writes:

By treating the original core of the religion as equivalent to certain patriarchal stories, Okin simply bypasses centuries of debate within each of the religions, debate highly pertinent to religion's role in the search for women's equality.(p. 107)

Nussbaum argues further that by ignoring religious struggle for justice, Okin alienates potential allies and makes her own feminist struggle difficult. With regard to state's political intervention to religious practices, Nussbaum hesitates to present a clear view, writing:

It is indeed difficult to say how far the state should accommodate comprehensive religious views that seem at odd with secular liberal political values. But this is my point: it is [sic] difficult, rather than easy. (p. 108)

She agrees with a special protection for minority religions because of their vulnerability in all societies. Questionable to her is how state should intervene. She proposes that we should ask whether a proposed law, banning child marriage or polygamy, for example, really does impose a 'substantial burden' on people's free exercise of their religion. If the answer is no, the law may go forward, she argues. On the basis of her argument, she calls for respect for different lives one choose to lead before delving into the complexity of this issue.

Women, Art and Ideology

: Questions for Feminist Art Historians. Pollock, Griselda. (1983). Woman's Art Journal, 4(1), 39-47.

In this article Pollock examines how feminism--she explains that it has steadily grown in art history since 1974--positions itself in relation to both mainstream art history and its radical critiques. She critiques Marxist cultural theory in its lack of insight into sexist exploitation and writes:

"Inasmuch as society is structured by inequal relations at the point of material production, so too is it deeply founded on inequal relations between the sexes. The nature of the societies in which art has been produced has not only been, for instance, feudal or capitalist, but in
historically varied ways, patriarchal and sexist. Neither form of exploitation, moreover, is reducible to the other." (p. 39)

In her refusal of the predominant art historian's myth about masculine creativity and feminine inferiority in art, she argues that feminism in art history is a political struggle contesting the dominant forms of social knowledge and the ideology of sexes.

With regard to the fact that even feminist art historians classify women artists as a gender representative, Pollock argues that such category not only has been pejorative but also dangerous because it may assume certain ideological supposed essence of womenless regardless of individual artists' situatedness.

She writes "art is a part of social production" (p. 43) in that it is productive and produces meanings, thus constitutive of ideology. Looking at films in particular, Pollock writes that in certain cases images of women in films are reflectors or representations of women's identities or social model, however, her emphasis is given to its signifying practice, i.e. actively producing meanings and reproducing certain ideological representations.

Feminist Theory

:From Margin to Center. hooks, b. (2000). (2nd Ed.). Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

In this book first published in 1984, hooks interrogates gender experiences interlocking with race and class. In the preface to the second edition, hooks remarks dialectic critique and exchange in feminist theory and practice in the past and states:

"There has been no other movement for social justice in our society that has been as self-critical as feminist movement. Feminist willingness to change direction when needed has been a major source of strength and vitality in feminist struggle. That internal critique is essential to any politics of transformation. Just as our lives are not fixed or static but always changing, our theory must remain fluid, open, responsive to new information" (p. xiii)

[It is a caution that self-reflexivity should not turn to self-indulgence or sentimentality. The notion of oppression/empowerment and the complexity of personal experience should be thoroughly examined in multiple dimensions.]

Black women: shaping feminist theory (1-17)
Critiquing middle-class white women oriented feminism in the United States, hooks refutes women's experience of oppression common to all and insists on the complexity interlocked with race and gender.

"While it is evident that many women suffer from sexist tyranny, there is little indication that this forge ' a common bond among all women.' There is much evidence substantiating the reality that race and class identity creates differences in quality of life, social status, and lifestyle that take precedence over the common experience women share--differences that are rarely transcended." (p. 4)

Defining oppression as the absence of choice, she continues to argue:

"Many women in this society do have choices...They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppression. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme restrictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against."(p. 5)

Countering informed-feminist based on scholarship, hooks brings to light the lived experience of the oppressed, poor black women, as a site for acquiring their awareness of patriarchal order as well as their resistance.

"[White feminists] do not understand, cannot even imagine, that black women, as well as other groups of women who live daily in oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived experience, just as they develop strategies of resistance (even though they may not resist on a sustained or organized basis)." (p. 11)

hooks validates black women's lived experience as a vantage point from which "to criticize the dominant racist, classist and sexist hegemony as well as to create a counter-hegemony", because "This lived experience may shape our consciousness in such a way that our world view differs fro those who have a degree of privilege (however relative within the existing system)" (p. 16)

Feminism: a movement to end sexist oppression (pp. 18-33)
hooks warns the co-optation of liberal feminist movement in that it eventually contributes to maintaining the status quo by limiting feminism to women's attainment of social status equal to men. Instead, defining feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression, hooks calls attention to its political struggle to eradicate domination and transform society.

hooks criticizes the slogan, "the personal is political", writing "[It] became a means of encouraging women to think that the experience of discrimination, exploitation, or oppression automatically corresponded with an understanding of the ideological and institutional apparatus shaping one's social status" (p. 26). hooks demands collectivity in addition to individual experience in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of women's political reality:

"Feminism defined in political terms that stress collective as well as individual experience challenges women to enter a new domain--to leave behind the apolitical stance sexism decrees is our lot and develop political consciousness." (p. 27)

[Here it seems that by collectivity hooks means massive feminist movement that encompasses colored or underprivileged women.]

The significance of feminist movement (34-42)
She argues that the feminist position devaluing the importance of family has been easily co-opted to serve the interests of the state by giving the impression that feminism breaks down families. In this regard, she sharply points out different perspectives on family between white women activists and many black women: while white women regard family as an oppressive institution, many black women think that it is the least oppressive one. She emphasizes that family ties are in fact the only sustained support system for exploited and oppressed people, thus she calls ridding family life of the abusive dimensions caused by sexist oppression while sustaining the value of family.

Stressing the development of political consciousness to end sexist oppression, hooks contests that feminism is more than for women:

"The fight against sexist oppression is of grave political significance--it is not for women only. Feminist movement is vital both in its power to liberate us from the terrible bonds of sexist oppression and in its potential to radicalize and renew other liberation struggles."

Sisterhood: political solidarity among women (43-67)
hooks repudiates the prevalent idea of common oppression among all women:

"The idea of common oppression was a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women's varied and complex social reality. Women are divided by sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege, and a host of other prejudices." (p.44)

The motivation of Sisterhood, thus, is different among women. hooks criticizes that shared victimization, which is the bonding basis for bourgeois women's liberation, reflects male supremacist thinking: sexist ideology teaches women that to be a woman is a victim. On the other hand, hooks sheds light on the power and resistance among less privileged, colored women for the basis of Sisterhood:

"Women who are exploited and oppressed daily cannot afford to relinquish the belief that they exercise some measure of control, however relative, over their lives. They cannot afford to see themselves solely as 'victims' because their survival depends on continued exercise of whatever personal powers they possess...They bond with other women on the basis of shared strengths and resources. This is the woman bonding feminist movement should encourage. It is this type of bonding that is the essence of Sisterhood." (p. 46)

hooks states that racism is fundamentally a feminist issue because of their interconnectedness with sexist oppression. Observing the discussion of racism in feminist movement in recent year, she writes:

"In more recent years, racism has become an accepted optic in feminist discussions not as a result of black women calling attention to it (this was done at the very onset of the movement), but as a result of white female input validating such discussions, a process which is indicative of how racism works." (p. 52).

In the effort for unlearning racism, hooks calls for political commitment beyond individual psychological acknowledgment of personal prejudice and recognition of difference, different cultural codes. On the other hand, hooks is more critical about classism embedded in feminist discourses and writes:

"Until women accept the need for redistribution of wealth and resources in the United States and work towards the achievement of that end, there will be no bonding among women that transcends class" (p. 60).

hooks demands more vivid confrontation among women to build solidarity among women in lieu of support:

"If women always seek to avoid confrontation, to always be 'safe', we may never experience any revolutionary change, any transformation, individually or collectively." (pp. 66-67)

Men: comrades in struggle (68-83)
hooks warns anti-male sentiments prevalent in bourgeois women liberation movement:

"Anti-male sentiment have alienated many poor and working-class women, particularly non-white women, from feminist movement. Their life experiences have shown them that they have more in common with men of their race and/or class group than with bourgeois white women." (p. 69-70)

On the other hand, she denotes that the solidarity between women of color and men and those women's recognition of common resistance have contributed to creating political bonding between men and women and attending to the transformative potential of feminism.

hooks refutes separatist ideology that women alone can make feminist revolution because they are the primary agents maintaining and supporting sexist oppression, thus calling for working together.

Changing Perspective on Power (84-95)
hooks refutes one of the prevailing feminist idea that women are different from men, think and act differently, thus having a different value system. She argues that, because women accept the value system of the culture overall, they passively absorb sexism and willingly assume a pre-determined sex role. In other word, they don't conceptualize power differently. She writes:

"The suggest that women must obtain power before they can effecitively resist sexism is rooted in the false assumption that women have no power. Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise some power. These power cna be used to advance feminist struggle." (p. 92)

hooks quotes Elizabeth Janeway from her work, Powers of the Weak:

"By disbelieving, one will be led toward doubting prescribed codes of behavior, and as one begins to act in ways that can deviate from the norm in any degree, it becomes clear that in fact there is not just one right way to handle or understand events."

Thus hooks emphasize that "Failure to exercise the power of disbelief made it difficult for women to reject prevailing notions of power and envision new perspective" (p. 93). She writes:

"Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed the strength or exploited it. Recognition of that strength, that power, is a step women together can take towards liberation."

One example of power exercised by women is the power of consumption. By boycotting purchasing certain products, women may impact society, hooks argues.

The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader

Jones, A. (Ed.). (2003). The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York and London: Routledge.

Introduction (pp. 1-7)

Amelia Jones writes that visual culture is a rubric and a model of critical thinking about the world of images saturating contemporary life. According to her, visual culture studies, which originated from cultural studies in the 1950s, became a new genre of studies in the 80s, moving cultural studies beyond textual analysis, with a strong influence from feminism and other disciplines, such as anti-racist theory, art history, queer studies and film studies.

Defining visuality as “the conditions of how we see and make meaning of what we see” (p.1), Jones argues that feminism has acknowledged visuality as a key mode of gender inscription in Western culture, therefore feminism and visual culture deeply inform each other.

In particular Jones points out John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing and Laura Mulvey’s (1975) “Visual Pleasure and narrative Cinama” as two seminal essays that marshal visual culture studies with feminism. She writes about the first author:

"In his epochal 1972 study of popular and fine art images, Ways of Seeing, John Berger noted ‘ [t]he way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe’(Berger , 1972, 3). Berger (among others) opened the way for conceiving the meaning of visual images as taking place in a process of exchange between the image (with its proposed ‘ways of seeing’) and the viewer, whose beliefs inform the way she or he interprets the work. Visual Culture, then, cuts through the conventional art-historical notion of meaning as inherent in an image, as presumably embedded there in perpetuity by the willful intentions of the artist…”(p.3)

Jones contests that visual culture studies became more complex with the influence of feminism since around 1970s.

"[S]ince around 1970, it has been feminist responses and approaches to visual images that have provided some of the strongest, most polemical, and most productive theories and critical strategies to come out of any of the disciplines or modes of analysis associated with visual culture. (p.3)"

Introduction to Part Two: Representation (pp. 33-36)
Jones asserts that both feminism and visual culture contribute to overturning (or dismantling) ‘reductivist (reductionist?)’ ‘modernist’ ‘formalist’ ‘neo-Kantian’ assumption that art works are AUTONOMOUS from the sociopolitical realm and their meaning is inherent to their structure and content created by the artist. This challenge, she argues, revolved around the notion of representation. While modernists regard representation as transparent and unmediated to the reality, visual culture and feminism studies interrogated the representation in relation to power and subjectivity.

[This dismantling process is aligned with multivocality, which is one of the critical notions of participatory (action) research and participatory video.]

From Ways of Seeing (J. Berger, 1972)
Regarding the nude of women as the principal European paining, Berger points out that, while men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at, thus turning themselves into an object of vision, a sight. Berger contrasts this cultural aspect with arts in non-European traditions, where women are as active as men within art works the theme of which is a sexual attraction.

[This signifies the ways in which women has been gazed within Western culture. Also, his comparison insinuates that the representation is a value-added cultural product, which continues to reify the existing cultural preferences embedded in power structure.]

Textual Strategies: The politics of art-making (Judith Barry & Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, pp. 53-59)
Barry and Flitterman attempt to theorize the practice of feminist art-making. They maintain that the initial feminists’ perspective that emphasized the importance of giving voice to women’s personal experience is facing a radical reconceptualization, which sees the personal experience within social and unconscious forces. They classify feminist art-making into four categories: 1) emphasizing female experiences and bodily processes, 2) viewing neglected women’s art as a sub-culture, 3) [I don’t understand] and 4) textual practice exploiting existing social contradiction, which emphasizes the constructedness of feminity by calling critical awareness for both the artist herself and her spectators. The authors argue that the fourth type can transform the spectator from a passive consumer to an active meaning producer. One exemplary art work, they mention in this article, is Mary Kelly’s (1975) Post-Partum Document.
[This fourth type resonates well in feminist PV perspective.]

The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female spectators (pp. 94-105).
(also appears in bell hooks (1992) In Black Looks: Race and Representation (pp. 115-131). Boston: South End Press.
Criticizing that mainstream feminist film criticism does not acknowledge black female spectatorship, hooks asserts that feminist film theories rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework suppress recognition of race and abstracts women. Thus, she argues that feminist film theories structure the discourse of women only within the perspective of white women. In particular, hooks develops the notion of cinematic negation, which means the absence of black female in cinema as a means of perpetuating white supremacy: in other words, the woman to be looked at and desired is white. Therefore, hooks argues that black women may develop an oppositional/critical gaze, which brings the pleasure of deconstructing films.

Hooks emphasizes active resistance that transcends beyond awareness:

"Many black women do not “see differently” precisely because their perceptions of reality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing…Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze… We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions." (pp. 102-103)

Stressing the creation of space for the construction of radical black female subjectivity, hooks calls attention to film as a powerful site for critical intervention. Citing Illusions, Daughters of the Dust and Passion of Remembrance, hooks writes, “Opening up a space for the assertion of a critical black female spectatorship, they do not simply offer diverse representations, they imagine new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity. Hooks argues that identity begins from recognition of difference, which is suppressed in mainstream cinema in the form of cinematic negation.

Difference, “A special third world women issue” (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 151-174)
Speaking that, as if sexism dehumanizes men, racism dehumanizes herself to the extent that it allows her to feel free from her neighbors’ troubles, Minh-ha argues that hegemony and racism are a pressing feminist issue.

In her discussion of authenticity, Minh-ha states that, “Today, planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression” (p.158). She argues, on the other hand, that identity should be understood as multiple presences such that ‘I’ is infinite layers.

One theme that reoccurs is subjectivity in feminist theory. What does it mean exactly?
judgment based on individual personal impressions and feelings and opinions rather than external facts -word reference. com

Participatory video in geographic research

: A feminist Practice of Looking? Kindon, Sara. (2003). Area, 35 (2), 142-153.

Criticizing the predominant masculinist gaze, Kindon explores possibilities of using participatory video as a means of achieving a feminist practice of looking in geographic research for more equitable outcomes and transformation for research participants.

Citing Sarah Pink's note, "the use of video as a method of qualitative research and representation has become 'revived' as a topic in discussions of qualitative methodologies" (p.586), Kindon maintains:

"[U]sing video makes the gaze explicit within a research process. It highlights the relationship between researcher/researched, observer/observed, drawing attention to who is in control of the viewing technology, what is being framed and how the images are being produced or represented. In particular, participatory video demands critical attention to the exercise of power within research relationships, it challenges us to explore reflexive ways that enable us to, 'join with another, to see together without claiming to be another' (Haraway 1991, 193)." (p.145-146)

In her criticism of the use of video for empowerment, Kindon sharply points out that, while such video enables researchers to discuss participants' self-reflexivity, it does not acknowledge reseachers' influence on the research or encourage their own reflexivity, which makes researchers effectively remain invisible in the video they make. [This is a paradox that Kindon draws from the practice of participatory video.] She continues that by rigorously participating alongside participants, the research method may destabilize conventional power relations between researcher and researched, observer and observed, and documentarians and documented.

Kindon compares cons and pros of using video for research. She writes about the potential benefit of using video, "[G]reater attention can be paid to the corporeal aspects of knowledge production by focusing on everyone's body language, use of and movements through space" (p.148). She cites other negative practices, such as confidentiality (negative impact on researcher-subject relationship) and access (the limitation of context-dependency). Kindon denotes that the same problems arose even in the participatory video project she involved with when those who were not directly involved with the research project were requested for an interview. However, she evaluates that participatory video transformed the relationships and the nature of research as shown in the discussion of the use of created video, which implies ownership, individual experience of empowerment, and a process of disruption of researchers' assumption.

Lastly she sheds light on the (time) commitment necessary to render the potential of transformation and empowerment that PV may bring to participants as well as researchers.


[Pink, S. (2001). More visualizing, more methodologies: on video, reflexivity and qualitative research. The Sociological Review, 49, 586-99.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. Free Association Books, London.]

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I do this through a consideration of how participatory video may offer a feminist practice of looking, which actively works to engage with and challenge conventional relationships of power associated with the gaze in geographic research, and results in more equitable outcomes and/or transformation for research participants. (p. 143)

I then discuss how a form of participatory video was employed in a bi-cultural research project with a group of Maaori people in Aotearoa New Zealand. This project was developed to explore
the relationships between place, identity and 'social cohesion' in communities in the district.

videos produced were not designed to travel outside of the iwi or be used for advocacy purposes, but were part of a process of internal capacity building and knowledge sharing. (p. 144)

Yet, using video makes the gaze explicit within a research process. It highlights the relationship between researcher/researched, observer/observed, drawing attention to who is in control of the viewing technology, what is being (p. 145) framed and how the images are being produced or represented. In particular, participatory video demands critical attention to the exercise of power within research relationships, it challenges us to explore reflexive ways that enable us to, 'join with another, to see together without claiming to be another' (Haraway 1991, 193). (p. 146)

Criticizing Ruth Holliday's video diary, Kindon argued:
They enable researchers to discuss participants' self-representations and reflexivity, but do not always acknowledge the influence of the researcher, or encourage their self-reflexivity. The researcher effectively remains invisible and reinforces conventions associated with documentary film and scientific observation. If the recordings generated are then treated as 'untainted realities', rather than as representations and/or performances produced in the context of social relationships and strategies of self representation (Pink 2001 b, 87), they may perpetuate unequal power relations and assumptions about objectivity within the research process.

Doing Participatory Research: a feminist approach

Maguire, P. (1987). Doing participatory research: A feminist approach. Center for International Education, School of Education, University of Massachusetts.

Maguire describes three core activities of PR--investigation, education and action--and emphasizes that these activities are collective processes, denoting that it is collective inquiry that builds group ownership of information while carrying out research. With regard to action, Maguire stresses the fluid time frame of action, writing "While direct community action is an intended outcome of participatory research, people may also decide not to act at a particular point in time. The important point is that those involved in the production of knowledge are involved in the decision making regarding its use and application to their everyday life" (p.37). Hence, she defines PR as "a systematic approach to radical social transformation grounded in an alternative paradigm world view" (p.37).

She finds the origins of PR in three domains: international economic development in the 60s and 70s, alternative adult education and social science communities: (1) radical and reformist reconceptualizations of internatinal economic development assistance by including the poor into full participation in development decisions, processes, and benefits, (2) the reframing of adult education as an empowering alternative to traditional educational approaches: Freire, for instance, emphasized the importance of critical consciousness, conscientization, for social change, and this consciousness is developed by taking actions. Bud Hall brought PR practices to adult education on the ground that adult learners participate actively in the world while adult education regards them as passive entities. (3) an ongoing debate within the social sciences, challenging the dominant social science paradigm.

Maguire delineates the underlying assumptions of PR as follows: (1) PR begins with the premise that knowledge the single most important basis of power and control and only one particular knowledge, scientific knowledge, became validated in society, excluding other types of knoweldge, in particular, knowledge developed by the ordinary. (2) PR emphasizes the partnership between researcher and participant, insisting on their further learning through collaboration. (3) PR assumes that ordinary people, provided with tools and opportunities, are capable of critical reflection and analysis. (4) The principle of shared power is central to PR to the extent that it attempts to shift the power and control of decision making to participants. (5) PR conceives social change by returning the power of knowledge production to the ordinary.

Maguire sharply points out the androcentricity of PR: PR, breaking the positivist monopoly of knowledge creation, appears to collude with the predominant male bias of the social sciences by rendering gender indistinguishably through generic terms such as "people", "oppressed", "the community", etc.

(p.61)
[CONTINUE]

Traveling Companions

:Feminism, Teaching, and Action Research. Brydon-Miller, M., Mcguire, P., & McIntyre, A. (Eds.). (2004). Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

Introduction (Mcguire, Brydon-Miller, & McIntyre, pp. ix-xix)
Despite the initial enthusiasm of feminists for PAR as a counter-hegemonic approach to knowledge creation through the collaborative process of inquiry, education and action, the authors denote, the androcentrism of PAR marginalized feminist issues as manifested in 1997 Cartagena World Congress. In response to the marginalization, the authors initiated a movement that connects feminist scholarship and PAR since then, including the publication of this book.

The authors explain that PAR and feminism shares its common ground that knowledge is produced in the context of human relationships where hierarchical power is embedded, thus, both feminist researchers and PAR practitioners attend to the dynamics and mechanics of researcher/participant relationships and attempt to reconstruct them. In this regard, the authors sharply point out that feminist-informed PAR embraces the notion of multiple positionalities/identities and multiple ways of being oppressed and oppressing. Within this context, they state that third-world feminist, Women of Color, contributed to challenging a monolithic or universal feminist perspective. The authors also argue that PAR will contribute to providing a framework to translate feminist insights into tangible action for social change.

Understranding Muslim Women's Self-Identity and Resistance to Feminism and Participatory Action Research (Barazangi, Nimat Hafez, 21-39)
She criticizes mainstream Western approach that have marginalized the world-view of Muslim women "by both dismissing their views as 'religious' and taking, unknowingly. the prevailing Muslim male elites' views at their face value" (p.23). Thus she calls for a genuine dialogue between western feminists and Muslim feminists.

Testimonio: Bridging feminist and Participatory Action Research Principles to Create New Spaces of Collectivity (Brabeck, Kalina. 41-54)
Looking into Testimonio, an indigenous literary genre that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s, Brabeck associates principles of feminism and PAR that converge in the genre. First, she asserts that feminism, despite variations, addresses issues of power and gender, calls attention the ways in which patriarchal oppression shapes women's experiences and perceptions of reality, intend to create a feminist consciousness and to be self-reflexive (in her explanation, it is, e.g.
"to reflect upon, examine critically, and explore analytically both the research process and one's own self" (p.43).
Within this context Barbeck outlines the common ground between feminism and PAR as follows:
1) Both regard subjective experience as a basis of knowledge production. PAR, aiming real-life change through the collective research-participant knowledge creation, calls attention to the researcher's subjective experience, self-reflexivity, to interrogate her assumptions, biases, privileges and power positionalities.
2)Both reappropriate silenced voice and agency of the oppressed. In order to do so, PAR explicitly move people from objects to subjects in their own research process. Feminist researchers seeks feminist perspectives and representation by challenging traditional, male-oriented research biases and distortions.
3)Both seek commitment to political action: While PAR attempts to change oppressive social structure as well as the positions of both researcher and participant, feminist researchers engage in action to achieve social justice for all.
4)Both encompass a commitment to collaborative work and solidarity among peoples: Like PAR, feminist research methods focuses on inclusive, accessible and creative dialogue between participants as well as shared process of discovery, expression, interpretation. Thus, self-reflexivity, that explores the power relationships between researcher and participant, is an important aspect for both. In particular, Lyke exclusively delves into this discourse--a (powerful) us and a (powerless) them (Lykes, 1997, "Activist Participatory Research Among the Maya of Guatemala: Constructing Meanings from Situated Knowledge").

Weaving Words and Pictures in/through Feminist Participatory Action Research (McIntyre, A., & Lykes, M.B. 57-77)
Reckoning the Photovoice projects both in Northern Ireland and Guatemala, McIntyre and Lykes describe the emergence of a third voice through their collaboration with research participants. Regarding the projects as a process of re-storying their realities towards a better and more just future, they conclude that it is building the relationships with each other that contributed to the research projects, and defines their roles as facilitators to the process of insiders' description of their realities whereby previously marginalized voices have generated stories within and beyond their communities.

Reflecting on her own experience in the research project, McIntyre writes recurring discussions about guidance as her own involvement in the research. In this regard, she writes,

"More often than not, we responded to the challenges with sarcasm, friendly banter, and/or by simply ignoring the problem...These behaviors can be distancing at times. Yet they are behaviors that we forged in our relationships as women, friends. and researchers." (p.66)

Lykes defines a third voice as "a dialectic wherein indigenous knowledge and academic research strategies inform knowledge construction within relationships across differences" (66-67). Particularly interesting in her account about the research is the development of a story through multiple reiteration. The example she brings up is a photo of a village girl, who collected wood to sell in the hope of getting a chocobanana. The original photographer incorporated narrations of her group's analysis into her original story when she presented in a conference in the U.S., and the story was transformed again in the final book. Tracing this process, Lykes describes,

"Personal desire and singularity have been deconstructed and resituated in a discourse of childhood characterized by poverty, human pain, and children's rights. The voice represented in the final phototext was coconstructed through negotiated relationality both in Chajul and on tour in the United States--relationships that shifted throughout the nearly three years of this project." (p.73)

Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema

Johnston, Claire. (2006, reprinted). In S. Thornham (Ed.), Feminist Film Theory: a reader (pp. 31-40). New York: NY University Press. (Originally from Johnston, C. (1973). In Notes on Women's Cinema. London: Society for Education in Film and Television (pp.24-31))

Johnston criticizes that, despite changes in the image of man in cinema, the primitive stereotyping of women remained with little modification, which she relates to sexist ideology in cinema. As a result, she argues, the dominant ideology inscribes women as ahistoric/eternal/unchanging entity while placing men inside history. Therefore Johnston asserts that women as women are absent in cinema and their fetishistic images are only portrayed in relation to male narcissism. Further, she writes that the star system relies on the fetishisation of woman, arousing the collective fantasy of phallocentrism.

Within this context, Johnston proposes the concept of counter-cinema as an alternative strategic use of film as a means to disseminate feminist ideas. Looking at emerging feminist cinema, Johnston sharply notes that women's cinema has taken its aesthetics from television and cinema vérité techniques (e.g. Three Lives, Women Talking, Portrait of Jason), which is depicting images of women talking to camera about their experiences, with little intervention by the film-maker. [This approach is very similar to PV] Refuting the possibility of capturing the reality, Johnston emphasizes in expressing women's oppression that "It has to be constructed/manufactured. New meanings have to be created by disrupting the fabric of the male bourgeois cinema within the text of the film (p.37)". In this way, she warns the danger of developing a non-intervention cinema. She argues such cinema promotes a passive subjectivity at the expense of analysis.

On the other hand, she writes, "[A] desire for change can only come about by drawing on fantasy" (p.37). With this respect, she delineates the counter-cinema as a collective work for a desire for change by sharing skills and developing sisterhood. Through the collective methods, she argues, one may truly come to understand how cinema works and demystify the workings of ideology.

The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film

Lesage, Julia. (1978). Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 3 (4), 507-523.

This groundbreaking thought about the feminist documentary film in a political vein examines its aesthetics in terms of the forms and contents that it takes repetitively. The authors summarizes this tendency as follows:

They are filmed in domestic space, and their words serve to redefine that space in a new. "women-identified" way. Either the stance of the people filmed or the stance of the film as whole reflects a commitment of changing the public sphere as well; and for this reason, these filmmakers have used an accessible documentary form [realist documentary]. (p. 521)

Noting endlessly reoccurring theme of a woman telling her story about her struggle against the public sphere, Lesage elicit the non-hierarchical relation between the filmmaker and her subjects that deeply resides within its narrative structure, which is in contrast with the sense of the male artist's 'seizing' the subject and presenting it as one's 'creation'. Thus, the collective process of self-conscioussness is intended at the outset. Lesage puts the power of collective knowledge production in the following way:

There is a knowledge that is already there about domestic life, but it has not necessarily been sopken in unolonized, women-identified terms. Women's art, especially the Feminist documentary films, like consiousness-raising groups, strive to find a new way of speaking about what we have collectively known to be really there in the domestic sphere and to wrest back our identity there in womens' terms. (p. 517)

Representing Reality: Issues ad concepts in Documentary

Nochols, Bill. (1991). Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

I. The Domain of Documentary (pp. 3-31)

"What films have to say about the enduring human condition or about the pressing issues of the day can never be separated from how they say it, how this saying moves and affects us, how we engage with a work, not with a theory of it" (p. xiii).

"We prepare ourselves not to comprehend a story but to grasp an argument. we do so in relation to sounds and images that retain a distinct bond to the world we all share" (p. 5).

"Our access to historical reality may only be by means of representation and these representations may sometimes seems to be more eager to chase their own tails than able to guarantee the authenticity of what they refer to" (p. 7)

"Dziga Vertov advocated in his writings and his films an active process of social construction, including the construction of the viewer's historical-materialist consciousness, and Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, foresaw the degree to which the image wold be placed in the series of the dominant ideology as spectacle and distraction but would also retain the explosive potential to reassemble time and space into whatever order one desired" (pp. 10-11).

---> Look into Vertov's notion of social construction!

Nochols defines the documentary from the point of view of the filmmaker, the text and the viewer. In explaining its institutional practice, Nichols sheds light on the limitation of reflexivity as follows: "Documentary may talk about anything in the historical world except itself (until we consider reflexive documentaries where this very presupposition becomes the object of scrutiny). It is hard to be reflexive if you have something urgent to say about a pressing issue, and for most documentarists the urgency of the said takes far higher precedence than the self-consciousness of the saying. This defines one of the classic traits of documentary at the same time that it helps explain why the 'discursive formation' (in Foucault's terms) remains somewhat underdeveloped and unexamined" (p. 17).

About a constituency of viewers, he says, "The documentary viewer employs 'procedures of rhetorical engagement' rather than the 'procedures of fictive engagement' that guide the viewing of classic narrative film" (p. 26).

II. Documentary Modes of Representation (pp. 32-75)

Nichols's topology of documentary mode provides a very useful tool to analyze many different types of documentaries.

1) Emerging as a counterpart of entertainment quality of the fiction film, expository documentary takes a voice-of-God commentary style. As often seen in evening news, the authoring presence of the filmmaker is represented through the VOG commentary or an on-camera voice of authority.

2) Agaist the moralizing quality of expository documentary, observational documentary (or direct cinema, non-fiction film, fly-on-the-wall style) --i.e. Fredrick Wiseman--tend to portray exhaustive depictions of everyday life with syn sound and relatively long shots, thus allowing viewers to have a vivid sense of comprehensive documentation. "Observational cinema affords the viewer an opportunityto look in on and overhear something of the lived experience of others, to gain some sense of the sidtinct thythms of everyday life, to see the colors, shapes, and spatial relationships among people and their possessions, to hear the intonation, inflection, and accents that give a spoken language its 'gain' and the distinguish one native speaker from another" (p.42). By emphasizing the absence of the filmmaker or an authoring agency, observational documentary "conveys the sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world" (p.43).

3) Interactive documentary, based on interview and interventionist tactics, makes the presence of the filmmaker more evident through interaction with individuals in present events. Nichols explains this mode predominated by verbal exchange, "The mode introduces a sense of partialness, of situated presence and local knowledge that derives from the actual encounter of filmmaker and other" (p. 44). As in Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, Nichols states, the interactive mode show many social actors but only through direct encounter with the filmmkaer. According to Nichols, a participatory dynamic in this mode take beyond the interview style employed in an expository text.

4) Arising from more self-awareness and dubious questioning of representation itself, reflexive documentary explores conventional documentary styles as well as structure, strategy, expectations and effects. In particular, by drawing attention to the film making process or its device itself, it poses to the viewers problems concerning film representation itself.

Nichols analyzes The Thin Blue Line directed by Errol Morris in depth. "Reflexive documentaries will employ such [representation of realism, unproblematic access to the world by means of acting style, narrative structure, and cinematic techniques such as point-of-view shots] techniques only to interrupt and expose them. The Thin Blue Line, for example, relies heavily on the conventions of the interview with its affinities for the conventional, but also draws attention to the tensions that arise when statements contradict one another...Morris dramatizes the quest for evidence, and underlines the uncertainty of what evidence there is" (pp. 57-58).

With an emphasis given to the encounter between filmmaker and viewer, the reflexive documentary, Nichols argues, prompts the viewer to a heightened consciousness of his or her relation to the text and of the text's problematic relationship to its representation itself. Here he brings the term, ostranenie, coined by the Russian formalists who made unfamiliar familiar and familiar unfamiliar through unexpected juxtapositions.

Based on epistemological doubt, Nichols maintains that "deformative intervention of the cinematic apparatus in the process of representation" (p. 61) thus taken-for-granted viewing conditions are subject to scrutiny such that "a thickened, denser sense of the textuality of the viewing experience is in operation" (p. 62).

In reviewing the reflexive mode in a historical context, Nichols affirms that this mode gained some ground in the 70s and 80s on the assumption that political urgency/radical transformation requires formal innovation and changes in the signifier. In parallel with this movement, Nichols mines into feminist documentary as another stream of reflexive mode of representation. Julia Lesage, in particular, recontextualizes domestic individual experience in a shared political domain and writes, "[These films] show experiences and to elaborate a strategy for making inroads in the public sphere" (cited p.64). Thereby Nichols redefines reflexivity: "Reflexivity, then, need not be purely formal; it can also be pointedly political" (p. 64). He recognizes feminism as a vital alternative discourse that documentary lacks: "The tools that documentary discourse lacked, feminism provided. It instigated a radical reconceptualization of subjectivity and politics that achieved through the programmatics of consciousness-raising an effect comparatble to that of reflexivity."

Thus, Nichols summarizes the bipolarity of reflexive strategies as formal reflexive and political reflexive. Thus he insinuates even expository documentaries may be seen as reflexive if they heighten viewers' consciousness. Now a question arise around films that open up formal awareness without political sense in viewer consciousness. He answers to this questions as follows: "We must attend to formal reflexivity since the content of the form, in Hayden White's phrase, is indeed decisive, but we must also attend to political reflexivity since the form of the content is equally critical.