Feminist Film Theory

in the theme of Feminism:

I have collected some references that the writer should use for the literature and see their relevance to my research area :

1. Interventions : feminist dialogues on Third World women’s literature and film / edited by Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose.

2. Gender in Judaism and Islam : common lives, uncommon heritage / edited by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet and Beth S. Wenger.

3. Race, class, and gender in “medieval” cinema / edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh.

4. Interventions : feminist dialogues on Third World women’s literature and film / edited by Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose.

5.Imagined masculinities : male identity and culture in the modern Middle East / edited by Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb.

and also you must use theoretical framework of which on below:

To examine how women have been represented in Kuwaiti films from 1972 to 2014, I will usethree well-established theories: the male gaze theory, the body theory, and melodrama theory.

My references for these theories are:
– Alison Butler’s Women’s Cinema: the Contested Screen (Wallflower, 2002)
– The sections on (a) feminist film theory and on (b) melodrama in Mieke Bernink and Pam Cook’s The Cinema Book (BFI, 1999)
– John Berger Ways of Seeing (1972)

I will rely on the male gaze theory as my main theoretical framework and will depart from it to melodrama and body theories.

The male gaze theory:

“The male gaze” was introduced in Laura Mulvey’s (1975) essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Mulvey views women representation in films, literature and society in general to have been dominated by the male point of view. Mulvey argues that in a patriarchal society, such as theone we inhabit, women are never inscribed in cultural production as the have subject of the look: they are constructed in visual culture as having a passive role, as the object of a male (gaze) that is assumed to be in an active scopophilic role. John Berger’s classic Ways of Seeing advances a similar argument in relation to painting and advertsing.

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Mulvey’s starting point is that in cinema and other visual media images of women are constructed for the visual pleasure of the heterosexual male. Representation of women remain objects of the male look or gaze and his voyeurism or scopophilia. She argued that the narrative strategies of the majority of films (if not all) construct the spectator (the looking subject) as (from the perspective of) a heterosexual male.

The male gaze theory suggests several points, including that:
• images produced in a patriarchal society, such as theone we inhabit, deny women a sense of subjectivity, i.e. that no images are constructed with woman in mind as the carrier of the look;
• women watch a film from a secondary perspective and only view themselves from a man’s perspective. They are encourage to internalise patriarchal values;
• mostly, a female character has no real function as such; her narrative role is a function of priorities and values that ultimately sustain male desire.

Mulvey also discusses the different types of looking:
• The look of the cameras as it records the filmic event
• The look of the audience as it watches the final product
• The look of the characters at each other in the visual images of screen illusion

She suggests that these looks are linked to the issue of genre and
representation because many relations of looking in the cinema are informed and disrupted by sexual desire and erotic contemplation of the female form.

For my study and analysis of Kuwaiti films in regards to the representation of women, I will attempt to explore the premises and suggestions of Mulvey’s arguments in mind considerations such as:

• the difference in the pace of feminist movement in the west and in the Arab world, particularly Kuwait. There is a vast gap between thesetwo worlds in terms of feminism and cultural development. As mentioned earlier, Kuwait is a conservative country closely adherent to Islamic rules and teachings;

• the difference between the objectives of filmmaking in the Western world and filmmaking outside the USA and Europe. As Frederic Jameson has argued in an essay entitled ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986) cultural production (and thus also films) in the South (in so-called developing countries) are more explicitly concerned with issues of national identity and national culture than US and EU films.

• The difference in film censorship regulations between the east and the west. Censorship and freedom of expression are still major issues that Kuwait is battling with.

The above considerations will have strong bearings on how women were represented in Kuwaiti films such as:
• Does the male gaze if Kuwaiti cinema objectify women in the way suggested by Mulvey’s theory?
• Could, inadvertently, the representation of women in Kuwaiti films be promoting Western feminism ideals because of censorship or religious teachings whichcall for extreme respect for certain female roles such as the mother? Or because religion prohibits the exposure of the woman body?
• Does the male gaze of Kuwaiti cinema resort to other methods to relay anti-feminism ideas to the spectator?
• Can the female spectator of Kuwait cinema be considered in the same way as the female spectator of US and EU cinema?