Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image by Lucy Reynolds;

Author:Lucy Reynolds; [Reynolds, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350113282
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

If there is a fear that, by no longer being able to take for granted the subject, its gender, its sex, or its materiality, feminism will founder, it might be wise to consider the political consequences of keeping in their place the very premises that have tried to secure our subordination from the start.9

The aim here is not to fault Womanhouse for its blindness to privilege or lack of investment in a post-structuralist critique of identity that would later gain ground. Rather, Womanhouse must be seen as emblematic of the convictions and shortcomings of hegemonic feminism in the early 1970s, and as casting into relief the radical difference and heterodoxy of I Don’t Know, a film that has never entered the canon of feminist art or cinema. Rather than make recourse to a stable subject of ‘woman’, I Don’t Know marshals what Roland Barthes, in his 1977 to 1978 Collège de France lectures, called ‘the Neutral’: in content and form, it ‘baffles the paradigms’ of gender and genre, refusing to repeat and reinforce the normalizing binaries of man/woman and documentary/fiction.10 Whereas gender and genre share an etymology leading to the Latin genus, suggesting the taxonomic division into kind – always an act of ideology and power – the Neutral is derived from the Latin neuter, meaning ‘neither of the two’. Casting off the oppressive, patriarchal logic of non-contradiction, the Neutral opts out of the either/or and refuses rigid governance in favour of an unsettled movement that teaches one how, in Barthes’s words, ‘to live according to nuance’ – which is to say, ethically.11 The binaries of man/woman and documentary/fiction reify each term as a stable unity, suppressing their internal difference and policing their boundaries with an exclusionary force. Perhaps it is better to leave identitarian certainty and its promises of conceptual mastery behind and instead wager, with Spheeris and her characters, that saying ‘I don’t know’ can constitute what Butler calls the ‘ungrounded ground’ of an emancipatory and intersectional feminist politics.12

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