Feminist Nightmares: Women At Odds by Susan Ostrov Weisser

Author:Susan Ostrov Weisser [Weisser, Susan Ostrov]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814726204
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 1994-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSIONS

The two films I discussed were both made shortly after the Mary Beth Whitehead case in direct relation to it. I offer them as diverse examples of how the Whitehead case was used to make imaginary productions, and how it figured in different kinds of imaginations, different fiction making processes. Interesting are the different meanings the different textual strategies produce: the Rosier video is in part a direct critique of the television Whitehead film and included its footage to makes its points. While the miniseries does not draw attention to values of any kind, it is clear that discourses about class, race, and “family values,” ongoing in U.S. culture, structure how surrogate mothering is conceptualized. The unavoidable genre of melodrama that constructs the Baby M commercial production, in turn, governs how the two women are categorized and the type of drama that is shown. Meanwhile, Martha Rosler’s deliberately provocative, didactic video on the miniseries and other media treatment of the case, made from a classical Marxist perspective, partly critiques dominant media treatment of the case, by focusing on representations of Mary Beth versus the Sterns from a theory of working class versus bourgeois relations. It also critiques the medical establishment in ways now quite predictable in some feminist quarters. Simple antimedicine perspectives too easily degenerate into antitechnology stances that assume there is an unmediated “nature,” that “biology” is discursively neutral. The antimelodrama narrative is, then, still constituted by melodrama forms.

It is easy to see how close some of the women’s positive and negative narratives, explored earlier on, are to genres like melodrama, or to the soaps Gordon mentions. Indeed, the traditions of the melodrama genre may construct or shape the form that women’s stories take in the first place, including sisterliness becoming unsisterly: women at odds. What is important for my purposes is how the melodrama form oversimplifies the actual psychological, political, social, and economic contexts of surrogacy. I have argued that the prevalence of the melodrama form in women’s lives itself conditions the modes through which women think their lives. Women need to find forms more subtle—ones that enable multiple perspectives, ambiguities, contradictions, the yes/but, and the no/and/yes possibilities that are crucial as feminisms enter the nineties and attempt to grapple with difference on new levels.

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