Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis

9. Envisioning Justice: The Politics and Possibilities of Transnational Feminist Film

192 ❰ 9 ❱ Envisioning Justice The Politics and Possibilities of Transnational Feminist Film RACHEL SILVEY Interstitched: A Collaborative Transnational Feminist Film Visual images are politically unwieldy. Transnational feminist collaborative film and video makers are aware that our work is framed by, and often unintentionally complicit with, the very power relations that we seek to disrupt and even modestly reformulate. Yet we continue to want to carry out this work in order to participate in a form of praxis that in its best moments aligns “the medium (inexpensive, debased, nonprofessional), the message (woman, as subject, needs to be constructed), and the ideology (the personal is political; process over product)” of transnational feminism (Juhasz 2003: 72). Collaborative film teams that work across national borders deliberately provoke questions about the ramifications of multiple axes of difference and inequality, and we invite dialogue about the exclusions and political tensions associated with doing ethnographic “fieldwork,” making film, teaching with film, and the power of the filmic gaze. I am interested here in exploring the implications and possibilities for transnational feminist alliance-building and pedagogy in film-making and teaching through film. With migrant workers and migrant rights activists in Indonesia, as well as students in both Indonesia and the United States, I have been working on a film titled, Interstitched. The film is a short documentary that asks viewers, initially assumed to be mostly undergraduate university students in the United States., to begin to critically analyze the politics of representing migrant women workers in the global South and in Indonesia in particular. It is inspired by transnational feminist theoretical work on representation and alliance-building (Alexander and Mohanty 997; Mohanty 99; Katz 200; Spelman 988; Moghadam 2005; Swarr and Nagar 2003; Pratt 2004; Sangtin Envisioning Justice 193 Writers and Nagar 2006). Its goals are to encourage viewers to consider both the construction of national, gendered, and racialized patterns of labor exploitation, and how students’ own lives are connected to these issues. It focuses on these themes through attention to local labor relations, immigrant rights, the consumption of globally traded commodities, discourses of victims and saviors, and the power relations manifest in image production, circulation, and reception. Viewers are also asked to consider the networks of activism emerging transnationally to combat migrant factory labor abuses, and the roles that both students and workers are playing in resisting and transforming the conditions under which migrant women labor in both Indonesia and the United States. This film project fits into long-term work I have done with Indonesian women workers, anti-sweatshop student activists, and immigrant factory workers in the United States. But film and video are new media for me, and engaging with them has pushed my collaborators and me to confront old questions about power, positionality, collaborative praxis, and transnational feminism from new angles. Specifically, while our previous projects have sought explicitly to engage issues of transnational inequality (e.g., Silvey 2002; 2003), none of my collaborators ever expressed interest in using the research in the direct service of their political goals. In this earlier, more standard written-format research, the research process had always involved the coidentification of themes with collaborators and deliberative, ongoing discussions about the politics of various methodological approaches (Acker et al. 99), but ultimately the written research product had been most obviously valuable to my own career.2 In contrast, when I suggested making a film that would mobilize images and stories of Indonesian workers and activists, many migrant workers, labor movement leaders, and students expressed great enthusiasm about the potential for such a film to contribute to their visions and enactments of justice. While these collaborators (discussed in detail further on) held multiple, often competing perspectives on how to define justice and how it should best be achieved, there was strong consensus about the importance of building networks of opposition to the gendered violence and exploitation that travels transnationally too smoothly, and the vital role that film and video can play in strengthening transnational opposition movements (see also Hesford 2005; Juhasz 200). Indeed, not only did all collaborators in both the United States and Indonesia express enthusiasm for the film project, but also they insisted that it was part of the responsibility of foreign researchers to move beyond written, published research products to participate with them in collecting, 194 Rachel Silvey deploying, and distributing moving images of the transnational spaces and subjects associated with migrant labor and activism. Some...