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  • Feminism and the Big Picture:Conversations
  • Sangita Gopal (bio)

When invited to contribute to an In Focus section in which Lucas Hilderbrand asked us to reflect on "the state of the field and whether it has expanded to the point where it is hard to keep track of the 'big picture' and take stock of the critical and political stakes of studying media old and new," I started reading the history of SCMS. A previous In Focus contribution by Jacqueline Stewart struck me as particularly significant, not only for noting how feminist scholars in the late 1970s and 1980s had transformed the study of film by giving it a social and political orientation and had helped to institutionalize it, but also in outlining the rewards and risks of such incorporation—especially for "the minority." She suggests that "'minority' subjects—human and scholarly—continue to occupy liminal spaces in the field, and productively so," while also emphasizing that "the recruitment and cultivation of scholars of color and scholarship on race must continue to be an organizational and fieldwide priority."1

Women, who constitute about a half of the membership of SCMS, are by no means a minority, and feminist perspectives were critical in the formation of media studies. So, in a sense the grand narrative that feminism has done its job both vis-à-vis the field and the institution is valid. However, because that narrative was never really grand but diverse, fractured, and contentious; because it was never only about equity but also about difference; because women-of-color [End Page 131] critique, third-world and transnational feminism, and queer hermeneutics, among other approaches, have always been alert to the entanglements of subjectivity and the capture of bodies by media; because feminism has always been as much about ontology as epistemology, I became interested in how feminist methods might still offer frames for this current expansion of the field. Simply put, can feminism continue to offer us theoretical vantages for analyzing media? What lessons can current scholars and media makers glean from feminist praxis as critique—and vice versa, as expressed by feminisms past? Is the unfinished project of feminism part of the big picture that continues to orient our expanding field in the present and future?

I decided to pose these questions to feminist scholars in the field—those who had helped found and lead the discipline as scholars and institution builders, as well as others who continue to shape what is to me its exciting present. My list was unsystematic and by no means representative or comprehensive, but I was able to speak with about twenty colleagues—mostly via Skype and in a couple of instances via email.2 I posed to them all some version of the following prompts:

  1. 1. What brought you to this field and what does being a feminist scholar of film and media studies mean to you?

  2. 2. How do you conceptualize the future of feminism in the expanding world of film and media studies? What important legacies and openings can feminist methodology and praxis offer this future?

  3. 3. What work is exciting you right now? What directions are you interested in exploring?

  4. 4. What are some challenges for feminist work? What do we need to be vigilant about?

I thank all my respondents for these thrilling conversations and for their patience, guidance, and generosity. What follows is but the crudest summary of these conversations, arranged by theme.

Feminist Film Studies: Program Building and Pedagogy

A key insight from these conversations was the intimate links between, on the one hand, a feminist pedagogy that stressed interdisciplinarity, the value of lived experience, critique, and activism, and, on the other hand, the establishment of film and media studies by women scholars. I learned that the institutionalization of film studies, as well as the expansion of SCMS, owes a considerable debt to women's labor. As Patricia White wryly notes, this of course has meant "a lot of service," while Lucy Fischer wonders whether it is worth considering a "gender audit," as it were, by SCMS to take stock of women's labor in campus departments and in the organization itself. As Patrice Petro notes, there were...

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