Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, and: Women & Cinema: Both Sides of the Camera (review)

reviews 169 escape is reaUy a revolt rather than an accomodation. The idea of the "good life" does not yet automatically bring to mind the more equitable distribution of wealth in this country; and freeing men from child support does not mean they will learn the nurturant quaUties often associated with chUd care. If I have a complaint about Ehrenrdch's 77ie Hearts ofMen, it is that the book is too short. Chapter by chapter, one wants to see the arguments extended. The same criticism could be levelled at Marilyn Frye's 77ie Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. The clarity and simpUcity of this phUosophical examination of the politics of gender are both the book's strength and its weakness. The book is quite special in that it grows out of Frye's personal consciousness of how social relations are carried out, and in that her viewpoint is that of a lesbian phUosopher. The marginal vantage point here, along with her philosophical training give this book an important place in feminist theory. It is not that I agree with her arguments and proofs always, but rather I found that I admired greatly her grass-roots approach to creating a plülosophy of everyday gendered life, and I respected her attempt to represent fairly the reaUties and possibilities of various groups—heterosexuals , homosexuals, blacks, whites, women and men. As I began reading this book, I found it too simpUfied; the paradigms were too general to be very useful, I thought. But as I read on, I began to respect the amount of original phUosophizing that was going on and the fresh perspective it brought to many women's issues. The opening work on defining concepts such as oppression, sexism, coercion—spade work famiUar to most feminist theorists—grows into essays on separatism, racism, and sexism insofar as it affects male and female homosexuals differently. These last essays break new ground. Frye's essay on separatism sees it as a facet of power —"Total power is unconditional access; total powerlessness is being unconditionaUy accessible" (103) —as a perhaps necessary step toward a more equitable sharing of control, not as an end in itsdf. Her essay on "Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement" foregrounds the extent to which women and men homosexuals deviate from very different norms: "our deviations are situated very differently in the male-suprematist world view and poUtical structure; we are not objects of the same phobias and loathings" (130). And, though she does demonstrate convincingly the divergence between males and females in the gay community, she ends by leaving open the possibility of a gay male-feminist alUance, at the very least because "the absence of privUege is a presence of knowledge" (147). The knowledge that both Frye and Ehrenreich bring into relief in thdr cultural criticism is sobering, yet they also offer us hope that knowledge ofhow sexual inequaUty is engendered wUl lead to a society where gender is not inscribed by a system of repressive power and oppression. LAURA RICE-SAYRE Annette Kuhn. Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. 226 pp. $9.95 (paper). E. Ann Kaplan. Women & Cinema: Both Sides ofthe Camera. London: Methuen, 1983. 259 pp. $10.95 (paper). In most arguments feminists put forth, there Ues buried the tension between what women's nature reveals and what political strategy seems to make possible. Discussions of what constitutes feminist fUms have it no easier: programs to radicahze the discourse and rewrite the scripts tend to meddle with rationales about women's otherness and women's terrain not yd colonized by men. And if this weren't enough, art acts with its own license; films can just barely be restrained. The camera itsdf is an indulgent, harping, patronizing worldmaker. We love it because it Ids us gaze; we are shocked when it toys with an object because we feel taunted by the voyeurism and fetishism we thought was only male. Its 170 the minnesota review power to persuade us sexuaUy underwrites its power to tdl a story, bring us to a new place, make us see a dream. The written word seems crisp, dever, almost adult next to the...