Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television [1 ed.] 9783030560997, 9783030561000

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Part I: Women Behind the Camera
Chapter 2: Agnès Varda and the Singular Feminine
Friends Old and New (Wave): Varda and Godard
Reframing Agency in Varda par Agnès
Varda and the New Cinephilia
References
Filmography
Directed by Agnès Varda
Chapter 3: Female Agency in Pelin Esmer Films: The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019)
Introduction
Digitality and Plurality
Female Agency
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: The Feminine Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), Bird Box (2018)
Introduction
A Woman’s Cinema
Impossible Distinctions
The Authentic ‘Danish’ and the Global
Art House and/or Popular
Gendering Inside and Outside, and Its Subversion
Brothers (2004)
In a Better World (2010)
Bird Box (2018)
Zones of Indistinction
Conclusion: A Feminine Indistinction?
References
Chapter 5: Consuming Bodies, Abject Spaces: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Transcultural Expressionism
Introduction: Amirpour’s Dark Fairy Tales
Extractive Environments: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Abject Lives: The Bad Batch
References
Part II: Women on Screen
Chapter 6: Claire Underwood: Feminist Warrior or Shakespearean Villain? Re-visiting Feminine Evil in House of Cards
Introduction
Motherhood
Seduction
Madness
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: The Phenomenology of Orphan Black as Molecular Politics
Introduction: The World of Orphan Black
A Phenomenological Look at Orphan Black
Orphan Black as a Template of Molecular Politics
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: ‘I Will Not Be Bullied into Submission’: Discussing Subjection and Resistance in GLOW (2017)
Introduction
Performing Gender in Wrestling Shows
Unconventional Women in the Ring
The Ring as a Hierarchical Space
Women Behind the Camera
Resistance Through Performativity
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Female Body Language: Cutting, Scarring, and Becoming in HBO’s Sharp Objects
Self-Harm and Its Language
Skin Language: Cuts, Wounds, and Openings
Scarring and Becoming
References
Chapter 10: The Strong Female Lead: Postfeminist Representation of Women and Femininity in Netflix Shows
Introduction
Netflix and Its Unique Attributes as a Streaming Platform
Creative Women at Netflix
The Strong Female Lead
Embracing Femininity: Unbelievable
Conclusion: Why Aren’t There More Shows Like Unbelievable?
References
Part III: Women in Context and Culture: Representational Struggles Across Genres and Platforms
Chapter 11: The Technological Turn of the Femme Fatale: The Fembot and Alternative Fates
Introduction
Defining the Femme Fatale
Female Robots in Cinema
Case Studies
Ex Machina
Westworld
Conclusion: The Fembot as the Rebellious Femme Fatale
References
Chapter 12: Women Remembering: Gender and Genre in Persona and Happy Valley
Persona
Happy Valley
Conclusion
References
Chapter 13: Bridal Anxieties: Politics of Gender, Neoconservatism and Daytime TV in Turkey
Introduction
Gendered Symbolic Violence in Western TV Culture
Daytime TV Shows in Turkey: A Troubled History
Methodology
Format as Symbolic Violence
Battles of Consumption
Discussion and Conclusion
References
Chapter 14: International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels: “Women’s Cinema, Women’s Resistance, Cinema of Resistance”
Introduction
The Filmmor Women’s Collective Within the History of Feminist Politics in Turkey
Filmmor Film Festival as the Practice of ‘Differential Consciousness’
Revealing Subjectivities Through the Stories of Women Across Borders
“With solidarity, no challenge is insurmountable”50
References
Chapter 15: Machine Gaze on Women: How Everyday Machine-Vision-Technologies See Women in Films
Introduction
Machine Vision: From Mechanical Eye to Algorithms
Coded Gaze in the Black Box
Quantifying Gender Representation in Films
Experimenting with Everyday Machine Gaze
Conclusion
References
Filmography
Software
Index

Citation preview

Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television Edited by Diğdem Sezen · Feride Çiçekoğlu Aslı Tunç · Ebru Thwaites Diken

Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television

Diğdem Sezen  •  Feride Çiçekoğlu Aslı Tunç  •  Ebru Thwaites Diken Editors

Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television

Editors Diğdem Sezen Department of Transmedia, Digital Art and Animation, School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies Teesside University Middlesbrough, UK Aslı Tunç Department of Media Istanbul Bilgi University Istanbul, Turkey

Feride Çiçekoğlu Department of Cinema Istanbul Bilgi University Istanbul, Turkey Ebru Thwaites Diken Department of Cinema Istanbul Bilgi University Istanbul, Turkey

ISBN 978-3-030-56099-7    ISBN 978-3-030-56100-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Editors would like to give their sincere thanks to Kenan Behzat Sharpe, whose outstanding abilities in copy-editing and proofreading were crucial for the readability of this volume.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Diğdem Sezen, Feride Çiçekoğlu, Aslı Tunç, and Ebru Thwaites Diken Part I Women Behind the Camera   9 2 Agnès Varda and the Singular Feminine 11 Colleen Kennedy-Karpat 3 Female Agency in Pelin Esmer Films: The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019) 27 Feride Çiçekoğlu 4 The Feminine Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), Bird Box (2018) 45 Ebru Thwaites Diken 5 Consuming Bodies, Abject Spaces: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Transcultural Expressionism 65 Joanna Mansbridge

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Part II Women on Screen  85 6 Claire Underwood: Feminist Warrior or Shakespearean Villain? Re-visiting Feminine Evil in House of Cards 87 Aslı Tunç 7 The Phenomenology of Orphan Black as Molecular Politics107 Luca Barattoni 8 ‘I Will Not Be Bullied into Submission’: Discussing Subjection and Resistance in GLOW (2017)127 Ayşegül Kesirli Unur and Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan 9 Female Body Language: Cutting, Scarring, and Becoming in HBO’s Sharp Objects145 Mihaela P. Harper 10 The Strong Female Lead: Postfeminist Representation of Women and Femininity in Netflix Shows165 Derya Özkan and Deborah Hardt Part III Women in Context and Culture: Representational Struggles Across Genres and Platforms 189 11 The Technological Turn of the Femme Fatale: The Fembot and Alternative Fates191 Şirin Fulya Erensoy 12 Women Remembering: Gender and Genre in Persona and Happy Valley209 Kenan Behzat Sharpe 13 Bridal Anxieties: Politics of Gender, Neoconservatism and Daytime TV in Turkey229 Feyda Sayan-Cengiz

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14 International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels: “Women’s Cinema, Women’s Resistance, Cinema of Resistance”249 Nazan Haydari 15 Machine Gaze on Women: How Everyday MachineVision-Technologies See Women in Films271 Diğdem Sezen Index295

Notes on Contributors

Nilüfer  Neslihan  Arslan  was born in New  York, USA, in 1989. She studied Urban and Regional Planning in the Faculty of Architecture at Istanbul Technical University and for six months at Trento University, Italy, through the Erasmus Program. She completed her MA degree in Film Studies at Bahçeşehir University. Her MA thesis is focused on mapping the multicultural components of Jim Jarmusch’s early films. After working for film programming companies and film festivals, she is currently a Research Assistant at the Department of Film and Television, Istanbul Bilgi University and a Ph.D. student at Media and Communication Studies, Galatasaray University. Luca  Barattoni  (Ph.D.  University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill) is Associate Professor of Italian and World Cinema at Clemson University. Among his publications: Jewish Identities in Latin American Cinema. Special Issue for Post-Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, 2019 (with Patricia Nuriel); “Edipo Re e lo statuto del soggetto” in Fulvio Orsitto and Federico Pacchioni, eds. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Prospettive Americane. Pesaro: Metauro, 2015; Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012; “Bergsonian themes and the human condition in Pirandello’s Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinema Operator” Forum Italicum, 2011. Feride  Çiçekoğlu  is a professor and director of the master program in film and television at Istanbul Bilgi University. She holds a Ph.D. in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. The military junta of 1980 in Turkey interrupted her teaching career. She spent four years as a xi

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political prisoner after which she adapted her first novella about a child in the prison for the screen and resumed her academic career with film. She has edited and written in collections on digital culture, gender, urbanism, and film. Most recently, she has co-edited The Dubious Case of a Failed Coup: Militarism, Masculinities, and 15 July in Turkey (2019). Şirin Fulya Erensoy  completed her Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies at Bahçeşehir University in 2017. Her thesis explores the films of the New French Extremity and their use of the body as a site where social anxieties are played out. Şirin conducts research on short film production in Turkey and video activism as an alternative media practice. She is currently a guest lecturer at Kadir Has University and Istanbul Bilgi University. Şirin has worked as a producer and advisor for international documentaries shooting in Istanbul. She is also the editor and the anchor of the weekly news bulletin This Week in Turkey on Medyascope TV. Deborah  Hardt is a Lecturer in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at Izmir University of Economics. She holds an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School in New York and is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee Switzerland. Mihaela  P.  Harper  is Assistant Professor in the Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas Program at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Her research spans comparative literature and cultural studies with a focus on the ethical and political dimensions of contemporary visual and literary texts. Her work appears in a variety of journals, including Symplokē, the Journal of Modern Literature, and the Slavonic and East European Review, as well as in the edited volumes Crime Fiction as World Literature (2017) and Simulation in Media and Culture: Believing the Hype (2011). She is the co-editor of Bulgarian Literature as World Literature (2020). Nazan Haydari  is associate professor of Media Department at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. Her research interests and publications are on radio and women, feminist media, intercultural communication and critical media pedagogy. She holds a Ph.D. in communications from Ohio University, United States. She is the co-editor of Case Studies in Intercultural Dialogue by Kendall Hunt. Her recent publications appear in Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to an Old Medium (edited by Golo Föllmer and Alexander Badenoch), The

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedia of Communication and Feminist Media Histories Journal.

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Intercultural

Colleen Kennedy-Karpat  holds a PhD in French from Rutgers University and teaches in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. She is the author of Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s (Fairleigh Dickinson 2013) and co-editor of the collection Adaptation, Awards Culture and the Value of Prestige (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Other essays have appeared in Adaptation, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, and several edited volumes, most recently A Companion to the Biopic (Wiley 2020). Her research focuses on adaptation, genre, stardom, and French national cinema. Joanna Mansbridge  is assistant professor in the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research and teaching interests span contemporary US drama, transnational performance, feminism, film, and visual culture. Her current research focuses on performance, ecology, urbanism, and intermediality. Her articles appear in Theatre Topics, Theatre Research International, Modern Drama, Canadian Theatre Review, Genre, and Journal of Popular Culture, along with chapters in edited collections. Her monograph Paula Vogel (University of Michigan Press, 2014) is the first book-length study of the playwright. She is on the international advisory board for the performance studies journal, Performance Matters. Derya Özkan  is an Assistant Professor in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at Izmir University of Economics. She received her Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies in 2008 from the University of Rochester, USA.  From 2008 to 2011, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Institute of European Ethnology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany and she was the Director of the research project “Changing Imaginations of Istanbul. From Oriental to the Cool City” funded by a grant from the DFG Emmy Noether Program from 2011 to 2016. Feyda  Sayan-Cengiz is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Manisa Celal Bayar University, Turkey. She received her PhD degree in Political Science from Bilkent University (2014). She was a Visiting Researcher at Columbia University Department of Anthropology (2009–2010). She has published articles on politics of gender in Turkey, politics of identity, Islamic media, media ­representations

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of gender, neoconservatism and women’s movements. Her book, “Beyond Headscarf Culture in Turkey’s Retail Sector” was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. Her current research projects focus on populist gender discourses and self-help culture. Diğdem Sezen  is a lecturer at Teesside University, School of Computing, Engineering and Digital Technologies, Transmedia, Digital Arts and Animation Department. She holds a PhD in Communications from Istanbul University in 2011. During her PhD, she was a Fulbright fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Digital Media. Between 2017 and 2019 she was a visiting researcher at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences in Germany at the EU funded RheijnLand. Xperiences innovation project. Her research focuses on interactive narratives, transmedia storytelling, and digital culture. She also teaches and publishes across this spectrum. Kenan Behzat Sharpe  received his PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2019. His research centers on the film, music, and poetry produced by twentieth-century left-wing movements in Turkey and the United States. He has published in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association and has contributed to various edited volumes on the global 1960s, aesthetics and politics in the 1930s, and Turkish literature. Sharpe is also a co-founder of the online Marxist-Feminist journal Blind Field and an assistant editor at Commune Magazine. He works as a journalist, writing a weekly arts/culture column for the independent Turkish news site Duvar English and contributes stories to Al-Monitor, Jacobin, and other outlets. He currently lives in Istanbul. Ebru  Thwaites  Diken  is an assistant professor in the Department of ̇ Film and Television at Istanbul Bilgi University. She holds a BA in Economics from Bosphorus University, Turkey and a PhD in Sociology from Lancaster University, UK.  Her current research interests include female subjectivity in film, film and social theory, Scandinavian cinema, director’s ethics and digital visual cultures. She has recently published a book, ‘The Spectacle of Politics and Religion in Contemporary Turkish Cinema’, funded by the Scientist Repatriation Support Fund of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey and several articles in international peer review journals. Aslı Tunç  is a professor at the Media and Communication Department at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. She has a BA in communication

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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s­ ciences from Istanbul University and an MA in film and television studies from Anadolu University. She received her Ph.D. in media and communications at Temple University in Philadelphia in 2000. She has given lectures and seminars at universities in the USA, the UK and Greece on the freedom of expression and the media’s changing role in Turkey and around the world. She has written numerous publications and country reports on the issues of democracy and media, social impacts of new media technologies, and media ownership structure in Turkey. Ayşegül  Kesirli  Unur studied advertising and film at Istanbul Bilgi University. She finished her MA degree at Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of Cultural Studies. She completed her joint PhD at Bahçeşehir University, Cinema and Media Research and University of Antwerp, Communication Studies. Her PhD dissertation concentrates on Turkish police procedural TV series and how police procedural genre is formed in the Turkish context. Currently, she works as an assistant professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of Film and Television.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Five sequential shots in The Beaches of Agnès (2008), each derived from a still photograph, all of which feature Jean-Luc Godard on the set of Varda’s film-­within-­a-film Les Fiancés du Pont Macdonald (1962) 15 Fig. 2.2 Agnès Varda, center frame, in Varda par Agnès (2019) discussing how her work on the documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) got her thinking about how the material of her own films—right down to the reel cases beside her—might find new life in another form. In the background is one of her cabane (cabin) installations, this one made from film stock of her early feature Le Bonheur (1965) and filled with sunflowers, which are a recurring motif in the film 20 Fig. 3.1 Fatma Fatih trying a moustache in Oyun (2005) 34 Fig. 3.2 Fatma Fatih as Queen Lear (2019) 34 Fig. 15.1 Google Cloud Vision API’s analyses of a close-up of general’s wife from Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928)280 Fig. 15.2 Chart of images to be tested with machine vision platforms 282

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Introduction Diğdem Sezen, Feride Çiçekoğlu, Aslı Tunç, and Ebru Thwaites Diken Harvey Weinstein, once one of the most powerful film producers and a titan of Hollywood, probably never anticipated such a disgraceful end to his career. On a chilly day in a New York City courtroom in March 2020 he looked puzzled and frail on a wheelchair while his final sentence was read out to him. The jury had found him guilty of two of the five charges he faced and sentenced him to 23 years in jail for sexual abuse. Six women who had testified against him were in tears holding one another tight. This was the kind of cathartic scene that we mostly see in movies.

D. Sezen (*) Department of Transmedia, Digital Art and Animation, School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Tunç Department of Media, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] F. Çiçekoğlu • E. Thwaites Diken Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_1

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This scene deeply resonated with us during the last stages of editing this book, the product of a long period of collaboration, the final two years of which coincided with a worldwide transformation in how female agency and subjectivity is perceived, especially in film and television. Our editorial team consists of four women academics in the fields of film, television, media, and transmedia storytelling, from different generations and back̇ grounds. Our paths have crossed at Istanbul Bilgi University over the last two decades, since the beginning of this century. When we first started out it was beyond our imagination that the period of our collaboration for organizing an international conference on Female Agency and Subjectivity ̇ in Film and Television (April 10–13 2019, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul) and editing the outcome of the conference in this book would be marked as a cathartic transformation highlighting our title. Many things have indeed changed since October 5, 20171 when the New York Times first broke the story of high-profile actresses accusing Weinstein of sexual assault. With the help of social media and the #MeToo hashtag, women all around the world started to share their own experiences of harassment or assault. The floodgates had been thrown open. The culmination of similar cases fueled a global #MeToo movement and numerous revelations about many prominent men in media, journalism, and politics shook those sectors to its core. Accusations were almost identical: powerful men had used their influence to intimidate and coerce women into performing sexual acts or enduring sexual harassment against their will. With the Weinstein case, the mainstream media conveniently focused on the famous actresses who identified themselves as victims. Yet, the MeToo movement galvanized complaints in other industries as well, such as tech companies in Silicon Valley, auto-plants or service sectors like tourism. Many well-known women in the entertainment sector jumped on the bandwagon, as in Oprah Winfrey’s speech2 promising young women “that a new day is on the horizon” at the Golden Globe Awards in 2018. Time Magazine declared the MeToo Movement and “The Silence Breakers” its Person of the Year. #MeToo definitely opened a new chapter in how scriptwriters of films and TV series began to challenge gender norms and focus on strong women character representations touching on controversial themes, stories of the margins, especially by those most vulnerable to sexual violence—women of color, Indigenous women, queer and trans youth. Those third-rail subjects not only inspired millions but unsettled them. While the Weinstein scandal was tarnishing the reputation of famous film and

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television celebrities (including Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Louis C. K., Ben Affleck, Brett Ratner, James Toback, Matt Lauer, and Charlie Rose) streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime added new productions of female-injected series to their watch lists. For instance, women-­centric series such as Big Little Lies and The Handmaid’s Tale won big at the Golden Globes and Emmys. HBO had to equalize pay for men and women, and The Crown agreed to pay its male and female leads equally. After Kevin Spacey was fired from the show House of Cards, Robin Wright stepped into the lead as a bigger success. In the midst of all the developments mandating women in the director’s chair, studios’ mentoring programs, and actresses’ demands on producing roles to have more control, the #MeToo movement revealed the continuing lack of women shaping female characters and storylines. Of the top 100 grossing films of 2017, women represented 8% of directors; 10% of writers; 2% of cinematographers; 24% of producers and 14% of editors, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.3 A New York Times analysis has found that, since the Weinstein scandal broke, at least 200 prominent men have lost their jobs after public allegations of sexual harassment, yet only forty-three percent of their replacements were women. Of those, one-third is in news media, one-quarter in government, and one-fifth in entertainment and the arts.4 Although no other nation has experienced anything close to the US, the impact of the #MeToo movement was nonetheless global in the media and entertainment sectors, yet at times complicated. For instance, in France where seduction is treated as cultural norm, actress Catherine Deneuve co-signed a letter depicting #MeToo accusers as puritanical. Scandinavia, long a bastion of gender equality, was not totally immune. In Norway, reports of harassment in media organizations were followed by a petition signed by almost 500 women complaining of harassment and abuse in the acting profession.5 Women in Italy, Spain and other European countries began to speak out, detailing how they were discriminated against and sexually exploited. According to United Nation Women Report estimates, between 2016 and 2019 #MeToo and its sister hashtags garnered 36 million social media impressions from many parts of the world across languages and beyond borders.6 This #MeToo explosion included Turkey (under the hashtag #SenDeAnlat), where domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment

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cases remain alarmingly high. According to the “We Will Stop Femicide” Platform, consisting of different women’s rights NGOs, 41% of women living in Turkey have suffered from sexual assault at least once in their lives, and 93% of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment.7 Similar to Hollywood, though, the #SenDeAnlat movement was spearheaded by celebrities such as Sıla Gençoğlu, one of the country’s most popular female singers, filing a legal complaint against her boyfriend, actor Ahmet Kural, accusing him of violence and revealing the details on social media in 2018. Amidst this turmoil, our incentive to organize an international conference on Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television turned out to be a more timely intervention than any of us could have foreseen. The passing of Agnès Varda on March 29, 2019 put her on the agenda, even more than she had been during the previous years, due to her lifelong devotion to gender equality and her unique vision of filmer en femme. Just a month before her passing, her final film Varda par Agnès (2019) premiered at Berlin Film Festival. Her joy of life, resilience and intimacy was celebrated as an alternative to the masculinist policies poisoning the film industry in that final festival she attended with her daughter and producer, Rosalie Varda, and her entire crew. The global response to her passing manifested a deep love and appreciation of not only her work but her life in general and demonstrated how it was no longer possible to demarcate the personal lives from the works of artists. The tone of the consensual global obituary for Varda was starkly different from the controversial one for Bernardo Bertolucci, who had passed a few months earlier in November of the previous year. His oeuvre was no longer mentioned with the idolization that usually favored the masculine cinéastes of the twentieth century. The sexual harassment in his 1972 film Last Tango in Paris became part of his legacy. Bertolucci had revealed that during the rape scene in the film a stick of butter was used as lubricant without informing Maria Schneider, the actress who was nineteen at the time of the shooting. Bertolucci argued that it was necessary to humiliate Schneider in order to make his film. “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” he had said. “I wanted her to react humiliated.” His passing did not end the criticism and his words were no longer taken as a sign of his genius as a filmmaker but of misogyny, and abuse of power.8 How Bertolucci’s legacy was marked was yet another sign that the myth of the “masculine singular” was shattered. The process had neither been sudden nor without an academic background. Geneviève Sellier’s

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monograph La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma au masculin singulier (2005), translated as Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema by Kristin Ross (2008) highlighted, more than a decade ago, that a change was coming.9 Agnès Varda herself was one of the vanguards of that change, throughout a career spanning more than six decades. Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) her first film with a digital camera, which she started shooting on the first day of the year 2000, marked a new period not only in her career, but in female agency behind the camera at the beginning of the new century. The structure and progression of this book highlights the transformation briefly outlined above. There are three sections, each devoted to a different aspect of the conference title: “The women behind the camera”, “women on screen”, and “women in context and culture: representational struggles across genres and platforms.” The first section starts out with Colleen Kennedy-Karpat’s article on “Agnès Varda and the Singular Feminine” with reference to Geneviève Sellier’s aforementioned monograph. Focusing on Varda’s representation of Godard in a pastiche of silent slapstick (Les Fiancés du Pont Macdonald, 1962) that appears in Cléo from 5 to 7 and of JR in Faces Places (2017), Kennedy-Karpat highlights the politics of memory in Varda’s work and shows how Varda’s resilience, including her acceptance of her own vulnerability, helped transform the canon. Feride Çiçekoğlu’s article “Female Agency in Pelin Esmer Films: The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019)” highlights the freedom and flexibility of the digital camera and tracing the example of Pelin Esmer shows how it empowered women directors in the new century. Çiçekoğlu argues that the two films of the director Esmer from 2005 and 2019, following a group of women from a southern province of Turkey over fourteen years from their initial attempts to form a theater group to their travelling troupe performing for the villages of the region, stand witness to the empowerment of women both behind the camera and on screen. Ebru Thwaites Diken elaborates on how the distinction between the inside and the outside is operationalized in a gendered fashion in Susanne Bier’s three films: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), and Bird Box (2018) in her article “The Feminine Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema”. She finishes with a controversial and provocative question as to whether blindness can be considered subversive due to a complete lack of the gaze, which is essentially masculine, referring to Irigaray. The final article of this section “Consuming Bodies, Abject Spaces: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Transcultural Expressionism” is by

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Joanna Mansbridge. Mansbridge discusses how A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and the director’s follow up feature, The Bad Batch (2016) use metaphors of vampirism and cannibalism, illuminating the violent fantasies animating relations within an economically divided, transcultural United States. The second thematic section, “Women on Screen,” contains contributions focusing on women’s screen representations. Aslı Tunç examines the character Claire Underwood from the Netflix drama House of Cards (2013–2018) by questioning whether Underwood is a feminist warrior or a Shakespearean villain by revisiting the concept of female evil and focusing on the themes of motherhood, seduction, and madness. Luca Barattoni self-formation in TV series Orphan Black (2013–2017). Ayşegül Kesirli Unur and Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan focus on Netflix Original series GLOW (2017) and question its self-reflexive approach through a comparative analysis of the show and its inspiration, the 1980s cable TV show GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (1986–1989). Mihaela P. Harper discusses HBO’s miniseries Sharp Objects (2018) as women’s storytelling representing internal and external lives of the three generations of women and highlights how the series complicates the relationship between self and body, self-consciousness and cultural context. Derya Özkan and Deborah Hardt assess the contents of female-­driven stories on Netflix through story arcs and inquire how the selected shows feature and emphasize female agency. The third section concentrates on the representational struggles across genres and platforms. Şirin Erensoy analyzes two examples, Ex-Machina (2014) and Westworld (2016–) and argues that film noir’s femme fatale today has evolved into emancipated female robot: the fembot as a figure of resistance. Kenan Behzat Sharpe approaches the crime dramas Persona (2018) and Happy Valley (2014–2016) and explores the themes of women’s agency, violence and trauma, and the political meaning of memory and forgetting. Feyda Sayan-Cengiz traces “ideal female subject” along the lines of neoconservative and neoliberal discourses of gender by analyzing popular Turkish daytime TV show Bridal House. Nazan Haydari focuses on Filmmor International Women’s Film Festival as a site of activism by drawing from the programming strategies published on the festival catalogs and she explains how the Filmmor IWFF becomes an inclusive ground for solidarity, resistance and agency of women. Diğdem Sezen, finally, discusses the machine gaze for women’s representation in algorithmically driven visual culture and plays with algorithmically driven machine

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vision technologies and film images to generate questions on glitches, errors and ambiguities of interactions of machine vision systems and film images.

Notes 1. Kanto, Jodi; Thowey, Megan. 2017. Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades. New York Times, October 5. https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html. Accessed 14 April 2020. 2. Elahe, Izadi. 2018. ‘A New Day is on the Horizon’ Read Oprah Winfrey’s Stirring Golden Globes Speech. Washington Post, July 1. https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/ wp/2018/01/07/a-new-day-is-on-the-horizon-read-oprah-winfreys-stirring-golden-globes-speech/. Accessed 14 April 2020. 3. Morris, Regan. 2020. Is #meToo Changing Hollywood? BBC News, March 3. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43219531. Accessed 22 March 2020. 4. Carlsen, Audrey (et al.). 2018. #MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women. New York Times, October 23. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metooreplacements.html. Accessed 22 March 2020. 5. Berglund, Nina. 2017. Sexual Harassment Complaints Soar. News in English.no: News and Views from Norway. https://www.newsinenglish. no/2017/11/17/sexual-harassment-complaints-soar/. Accessed 20 March 2020. 6. Sen, Purna. 2019. What will it take? Promoting cultural change to end sexual harassment? https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2019/09/discussion-paper-what-will-it-takepromoting-cultural-change-to-end-sexual-harassment#view. Accessed 20 March 2020. 7. 2020 February report. 2020. We Will End Femicide Platform. http:// kadincinayetlerinidurduracagiz.net/veriler/2897/2020-february-reportof-we-will-end-femicide-platform. Accessed 21 March 2020. 8. . North, Anna. 2018. The disturbing story behind the rape scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, explained. Vox, November 26. https:// www.vox.com/2018/11/26/18112531/bernardo-bertolucci-mariaschneider-last-tango-in-paris. Accessed 20 March 2020. 9. Sellier, Genevieve. 2020. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema. https://www.dukeupress.edu/masculine-singular/. Accessed 14 April 2020.

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References Berglund, Nina. 2017. Sexual Harassment Complaints Soar. News in English.no: News and Views from Norway. https://www.newsinenglish.no/2017/11/17/ sexual-harassment-complaints-soar/. Accessed 20 March 2020. Carlsen, Audrey (et  al.). 2018. #MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women. New York Times, October 23. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-replacements.html. Accessed 22 March 2020. Elahe, Izadi. 2018. ‘A New Day is on the Horizon’ Read Oprah Winfrey’s Stirring Golden Globes Speech. Washington Post, July 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ar ts-and-enter tainment/wp/2018/01/07/a-newday-is-on-the-horizon-read-oprah-winfreys-stirring-golden-globes-speech/. Accessed 14 April 2020. Kanto, Jodi; Thowey, Megan. 2017. Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades. New  York Times, October 5. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/10/05/us/har vey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html. Accessed 14 April 2020. Morris, Regan. 2020. Is #meToo Changing Hollywood? BBC News, March 3. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43219531. Accessed 22 March 2020. North, Anna. 2018. The disturbing story behind the rape scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, explained. Vox, November 26. https://www. vox.com/2018/11/26/18112531/bernardo-bertolucci-maria-schneiderlast-tango-in-paris. Accessed 20 March 2020. Sen, Purna. 2019. What will it take? Promoting cultural change to end sexual harassment? https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2019/09/discussion-paper-what-will-it-take-promoting-culturalchange-to-end-sexual-harassment#view. Accessed 20 March 2020. Sellier, Genevieve. 2020. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema. https:// www.dukeupress.edu/masculine-singular/. Accessed 14 April 2020. We Will End Femicide Platform 2020 February Report. http://kadincinayetlerinidurduracagiz.net/veriler/2897/2020-february-report-of-we-will-end-femicide-platform. Accessed 21 March 2020.

PART I

Women Behind the Camera

CHAPTER 2

Agnès Varda and the Singular Feminine Colleen Kennedy-Karpat

Time spares no one, and few filmmakers have found more ways to explore and express this fact than Agnès Varda: from the pop star killing time in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), to the rotting potatoes in The Gleaners and I (2000); from her loving reconstitution of her husband’s youth in Jacquot de Nantes (1990), to the exploration of her own memories in her last documentaries, including The Beaches of Agnès (2008), Faces Places (2017), and her final work Varda par Agnès (2019). When cinema loses one of its luminaries, their passage is usually marked through predictable rituals of public mourning. It is not at all surprising that the immediate aftermath of Varda’s own death saw an outpouring of love and memories of her life and work from cinéphiles around the world. The narrative of recognition holds firm, but what sets apart these elegies

The title of this essay riffs on the ingenious title of Geneviève Sellier’s monograph La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma au masculin singulier (2005), which was rearranged for its English translation, to reduced effect, as Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (trans. Kristin Ross, 2008). C. Kennedy-Karpat (*) Department of Communication and Design, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_2

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for Varda is their tone. For comparison, the death of Bernardo Bertolucci in late 2018 was just as widely acknowledged, though in a way that more or less followed the script for a director of both global repute and lengthy career. By and large, the tributes he received focused on the past: on his place in cinema history; on his achievements as a director; and, from many commentators, statements about why his treatment of women should merit an asterisk, at the very least, to qualify the methods used in making these assessments. For Varda, however, this script seemed to veer off course, with tributes that focused not only or not as much on historical import, but rather on more subjective, personal measures of her impact. Part of this de-emphasis on the past can be explained by Varda’s near-continuous output and media presence until her death at age 90 in March 2019, which put an abrupt end to a late-blooming, upward trajectory. Fittingly enough, the honorary Palme awarded to Varda for lifetime achievement at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 was hardly her final success: her 2017 feature documentary, Visages Villages (released under the English title Faces Places), was nominated for an Oscar and netted a slew of other awards; Varda par Agnès débuted out of competition in Berlin only a month before her passing. Neither slowing down nor slipping into obscurity, Varda used the experience of her advancing years to breathe new life into her art with groundbreaking, multimedia work that won her new audiences and garnered unprecedented public recognition. The tributes to Varda have certainly not ignored her contribution to film history, but evaluative assessment of her life’s work often gives way to personal memories and private feelings about what her life has meant. Beyond standard measures of respect, an astounding proportion of the tributes in publication and on social media are framed by gratitude, citing her as a major inspiration for their own cinematic, artistic, and critical pursuits. While this observation may be limited to my own Twitter feed, it would be worth a more formal examination of the social media response to Varda’s death, particularly as compared to memorializations for similarly positioned figures that have been proffered through the same platforms. There could be many such candidates for comparison—Bertolucci is just one—but the most apt will eventually and probably inevitably be Jean-Luc Godard.

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Friends Old and New (Wave): Varda and Godard The specter of the still-living Godard, whose career in many ways has run parallel to Varda’s (though their paths diverge in equally meaningful ways), is in fact the provocation for this study. When Faces Places appeared on the 2017 program for the Gezici Festival (Festival on Wheels) in Ankara, I immediately purchased a ticket; while I awaited the screening, in the intervening days I read reviews. Some of them described the failed encounter with Godard that concludes the film, but none had prepared me for the extent to which Godard punctuates the movie by his absence. Nor was I prepared to take in the uncanny physical resemblance between midcentury Godard and the film’s young co-director, the French photographer and street artist JR. Since watching Faces Places, it is precisely the question of Varda’s agency that has bothered me most insistently. Why would Varda, whose accomplishments are many and enviably varied in their scope, choose to spend the precious little time left for her art dwelling on Godard? To be sure, this was absolutely her choice, and for better or for worse, interpersonal and professional connections have defined Varda’s career. For the better: Alain Resnais edited her directorial début La Pointe Courte (1955), a film he admired enough to say, on the record, that he wished he had directed it. For the worse: this same feature film, released four years before the infamous Cannes festival of 1959 that launched the Nouvelle Vague, inspired Varda’s generationally nonsensical title as the “mother” or, in a more recent and even more irritating variant, the “grandmother” of the New Wave.1 Again, for the better: Varda directed a segment of the political anthology film Loin du Vietnam (1968) along with some of her New Wave peers as part of her antiwar activism; still, for the worse: her contribution to Loin du Vietnam was cut from the distributed version. Varda’s marriage to fellow director Jacques Demy also had its moments of better and worse, some of which were echoed in films like Documenteur (1981), which creates a deeply personal fiction whose resonance comes from Varda’s own personal life. After Demy’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1990, Varda devoted a considerable portion of her career to her late husband’s work and memory. The specifics of Varda’s multiple cinematic engagements with Demy and his films merit a book of their own, and it is not my intention to approach this topic in the limited scope of this essay. But in her late and most personal documentaries, Varda occasionally expanded her address beyond Demy to other New Wave peers—all of

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whom were men—while also framing these documentaries to varying degrees as self-assessments that treat her own work. In the context of these intimate, self-exploratory films, Godard figures prominently and repeatedly. Varda certainly isn’t alone in situating herself among her brothers in cinema. The interviews compiled in T. Jefferson Kline’s volume show that her interlocutors over many decades frequently imposed this context on their shared conversations.2 Varda scholar and curator Rebecca DeRoo has also noted interviewers’ enervating tendency to treat Varda as less than a truly independent filmmaker by drawing and even demanding comparisons to Demy or other male contemporaries; however, DeRoo proposes that Varda sought to evade this limited and limiting conception of her work by “strategically promot[ing] myths of her own naiveté and separateness,” including the oft-repeated story of how she had only seen ten films before embarking on a filmmaking career of her own.3 Varda’s selective embrace of her New Wave connections, particularly in films that she herself has directed, should therefore be read with a mind to divining its underlying strategy. In Varda’s late films, Godard certainly represents himself, but he also serves as a synecdoche for an entire peer group (minus Demy, who merits separate consideration given the depth of their intimate relationship). How Varda deals with Godard in her work should indicate why she felt it was important to publicly and repeatedly negotiate this relationship, indeed these multiple relationships where personal and professional affinities intertwined. Godard’s first appearance in a Varda film coincides with the crest of the New Wave. Varda recruited Godard, Anna Karina, and a few other familiar faces from their circle to make the film-within-a-film Les Fiancés du Pont Macdonald / The Lovers of Macdonald Bridge, a pastiche of silent slapstick that appears in Cléo from 5 to 7. Godard is the protagonist, and he appears on camera without his signature sunglasses. Beyond this film’s immediate contribution to Cléo, Varda invites further scrutiny of this moment in both The Beaches of Agnès and Faces Places. In Beaches, Varda includes stills from Macdonald and its production in an aside that she presents while reminiscing about how she and Demy interacted with one another on set and with one another’s films. She visually interrupts this train of thought with five shots of Godard, in various poses, and narrates them in voiceover, in French: “Je veux signaler en passant que Godard, par amitié, avait accepté d’être filmé sans lunettes noires. J’aimais ses beaux yeux, et son cinéma.” (Fig. 2.1).

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Fig. 2.1  Five sequential shots in The Beaches of Agnès (2008), each derived from a still photograph, all of which feature Jean-Luc Godard on the set of Varda’s film-­ within-­a-film Les Fiancés du Pont Macdonald (1962)

This mention is truly “in passing,” for Varda moves quickly both visually and in her narration from one set to another, from her films to Demy’s, from their films’ settings to their stars—and somehow, in the midst all of this, voilà Godard. Before this aside, Varda had been sharing memories of her 1966 film Les Créatures, particularly how she filmed Michel Piccoli and Catherine Deneuve on the island of Noirmoutier, a location with deep personal resonance that also meant Demy spent more time on her set than was his habit. Then, after Godard, Varda resumes her reminiscing about Demy, talking about her time on Demy’s sets taking photographs, and finally segues into explaining how Demy’s success with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), another film with Deneuve, led to their joint stint in California in the late 1960s. Godard’s cameo may be jarring, but the

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pacing of this interlude—which functions, essentially, as the cinematic equivalent of a footnote—blends so seamlessly with the surrounding sequence, and its duration is so brief, that its incongruity barely registers. Including Godard in Beaches may have been inevitable, as this is the film where Varda most directly addresses her place within the New Wave. But this confluence of history cannot answer the question why here? Why choose this particular moment in the film, literally in the middle of a seemingly unrelated line of thought? It could be a concession to the very nature of memory: it can be intrusive; it has no obligation to move chronologically; it does not guarantee a coherent narrative. Still, this is a curious insertion for several reasons. Firstly, the film refrains from naming Cléo as the film that features these shots of Godard sans lunettes, even though the same sequence includes other films’ titles in the visuals and/or narration. Those who know Cléo will recognize these shots, most likely precisely because of Godard’s presence in them; still, Varda relies on her spectators’ intertextual knowledge to connect them to their original context. Bringing up Cléo after Les Créatures also muddles the chronology of her filmography, perhaps suggesting that somehow it was Les Creatures—a notorious flop—that inspired Godard to remove his glasses on camera. More curiously still, Varda does not insist on the glasses’ role in the story told in Macdonald: Godard’s character “sees everything darkly” through the glasses, including the death of his fiancée (played, of course, by Karina). When he removes his glasses—and finally throws them into the river (!)— her life is restored, and his life returns to normal. This rather elaborate gag, which cast Godard in a role that required considerable self-awareness, is reduced in Beaches to the simple fact that Godard once removed his glasses on camera. Finally, and perhaps most provocatively, the way Varda’s language frames these five shots introduces some ambiguity about what actually prompted this act. Godard “avait accepté d’être filmé,” he accepted to be filmed without his glasses—but who made this request? And then who filmed it? Obviously, Cléo is Varda’s film, but her own narration elides not only the film’s title, but also her authorship of it. The English subtitles on this version, though, register a different sense to Varda’s utterance, reading: “I want to point out that Godard, in friendship, let me film him without his dark glasses” (emphasis added). This translation makes explicit Varda’s place as the filming subject, which frames Godard all the more clearly as an object for her camera’s gaze. The second line of Varda’s narration further highlights Godard’s objectification: “J’aimais ses beaux

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yeux, et son cinéma” / “I loved his beautiful eyes and his cinema.” The objectified eyes on camera—by inference, Varda’s camera—come first, followed by Godard’s own subjective eye behind the camera. The visual component of this sequence also underscores Varda’s ambiguous positioning in this narration. At this moment in Beaches, she includes just five shots of Godard, all of them created from still photographs. The first two also include Demy, creating a visual bridge between Godard and the overarching topic of Demy’s and Varda’s set visits. Varda also appears in the first shot, though her face is buried in Demy’s shoulder as they embrace. Meanwhile, Demy’s gaze is fixed on Godard, who is wearing his glasses and who seems to be talking to Demy. There is no visible sign here or indeed in any of these shots of Varda interacting directly with Godard. The second shot shows a different couple, Godard and Karina, who occupy roughly the same frame space as Demy and Varda in the first shot. But here, Varda is entirely absent, and Demy takes center frame while once again conversing with Godard, who is still (again?) wearing his glasses. Karina and the woman in the left of the frame gaze at Demy; the men look beyond the frame, neither at one another nor at the women. Demy’s engagement with Godard captured in these two shots—they are amicable, perhaps even close—suggests that the friendship that compelled Godard to take on this project (and take off his glasses) may well have been Demy’s rather than Varda’s. In Faces Places, Varda returns to Macdonald and the fated lunettes even more emphatically as she coaxes a similar gesture from Godard’s doppelgänger JR.  Over the course of the film, Varda comments repeatedly on JR’s glasses, using Godard’s acquiescence in 1962 as leverage to convince JR, more than half a century later, to remove his dark glasses for her camera. Expanding beyond the level of a brief aside, as the glasses were in Beaches, in Faces Places glasses and vision form a key part of what Kelley Conway identifies as the film’s four main motifs: “Varda’s diminished sight, JR’s sunglasses, the park bench conversations, and the phantom presence of Godard.”4 The act of removing dark glasses is especially useful in establishing an active parallel between JR and Godard that transcends the mere coincidence of their strong physical resemblance. Such repetitions that juxtapose past and present appear in Varda’s films frequently and significantly enough for Homay King to point to their common patterns as a coherent “theory of memory.”5 According to King, in Varda’s films

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one can only reencounter the past by displacing away from it; […and] it is not simply that a chance encounter with a long-lost sensory experience provokes a rich, involuntary return to the past; it is also necessary that the object that elicits the new sensory experience not be identical with the original object.6

Although King was writing about Beaches, before the release of Faces Places, her observation uncannily presages and lucidly explains Varda’s dual fixation on JR’s glasses and on Godard. It is only after Godard refuses to honor his appointment with Varda—a rejection that leaves her visibly upset—that JR finally removes his glasses. Unlike in Macdonald, but just as King might have predicted, viewers of Faces Places are not treated to a clear view of JR’s gesture. On screen, Conway notes, his face is “comically out of focus,” its blurriness suggesting how Varda herself may have seen him through her failing eyes.7 The past can be neither restored nor revisited, but with any luck the present might reclaim its lost potential. Faces Places shows how, in JR, Varda found a source of fruitful collaboration as opposed to the endless comparison she endured to Godard and to other New Wave directors. In a brief obituary published in Time, JR remembers Varda as a friend and an artist firmly ensconced in the present, fixing her gaze toward the future rather than the past.8 The air of retrospection and recycling that shapes Varda’s last documentaries might seem to betray this impression, but in Varda par Agnès the storied director and visual artist explicitly imagines a future without her. Yet before resigning herself and her audience to this future, in Varda par Agnès the director offers a bookend of sorts that complements the autobiography of Beaches and Faces Places while reclaiming and reframing her own agency, thereby inviting her legacy to be read not only as a testament to the pleasures of collaboration, but also through a lens of authorial control.

Reframing Agency in Varda par Agnès If The Beaches of Agnès can be read as an outward-facing cinematic memoir that explores the contexts that framed Varda’s life and work, then Varda par Agnès serves as a more inward-looking self portrait, one whose medium is a recombination of her own oeuvre. As such, the later film necessarily revisits much of the same material as Beaches, adding to this history the pieces produced during Varda’s final, prolific decade as a wide-ranging visual artist. But unlike Beaches, which explicitly grapples with origins,

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belonging, and legacy, Varda par Agnès eschews questions about Varda’s place in the world—both the world of cinema and the world tout court— and instead takes a deep dive into her work to examine its recurring preoccupations. The result of this immersive experience is a film that definitively centers Varda’s agency, presenting her greatest hits (so to speak) neither for their own sake, nor as a gratuitous victory lap before crossing the finish line. Nor is Varda par Agnès simply “a valedictory gift to her audience,” as Max Nelson understands the film, although it is certainly also this.9 After a career marked by comparison and contingent belonging within her peer group of accomplished cinéastes, Varda par Agnès unequivocally declares her creative ownership and prioritizes her agency as an artist. The film uses her own, singular voice in the present to find echoes of that same voice throughout her career, and the resulting film transcends the eclectic facade of her oeuvre to show us that, from the beginning, she has indeed been singing the same song. In the film’s opening sequence, Varda underscores a consistent, three-­ pronged ethos that drives her work: inspiration, création, partage (inspiration, creation, sharing). She presents evidence of this motto in meticulously curated, extensive citations of her work, threading these together with a narration that amounts to a masterclass of filmmaking and artistic practice. Many of the film’s settings represent the notion of a masterclass quite literally: the opening shot shows Varda seated in a director’s chair, her back to the camera with “Agnès V.” emblazoned on the chair, addressing a sizeable crowd that fills an opulent theater; she is shown later speaking to a smaller group in a spartan classroom, then to a group assembled in a more contemporary theater space. She also lectures outdoors, at one point speaking to a well-populated crowd seated on a veranda while the breeze flutters through the tasteful landscaping behind her as she introduces her work. At pivotal moments in the narration, Varda appears on a beach, at which point the film viewer becomes the only target audience for her narration. When audiences appear on screen, they are made up of people of all ages: some, like Varda herself, would have experienced the end of the twentieth century in the full awareness of adulthood, while others probably took their very first steps just as the new millennium was also finding its footing. But Varda never yields control of the narration nor, by extension, of the film itself. When she is on screen, she dominates the center of the frame. When conducting on-stage interviews with friends and past collaborators, these conversations are not motivated by her curiosity—as they often are

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in Beaches and even more so in her televised documentary series Agnès de ci de là Varda / Agnès Varda from Here to There (2014)—but rather by the speaker’s unique ability to shed light on some aspect of her own work as work. The film’s non-chronological presentation of Varda’s oeuvre serves a similar purpose, constructing an argument that linear progress is not always possible, nor desirable when it comes to inspiration and creation. In Varda’s art, lines have a tendency to turn into circles. As discussed above, King sees a theory of memory in this circling-back-but-not-exactly; if the memories that Varda revisits in Beaches and Faces Places tend to be populated by the people that surrounded her, in Varda par Agnès she centers the work itself.10 What was once a part of one discrete piece can become a part of something new, an idea that emerges not only in Varda par Agnès, but also in her installations. Varda explains in the film how the gleaning and recycling that she depicted in The Gleaners and I inspired her own repurposing of her older films as material art (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2  Agnès Varda, center frame, in Varda par Agnès (2019) discussing how her work on the documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) got her thinking about how the material of her own films—right down to the reel cases beside her—might find new life in another form. In the background is one of her cabane (cabin) installations, this one made from film stock of her early feature Le Bonheur (1965) and filled with sunflowers, which are a recurring motif in the film

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Varda par Agnès thus emphasizes that her late-career turn away from cinema might rather be understood as picking up the thread of her earliest work as a still photographer, a period in her life that comes up halfway through the film to lend continuity to her artistic path from these earliest forays into visual art, to her cinema, and finally to the multimedia installations that came to define the final act of her long career. In the last frames and parting comments in Varda par Agnès, the artist acknowledges that her art, cinema, and audiences shall certainly proceed without her. But what the film contributes to Varda’s legacy is an incontrovertible declaration that her art and her cinema have always depended on her agency. In this sense, Varda par Agnès functions much like a feature-­length video essay that illustrates Janet Staiger’s concept of authorship as a “technique of the self”: a film that is itself a performative statement and a catalog of the authorial statements she had been making in her work throughout her life.11 Looking at how it is expressed in Beaches and Faces Places, the notion of partage (sharing) that Varda names as a crucial motivation for her work might provoke some degree of misunderstanding in the realm of authorship, for partage can suggest a generosity that centers those around her—her audience, her subjects, her collaborators, her characters—at her own expense. If Beaches and other earlier documentaries focus their attention on this external side of sharing, Varda par Agnès offers assurance that Varda foregrounded these relationships according to her own agenda and on her own terms as an artist. Her last film thus insists that partage goes beyond the benefit it holds for others. Partage also stakes a claim on the ultimate responsibility for what and how something is shared. The logistics and aesthetics that are intrinsic to a collaborative dynamic are shown in Varda par Agnès to stem from unquestionably agentive choices. We are left, then, to forge ahead into the future of film and art without Varda to point us towards people and ideas that she found worth sharing through these media. But Varda par Agnès clarifies down to its very title the crucial role of her own authorship, even or perhaps especially when her work honors and remembers her personal history and creative collaborations with others. This ethos of partage, which strikes a subtle but essential balance between equitable collaboration and agentive authorship, thus forms a major part of Varda’s legacy to filmmakers to come.

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Varda and the New Cinephilia Though the future is yet to be written, Varda suggests in her late films that this future may allow us to understand and connect with the past in more productive ways. Perhaps Varda’s most prescient insight from her late career is that future perspectives will comprehend the past in ways that we in the present moment cannot possibly grasp. The anticipation that comes with recognizing this eventual, inevitable shift colors not only Varda’s films, but the cinephilic milieu into which she released them. It is hardly a coincidence that the expanding interest in Varda’s work since 2000 aligns with an evolution in cinephilia itself. Varda’s origin and recent trajectory connect her simultaneously with “old cinephilia” as well as the “new cinephilia,” to use Girish Shambu’s conception of the divide.12 For Shambu, the deeply familiar old cinephilia started with the Cahiers critics and the French New Wave, while the new cinephilia deemphasizes their aesthetic and authorial judgments.13 The new cinéphile eschews auteurist discourse, and instead seeks diversity of representation both in films and among the filmmakers who create them. The recent critical pivot to Varda is grounded in her value within both of these epistemological frames. Her link to canonical cinema is well established, but so is her marginalization within that canon. While Varda accepted and frequently remarked upon her hard-earned auteur status, she also made a point of pushing back against the token-ness that came with it, as she did in one of her final interviews, with phrasing that reads all the more poignantly after her passing: I think it must annoy a lot of young women that I’m not dead yet and that I’m still making films: people still talk about me, I get prizes all over the place. The older I get, the more prizes people give me. I won’t refuse them; people are nice to give me things. But I think that I take up a bit too much of the spotlight while there are lots of young women with talent.14

With this comment, Varda demonstrates an evident understanding of two key facts: first, that representation matters; secondly, that her own role in this representation continues to matter after many decades as a filmmaker and artist. Those of us left to grapple with her legacy can also understand that Varda’s representation—both of her moment in filmmaking as well as women filmmakers more broadly—still matters even after her death. Yet during her life, Varda herself was at pains to underscore her own

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recognition that she should not be (nor, really, should ever have been) the sole representative, that other marginalized voices in cinema also deserve the same accolades that she had only just started to collect at the end of her life. Emerging from a cinephilic context that, for decades, has doggedly framed Godard as the victor of battle after battle—for funding, for recognition, for screen time in festivals and academic film courses, for the right to stand as shorthand for an entire era of filmmaking—I conclude this essay with my own hope that Varda stands on the cusp of winning the war. The rise of the new cinephilia means that we can finally, righteously reclaim her status as cinematic matriarch, but this time with a more meaningful sense of generational advancement and intergenerational inheritance. In a more forward-thinking, utopian cinephilia, Varda should no longer be known as “the Mother of the New Wave,” but rather as a mother of the new cinephilia. She sought out and engaged with the marginalized, the struggling, the overlooked—and she literally stood by them in her films, lending them whatever spotlight she herself had earned by virtue of her persistence as a filmmaker. In making this choice, by her work and by her very being, Varda has left us with a model of cinematic love where the hermeneutics of the frame are never hermetically sealed off from life itself.

Notes 1. Several interviews featuring one or both variants appear in Kline, T.  Jefferson. 2014. Agnès Varda: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. If this collection serves as an accurate indication, the “grandmother of the New Wave” designation began to circulate sometime in the 1990s; within the collection, it first appears in Varda’s interview with Carol Allen (pp. 160–172 in Klein’s volume), which originally appeared in 1996, and then again with Melissa Anderson in 2001 (pp. 173–182). 2. Kennedy-Karpat, Colleen. 2016. Review of Agnès Varda: Interviews, edited by T. Jefferson Kline. Journal of Popular Film and Television 44.1: 61–62, p. 62. 3. DeRoo, Rebecca J. 2018. Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art. Oakland: University of California Press, p. 17. 4. Conway, Kelley. 2019. Visages Villages: Documenting Creative Collaboration. Studies in French Cinema 19.1: 22–39, p. 32. 5. King, Homay. 2015. Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 92.

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6. King, Homay. 2015. Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 92. 7. Conway, Kelley. 2019. Visages Villages: Documenting Creative Collaboration. Studies in French Cinema 19.1: 22–39, p. 33. 8. JR. 2019. ‘She Was Always in the Present’: Artist JR on the Films and Friendship of Agnès Varda. Time, 4 April. 9. Nelson, Max. 2020. The Intimate and the Collective: A deep dive into Agnès Varda’s cinematic archive. The Nation, 23 January. 10. King, Homay. 2015. Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 92. 11. Staiger, Janet. 2003. Authorship Approaches. In Authorship and Film, ed. David A.  Gerstner and Janet Staiger, 27–57. New  York: Routledge, pp. 49–51. 12. Shambu, Girish. 2019. For a New Cinephilia. Film Quarterly 72.3: 32–34, p. 32. 13. Shambu, Girish. 2019. For a New Cinephilia. Film Quarterly 72.3: 32–34, p. 33. 14. Sarratia, Géraldine. 2019. Agnès Varda: ‘Plus je vieillis plus on me recompense, mais tant de réalisatrices ont du talent.’ Nova.fr, 25 January. Translation to English is the author’s; Varda’s comment in its original French reads as follows: “Je pense que ça doit agacer beaucoup de jeunes femmes que je ne sois pas encore morte et que je fasse encore des films, qu’on parle encore de moi, que je reçoive des prix partout. Plus je vieillis, plus on me donne des prix. Je vais pas dire non, les gens sont gentils, ils m’offrent des choses. Mais je trouve que je prends un peu trop la lumière alors qu’il y a beaucoup de jeunes femmes qui ont du talent.”

References Conway, Kelley. 2019. Visages Villages: Documenting Creative Collaboration. Studies in French Cinema 19.1: 22–39. DeRoo, Rebecca J. 2018. Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art. Oakland: University of California Press. JR. 2019. ‘She Was Always in the Present’: Artist JR on the Films and Friendship of Agnès Varda. Time, 4 April. Kennedy-Karpat, Colleen. 2016. Review of Agnès Varda: Interviews, edited by T. Jefferson Kline. Journal of Popular Film and Television 44.1: 61–62. King, Homay. 2015. Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality. Durham: Duke University Press. Kline, T.  Jefferson. 2014. Agnès Varda: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

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Nelson, Max. 2020. The Intimate and the Collective: A deep dive into Agnès Varda’s cinematic archive. The Nation, 23 January. Sarratia, Géraldine. 2019. Agnès Varda: ‘Plus je vieillis plus on me recompense, mais tant de réalisatrices ont du talent.’ Nova.fr, 25 January. Sellier, Geneviève. 2005. La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma au masculin singulier. Paris: CNRS.  English edition: Sellier, Geneviève. 2008. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (trans. Ross, Kristin). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shambu, Girish. 2019. For a New Cinephilia. Film Quarterly 72.3: 32–34. Staiger, Janet. 2003. Authorship Approaches. In Authorship and Film, ed. David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger, 27–57. New York: Routledge.

Filmography Demy, Jacques, dir. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. 1964.

Directed by Agnès Varda Agnès de ci de là Varda [Agnès Varda from Here to There]. 2014; iTunes, 2019. The Beaches of Agnes. 2008; iTunes, 2019. Le Bonheur. 1965; The Criterion Collection, 4 by Agnès Varda, 2007. DVD. Cléo de 5 à 7. 1962; The Criterion Collection, 4 by Agnès Varda, 2007. DVD. Les Créatures. 1966. Documenteur. 1981; The Criterion Collection, Eclipse Series 43: Agnès Varda in California, 2015. DVD. Les Fiancés du Pont Macdonald. 1962; The Criterion Collection, 4 by Agnès Varda, 2007. DVD. The Gleaners and I. 2000; New York, NY: Zeitgeist Video, 2002. DVD. Jacquot de Nantes. 1990. Loin du Vietnam. 1968. La Pointe Courte. 1955; The Criterion Collection, 4 by Agnès Varda, 2007. DVD. Varda par Agnès. 2019; screened 27 April 2019 at Büyülü Fener, Ankara, Turkey. Visages Villages [Faces Places]. 2017; screened 6 December 2017, Gezici Festival / Festival on Wheels, Çagdas Sanatlar Merkezi, Ankara, Turkey.

CHAPTER 3

Female Agency in Pelin Esmer Films: The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019) Feride Çiçekoğlu

Introduction Scanning Pelin Esmer’s experience across almost two decades, with six films of many awards and screenings all over the world, the focus of this chapter is on two of her films in particular: The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019).1 The Play was the first film to put Esmer on the international arena and it stands as a unique experience in her career since it initiated long-term relationships with some of the women who acted in the film. The narrative of these films resonates with the epigraph Hannah Arendt used for her chapter on action in her book The Human Condition: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them.”2 Going back to The Play and contemplating her experience of filming the rehearsals of a group of nine women from a village in southern Turkey in 2003, Esmer summarizes her initial motivation with a single sentence: “I was curious to see how theater would transform them.”3 Personal stories were at the core of her interest: How would a seemingly homogeneous group of nine women from the village of Arslanköy in

F. Çiçekoğlu (*) Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_3

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Mersin bring their individual experiences into the act of acting? Which characters would come to the fore and how would that make an impact on their lives outside of the theater? Would they be able to forget that they were being filmed and delve into the spur of the moment? Would she herself be able to float in the same boat with them, quitting her position at the helm and focusing on their play, rather than caring about her filming of the play? These were some of the questions she had in mind, she says. In retrospect, Esmer’s questions resonate with a two-fold transformation in filmmaking, both theoretical and practical, which was underway during the period she shot and edited The Play. In terms of theory, right at the turn of the century, a rejuvenation of Hannah Arendt by Julia Kristeva as expressed in the succinct resume of Arendt’s writings and her life story with the premise “Life is a narrative,” highlighted the importance of the female lived experience.4 Arendt had emphasized in The Human Condition that, “each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have had before.”5 Three decades after her passing, Arendt’s own life as a narrative became highlighted from a feminist perspective, mainly due to Kristeva but also due to the work of other scholars who focused on her embodied experience, linking it to other lives as narratives.6 Around the same time, Carnal Thoughts by Vivian Sobchack brought into focus not only the importance of embodiment but also its relevance to moving image culture.7 Meanwhile, Agnès Varda had sensed the flexibility of digitality, which would allow her to trace the plurality of individual lives, and filmed Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) from January 1st to May 1st of 2000. As framed in Homay King’s The Virtual Memory (2015) under the heading “Digitality and Duration,” Varda grounded her film in a specific historical era, with a spotlight on the dates on screen. King underlines this as a tribute to the digital technology empowering Varda to delve into the lives of gleaners with no inhibition and no obvious intrusion. Referring to Arendt, Bergson, Marleau-Ponty and Sobchack, among others, King gives a comprehensive resume of Varda’s film, highlighting its main attributes: “With The Gleaners and I, Varda crafts a digital cinema that is materialist, feminist, phenomenological, and political.”8 Dating her involvement with the topic to 2005, King points out to the transformative power of those years.9 After almost half a century of filmmaking Varda was now equipped for “cine-writing” (cinécriture), with the singularity of composition she

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strived to achieve, from story and script to camera and editing. Varda’s autobiographical film Beaches of Agnés (2008) continued her “cine-­ writing”, expressed in a nutshell with her sentence: “If one opened me up, one would find beaches.”10 When in 2003 Pelin Esmer grabbed her digital camera and traveled to a village where she knew no one, hers was a similar venture. Writing about The Play in 2006, a few days after its premiere in Turkey on March 8th, I emphasized the impact of the digital revolution as a feminist tool, referring to the poster of the film: “Production-direction-camera-editing by Pelin Esmer”. This line was a proof of the empowerment of women by digital technology; a woman director was able to tell the seemingly insignificant personal stories of women from the countryside because she was able to do so with minimum support from anyone else. Esmer spent two more years for the film after the shooting, editing the footage herself and financing the post-production. While describing this whole process of her personal involvement, I then alluded to the meaning of ‘digit’ (finger) to emphasize the embodied aspect of digitality in Esmer’s venture.11 That Esmer has continued to follow the stories of the women after fourteen years—not dissimilar to Varda revisiting her gleaners with Two Years Later (2002)12—enriches the premise of this chapter that “life is a narrative”. Arguably, Esmer has presented film history with a unique example of transformation since the women reflect on how their lives changed and they interact with their own images as reflected on screen.13 The following two sections will explore Esmer’s contribution as crafted in the digital cinema of the two films, The Play and Queen Lear, along two interrelated axes: digitality and plurality, and female agency. Each section will refer to the narratives of the films and the details of the filmmaking process as discussed with the director. The conclusion will tie up those sections with the theoretical background framed here, highlighting the main points of reference.

Digitality and Plurality When Pelin Esmer saw a newspaper item in the spring of 2003 about a group of women that started a theater group in the Arslanköy village of Mersin, she was working as an assistant director for an advertisement film ̇ in Istanbul. She remembers financing her first trip to the village with the payment she got from the film. She had a Digital High-8 with her. This was her first camera, and she had used to shoot her first documentary, The

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Collector (2001) about her real-life uncle. Her interest in the drama of real life was once again her motivation to travel all the way to this village where she knew no one. She headed to the school when she reached the village up in the mountains and told the teacher, Hüseyin Arslanköylü, whom she met there that she wanted to congratulate the group of women for their initiative and to talk to them if they would have the time for her. Hüseyin Arslanköylü, whose surname certified his birthplace as that village, would be a key figure and a long-term friend for Esmer. His contribution would be essential both for The Play, and, fourteen years later, for Queen Lear. Esmer would get to collaborate with him again in 2017 after he had become the director of the theater of the greater municipality of Mersin, traveling with five of the women and shooting Queen Lear. On her first visit to the village in 2003, when Arslanköylü introduced Esmer to the women involved with theater they were baking bread. Esmer spent the day with them, but she did not take out her camera during that first day. Neither did she mention her intention to film them until they got to know each other better mutually. She headed back to the city for the night and came back to the village again the next day to accompany them to their day job of planting trees for the local forest administration. On the way back to the village from planting trees, while traveling in the truck bed together, the women started singing and dancing. Esmer says though she had not wanted to point her camera at them “like a gun” before they could discuss the matter in detail, she could not hold herself back anymore and started shooting after asking for permission. Following this experience, and seeing how relaxed they were in the presence of her camera, she mentioned her intention to document their next play. The women said Hüseyin Arslanköylü was going to help them write a play collectively and they were going to stage it in three weeks; they wanted to represent their own experiences and she could come back to follow the rehearsals if she wanted. Esmer remembers that they were skeptical at that point, not really expecting to see her back in three weeks. Esmer spent those three weeks trying to put together a crew. She was not able to find an available cameraperson within that short period of time so she would end up shooting herself. The only two people she could recruit with her extremely modest budget were a sound technician (Emrah Yıldırım) and a line producer (Peri Johnson). Esmer managed to borrow ̇ a better digital camera, a mini DV, from Istanbul Bilgi University, borrowed sound equipment from her sound engineer friend Kaan Karlık, received a small amount of production support from her producer friend

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Nida Karabol (co-producer of the film) and she set out to Arslanköy once again, this time prepared to stay in the village with her tiny crew of three, including herself as the producer, director, and DOP. She still remembers her embodied experience of having to shoot 12–13 hours daily, with her right arm and shoulder stiffening due to the weight of the camera, and her legs trembling with stress, while trying not to miss any crucial moment of the nine women rehearsing and acting.14 Esmer spent her next two years editing ninety-two hours of footage from that shooting, ending up with the 72 minute-long film The Play. The film tells the non-linear story of creating the play titled “The Outcries of Women” assembled from the real-life stories of the women with the names of the real characters changed. The film starts with the off-screen music and announcement of the performance in Arslanköy Primary School playground, inviting everyone saying that “the play is free of charge” while the acting women and the villagers sweep and wash the floors, carry the benches into the playground, fix the lights, and build an ad-hoc stage, putting up the decor and props and fine-tuning the costumes and make-up. Noteworthy is the switch in gender roles, using the mustaches produced by one of them. This is by itself a subversion of the theatrical tradition in Turkey from a century before, where women were not allowed on stage and men impersonated women. By the second minute of the film, we have a number of visual clues that the film is about the transgression and subversion of traditional gender roles, both by reversing positions and generating unexpected common ground between what is expected from womanhood and manhood, femininity and masculinity. As the nine performers are announced by Hüseyin Arslanköylü, we get to know them one by one and our first acquaintance turns into a deeper sense of their plurality as Esmer’s camera follows them through their daily lives, their workplaces, and their familial relations. It is striking to witness the address of an anecdote about a domestic problem when the husband tells his wife how much he actually loves her, as in the case of Zeynep and Mustafa Fatih. In the case of another couple, Behiye and Mehmet Yanık, the husband makes a joke that his friends are teasing him, saying his wife will become famous, and leave him. Then they walk hand in hand, as if trying to prove the opposite. While Behiye Yanık’s hair is being styled, she shares the story of her name: Her father had named her after his first love and never allowed her to cut her hair since his first sweetheart had long hair, which made her mother bitter. Her husband inserts a comment that true love should be for a lifetime and they have an intimate moment of exchanging glances.

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Even during these initial stages, the case of Fatma Fatih, married to the brother of Mustafa Fatih, stands out because her emphasis is more personal and subjective as she describes her childhood dream of becoming a teacher. She laments her father, who promised to send her to secondary school but did not keep his promise, saying she was “a teacher of the goats” since she was the eldest sibling and had to shepherd the goats. Her tone, however, is far from victimization. She emphasizes how she has become self-confident since they started working on the play: “I could never enter the door of that school. I used to feel ashamed. But now it’s like my home.” She feels empowered since the storyline of their play emphasizes that girls should go to school and women can make theater. The staged play ends with the character of Aytül—the girl who has insisted to go to school in spite of her father—announcing that they are human and entitled to all human rights as women. The film goes on to show the atmosphere of festivity once the play ends, with applauds, cheers, and acclaim by the whole village there as an audience. Fourteen years after this scene was shot, Queen Lear starts with an unusual scene of rehearsal, with five of the women from the first film at a seaside, sitting in the shallow water and telling their lines from Shakespeare, facing the sea with their backs to the camera.15 “Yes father?” asks one of them. “Tell me how much you love me!” orders Lear, played by Fatma Fatih. As each daughter takes her turn to prove her love, comparing it to the skies and heavens, ants and mammals, one of them says her love is as much as the “oceans in the sea”, thinking ocean is a kind of fish. Zeynep corrects her; ocean is not a fish but a huge sea and they all burst into laughter. We get the clues even from this short rehearsal that they have transformed and grown since the first film was shot. Their focus has shifted; instead of defining themselves with their familial roles of being a wife, a mother, a daughter or a daughter-in-law, they have come to recognize and to question their own position in life. As both Fatma and Zeynep verbalize, they have become more self-confident and they now believe that they can change their fate. The heated discussion on fate during the dangerous bus trip to a mountain village is one of the highlights of Queen Lear. While they are all tense about the possibility of an accident as the dirt road winds along a steep cliff, Zeynep insists that there is no fate except where and to which parents you are born. “If we die in an accident here, it is not fate, it is because the road is bad,” she claims and she goes on to point how their own lives were changed due to their conscious decisions: “If I had lent an ear to those

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who said women should not go on stage but should keep to their homely duties, I would not have had this freedom.” She points out that the same is true for Fatma, who has taken up a job in the city of Mersin, renting an apartment on her own there while her husband has remained in the village. This discussion goes on throughout the film creating a brilliant backbone and a leitmotif for the non-linear storyline. That Esmer is able to participate in their lives with minimum hindrance is critical both in following the discussion on fate and delivering their stories to the camera from the intimacy of their homes. Relations are less stressful now, as the women narrate their experiences of performance while the husbands listen respectfully. Zeynep and Fatma, who both have subversive views about fate, share these opinions with their husbands. While both couples call Esmer by her first name (Pelin), they narrate to the camera how their lives have transformed since the filming of The Play. A similar conversation takes place with Behiye Yanık and her husband at their home; Behiye’s husband has cancer but he is optimistic that he will recover since they still love each other deeply. Cutting back and forth between the discussion on fate during the bus trip and the interviews at each home, Esmer is able to show us the authenticity of each character. That Behiye is ordering two boxes of peaches for her husband while they are on the road, happy to hear that he has an appetite, and her loving care for her husband at home, creates a sense of embodied identification with her pain, while we continue to ponder on the issue of fate once again as the discussion continues.16 All these nuances that Esmer is able to forefront with minimum intrusion into the unfolding of real-life drama brings into focus the meaning of individual lives, creating a public world of shared narratives, both on-­ screen and interactively with the audience. In a similar sense Arendt emphasizes the relation of embodied experience and plurality in the first paragraph of her posthumously published The Life of the Mind, expressing that all things “appear [italics HA] and hence are meant to be seen, heard, touched, tasted and smelled, to be perceived by sentient creatures. … Nothing and nobody exist in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator [italics HA]. In other words, nothing that is, in so far as it appears, exists in the singular, everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody. … Plurality is the law of the earth” (Figs.  3.1 and 3.2).17

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Fig. 3.1  Fatma Fatih trying a moustache in Oyun (2005)

Fig. 3.2  Fatma Fatih as Queen Lear (2019)

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Female Agency The Play and Queen Lear can be viewed as a seamless continuation of one another, but they also enhance a fundamental change as one transforms to the other: While the former focuses on plurality, and forefronts each character in depth, the latter delves into the nuances of a specific character, following her as she transforms into someone who is able to transmit her life experiences in a way to encompass others, in short as she comes to the foreground as a storyteller herself. While the subjectivities of the five women participating in the theater troupe are still explored in depth, the temporal and spatial duration of an individual life as exemplified by Fatma Fatih stands out in Queen Lear, especially when she meets a young girl of ten shepherding the goats in the mountain, and she remembers how she was expected to do the same at that age. Esmer’s camera follows the girl as she goes to announce to her parents that a theater group has come to perform for them. The way the father responds, giving the priority of spoken word to the girl’s brother, reminds us what a long journey Fatma Fatih has made to claim her voice in this patriarchal environment. Fatma Fatih spends time with the girl, while Esmer’s camera catches every subtle detail in their communication. As Fatma Fatih tells the girl how she used to put garlic on her lips so that the flies would not come near while milking, we see her expression hardening with the memories of those days. She asks the girl if she is going back to school, and when the girl answers “kısmet!” (fate) her sense of empathy and her projection into the past and future reaches out from the screen. We are caught up in the sensation of that moment with her, delving both into her individual story and to the inter-subjectivity of our shared experiences. That her character stands out from the other women is consistent with the choices Esmer made for this second film. Originally, when Hüseyin Arslanköylü invited Esmer in 2017, his idea was to use “dramatic village plays” as a format.18 Originating from the nationalist movement of the 1940s with its motivation to return to Anatolia for inspiration, these plays are based on the traditional types rather than on individual characters. Esmer says that after her first visit in 2017 when Hüseyin Arslanköylü and his colleagues from the theater of Mersin greater municipality were experimenting with the idea of staging dramatic village plays on their tour, she gave some thought to the matter and suggested that they might try a more universal format. “Why not Shakespeare?” was a question that came

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̇ up during a phone conversation after she returned to Istanbul and the art director of the theater, Ahmet Aksoy took it as a challenge to experiment staging King Lear. Who might play the Lear character was a matter of discussion only for a short while since Fatma Fatih was an obvious choice due to her dedication, her perseverance and also due to her own transformation in life. Fatma Fatih has a scene in the film Queen Lear when she is addressing the camera directly, contemplating whether she will be able to impersonate King Lear. In one of the few scenes where she breaks the fourth wall, Esmer listens to Fatma Fatih and lets her express her concern, but also her determination to act in a way to give depth to the character. This scene marks a crucial transformation in the narrative structure as well as the filmic language. The real life experiences of the women are replaced by a temporally and spatially distant character, which also happens to be a man, and a king no less, who is four hundred years and a whole continent apart. Yet, Fatma Fatih’s identification with the character makes him a familiar figure and the way she relates to him convinces those who play his daughters so they all become relatable for the spectators. Playing King Lear is not Fatma Fatih’s first transgression of gender boundaries in her acting career. She wears a mustache in The Play, to impersonate a man, and her son Mithat, who was 2 years old at the time of shooting in 2003, weeps and protests when he sees his mother transformed into a man. When the film was projected during the tour in 2017, Mithat is among the audience as a teenager, watching himself protest on screen.19 The elusive expression on his face gives no clues about his reaction. Fatma Fatih’s expression is much more nuanced, especially as she weeps while watching herself from fourteen years ago explaining her dreams of becoming a teacher. She has no problem stepping over gender boundaries and acting as a man, she seems quite relaxed to assume the role of a king, and even enjoys being a man, correcting someone who calls her a queen during the rehearsals, saying that she is the king, not the queen. In response to my question as to when and how King Lear transformed into Queen Lear, Esmer says that the decision was spontaneous. She reminds me of the scene in the film when, during the rehearsals, the art director Ahmet Aksoy is getting Fatma Fatih ready for her role; he is crowning her with the branches from a tree, and he gives her a bracelet of green leaves. I watch the scene again and when I listen carefully, I hear the off-screen voice of Esmer saying that Lear now became a queen. So it was

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during the rehearsals and the staging of the play in the villages, rather than when Esmer was editing the film, that the idea of transforming Lear from a king to a queen emerged. In that sense, both the play and the film are different in emphasis from other examples where a woman plays Lear, such as Glenda Jackson’s Broadway performance of 2019, during which Jackson said “gender barriers ‘crack’ with age while answering an interview question about how it was to impersonate a man.20 Esmer herself is not keen on emphasizing the importance of “female agency”. For her, it is coincidental that Fatma Fatih happens to be a woman. “She could well have been a man, you know I filmed Mithat Esmer in my first documentary, who happens to be a man and also real-life uncle; when I’m interested in a character, the gender is not my first concern,” she says. And she has a reason for saying so, since she revisited the character of her uncle once again also, situating him in a partially fictionalized narrative of her film 10 to 11 (2009) and having him playing himself. Yet I insist that the gender of Fatma Fatih and her playing Queen Lear is not totally coincidental. Would she be equally intrigued if the news item she had read in 2003 mentioned a group of men from the countryside putting together a play about their lives, I ask Esmer. I further delve into her personal transformation through the years, asking her if she would be interested in making an autobiographical film in the future, similar to Varda in her later life. She evades the question with a joke that resonates with the response of the ten-year-old girl to Fatma Fatih’s question as to whether she will go back to school, saying “Kısmet!” (fate). As we continue joking and discussing the subject an interesting feature of her life comes up, something she has shared neither with me during our long friendship, nor in any of the interviews she has given about her films. It turns out that she had a regular and a professional acting life from the age of 9 to 14, when she used to perform each Sunday in the Children’s Theater of Türk Ticaret Bankası (Turk Ticaret Bank), even receiving a paycheck for each performance. She remembers herself acting as the “fairy ̇ of joy” in different theaters of Istanbul. These memories, which come up towards the end of our in-depth-interview, is surprising even for Esmer: they bring up a fact which has never come to attention about her motivation in 2003: So maybe this was also a reason why she ventured to travel to that village in the first place? Whatever the reason behind Esmer’s original motivation, we agreed that the agency of Fatma Fatih—moving to the city, getting a job with social security, renting a place of her own and going to work wearing

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pants—is beyond dispute. In 2003, how the working women in the village and the city look differently in what they wear is a matter of discussion and Fatma Fatih says in The Play that she will wear pants like the “city women” once Mithat has grown up. As Esmer’s camera follows her getting ready to go to work with pants, tidying up her humble flat in 2017, we sense Fatma Fatih’s pride and her sense of self-sufficiency. She is equally at ease both with her husband in the village, who keeps their home there, and with her colleagues at work in the city. While she is reciting her experience of embodying Lear at her workplace, dressed in the uniform of a hospital cafeteria, she portrays a unique interpretation of Shakespeare, paying homage to the character for the wisdom she has gained.

Conclusion Seldom, if ever, is it possible to see the same real characters followed on screen, not only with the stories of their lives unfolding but also with their real-life images reflecting on their lives as they see themselves reflected on screen. The continuity of the films The Play and Queen Lear offer a meta-­ level of inter-subjectivity, allowing the characters to interact by their screen personas, which happen to be themselves from a different period of their lives: almost a perfect representation of what would constitute a temporal duration in the Bergsonian sense, and a phenomenological interactive experience of the same person as the character on screen and an embodied spectator of herself seeing herself on screen. As such, the films accentuate the Arendtian key concept of plurality and link it to storytelling with its key role in public life. Female screen characters as central dramatic engines driving the narrative forward have increased considerably during the last two decades and this transformation has coincided with the development of digital technologies enabling women to delve into filmmaking without the necessity of huge budgets and big crews. The main argument of this chapter revolves around this development, focusing on the importance of narratives as a shared experience, and focusing on Pelin Esmer as an outstanding director of this new technology in the new century. Esmer is a director of transgressions; she is a fan of breaching the boundary and a subscriber of hybridity. She loves the in-between space-­ time of thresholds, switching between fact and fiction, documentary and drama, past and present while anchoring herself, her actors and her spectators, always in the lived bodily experience of the moment, pending between

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joy and sorrow, laughter and tears. Emphasis on polarities, such as feminine/masculine, intellect/affect, body/mind make her frown and as such, she is an embodiment of duration. Her career started with a digital hand-held camera and with her keen pursuit of the embodied duration. This may well be the reason why, after fourteen years and three full-length feature films with big crews, she felt the necessity to grab her camera once again, and be fully embodied during the process of filming. As a final word, I would revisit Varda’s sentence, that if one opened her up, one would find beaches, and I would say about Esmer: “If one opened her up, one would find playfulness”.

Notes 1. For details of Pelin Esmer’s filmography: http://pelinesmer.com/en/. Accessed on January 8, 2020. 2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London, [1958] 1998, 175. 3. The in-depth interview with Pelin Esmer was carried out in her office ̇ Sinefilm, Moda-Kadıköy Istanbul on January 1st of 2020. The interview is based on the accumulation and infiltration of the whole period that we have known each other. While the time-span of this chapter extends back to 2003, my acquaintance and friendship with Pelin Esmer goes beyond that, dating all the way from 1997 when we met in the Yıldız office of History Foundation. Esmer had recently graduated from Boğaziçi University with a degree in sociology. She submitted an essay titled “Beş Çayında Mozayik Pasta” (Mosaic Cake for five o’clock tea) for the quaṙ ̇ terly Istanbul (Istanbul, October 1997, 53–56), published by the History Foundation, where I was then editor-in-chief. She contributed again in ̇ ̇ ̇ 1999, with an essay “Bir Nefes Istanbul” (A Breath of Istanbul) (Istanbul, July 1999, 104–105). Both pieces reflected her interest in oral history and the experiential representation of places with an emphasis on senses. These aspects continued to form the phenomenology of her later work as a director of films where the lived bodily experience and the senses were always important. I have written the following in Turkish on Esmer’s films before: “Yönetmen gider Mersin’e” (The director goes to Mersin) Radikal, 11.03.2006. http://www.radikal.com.tr/hayat/yonetmen-gider-mersine-866194/. Accessed on January 8, 2020. “Ses ve Zaman: 11’e 10 kala” (Sound and Time: 10 to 11) in, Umut Tümay Arslan (ed.) Bir Kapıdan Gireceksin: Türkiye Sineması Üzerine ̇ Denemeler, Istanbul: Metis, 2012, 144–157.

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“Kraliçe Lear” (Queen Lear) manifold, 02.11.2019. https://manifold. press/kralice-lear. Accessed on January 8, 2020. 4. Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative, (translated by Frank Collins) Alexander Lectures, University of Toronto Press, 2001. 5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 50. 6. Lynn. R.  Wilkinson, “Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between Storytelling and Theory,” Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Winter, 2004), pp. 77–98. 7. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2004. 8. “The Gleaners and I, however, is a film that denies the digital, this divorce from the tangible and time-bound. It offers an implicit critique of the Cartesian dream of immateriality, the fantasy of freedom from the body, from the gravity of earthly constraints, and from the suspicion of the senses. Varda’s film counters transcendence with immanence, insisting on matter, body, and duration, despite being made in a medium that is the logical outgrowth of the desire to overcome these things. With The Gleaners and I, Varda crafts a digital cinema that is materialist, feminist, phenomenological, and political.” Homay King, Virtual Memory: TimeBased Art and the Dream of Digitality, Duke University Press, 2015, 74. 9. While answering the question of how she chose her objects of study in Virtual Memory, King says: “Varda was first: I published an essay about The Gleaners and I (2000) in 2007, which was in turn based on a conference talk from 2005. So I guess that means I have been thinking about these questions for ten years.” “The Digital, The Virtual, and The Possible: Riffing with Homay King on Virtual Memory”, by Regina Longo, from Film Quarterly, Fall 2015, Volume 69, Number 1. https://filmquarterly. org/2015/09/25/the-digital-the-virtual-and-the-possible-riffing-withhomay-king-on-virtual-memory/. Accessed on January 8, 2020. 10. Homay King, Virtual Memory, 89. King refers to this sentence as a link to Maurice Marleau-Ponty and his method of phenomenology in his interpretation of Cezanne’s work, to point out to Varda’s line of embodied thinking in her filmmaking. 11. The sentence ‘production-direction-camera-editing by Pelin Esmer,’ which takes place in the poster of The Play, is a declaration of the freedom enhanced by the digital revolution. Esmer emerges as ‘the woman with a camera’ due to the technological revolution and the ways this transformation is changing our ways of seeing. The digital way of encoding information with the same unit makes it possible to represent all that addresses our perception, from film to architecture, music to photography and graphic design in the same medium. This reductionist aspect of the technology

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creates both its strength and weakness. Just like previous forms of technology, whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depends on the way it is used. Who is using it, and for what purpose? These are the critical questions. And here comes the critical cue that digit means finger. In that sense, The Play is one of the best examples of how the digital revolution can provide a freedom of expression. It is a revolution which saves the technology from the power structures dominated by the rich, the male and the institutions, and makes it accessible to the street, to women, to the young, to the minorities and to all of us. (My translation) Feride Çiçekoğlu, “Yönetmen gider Mersin’e” (The director goes to Mersin) Radikal, 11.03.2006. http://www.radikal.com.tr/hayat/yonetmen-gider-mersine-866194/. Accessed on January 8, 2020. 12. Homay King, Virtual Memory, 83–88. 13. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014) https://www.imdb.com/title/ tt1065073/ was filmed from 2001 to 2013 as a continuous narrative of the same central character Mason (Ellar Coltrane) but does not have the inter-­active reflexivity of The Play and Queen Lear since the latter pair, filmed 14 years apart, present the same characters reflecting on their younger selves. 14. The names of the women and the characters they acted are as follows: Nesime Kahraman (the teacher), Fatma Fatih (Hatice), Zeynep Fatih (Emine), Saniye Cengiz (the doctor), Ümmü Kurt (Recep), Fatma Kahraman (the nurse), Cennet Güneş (Seyfi), Behiye Yanık (Iraz), Ümmüye Koçak (Aytül). In addition to these main roles, some among them acted additional roles, such as Fatma Fatih wearing a moustache to act as a man. 15. The five women who were invited by Pelin Esmer to participate in the initiative of the theater of greater municipality of Mersin in 2017 were: Fatma Fatih, Zeynep Fatih, Behiye Yanık, Cennet Güneş and Ümmü Kurt. In addition to the director of the theater, Hüseyin Arslanköylü; the art director Ahmet Aksoy and another employee of the theater; Erkan Güzel also joined the group throughout the trip to the villages during the full month of August in 2017. 16. Once the group arrives at a mountain village after the dangerous trip, some locals meet them, among them a man in his fifties, with a mustache and an angry attitude. He declares that the municipality should build their road instead of dealing with trivia like staging a play. The art director Ahmet Aksoy listens to him carefully and says, “We came for the play, and we learned your problem, so your road will be built and we’ll come back again, that’s good, no?” Instead of hearing the man’s answer, cut to the rehearsal scene where the man with a mustache is wearing a headscarf and he is acting the daughter of Lear. During the performance, he gets the

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greatest laughter when he demands that Anamur (a region in Mersin) is hers, since Lear gave it to her as her share of the kingdom. This is one of the joyful highlights of the film. I attended a test screening of the film in ̇ Soho House Istanbul on November 17th with my friend Jennifer Clement from Vancouver Film School. She is head of the department of Acting for Film and Television. The film did not have subtitles so Jennifer was curious after the show as to what the man was saying. When I summarized the scene, she remembered her own experience of traveling with a theater troupe when she was a u ­ niversity student in Canada. They were staging a play about the right of the women to birth control and a high school director managed to mobilize the local authorities and to stop their performances in a certain region. We pondered the similarities and the differences between the two experiences, some thirty years and many seas apart. 17. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, A Harvest Book, San Diego, New York, London, [1971] 1978, 19. 18. This format, which is theorized and laid out in detail by Ismayıl Hakkı ̇ Baltacıoğlu (“Tiyatro”, Sebat Basımevi, Istanbul 1941) and by Nurhan Karadağ (“Köy Seyirlik Oyunları”, Türkiye Iş̇ Bankası Yayınları, I.  B., Ankara 1978) is revisited by Nurhan Tekerek in 2007: Some characteristics of village spectacles are similar to worship rituals of villagers. Kidnapping the Girl, Dying-Incarnating, Collecting Food, Eating Together and Blessing in the authentic plays, permanent updating of the plays and their getting affected by the actual and finally laughter are the common elements. Dramatic village plays, with a structure of presentational theatre, are played all together. In other words, they are played to villagers by villagers who deal with this activity. … Some of the plays with the aim of fertilizing based on rituals can have obscene content. Such plays are played separately by women and men. Nurhan Tekerek, “Köy Seyirlik Oyunları, Seyirlik Uygulamalarıyla 51 Yıllık bir Amatör Topluluk: Ankara Deneme Sahnesi ve Uygulamalarından ̇ Örnek: Bozkır Dirliği ve Gerçek Kavga” (Dramatic Village Plays and Iki Ankara Deneme Sahnesi which is an Amateur Assembly for 51 Years with its Practice of Spectacles and Two Examples of its Productions: Bozkır Dirliği ve Gerçek Kavga) Tiyatro Araştırmaları Dergisi, 24:2007 • ISSN: 1300-1523, 67–124. http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/13/905/11574.pdf. Accessed on January 8, 2020. 19. Mithat Fatih worked as the grip in the crew. 20. Terry Gross hosts: “Glenda Jackson on Playing King Lear: Gender Barriers ‘Crack’ with Age” (April 23, 2019) https://www.npr.org/transcripts/716305342. Accessed on January 8, 2020.

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References Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London, [1958]. Arendt, Hannah. 1978. The Life of the Mind, A Harvest Book, San Diego, New York, London, [1971]. Çiçekoğlu, Feride. 2006. “Yönetmen gider Mersin’e” (The director goes to Mersin) Radikal, March 11. http://www.radikal.com.tr/hayat/yonetmengider-mersine-866194/. Accessed on January 8, 2020. Çiçekoğlu, Feride. 2012. “Ses ve Zaman: 11’e 10 kala” (Sound and Time: 10 to 11) in, Umut Tümay Arslan (ed.) Bir Kapıdan Gireceksin: Türkiye Sineması ̇ Üzerine Denemeler, Istanbul: Metis. Çiçekoğlu, Feride. 2019. “Kraliçe Lear” (Queen Lear) manifold, February11. https://manifold.press/kralice-lear. Accessed on January 8, 2020. Gross, Terry. 2019. “Glenda Jackson on Playing King Lear: Gender Barriers ‘Crack’ with Age” April 23. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/716305342. Accessed on January 8, 2020. King, Homay. 2015. Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality, Duke University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2001. Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative, (translated by Frank Collins) Alexander Lectures, University of Toronto Press. Longo, Regina. 2015. “The Digital, The Virtual, and The Possible: Riffing with Homay King on Virtual Memory”, by Regina Longo, from Film Quarterly, Fall, Volume 69, Number 1. https://filmquarterly.org/2015/09/25/thedigital-the-virtual-and-the-possible-riffing-with-homay-king-on-virtual-memory/. Accessed on January 8, 2020. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. Tekerek, Nurhan. 2007. “Köy Seyirlik Oyunları, Seyirlik Uygulamalarıyla 51 Yıllık ̇ Örnek: bir Amatör Topluluk: Ankara Deneme Sahnesi ve Uygulamalarından Iki Bozkır Dirliği ve Gerçek Kavga” (Dramatic Village Plays and Ankara Deneme Sahnesi which is an Amateur Assembly for 51 Years with its Practice of Spectacles and Two Examples of its Productions: Bozkır Dirliği ve Gerçek Kavga) Tiyatro Araştırmaları Dergisi, 24. http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/13/905/ 11574.pdf. Accessed on January 8, 2020. Wilkinson, Lynn. R. 2004. “Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between Storytelling and Theory,” Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Winter).

CHAPTER 4

The Feminine Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), Bird Box (2018) Ebru Thwaites Diken

Introduction This chapter explores the im(possibilities) of female subjectivity in three films directed by Susanne Bier: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), Bird Box (2018). All three films operate with an inside/outside distinction which is articulated in various ways, including ‘home and abroad’, ‘the local and the global’, ‘the present and the apocalyptic’, and ‘the barbaric and the civilized’. In all three films, the ‘outside’ functions as a chaotic, formless background which shapes and determines the unfolding of the events in the ‘inside’. In this context, the inside/outside distinction maps onto the divide between order and chaos; to put it differently, between the normal and the exceptional. As the narrative unfolds, the ‘outside’ gradually permeates the ‘inside’. The distinction between democracy and the state of exception and the present world and the

E. Thwaites Diken (*) Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_4

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post-apocalyptic gradually disappears to constitute a grey zone characterized by confusions and reversals. I first discuss Susanne Bier as a female auteur in the context of the trans-­ nationalization of Danish cinema, addressing the impossibility of classifying her films as either authentically Danish or global. I also address the impossibility of situating Bier’s cinema within the gendered categorizations of the art house and the popular. The ambivalent status of her films as ‘glocal’ and ‘art house and popular’ at once makes her cinema an interesting case in relation to discussions and cultural contextualizations of female subjectivity. Therefore, in the second and the third parts, I discuss the alternative aesthetic and thematic strategies which Bier employs in her films, with a view to explore the new, radical meanings and possibilities of female subjectivities which emerge in this grey zone of indistinction. Against this background, I show how Bier subverts the spatially gendered distinctions between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ and articulates the conflictual notions and performances of masculinity. The article concludes by asking whether, if at all, the disintegration of this distinction can pave the way for a feminist messianic opening.

A Woman’s Cinema In fact, as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.1

Woolf’s prose not only signals the problematic relationship of women to historically gendered, exclusionary and politicised notion of space,2 but also calls into question Susanne Bier’s indeterminate status as a woman director in ‘Danish’ cinema and global cinema.3 The thematic and aesthetic choices in Susanne Bier’s films challenge the conventional lines not only between the local and the global, but also between the art house and the commercial film. Her films are at once Danish and global, and, likewise, at once art house and popular. The fact that a significant aspect of the internationalization of Danish cinema is its articulation of a feminist politics and aesthetics adds another layer of complexity to Susanne Bier’s indeterminate status as a woman director in historical context. The conditions of an emerging women’s cinema cannot be understood in terms of the older national cinema models.4 In the last three decades, the trans-nationalization of the fields of film and feminism, for instance

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international film festivals, has allowed women’s productions to circulate at a global scale, and the increase in international funding and distribution channels, including digital platforms, has endowed women directors with new capacities as agents. The international visibility of Bier’s films owes much to this contextual background. In addition, the institutional culture fostered by the Danish Film Institute and the National Film School of Denmark, with clear and consistent objectives to ‘de-nationalize’, ‘hybridize’ and ‘globalize’ Danish cinema by supporting Nordic and European collaborations,5 opened up a new transnational space for many Danish women directors including Bier. It goes without saying that the internationalization of Danish cinema is also promoted by the state’s cultural policies and the collaborative ventures between the state and commercial actors. The Nordic countries, in an attempt to re-define themselves in a globalizing world, have promoted ‘culture as a nation state brand.’6 Insofar as Danish films and especially transnational television dramas from Denmark such as Borgen (Price, 2010) and Bridge (Rosenfeldt, 2011) are concerned, the cinematic gaze and the tourist gaze coincides. Scandinavia is an exotic destination. It is no coincidence that, in Danish films and television series, the spectator is deliberately confronted with ‘Nordic’ cultures and culturally specific life styles. What is particularly interesting in this prism is the gendering of Danish cinema in which the feminine social position is depicted as an indispensable condition of Scandinavian democracy. In this light, Bier’s is a highly localised cinema with a Danish ideological background, gender relations, life styles and with a distinctively Danish/Scandinavian style of product placement. Smaill7 argues that this trans-nationalization changed the ‘discursive context for reading the female director’. On the one hand, Hollywood still dominates global film consumption and ‘world cinema presents itself as a category that preserves film art and national identity.’8 In this sense, Bier’s filmmaking9 emerges from the Danish cultural context. On the other hand, women directors, including Bier, have developed alternative thematic and aesthetic strategies, which push the boundaries of national cinema and communicate local stories to transnational audiences. Bier’s cinema establishes a bridge between the Danish cultural imaginary and the global audience in intriguing ways.

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Impossible Distinctions The Authentic ‘Danish’ and the Global Bier establishes the communication between the global and the local by constructing her narratives across geographical boundaries. Brothers (2004) and In a Better World (2010), for instance, combine the ‘psychological realism’ of every day drama taking place in Denmark with a global storyline which serves as a significant catalyst for the events that unfold at home.10 Hence the intimate story line takes place on the ‘inside’ (at home, in Denmark) with focus on a relationship drama and the global political storyline takes place on the ‘outside’ (abroad, in Sudan and Afghanistan) with focus on a political question (such as the war against terror and humanitarian aid). Shiver Rice11 argues that the ‘emotional authenticity’ of the intimate story marks the ‘Nordic element’ in Bier’s films. These two films, along with After the Wedding (2006), are part of what Smaill12 names the ‘male sojourner trilogy’. In these films, a white male protagonist moves between home and abroad and is caught up in situations in which he has to negotiate an ethical position about politically significant events (i.e. how to treat a war criminal, how to survive in a Taliban camp). The effects of such conflict-ridden situations abroad eventually determine the kind of person the protagonist becomes and the resolution in family affairs at home. This geographical difference, one way in which both films play out the inside-outside distinction, functions along gender lines. Geographical difference also functions along ethnic lines that differentiate the ‘Nordic’ from its ‘Other’. In both films, the male sojourner represents ‘neither the colonizer nor the tourist but constitutes the new figure of the aid worker or the peace keeping soldier.’13 Danish cinema, in this context, serves as a site on which the Danish cultural imaginary reconciles with its colonial past.14 The protagonists in both films negotiate their ethical positions vis-a-vis the ‘Other’ with the consciousness of this colonial past. Although the roles of the aid worker and the peace-keeping soldier gives agency to the white male protagonists to reconcile with the past, it also confronts them with the impossibility of a universalistic ethics towards the ‘Other’. Cultural authenticity and the Danish cultural imaginary are communicated to the global audience in different ways. In both films, the scenes in Denmark implicate cultural notions of Danishness in the mise-en-scene, including the setting, lighting, and decoration. To illustrate with an

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example, the diffuse, low lighting of domestic interiors (instead of high contrast) in The Brothers (2004), combined with a soft colour palette and organic textures evoking a sensory feeling, characterizes an authentic, cozy (‘hyggeligt’) Danish home. The scenes of transition between Denmark and abroad contrast the stability and tranquility of the home with the chaos of foreign lands. In other words, the transition scenes mark the cultural contrasts between two geographical spaces, Denmark and the ‘Orient’, inviting an Orientalist gaze at the ‘Other’. Post-colonial critiques of Bier’s cinema often address Orientalist representations of Afghanistan and Africa in Brothers (2004) and In a Better World (2010), as chaotic, lawless, and barbaric. As the camera cuts between scenes of transition, the international spectator not only participates in the ethical complexity of the protagonist’s situation, but also is invited to see the ‘Other’ from the protagonist’s point of view. Art House and/or Popular The same indistinction between the local and the global makes itself relevant as to the question of whether Bier is an art house or a commercial film director. Bier started her film career as part of the Dogme 95 movement. Her films generally adhere to the principles of Dogme, such as the use of natural lighting, hand-held cameras, and shooting in real locations, which are all aimed at achieving a photographic reality and an authentic visuality. Among the three films, only Brothers (2004) can be considered a Dogme film, with narrative discontinuity, hand-held camera work and natural lighting.15 In In a Better World (2010), Bier breaks the Dogme rules of film making by using color balancing and post production effects, yet the film’s visual style still contains the techniques and the aesthetics of the Dogme movement. For example, in In a Better World (2010), a hand-­ held camera is used in close ups of the characters’ faces, aiming for the viewer’s realistic perception of their emotions. At the same time, medium and long shots in the film are generally steady and resemble conventional camera work.16 In Bird Box (2018), streaming on Netflix, in addition to hand-held camera work, Bier heavily relies on stylistic, fore planned camera use, including crane shots and tracking shots. Especially in the first two films, Bier uses visual jump cuts to engage the viewer with the intensity of the emotional exchange between characters. The narrative discontinuity through jump cuts serve to create momentary lapses in the viewers’ consciousness and create shifts in their mood,

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suturing them in the psychological shock or trauma of the situation.17 In Brothers (2004) and In a Better World (2010), discontinuous jump cuts convey to the spectator the characters’ recalled events from the past lives and the future desires of the protagonists. Overall, Hodjberg18 argues that Bier’s distinctive visual style, which ‘weaves Dogme light and art house elements into a complex narrative strategy’, makes her an art house auteur director rather than a popular film maker. It is, however, important to note that, film production in Denmark diverges from the classical European film tradition, which is grounded in the auteur, and from the Hollywood tradition, based on the producer as the key player.19 The credit is often shared by the director, the script writer and the producer. Bier and Jensen collaborated on five films, including In a Better World (2010). On the other hand, the company Zentropa, which has produced many of Bier’s films prioritizes auteur driven films. Sisse Graum Jorgensen, the CEO states in an interview that the success of Zentropa comes from auteur signature films combining art and market.20 Both of these factors, the collective centred Danish film making network and the strategic priority given to auteur driven films have contributed to Bier’s international visibility. Bier is often seen as an art house director in English speaking circles who identify the popular with Hollywood; while at the same time, however, European art house circles perceive her films to be closer to popular Hollywood cinema.21 As is the case with the local and global, the categorization between art house and popular is gendered, too. Bier’s focus on the family dramas, often associated with popular film, are ‘framed pejoratively as feminine’. However, unlike classical melodramas, Bier’s films neither address a particularly female audience nor they feature a strong lead female character, except for the Bird Box (2018). On the contrary, in Brothers (2004) and In a Better World (2010), Bier tackles with the conflictual notions and performances of masculinity and the protagonists are both white, male and Danish. Bier rejects the designation of her work as belonging to the genre of melodrama.22 Mainstream approaches code melodrama genre as feminine. Yet, in Brothers (2004), the melodramatic story serves as a context in which the characters negotiate the ethical paradoxes of doing good and evil. The protagonist is left with the choice of being killed and killing another captive Danish soldier to stay alive. Thinking of reunion with his family in Denmark, he kills the other soldier. Against this background, Bier’s narration of the family drama resonates well with Brook’s23 view of

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melodramas, which have emerged as a reaction to the uncertainties of modernity and configure a desacralized, human world with polarized positions of good and evil. Bier says: ‘All my films have been different. I’ve made romcoms, I have been political, I’ve made films about violence and trauma. But because I am a female director, they are all treated the same. Anything made by someone who is not a white male is labeled art house and niche.’24 The gendered tropes of art house and popular labels attached to Bier’s films undermines their hybrid aesthetics, deep focus on character psychology and plot development, the masterful subversion of genre formulas, and the sophisticated choice of the subject matter with philosophical, sociological and even theological sub-contexts. This is also reflected in her multi-disciplinary background. Born to Jewish parents of Russian and German origin in Copenhagen, Bier studied religion at the Bezazel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, architecture in London and took directing courses at the National Film School of Denmark.25 Bier undeniably uses gender as a ‘transnational narrative strategy’.26 It is important to note that not all women filmmakers label themselves as ‘feminist’ or deploy an explicitly feminist political agenda. Bier states that her generation of film makers have ‘broken away from old style feminism. The women making films fifteen years ago were very interested in their being women. We are not. I don’t make films because I want to make some political statement about women. I do make films which says a lot about women, because they are what really interests me.’27 Against this background, I consider female authorship in Bier’s films in terms of whether and how, if at all, she articulates women’s voices, uses female centered plots and strong female leads and endows women with agency and subjectivity.

Gendering Inside and Outside, and Its Subversion Brothers (2004) Brothers (2004) tells the story of Michael, a major in Danish army, who is about to join the war in Afghanistan. The film begins with gleams of light on water, followed by camera close ups of Michael’s and Sarah’s eyes, and distant visuals of wheat straws swaying in the wind. This montage is followed by a voice over: ‘I will always love you. That is the only truth. Life is neither right nor wrong, good or bad. But I love you. That is all I

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know’. This statement is suggestive of the ethical dilemmas Michael will face during his imprisonment in a Taliban camp. At home, Michael is portrayed as a loving husband and father. The dinner taking place the night before Michael leaves shows all family members gather around the table. The scene where Michael’s father, Henning, is seated at one end of the table, facing the camera, frames a patriarchal family setting. Michael, with politically correct, acceptable standards of masculinity in the cultural grip of Danishness, is contrasted with his younger brother, Jannick, the outlaw who has served prison for robbing a bank. Henning uses the conversation on the civilizing mission of the war to compare his sons and emphasize that Jannick does not meet up to his standards of masculinity: ‘There is a difference between rebuilding a country and going to jail.’ In the gendered opposition between the home and abroad, Bier designates the battlefield in Afghanistan as a male space and de-masculinizes the home space. Michael moves back and forth between home and abroad. This mobility serves as a journey of self-exploration for Michael. The conflict-­ridden situations provide him the context for self-exploration. Sarah is not given a pro-active role with access to the same global political space where she can negotiate positions.28 The film confines her to home, the Danish soil. Jannick is the only one who openly says that wars kill people. He jokes about Danish soldiers ‘shooting at anything that moves’. ‘That is why Sarah wears jeans. Michael shoots anything in a dress’, referring to women wearing burqas in Afghanistan. Addressing the state of exception in the war zone, Jannik points at one of the film’s thematic preoccupations, the indistinction between home and abroad in terms of the transgression of the rule of law. Immediately after Michael’s arrival to Afghanistan, the camera cuts to Sarah on a bus journey to go to work at a daycare center, showing a panoramic vision of everyday life in Denmark. After the helicopter accident, Michael is taken captive by Taliban soldiers and his family is informed that he is dead. The destabilizing movement of the camera in the Taliban camp surrounded by mountains, shifting its focus between Michael, the armed men shouting in a foreign language accentuates Michael’s helplessness. The film continues to contrast Michael and Jannick in terms of masculinity, even after Michael’s supposed death. Henning to Jannik: ‘I lost a son. Now I am left with nothing.’ Jannick to Sarah: ‘Michael was always good at things that men are.’ This comparison reaches a climax when

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Sarah starts a romantic affair with Jannick who almost replaces Michael. He consoles Sarah, cheers her up and spends time with her daughters. White-Stanley29 argues that Jannick’s critical attitude towards the war on terror and his nurturing attitude towards Sarah and Else, transgresses gender stereotypes. Thinking about the ending of the film in the light of White-Stanley’s argument, it would be simplistic to say that Brothers (2004) affirms Danish nationalism and patriarchy. At the end of the film, the characters reverse roles. Michael, the patriotic soldier, is arrested for domestic violence. Jannick, the ex-convict who makes anti-war commentary becomes a hero. However, Jannick also proves to Henning that he is also capable of doing men’s work by fixing the kitchen.30 In the funeral, Henning had scolded Jannik: ‘If you want to do something useful, fix the kitchen!’ It is no coincidence that, seeing the kitchen fixed raises Michael’s suspicions about Sarah and Jannik. This suspicion is conveyed to the spectator with a high angle shot of Michael, re-ordering the kitchen shelves. The tensions in the family heighten on Camilla’s birthday. Natalia openly says that her mum sleeps with Jannick. After a brief moment of silence, Henning continues the conversation as usual. Jannick’s girlfriend Solvey repeats his comment that soldiers are not trained to see people shot. When they return home, Michael has a tantrum and dismantles the kitchen. Jannick saves not only Sarah and the children from Michael, but also tries to protect Michael from the police. In a Better World (2010) In a Better World (2010) also frames the inside/outside distinction in terms of home and abroad. The film begins with long shots of an unknown, nameless location in Africa, showing patchy tents blowing in the wind, children and women in colorful, yet ragged clothes. This scene is followed by a first close then a middle shot of a Swedish doctor, Anton and African children running behind the truck, raising clouds of dust. Anton works as a doctor in a refugee camp in a region hit by civil strife. He has a troubled marriage to Marianne and a son, Elias, who is bullied at school by Sofus. Christian moved to Denmark from London with his father, Claus, after the death of his mother and attends the same school as Elias. The film tells the story of Anton and the two troubled boys, with particular focus on the themes of violence, revenge and ethics.

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Anton operates on a woman whose stomach was cut open by a war thug at the camp. The war thug bets with his men on whether the fetus is a boy and a girl and cuts pregnant women’s stomachs to find out. The voice over of a boy reciting a story from Hans Christian Anderson, ‘The Nightingale’ falls onto the image of an unidentifiable grave in Africa. Then the camera dissolves into an image of Christian’s back. Christian, dressed neatly in black clothes, makes a speech at his mother’s funeral. The voice over falling onto the images in Africa makes a reference to the overarching theme of the film, masculinities in the context of local and global violence. Christian, as the only character who openly defends violence in acts of revenge, connects the violence at home and abroad in the eyes of the spectator. He epitomizes the indistinction between home and abroad in terms of how manifestations of violence define the relationship between men.31 The film portrays different articulations of masculinity, negotiating positions about the legitimacy of violence. Adhering to the Hippocratic oath, Anton accepts to treat the war thug. Nevertheless, hearing his jokes about his victims: ‘little pussy, big knife’, Anton lets the crowd lynch him. However, in Denmark, Anton is politically correct about violence. He turns his other cheek to Lars, the auto mechanic who bullies and slaps him, trying to prove to the children that the bully is the loser. Christian: ‘He hit you. Go beat him up. Are you afraid?’ Anton: ‘What kind of world would that be?’ The boys are not convinced. Christian: ‘I don’t think he thought he lost’. The inside-outside distinction in this film is gendered too. Just like in Brothers (2004), the male protagonist Anton is mobile whereas Marianne is bound to Denmark. The journey between home and abroad serves as a context of self-exploration for Anton. Moore32 argues that women who are confined to Denmark provide stability, a shelter, a sense of belonging to a ‘dislocated male ego in momentum.’ The film gives primary agency to Anton. His decisions shift the narrative forward. Being a doctor in a war-­ ridden location, he has a direct influence on life and death. His wife, Marianne is also a doctor in a Danish hospital. Nevertheless, the ‘sense of urgency, significance and nobility attached to Anton’s work is missing.’ While Anton functions under high stress in deprived medical facilities, the film shows Marianne having a conversation with a patient about hospital food. The only time we see Marianne running in the hospital corridors is when she sees her son being rushed into emergency after the bomb blast. In this scene, the film contrasts Marianne’s maternal care with Anton’s universalistic care for the ‘Other’.

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Towards the end, Bier de-masculinizes the protagonist in several ways. Being slapped in the face, instead of being hit with a fist, implies de-­ masculinization’33 Nielsen says: ‘For a man to slap a man is to render the other’s body and person as feminized, signifying their lack’. The camera shows Anton swimming on his back in the sea, caressing his cheek, and healing himself, ‘a trope saturated with feminine symbolism.’ Nielsen argues that Bier represents masculinity as something which can include its anti-thesis. Bird Box (2018) Bird Box (2018) differs from the first two films in significant ways. The story takes place in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic setting where an invisible, unknown, mysterious evil provokes people who gaze at them to commit suicide. The extra-diegetic voice as well as the frantic camera movements makes the characters and the spectator aware of the approaching imminence. Before the apocalyptic event, we see Malorie have an ultrasound check at the hospital. She seems indifferent at the clinic. Dr. Lapham: You can make whatever choice you want. But what you can’t do is ignore it and hope it just goes away’. The doctor hands her a leaflet about adoption. Malorie is single, pregnant and has no stigma attached to being a single mother. On the contrary, she takes pride in ‘being raised by the wolves’. After the mysterious evil starts killing people, Malorie takes refuge in a house with other people. They seal the windows to stay alive. The film contrasts Olympia, the other pregnant woman in the house, with Malorie, in terms of different articulations of maternity. Olympia: ‘You’re not soft like me. I’m so spoiled. My parents have always done everything for me, and then my husband, and I just, I got soft from all that love.’ Unlike the first two films, Bird Box (2018) does not introduce us to a husband/boyfriend figure in the beginning of the film. So the inside-­ outside distinction between the present world and the post-apocalyptic one is not defined along gendered lines. In contrast to the other films, Bird Box (2018) has a strong female character who reflects on her motherhood throughout her journey to the sanctuary and pushes the narrative forward. Yet, unlike the other films, the inside-outside distinction is not defined in geographical terms, where home is associated with normality and abroad with the state of exception. In Bird Box (2018), the apocalypse

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generalizes the state of exception. There is no such difference between the inside and the outside in the post-apocalyptic world. In the refuge house, a romantic relationship develops between Malorie and Tom. Malorie and Olympia give birth around the same time. Olympia, seeing the evil, jumps out of the window and Malorie adopts her baby. From the extreme situation in the post-apocalyptic setting emerges a nuclear family. Malorie and Tom raise the two children together and try to reach the sanctuary for survivors. Malorie calls the children Boy and Girl. She is afraid of losing them so she refrains from giving them names which would make them real people. Although, it may seem that, Bier, by sacralizing motherhood, conforms to patriarchal expectations of femininity, her intimations of indistinction are far more nuanced. Firstly, the film reverses the maternal and paternal roles. While Tom is presented as the gentle, affectionate and compassionate parent, Malorie is presented as the strict, disciplined one. While Tom tells the children bedtime stories in which children meet other children and climb trees, giving them hope of a possible world to come, Malorie does not want them to dream of such a world. Her priority is their survival. Tom: ‘Life is more than just what is. It’s what could be. What you could make it. You need to promise them dreams that may never come true. You need to love them knowing that you may lose them at any second. Okay? They deserve dreams. They deserve love. They deserve hope. They deserve a mother. They deserve a mother. You haven’t given them names, Mal. Malorie: Every single decision I have made has been for them. Every single one.’ The director does not endow Malorie with traits of motherhood as defined by patriarchal society. It is also significant that Tom dies during an ambush and Malorie and the children navigate the river blindfolded. In most apocalyptic literature, mediators vanish after accomplishing their missions. In this film, the vanishing mediator is the male character. He has acted temporarily as a father figure, given the children the dream and hope of another world. After his death, Maliorie and the children reach the sanctuary where they build a new life without a father figure. The question of whether the absence of a father figure in the sanctuary signifies the end of the patriarchal society remains to be answered.

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Zones of Indistinction In the first two films, the inside-outside distinction maps onto the divide between order and chaos. The outside functions as a background which frames the story that takes place on the inside. In Brothers (2004), Michael experiences the darkness of the outside and uses it as a context to reflect upon ethical perspectives and the supposed normality of his life in Denmark.34 Michael stands for the rule of law in Denmark, yet, in the ‘Orient’, characterized as a state of nature or a state of exception, he is forced to transgress the law. His decision to kill Niels to save himself makes it impossible for Michael to resume his life in Denmark. He resorts to violence and becomes an outlaw there. On one occasion, he tries to confess having seen Niels in the camp to his superior in the army. However, his superior tells him that it is quite common for traumatized soldiers not to remember everything, almost discouraging his confession. To use Agamben’s35 terminology, Michael finds himself in a grey zone, a ‘zone of indistinction’, in which the exception becomes the norm, not only in Afghanistan, but also in Denmark. Law and lawlessness, society and nature, become indistinct categories. Having realized this, Michael resorts to extreme and irrational violence. In In a Better World (2010), Anton, who justifies violence in Africa, does not justify it in Denmark. Nevertheless, Christian reminds him that the rules of the game are equally similar in Denmark. In order to avoid an aggressor bully, one should ‘hit hard enough the first time’. Sofus stops bullying Elias and Christian only after Christian holds a knife against his throat, threatening to kill him. By showing such controversies, the film addresses that violence lies at the heart of Western democracies too. As exception is inherent in the law, it is no coincidence that violence also lies at the heart of the rule of law. The distinction between the inside and outside disappears. Moreover, the outside permeates the inside. In Bird Box (2018), the distinction between the inside and the outside is much less visible. The scenes from the present world last only for the first few sequences. The apocalypse is a permanent state of exception. It is where the distinction between the inside and the outside completely disappears. And for the same reason, the apocalyptical paves the way to a messianic opening. Could this opening be a feminist one?

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Conclusion: A Feminine Indistinction? The apocalypse is a state in which exception, the anomaly, is normalized. In this sense, the apocalyptic event marks the end of the social, and, by the same token, the end of the distinction between nature and culture. Thus, the post-apocalyptic is a condition with no distinctions. In a setting where the background and the foreground are no longer distinguishable, the normality can only last momentarily, as is the case with Bird Box (2018). In Bird Box (2018), the post-apocalyptic setting is lawless and chaotic. But what if the apocalypse is not merely a tragic incident but also a political-­ethical event that opens up the space for the new, for the new possibilities of the social, to emerge? Could the apocalyptic signify a resurrection of the primal feminine subjectivity, the ground zero of all sociality? Producing such questions, the ending of Bird Box (2018) is particularly thought-provoking. In a classical Hollywood film, the nuclear family (Tom, Malory and the children) would reach the sanctuary together, as a family, and re-build the patriarchal society in a way reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe’s repetition of the same on a desert island. Further, such a ‘happy’ ending would normally ascribe the primary agency to the heroic father. Susanne Bier does not do so. On the contrary, her story in Bird Box begins without a father, and when the father (who is not a biological father) appears, he does so in order to be sacrificed. Similarly, in Bird Box the sanctuary is a school for the blind. Since the subject-object (male-female) relation is primarily constituted through gaze, one can reasonably assume that ‘not seeing’ can potentially subvert this relation, that the absence of vision can enhance perception in haptic terms. It is interesting that it is precisely such a move from vision to touch that marks the transition from the realm of the masculine symbolic order to the primal feminine ground zero in Irigaray’s36 terms.

Notes 1. Woolf, Virginia. 1938. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press, p. 167. 2. The agora in ancient Greece, the bourgeois public space in nation states, sacred religious spaces are all patriarchal constructs. 3. Smaill, Belinda. 2014. The Male Sojourner, The Female Director, and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies. May 85. Vol 29. No 1, p. 6. Women

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film makers born in the 1950s and 1960s are situated in the context of an emerging transnational feminism and a global film culture at the expense of a gradual dissolution of a national cinema. 4. White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 201. 5. Hjort, Mette. 2005. Small Nation, Global Cinema. Minneapolis. London: University of Minnesota Press, p. xi. 6. Hjort, Mette. 2005. Small Nation, Global Cinema. Minneapolis. London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 16. 7. Smaill, Belinda. 2014. The Male Sojourner, The Female Director, and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies. May 85. Vol 29. No 1, p. 7. 8. White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. x. 9. Bier is the first of the Dogme group to win an Oscar. To name a few of her internationally acclaimed films, Open Hearts (2002) won the Danish Academy Award and the International Film Critics Award at the Toronto Film Festival; Brothers (2005) won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and at the Boston Independent Film Festival; and In a Better World (2010) won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film and the best director at the European Film Award. 10. See Moore, Cath. 2017. Position-in-frame: gendered mobility, legacy and transformative sacrifice in the screen stories of Susanne Bier. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/33545182/Position-in frame_gendered_ mobility_legacy_and_transformative_sacrifice_in_the_screen_stories_of_ Susanne_Bier (accessed 07.01.2020). 11. Shiver-Rice, Meryl. 2015. Inclusion in New Danish Cinema: Sexuality and Transnational Belonging. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 152. 12. Smaill, Belinda. 2014. The Male Sojourner, The Female Director, and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies. May 85. Vol 29. No 1. 13. Smaill, Belinda. 2014. The Male Sojourner, The Female Director, and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies. May 85. Vol 29. No 1, p. 24. 14. Shiver-Rice, Meryl. 2018. Danish Privilege and Responsibility in the Work of Susanne Bier. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 243–260. 15. Hojbjerg, Lennard. 2017. The Visual Style of Susanne Bier’s Films. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Volume 7 Number 3, p.  256, cited in Smaill,

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Belinda. 2014. The Male Sojourner, The Female Director, and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies. May 85. Vol 29. No 1, p. 11. 16. Hojbjerg, Lennard. 2017. The Visual Style of Susanne Bier’s Films. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Volume 7 Number 3, p. 256. 17. Anderson, Travis, Packard, Dennis. 2014. AI Jump Start: A Reappraisal of Editing for Continuity and Discontinuity in Film and Video Games. Intelligent Cinematography and Editing: Papers from AAAI-14 Workshop, p.  4. https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/WS/AAAIW14/paper/ viewFile/8851/8323 (accessed 11.02.2020). 18. Hojbjerg, Lennard. 2017. The Visual Style of Susanne Bier’s Films. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Volume 7 Number 3, p. 254. 19. https://sciencenordic.com/art-business-denmark/teamwork-broughtdanish-films-to-the-top/1379739. 20. http://www.nordiskfilmogtvfond.com/news/stories/combining-art-withthe-market-is-what-defines-zentropa. 21. The arguments in this paragraph follow Smaill’s arguments. Smaill, Belinda. 2014. The Male Sojourner, The Female Director, and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies. May 85. Vol 29. No 1, pp. 12–15. 22. Nielsen, Mimi. 2018. Tracing Affect in Susanne Bier’s Cinema. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 155–172. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 23. Brooks, Peter. 1985. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. New York: Columbia University Press. 24. Available at: https://www.vulture.com/2016/04/director-susanne-bieron-women-in-hollywood.html; Hjort, Mette. 2018. Gender Equity in Screen Culture: On Susanne Bier, the Celluloid Ceiling, and the Growing Appeal of TV Production. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, p.  138. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 25. Wood, Jason. 2016. Talking Movies: Contemporary World Film Makers in Interview. London and New York: Wallflower Press, p. 3. 26. Moore, Cath. 2017. Position in-frame: gendered mobility, legacy and transformative sacrifice in the screen stories of Susanne Bier, p. 56. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/33545182/Position-in-frame_gendered_ mobility_legacy_and_transformative_sacrifice_in_the_screen_stories_of_ Susanne_Bier (accessed 07.01.2020). 27. Redvall, Novrup Eva. 2015. Denmark. In Women Screen Writers: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes, Jule Selbo, pp.  266–288. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 283.

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28. Moore, Cath. 2017. Position in-frame: gendered mobility, legacy and transformative sacrifice in the screen stories of Susanne Bier, p. 59 https:// www.academia.edu/33545182/Position-in-frame_gendered_mobility_ legacy_and_transformative_sacrifice_in_the_screen_stories_of_Susanne_ Bier (accessed 07.01.2020). 29. The arguments in this and the following paragraph follow the argumentation of White Stanley (2014). White-Stanley, Debra. 2014. I Don’t Know How She Lives with This Kitchen The Way It Is. In Heroism and Gender in War Films. Eds. K.A.  Ritzenhoff, J.  Kazecki, 133–153. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 138. 30. White Stanley argues that fixing the kitchen serves as a symbolic performance of masculinity in the film. White-Stanley, Debra. 2014. I Don’t Know How She Lives with This Kitchen The Way It Is. In Heroism and Gender in War Films. Eds. K.A.  Ritzenhoff, J.  Kazecki, 133–153. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 138. 31. Erdede, Ruken Doğu. 2018. Film and Ideology (Class Lecture, Department of Cinema, May 2018). 32. The arguments in this paragraph follow Moore’s argument about gendered spaces in Bier’s films. Moore, Cath. 2017. Position in-frame: gendered mobility, legacy and transformative sacrifice in the screen stories of Susanne Bier, p. 62 https://www.academia.edu/33545182/Position-inframe_gendered_mobility_legacy_and_transformative_sacrifice_in_the_ screen_stories_of_Susanne_Bier (accessed 07.01.2020). 33. The arguments in this paragraph follow Nielsen’s arguments about the ways in which Bier provides a paradoxical and multi-layered approach to masculinity. Nielsen, Mimi. 2018. Tracing Affect in Susanne Bier’s Cinema. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 243–260. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 166. 34. Morrison, Tim. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, p. 38. 35. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Standford: Stanford University Press. ̇ 36. Irigaray, Luce. 2014. In the Beginning, She Was (çev. Ilknur Odabaş, Melika Özallı). Ankara: Pinhan Publications.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Standford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Travis, Packard, Dennis. 2014. AI Jump Start: A Reappraisal of Editing for Continuity and Discontinuity in Film and Video Games. Intelligent Cinematography and Editing: Papers from AAAI-14 Workshop, https://www.

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aaai.org/ocs/index.php/WS/AAAIW14/paper/viewFile/8851/8323 (accessed 11.02.2020). Brooks, Peter. 1985. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. New York: Columbia University Press. Erdede, Ruken Doğu. 2018. Film and Ideology (Class Lecture, Department of Film and Television, Istanbul Bilgi University, May 2018). Hjort, Mette. 2005. Small Nation, Global Cinema. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Hjort, Mette. 2018. Gender Equity in Screen Culture: On Susanne Bier, the Celluloid Ceiling, and the Growing Appeal of TV Production. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 134–148. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hojbjerg, Lennard. 2017. The Visual Style of Susanne Bier’s Films. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Volume 7 Number 3, pp. 253–265. ̇ Irigaray, Luce. 2014. Başlangıçta Kadın VardI (çev. Ilknur Odabaş, Melika Özallı). Ankara: Pinhan Publications. McHugh, Kathleen. 2009. The World and the Soup: Historicizing Media Feminisms in Transnational Contexts. Camera Obscura. No 72, p. 111. Molly, Missy, Shiver-Rice, Meryl, Nielsen, Mimi (eds.). 2018. Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier, pp. 1–12. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Moore, Cath. 2017. Position in-frame: gendered mobility, legacy and transformative sacrifice in the screen stories of Susanne Bier https://www.academia. edu/33545182/Position-in frame_gendered_mobility_legacy_and_transformative_sacrifice_in_the_screen_stories_of_Susanne_Bier (accessed 07.01.2020). Morrison, Tim. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage. Nielsen, Mimi. 2018. Tracing Affect in Susanne Bier’s Cinema. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 155–172. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pham, Annika. 2018. Combining Art with the Market is What Defines Zentropa. Interview with Sisse Graum Jørgensen and Louise Vesth http://www.nordiskfilmogtvfond.com/news/stories/combining-art-with-the-market-is-whatdefines-zentropa (accessed 11.01.2020). Redvall, Novrup Eva. 2015. Denmark. In Women Screen Writers: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes, Jule Selbo, 266–288. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shiver-Rice, Meryl. 2015. Inclusion in New Danish Cinema: Sexuality and Transnational Belonging. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shiver-Rice, Meryl. 2018. Danish Privilege and Responsibility in the Work of Susanne Bier. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 243–260. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Virginia Woolf. 1938. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press.

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White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. Durham and London: Duke University Press. White-Stanley, Debra. 2014. I Don’t Know How She Lives with This Kitchen The Way It Is. In Heroism and Gender in War Films. Eds. K.A.  Ritzenhoff, J. Kazecki, 133–153. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wood, Jason. 2016. Talking Movies: Contemporary World Film Makers in Interview. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

CHAPTER 5

Consuming Bodies, Abject Spaces: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Transcultural Expressionism Joanna Mansbridge

Introduction: Amirpour’s Dark Fairy Tales Ana Lily Amirpour emerged onto the independent film circuit with her critically acclaimed vampire western film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (United States, 2014). Her follow up western thriller, The Bad Batch (United States, 2016), was less well received, its grisly imagery and dystopian themes too unconventionally gruesome for audiences and critics alike. Both are, in Amirpour’s words, “dark fairytales.”1 Girl Walks is set in the fictional Iranian ghost town, Bad City, and Bad Batch meanders through the desert between two border settlements, one a community of cannibals and the other dilapidated frontier town called Comfort. At the centre of both film-worlds are wandering female protagonists, whose quests for  survival and yearning  for intimacy simultaneously  invoke and  revise familiar genre  scripts, while comprising a resonant image of contemporary US culture. Using the structure of fairy tales, conventions of genre films, and metaphors of vampirism and cannibalism, Girl Walks

J. Mansbridge (*) City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_5

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and Bad Batch amplify the spaces, subjects, and ways of life in the border zones of a transcultural America. Scholars have highlighted the agency of Amirpour’s female protagonists. Shadee Abdi and Bernadette Marie Calafell, for example, see the construction of a “queer utopia” in Girl Walks and its “monstrous feminist anti-hero,”2 while Kimberly Jackson sees in Bad Batch a tale of redemption, concluding that its heroine “accepts and embraces a partial identity and creates an in-between space for herself through which she will eternally wander.”3 Expanding on and at times complicating these arguments, this chapter aims to underscore the  ambivalence  of Amirpour’s protagonists, emphasizing the ways in which their agency is constrained within environments conditioned by history and economics and emerges as an enactment of cross-cultural entanglements. Amirpour’s cinematic signature, I argue, is best described as transcultural expressionism, an aesthetic formed from the filmmaker’s multiple, often conflicting cultural identifications (US, Iran) and from the broader geopolitical forces in which these films and their maker are embedded. With a cinematic gaze that is at once sensuous and unflinching, Amirpour pierces into both the violence at the core of US socio-economic relations and the yearning for intimacy at the core of its prevailing genre, romance. As this chapter will elaborate, Girl Walks and Bad Batch can be read on (at least) three levels: as radically revised fairy tales, in which female protagonists are not damsels in distress but outcasts, wanderers, and killers, whose acts of violence and search for intimacy co-exist as conflicting tendencies; as political allegories, in which economic logics of extraction and consumption define the bodies, environments, and relationships in the films; and as expressionistic dreamscapes that refract the multiple cultural identifications comprising the filmmaker’s personal and artistic formation.

Extractive Environments: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night Born in London to Iranian parents who left Iran during the 1979 revolution, Amirpour immigrated with her family to Miami when she was a child, then moved to Bakersfield, California, where she spent her adolescence. Speaking about her debut feature, Girl Walks, Amirpour explains that the film is “set in my mind. And in my mind, there’s Iran.”4 Both she and Sheila Vand, who plays the Girl, stress that the film-world is their

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world, an extension of their psychic displacement as Iranian Americans. As Amirpour explains: A film is like a dream. It’s the opportunity to work inside of a dream. A film is really a place of the mind. […] Bad City became our Iran because it became really a true mash up of all the things that we are, which is our parents and our parents’ Iran, but also America and Europe and all these influences of pop culture that we grew up on. It kind of became a place for all of us.5

At once collective and personal, Amirpour’s dark fairy tales are thus also a form of transcultural expressionism, both affectionate homages and fierce critiques of the cultures to which the director belongs. Girl Walks was promoted at its 2014 Sundance premiere as “the first Iranian vampire spaghetti western,” an attempt, no doubt, to draw on the currency of Iranian women filmmakers in world cinema circles.6 It is more accurate to say, however, that it is an American film set in an imagined Iran. Shot in the oil town of Taft, California, Girl Walks includes a cast of Iranian-American and Iranian-German actors and a Farsi script. The titular protagonist, the Girl, is a chador-wearing vampire, who stalks and devours the damaged and damaging men of Bad City. With references to filmmakers ranging from David Lynch to Robert Zemeckis, Girl Walks is, at once, a coming of age story, horror film, teen romance, western revenge fantasy, and music video. Music acts a shared space and extension of the characters (and cast) in the film: the Pimp Saeed’s techno, the Rockabilly’s American western, Arash’s Iranian rock, and the Girl’s UK and American pop express these characters. Portland-based band Federale provided several original songs for the soundtrack, imbuing the film with its western undertone, while Iranian and British indie rock music from Kiosk, Radio Tehran, and Farrah converges with the sounds of American-Armenian composer Bei Ru and the 1980s post-punk of White Lies. Amirpour’s Gen X nostalgia and masterful mixing of music, cinematic imagery, and genre tropes create highly curated film-worlds, in which everything and everyone on screen is more and other than what they appear to be. Although the film reveals nothing of the Girl’s backstory, Amirpour sketched out a detailed chronology of her life, which she has documented in two prequel comics, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night #1: Death is the Answer and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night #2: Who Am I?, both published by Radco. Born in a Persian town in 1880, the Girl became a

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vampire in 1899, when, on the verge of dying during a heat wave, she was taken from her balcony by a vampire. Between 1929 and 1959, she travelled through Morocco, Hungary, and Turkey, where she “got really into music” and saw Elvis. She returned to Persia in 1959 to find her sister. The next period, the Iranian Revolution, is described on the chronology as: “Death-Islam. Destruction.” Following this period are “the killing years,” which span the 1980s and 1990s and mark the Girl’s arrival in Bad City.7 According to Abdi and Calafell, Girl Walks “manifests feminist themes of possibility, identification, and anxiety,” using “the transgressive possibilities of this vampire” to document “how people with lineages connected to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have been historically coded in the United States, as simultaneously invisible and threatening.”8 Hudson writes similarly that Girl Walks “tells a story of a world that has mutated due to human migrations.”9 Hudson goes further to suggest how, in contemporary US films, “vampires are not necessarily feared or desired because they will drain the blood of nation; instead, they may be feared or desired because they threaten or promise to populate the nation with progeny of so-called mixed blood.”10 And yet the Girl does not turn her prey; she only kills. The Girl does not embody the reproductive anxieties and xenophobic fears of contemporary America, but rather the loneliness of a figure caught between and composed by two distorted worlds—damned, on the one hand, as an embodiment of the so-called “axis of evil” and, on the other, by a rhetoric of freedom drained of all life. Stalking the streets at night on her skateboard, with her chador flapping in the wind, the Girl’s victims include: pimps and drug lords (Saeed, played by Dominic Rains); drug addicts and gamblers (Hossein played by Marshall Manesh); and even, nearly, a little boy, who stands to inherit these bad habits as he comes of age in Bad City. Her chador—a garment so often deemed in western discourse as a sign of patriarchal oppression— is here  a superpower; it acts as a disguise and invests the Girl with an omniscient gaze. The film pivots from horror to teen romance when the Girl encounters Arash (Arash Marandi), whose vulnerability and beauty recall the emotive male archetype made famous by Marlon Brando and James Dean and reimagine an Iranian masculinity unconditioned by an authoritarian state or religious regime. His soft beauty and co-dependent relationship with his addicted father, Hossein, provide a contrast to the Girl’s cool, distant autonomy. Arash’s earnings as a gardener allowed him to buy a 1957 Thunderbird, but his car and his money get consumed by his father’s heroin habit. Like the nation states looming in the background,

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the characters in Girl Walks are enmeshed in an economy governed by extraction and corruption. The film’s visual imagery—shots of oil rigs plunging like pre-historic monsters into the landscape, needles injected into bodies, a vampire sucking blood from her prey—establishes a logic of penetration, extraction, and consumption. Spliced between the film’s two opening sequences is a wide shot of a bleak horizon populated by oil rigs churning like prehistoric monsters. Then, the film’s money shot: a close-up of a pump jack-head as it thrusts into the ground. The shot disappears as quickly as it appears, then cuts to a shot of the post and crank, pumping up and down. The eroticism of the vampire is displaced onto the obscene economy of oil. The actual location of Girl Walks in arid northern California aligns the film with the western genre, but there is no wilderness here and no promise of opportunity. Bad City is not a frontier town, but the end of the road. Taft has been an oil town since its founding in the late-nineteenth century and has the largest oil field in California and third largest in the US.  Although the area generates large profits for oil corporations, the town itself is economically depressed. At the same time, even as the US prevents Iran from exporting its own oil, Iran supplies much of the opiates that go into making the synthetic opioids consumed by so many in California and the US, more generally. In this way, Bad City is an uncanny place born from the entangled economies, ecologies, and psychologies of US-Iran relations. Drugs, blood, and oil act as metonyms of these entanglements, trapping the characters in a death-like existence and keeping them, at once, dependent on and isolated from one another.  By fusing horror and romance, Amirpour revises the oft-repeated rape culture script; a meaningful example from recent vampire films would be the parking lot scene in Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight (United States, 2008), where Edward saves Bella from a gang of would-be rapists. Girl Walks invokes and overturns such familiar set ups. For example, early in the film and before we know the Girl is a vampire, a roving handheld camera enters the Girl’s basement room and spies her dancing alone. She gets ready for her night out on the streets by rimming her eyes with dark liner and coating her lips in red lipstick.11 Using the voyeuristic camera work of slasher films, Amirpour tricks us into assuming one thing (that the Girl is a victim-in-waiting), only to overturn that assumption in the next scene, where she herself becomes the predator. Spotting Saeed walking down a dark sidewalk, the Girl tracks him with her gaze, having planned her nightly walk for precisely this encounter. He

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takes her in with his own gaze and asks why she is out alone at night. Seeing what he thinks is a sexual opportunity, Saeed leads the Girl back to his lair, assuming the Girl to be his prey—an assumption reinforced by the mounted deer heads and animal skins adorning his living room. It is twenty-five minutes into the film, and the Girl has not spoken a word. The scene is set up to break mahram/na-mahram, the Islamic law governing relations between men and women and demarcating public and private spheres, while invoking the codes of the classic horror scenario: a young Girl out alone at night, a predatory man, a domestic sphere invaded by a threatening other.12 But, here, the Girl is that other. Point of view shots shift from omniscient to the Girl’s and imply that she is in control of the action. Pumped up on cocaine and weights, Saeed bares his chest and dances, while the Girl watches with a disinterested gaze. Tattooed on Saeed’s neck is the word ‘SEX,’ marking where the Girl’s bite will soon penetrate.13 As Saeed shimmies closer, she bares her fangs, and our recognition of what the Girl is occurs along with his, although he is slower to catch on and thinks her fangs are a form of foreplay. He puts his finger in her mouth, expecting a precursor to his pleasure. Instead, she bites off his finger, then follows this symbolic castration with the film’s most gruesome killing. The scene then cuts to Hossein shooting the heroin Saeed had supplied, thus creating an associative logic of extraction/injection, sex/death. The Girl kills Saeed as revenge for his abuse of Atti (Mozhan Marnò), Bad City’s prostitute and other “girl who walks alone at night.” The third, girl who walks alone at night is the transgender Rockabilly (Reza Sixo Safai), who acts as the symbolic center of Girl Walks. Abdi and Calafell see in the film’s “monstrous feminist anti-hero and queer doublings” both the contradictions of Iranian feminism and “the possibility of resistance for (queer) Iranian and Iranian-American women.”14 In the comic prequel to the film written by Amirpour, the Rockabilly, a prostitute, stands next to a chain-link fence, putting on lipstick while waiting for a customer. She is attacked by thugs who hurl homophobic insults as they brutalize her. The narrative captions read: “People hate the things they don’t understand. They’ll think you’re a monster. Call you a freak.”15 The Girl appears and kills the aggressors. This scene in the comic initiates the Girl’s killing spree and becomes the inciting incident of the film. Although she appears in the background of the film, the Rockabilly occupies a prominent position in a dreamy sequence in which she dances freely in the daylight with a red balloon. The surrounding environment is plastered with theatre posters and

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graffitied with Persian words, a stylised eye, and the English word ‘Sex,’ which recalls the tattoo on Saeed’s neck seen earlier. The Rockabilly thus acts a counter-image to the abusive sexuality embodied by Saeed. These queer doublings lead Abdi and Calafell to characterise the film as “a queer utopia [which] needs a feminist monster, a fairy tale or malleable figure, to serve as an anti-hero to help actualize it.”16 Indeed, the Rockabilly’s performance of freedom is structurally linked in the film to the Girl’s tentative yielding to Arash in the scene preceding it, suggesting that the possibility of pleasure for both, sexual and otherwise, are linked. Women who want anything, especially sex, are generally dealt a dead card in horror films. In Girl Walks, the scenario is turned upside down. When the Girl finds a wasted Arash, dressed as Dracula and trying to find his way home, he is positioned as the vulnerable, would-be victim. At first, he tries to play the part of moral policeman, asking her why she is out alone at night, but his tone is humorous and tender. He imitates a Dracula voice, wraps her in his cloak for warmth, then falls to the ground, bringing his act to an end. The Girl uses her skateboard to wheel him to her basement room, where the scene is again set up as a date rape scenario with Arash, stoned and lying on the Girl’s bed, framed as potential victim. With its super-slow pacing and understated eroticism, the scene is charged with the tension between the Girl’s instinct to kill Arash and her desire to be close to him. She surrenders to her desire for closeness. She rests her head on his chest, establishing a connection that is both visceral (she listens to his heart beat, which the audience also hears blended with the beats of the White Lies song “Death” playing on the Girl’s turntable) and existential (it is as though she is remembering the gestures of intimacy). Unlike the rigs pumping oil or the drugs coursing through Hossein’s veins, the blood pumping through Arash’s body is life she wants to preserve. In the end, the Girl gives Arash the courage to leave his doomed environment, and Arash goes with the Girl, even though he knows that she’s a vampire, and that she killed his father. The film ends with the two sitting in the Thunderbird, about to set out down a desolate road lit only by a full moon. Recalling the closing shot of Mike Nicholls’s The Graduate (United States 1967), they look warily ahead, then away from each other. After a brief moment of doubt, Arash puts a cassette in the tape deck, and Kiosk’s “Yarom Bia” plays, a song expressing the cultural angst of Iranian youth. With the music as their meeting place, they turn to each other, smile, and drive slowly down the unpaved road.

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Amirpour’s transcultural expressionism occupies the permeable borderlands linking isolation and intimacy, horror and romance, origins and entanglements. Girl Walks models a dark awareness of how cultures, environments, histories, and subjectivities are both bound together and kept apart. At the same time, it stakes a tenative claim on the risky promise of romance—of being drawn toward another, and yet resisting the urge to consume them. In The Bad Batch, the filmmaker again reworks genre tropes to create a world that is both personal and political, familiar and frightening. Amirpour’s imagined Iranian ghost town is, in Bad Batch, a dystopian borderland populated by castoffs who live off the waste generated by America’s seemingly insatiable desire to consume and whose methods of survival push the logic of consumption to its most extreme.

Abject Lives: The Bad Batch Abject is that which is discarded, expelled, cast off, and thus what consequently threatens to disrupt distinctions between subject and object, pure and impure: ghosts, corpses, vomit, and wounds are abject.17 In her article “Dejects and Cannibals: Postmodern Abjection in Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch,” Kimberly Jackson sees redemption in Arlen’s journey, arguing, “The Bad Batch takes us to a primal, pre-cultural phase where we must confront the monsters we try so desperately to repress” and serves as a “salient commentary on the postmodern condition, which has hindered our ability to drum up the kind of ritualistic expulsion necessary to complete the process of abjection.”18 And yet abjection is never complete, and thus always threatens the borders of the subject; it is a process that must be repeated again and again. In Judith Butler’s formulation, abject defines the unlivable spaces that are nonetheless densely populated by those whose personhood is not legible, whose lives are read as illegitimate, within dominant culture. For Butler, abjection is the process by which some bodies come to matter, and others do not.19 As I am using it here, following Butler, abjection defines the logic of exclusion through which non-normative, criminal, or otherwise devalued bodies have been expelled from the US body politic and fantasies of the good life. Neither pre-cultural nor primal, abject bodies and environments preserve the very borders of presumably bounded subjects and nations. Cannibalism both radically transgresses borders between subject and object and, at the same time, makes literal the capitalist economic logics of competition and consumption  that drive much of US

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cultural life. Amirpour focuses on the unseen places and not-quite subjects existing in the cracks of US culture, where the weakest members are left vulnerable to corruption and the stronger members feed off them for their own survival. At the center of Bad Batch is Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), a survivor who is both constituted by the abject environments in which she lives and who seeks to transform them. As in Girl Walks, agency and morality in Bad Batch are defined not by individual choice, but as contingent capacities and modes of survival within a dog-eat-dog environment. As with Girl Walks, Bad Batch begins with the personal and expands into the broader cultural milieu that has shaped Amirpour’s identity and cinematic vision. When asked in an interview about the impetus for Bad Batch, Amirpour replied: It was this pain that I felt in my personal life, that was personified in the image of a girl missing limbs and bleeding in the middle of the desert. There are some parts of heartbreak that make you feel dismembered. So that was the beginning, but I knew this girl was going to survive, and she was going to figure out who she was again, and how to adapt to this new form. Then it became a portrait of America as I see it.20

While her Iranian identity was explored in Girl Walks, in Bad Batch Amirpour mines her early years in Miami and her coming of age in the desert badlands of Bakersfield, California for psychic material. Amirpour feels “attached to the desert in a deep sense.”21 Bad Batch is both an expression of that attachment and a take on perhaps the darkest fairy tale of them all, the American Dream. Bad Batch is populated by cast-offs existing on the fringes of America’s geographical and existential borders. It is not, as most critics have called it, a post-apocalyptic film, but a film that amplifies and reframes the politics of class and race in contemporary US cultural life (Yamato 2017). To claim Bad Batch is post-apocalyptic is to neglect seeing it as trenchant comment on a present-tense US culture littered with the historical remnants of failed utopian futures. Aesthetically inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970s acid western film El Topo, Amirpour revises the western genre’s frontier narrative into its mirror opposite; here, the frontier is not a space of wilderness and opportunity, but a wasteland of discarded lives and objects. The director holds nothing back from showing the grisly side of a culture that commodifies, consumes, and discards as an exercise of freedom.

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In contrast to the black-and-white nocturnal world of Girl Walks is the scorched earth-toned daytime environment of Bad Batch. The opening credit sequence shows Arlen being released from prison in the middle of the Texas desert. As her first free act, she devours a hamburger. As in Girl Walks, the sound is amplified in Bad Batch (Amirpour has 30% hearing loss), and as we watch Arlen in close-up and listen to her carnivorous mastication, we are immediately tuned into the film’s visceral world, where freedom is equal to the freedom to consume. We then watch Arlen walk into a desert landscape littered with trash, wearing a ball cap, t-shirt, tie-­ died shorts, and sneakers and carrying a gallon of water. She passes a sign in English and Spanish that reads: “WARNING: Beyond this point is no longer the territory of Texas. That hereafter no person within the territory beyond this fence is no longer a resident of the United States of America or shall be acknowledged, recognized or governed by the laws and governing bodies therein. Good luck.”22 She encounters an abandoned car and takes cover inside. Surveying her appearance in the rearview mirror, she applies lip gloss, à la Thelma in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (United States, 1991), and looks through her wallet, finding a folded-up photo of herself and her boyfriend, a hint of her pre-prison life. She spots a golf cart heading towards her in the rearview mirror, and the camera cuts to Arlen sprinting across the desert. One of the golf cart pursuers, a middle-­aged woman, enters the frame and tackles Arlen. The title flashes on the screen, and the first narrative sequence begins with a close-up of Arlen tied and gagged. This sequence of captivity-release-captivity invokes the western genre and echoes historical settler colonial practices that decimated indigenous tribes and enslaved Africans Americans. Arlen leaves prison to find herself captive to a community of cannibals, known as “bridge people.” Arlen’s captor injects Arlen with a needle, then saws off her right arm and leg and cauterizes the amputations with a cast iron skillet. Another woman tries to drown out Arlen’s screams by turning up the music (Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants”). When Arlen’s severed arm is cast aside, we see the hand, with tattooed letters on each finger spelling “fear,” go limp. Arlen’s dismemberment early in the film introduces a visceral metaphor of a hostile culture that feeds off its own. It also initiates Arlen’s fearless quest for survival in this environment. The scene then cuts to a brief shot of Arlen lying in a shed with her severed arm and leg bandaged, then to a shot of members of the community lifting weights outside to the pulsing beats of hip hop, their tanned and over-developed muscles a caricature of America’s body-obsessed culture and a jarring

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contradiction to the dismembered bodies of Arlen and the other captives populating the background. Dismembered bodies, discarded objects, disused airplanes made into shelters, décor made up of abandoned household items, and a tattered American flag waving in the air comprise the mise en scène. Arlen escapes on a skateboard (a prop she shares with the Girl) that she finds in a pile of detritus, and with the help of the Hermit (Jim Carrey), finds her way to a makeshift settlement called Comfort, a fun house version of a frontier town where skateboarders, strippers, Korean noodle sellers, and the homeless piece together makeshift lives. It is gathering place for those who have gotten lost on their way to achieving the good life, an abject space that sustains and secures the borders of the utopian fantasy of the American Dream. The film was shot in and includes extras from an actual off-grid community in Southern California called Slab City. In both Slab City and Comfort, those who are not recognized as a subject or citizen organize their own rules and forms of enjoyment. As Comfort’s sleazy leader, The Dream (Keanu Reeves), puts it, they are the bad batch, those who “weren’t good enough, smart enough, young enough, healthy enough, wealthy enough, sane enough” to achieve the Dream. Deemed “freaks” and “parasites,” they seek refuge in Comfort, where raves stand in as a utopian space of collective public life.23 After healing and getting a prosthetic leg, Arlen’s first encounter in Comfort is with the Screamer (Giovanni Ribisi). Wandering down the main street, he mutters with manic urgency: “if you forget everything else, but not this, you have nothing to worry about. One thing…. If you remember everything else, but you forget this one thing, you will have done nothing in your life. There’s one thing you must never forget. One thing! One thing!” When Arlen asks what “this one thing” is, the Screamer doesn’t remember, and says to Arlen “you have to find it yourself. It’s up to you to figure it out.”24 It is the individual’s responsibility to remember the secret to survival in this world, and even those who have forgotten the secret recognize this truth. Directly after this encounter, three back-to-­ back slow-motion shots characterize Comfort as a dream-like amplification of the underbelly of US cultural life: first, we watch a young white woman wearing a baggy tank top with an American flag bikini printed on it and pole dancing for an audience of one (white male); this is followed by a shot of a young black man wearing a tatty Statue of Liberty costume and holding an arrow-shaped sign that reads, “Find the Dream”; finally, a

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soft-focus shot showing two homeless men sorting their collection of refuse, as the stripes of the flag wave in the corner of the frame. If the oil rigs in Girl Walks are the film’s money shot, a metonym of the obscene political landscape that lies just off scene, the American flag in Bad Batch operates likewise as a symbolically charged object that pervades the cultural consciousness as an overdetermined signifier of freedom and the good life. The flag appears in brief glimpses and various guises, often looking tattered or remediated to reinforce its repeated  promises. Moreover, the use of soft focus, classic voyeuristic close-ups of Arlen’s body, and slow motion accentuates the film’s pornographic gaze, which is the implied gaze of a US culture that diverts deeply engrained classist, misogynistic, racist impulses with a media landscape saturated with glamorized, sexualized, racialized imagery. US-driven visual media glosses over social and economic abjection with images of youth, luxury, and libidinal excess. In the uncommodified, underbelly world of Bad Batch, however, art survives. In an early sequence, Miami Man (Jason Momoa)—a bridge person, Cuban exile, and ex-convict—paints a portrait of his mixed-race daughter, before going outside to slaughter and dismember a captive young white woman, then chop her body into pieces, cook the parts over an open fire, and eat them for dinner with his African-American wife, Maria (Yolanda Ross). This gruesome sequence cuts to Arlen leafing through a porn magazine. She cuts the arm off one of the models and stands in front of a mirror, suturing the cut-out onto her own severed arm and posing to gauge the effects. The pop culture supplement fails to satisfy her, and so she grabs a gun and plans her revenge. These literal and symbolic dismemberments set up the primary metaphor of the film and define Arlen’s quest: to seek revenge for her lost limbs and find out what “this one thing” is, the secret that everyone seems to have forgotten. Revenge comes first. Armed with the gun, Arlen makes her way back toward the bridge people, which is separated from Comfort by a barrier made of shipping containers (a resonant gesture to Trump’s US-Mexico border wall). On her way through the desert, she fires a shot at a crow flying overhead, and the sound rings into the next shot of a hazardous waste site, where Miami Man’s wife, Maria, and their daughter rifle for resources. Wielding her gun, Arlen asks where they are from and if they are bridge people. “Does your kid eat people too?” Arlen asks, to which Maria replies, “We just trying to live out here. Same as you…. We the same, we are. We both bad batch, right?” Maria’s attempt to articulate a kind of solidarity within their shared abject environment is shunned by

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Arlen, who says, “We ain’t the same. We ain’t the fuckin’ same.”25 Arlen abruptly shoots Maria and takes her daughter with her to Comfort to live in a ramshackle middle-class house reminiscent of 1980s sitcoms. The violence of this scene is disturbing in that it simultaneously registers the systemic violence towards black women and men in the US, and at the same time stages it in the form of revenge. How are we to interpret Arlen’s revenge? Maria did not do Arlen any direct harm, though she did consume her flesh. Her complicity in the violence necessary to survive in the world still does not prepare us for Arlen’s murder. Arlen herself seems shocked after shooting Maria. It bears noting that, unlike the gruesome butchering, dismembering, and cooking of the two white female bodies witnessed earlier in the film, Maria’s death was depicted as abrupt and bloodless. One way of interpreting this is as a metaphor for how violence against women is mediated differently across racial boundaries: media and popular culture are in the business of glamorizing the white female body, reducing it to its constituent parts, and then packaging these parts for the consumer. On the other hand, the historical and ongoing violence against black women is a literal and normalized fact of US culture. When violence against black women is glamorized, as in the publicized private lives of pop icons like Rhianna, Whitney Huston, and Tina Turner, it is linked to their own private domestic affairs, and not to institutional violence. In this way, the racist misogyny of US culture is framed as the result of a bad romance and poor personal choices. Amirpour’s decision to depict violence differently is important. One might think here of the realistic violence against the black slave characters in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (United States, 2012) versus the more stylized violence against white slave owning characters. Stylization exaggerates the violence and foregrounds it as a mediated representation—i.e. what we are all used to seeing on the screen—while realism emphasizes the historical facticity and legacy of slavery—i.e. what we would prefer not to see or remember. Likewise, the metaphorical violence in Amirpour’s film—of dismembered and consumed white female bodies—contrasts with the realistic murder of Maria. When Miami Man finds Maria in the waste dump, her eyes being pecked at by vultures, the naturalization of violence against black bodies in US culture is rendered viscerally visible. Arlen’s murder of Maria disturbs because it taps into a grim truth about entangled class, race, and gendered antagonisms coursing through the veins of American culture: consume or be consumed.26

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Just as the gaze and looking are motifs in Girl Walks, visibility and representation are foregrounded in Bad Batch. Making violence visible—real and systemic violence against women, black people, the poor, and the mentally ill—is the film’s central point. But defamiliarizing the normalized violence of everyday American cultural life requires extreme measures, and Amirpour certainly exploits those extremes. In a more playful scene, however, the Hermit asks Miami Man to draw his portrait in exchange for information about his daughter’s whereabouts. The Hermit opens his tattered shirt, revealing his bare chest and posing for Miami Man. Seeing himself represented, the Hermit is thus granted the status of a subject, a fleeting escape from his abject state on the margins of society. The power of representation is, here, the capacity to be seen and to see one’s self as a subject in the world. Pleased with his portrait, the Hermit directs Miami Man to “find Comfort.”27 Comfort evokes notions of home, and Amirpour pays particular focus in Bad Batch to the centrality of the heterosexual family in formulations of the American Dream. After Arlen loses the little girl at a rave, she (the girl) is taken in by the Dream, who lives in a palatial mansion with his harem of women, many of whom are very pregnant. As a parody of family and reproductive futurity at the centre of the American Dream, the Dream’s stable of wives and lush surroundings contrast with the isolated poverty of the rest of the characters. Lured into joining this world, Arlen decides instead to leave, taking the little girl with her and returning her to Miami Man. When they meet in the open desert, Arlen extends her hand to Miami Man and insists on staying with them. The three tentatively form their own family, sitting around an open fire and eating rabbit in the deserted zone between the cannibals and Comfort. Arlen clearly problematizes the simplistic notion that a female protagonist’s agency is, by definition, positive and freely chosen. Arlen’s agency— and agency in general—must be understood not as the choice of the supposedly free individual, as neoliberalism would have it, but as actions that are possible within given socio-economic conditions. Arlen and the rest of the characters in Bad Batch, as in Girl Walks, are bad, but their badness is neither chosen nor destiny but an effect of socio-economic processes that determine the value of human lives. Miami Man articulates the contingency of both agency and morality, saying to Arlen, “here’s the thing, being good or bad mostly depends on who is standing next to you.”28

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Despite the extreme circumstances Arlen navigates, she retains a strange optimism, a variation on what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism,” which describes an affective attachment to fantasies of the good life that has been, under neoliberal capitalism, exhausted into the pursuit of objects and ways of living that have become harmful.29 When The Dream asks Arlen, “What do you really want?,” she replies, “I wanna be the solution for something.”30 The vagueness of Arlen’s articulation suggests something of the exhaustion of utopian impulses in twenty-first century. Emphasizing the role genre plays in mediating affects and providing a narrative structure for ideas of the good life, Berlant points out how reproducing the intelligibility of the world nudges affective forces into line with normative realism [which] is also the story of liberal subjectivity’s fantasies of individual and collective sovereignty […] and the distribution of sensibilities that discipline the imaginary about what the good life is and how proper people act.31

Evoking abject affects—repulsion, disgust, horror—Bad Batch displaces realism and its fantasies of liberal subjectivity to confront audiences with the ways in which pursuits of the good life depend on the exclusion of those who fail to achieve its material and affective promises. As examples of transcultural expressionism, Girl Walks and Bad Batch are, at once, fierce critiques and affectionate homages to the cultures that have formed Amirpour’s vision as a filmmaker. Refusing moral messages, her films instead move unflinchingly between  violence and intimacy. Metaphors of vampirism and cannibalism amplify the entanglements of cultures and the imperative to consume that has propelled pursuits of the good  life. Within these bleak worlds are female  characters,  whose tenacious quests for survival co-exist alongside a tentative search for intimacy. 

Notes 1. Mary Coffin. 2014. “The Mary Sue Interview: A Girl Walks Ho.me Alone At Night Director Ana Lily Amirpour and Star Sheila Vand.” The Mary Sue, November 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auFuVA8JmbY. 2. Shadee Abdi and Bernadette Marie Calafell. 2017. “Queer utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian vampire: a critical analysis of resistive monstrosity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34, no. 4: p. 367.

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3. Kimberly Jackson. 2020. “Dejects and Cannibals: Postmodern Abjection in Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch.” Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 7, no. 2: p. 150. 4. Vice Films. 2014. “Behind the Scenes of ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’” Part 2),” December 4. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WCoLFR_1BwA. Accessed 1 October 2019. 5. The Vilcek Foundation. 2014. “Interview with Ana Lily Amirpour, Director of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” November 6. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtDim5P__Uo. 6. See chapter two of Patricia White. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 7. Vice Films. 2014. “Behind the Scenes of ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’” Part 2),” December 4. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WCoLFR_1BwA. Accessed 1 October 2019. 8. Shadee Abdi and Bernadette Marie Calafell. 2017. “Queer utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian vampire: a critical analysis of resistive monstrosity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34, no. 4: p. 360. 9. Dale Hudson. 2017. Blood, Bodies, and Borders. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. p. 21. 10. Dale Hudson. 2017. Blood, Bodies, and Borders. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. p. 23. 11. This scene is additionally laden if one recalls the laws regulating make-up in post-1979 Iran. When the Ayatollah Khomeini came into power, he enforced veiling and forbade facial adornment in the form of cosmetics, especially targeting lipstick. As Valentine Moghadam explains, some young women in the early 1980s who defied this law were subjected to “a novel form of punishment by the enforcers of public morality—removal of lipstick by razor blade” (Moghadam 2004, 1). 12. Mahram and Na-Mahram is the Islamic law defining relations between men and women and distinguishing between private and public, insider and outsider. Mahram are those associated with the private sphere of family and kin, while na-mahram are outsiders associated with the public sphere. Women and men are forbidden, under Islamic law, to look at namahram men and women, and women are expected to dress modestly when out in public. By wielding her more-than-human gaze in public and entering Saeed’s home, the Girl breaches the law of na-mahram in multiple ways. 13. The tattoo on the side of Dominic Rain’s head, drawn by Amirpour’s mother, translates into English as “pussy stretcher” (Vice Films 2014). 14. Shadee Abdi and Bernadette Marie Calafell. 2017. “Queer utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian vampire: a critical analysis of resistive monstrosity in A

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Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34, no. 4: p. 361. 15. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2014b. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night #1: Death Is the Answer. Radco Comics. 16. Shadee Abdi and Bernadette Marie Calafell. 2017. “Queer utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian vampire: a critical analysis of resistive monstrosity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34, no. 4: p. 361. 17. See Julia Kristeva. 1982. Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. 18. Kimberly Jackson. 2020. “Dejects and Cannibals: Postmodern Abjection in Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch.” Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 7, no. 2: p. 141. 19. Judith Butler. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. pp. 1–26. 20. Matt Mullen. 2017. “The Hallucinogenic Worlds of Ana Lily Amirpour.” Interview Magazine, June 26. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/ film/ana-lily-amirpour. 21. Matt Mullen. 2017. “The Hallucinogenic Worlds of Ana Lily Amirpour.” Interview Magazine, June 26. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/ film/ana-lily-amirpour. 22. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2016. The Bad Batch. Annapurna Pictures and VICE Films. DVD. 23. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2016. The Bad Batch. Annapurna Pictures and VICE Films. DVD. 24. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2016. The Bad Batch. Annapurna Pictures and VICE Films. DVD. 25. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2016. The Bad Batch. Annapurna Pictures and VICE Films. DVD. 26. The race politics, not surprisingly, became a controversial point, and the film’s success was likely undermined by bad press following a comment from audience member Bianca Xunise at a pre-screening discussion in Chicago on June 6, 2016. Xunise asked Amirpour, “Was it a conscious decision to have all the black people have the most gruesome deaths on screen?… what was the message you were trying to convey with having this white woman kill a black mother [Maria], in front of her child and then have her assume to be the mother figure for the little black girl?” Amirpour responded, somewhat defensively, that “just because I give you something to look at doesn’t mean I’m telling you what to see.” When Xunise pressed her to “what was your message?” Amirpour snapped back, “I don’t make a film to tell you a message.” A Twitter storm followed. Amirpour herself tweeted that she did not handle the question well and sent an apology to

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Xunise. Watch the entire interview here (question is at 9:50): https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhm6MU11PXw. 27. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2016. The Bad Batch. Annapurna Pictures and VICE Films. DVD. 28. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2016. The Bad Batch. Annapurna Pictures and VICE Films. DVD. 29. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. p. 2. 30. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2016. The Bad Batch. Annapurna Pictures and VICE Films. DVD. 31. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. pp. 52–53.

References Abdi, Shadee and Bernadette Marie Calafell. 2017. “Queer utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian vampire: a critical analysis of resistive monstrosity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34, no. 4: pp. 358–370, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1302092. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2014a. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Logan Pictures and Spectre Vision. DVD. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2014b. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night #1: Death Is the Answer. Radco Comics. Amirpour, Ana Lily. 2016. The Bad Batch. Annapurna Pictures and VICE Films. DVD. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. Coffin, Mary. 2014. “The Mary Sue Interview: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night Director Ana Lily Amirpour and Star Sheila Vand.” The Mary Sue, November 23. https://www.themarysue.com/interview-girl-walks-home/. Hudson, Dale. 2017. Blood, Bodies, and Borders. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Jackson, Kimberly. 2020. “Dejects and Cannibals: Postmodern Abjection in Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch.” Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 7, no. 2: pp. 134–152. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2004. “Women in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Legal Status, Social Positions, and Collective Action.” Paper given at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, November 16: 1. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ValentineMoghadamFinal.pdf.

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Mullen, Matt. 2017. “The Hallucinogenic Worlds of Ana Lily Amirpour.” Interview Magazine, June 26. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/ ana-lily-amirpour. Vice Films. 2014. “Behind the Scenes of ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’” Part 2),” December 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCoLFR_ 1BwA. Accessed 1 October 2019. The Vilcek Foundation. 2014. “Interview with Ana Lily Amirpour, Director of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” November 6. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CtDim5P__Uo. White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Yamato, Jen. 2017. “Ana Lily Amirpour shoots from the gut with dystopian cannibal love story ‘The Bad Batch’.” LA Times, June 25. https://www.latimes. com/enter tainment/movies/la-et-mn-ana-lily-amirpour-bad-batch2017-story.html.

PART II

Women on Screen

CHAPTER 6

Claire Underwood: Feminist Warrior or Shakespearean Villain? Re-visiting Feminine Evil in House of Cards Aslı Tunç

Introduction The critique of the concept of evil as linked to literary tradition—mostly in Shakespearean tragedies—which vilifies strong female characters (women who seek power, reject filial loyalty, and pursue desire in all forms, romantic, adulterate, authoritarian, and eventually violent) is pivotal to feminist post-structuralist debate.1 The women who become evil in Shakespeare’s plays have long been hailed by various scholars2 for their refusal to perform femininity through appropriate behavior such as obedience, submission, and for ending up in monstrosity. Women’s use of extreme violence is considered unusual, unnatural, and doubly deviant since they have transgressed the norms of femininity. However, trying to understand the morality of this evil has never been an issue in male wickedness. In Kristeva’s terms, feminine evil, what is finally the “feminine

A. Tunç (*) Department of Media, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_6

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abject,” haunts not just early literature or the Biblical definition of sin but also postmodern culture more broadly.3 Although her work is concerned with psychoanalysis and literature, it undeniably suggests a way of situating feminine evil in “abjection”, which does not “respect borders, positions, rules”, that which “disturbs identity, system, order”.4 Her discussion of the construction of abjection is best applied to the horror film genre with horrific figures such as “bodies without souls” (the vampire) and the “living corpse” (the zombie) in the monstrous-feminine context.5 Beyond the horror genre, feminine evil appears in a multiplicity of forms and is related to these cultural specificities having similar traits in various narratives. The idea of feminine evil can be either perceived as an intrinsic characteristic of women—the dark side of the feminine—or as an evil force or being represented as female or appearing in the form of a woman. When it comes to the Elizabethan period in which Shakespeare wrote, “women […] are frequently represented by evil, sickness, and death”.6 In this context, the most villainous woman within the Shakespearean tragedies, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth (1603), provided literary critics and feminist scholars with deep challenges. For instance, Hill7 states that “Lady Macbeth’s characterization is one dimensional and non-developing” and refers to her as “single-minded,” especially in comparison to the “complex” characterization of Macbeth. Lady Macbeth has also been often considered more masculine than feminine. As Jeanne Addison Roberts points out in her book, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender,8 “Shakespearean women are […] the representation of Shakespearean men, the projected mirror images of masculine self-differentiation.” Furthermore, a coterie of Shakespeare scholars9 has claimed that, by describing the evil deeds of these women, Shakespeare himself exhibits his misogyny and fear of female power, which he manages by eliminating the female characters who threaten masculine identity. In Macbeth, Shakespeare tells a story of a soldier whose overriding ambition and thirst for power causes him to abandon his moral values and bring about the near destruction of the kingdom he seeks to rule. Like most of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth deals with the question of kingship and portrays the “problems of legitimacy and succession” surrounding the serious political power that belonged to the monarch, the court, and the royal councils.10 Macbeth revolves around subjects such as human desire, cruelty, and guilt. Gender roles and their relationship to power also have a great significance for the interpretation of the play. By the end, Macbeth is a bloody tyrant, disappointed in all aspects of his life—his reign, his

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marriage, a family for a potential dynasty—and damned for eternity in death. Shakespeare constructs the narrative partly by means of imagery, symbolism, and repetition. The effects of evil are much stronger and obsessive in Lady Macbeth than on Macbeth. “She deliberately chooses evil, her choice being more deliberate than her husband’s”.11 Lady Macbeth embraces evil more spontaneously than her husband does. Macbeth thinks his “vaulting ambition”12 only stimulates him, but it is Lady Macbeth whose reprimands force him to shake off the reluctance of committing murder.13 At the beginning, she is Macbeth’s “dearest partner of greatness”14 but by the end she is his “fiend-like queen”.15 She has a lust for power, and it is her persuasion that leads Macbeth to seize the throne of Scotland by murdering Duncan. A female villain, Claire Underwood, who greatly resembles Lady Macbeth appeared in House of Cards House of Cards (2013–2018), which debuted as the first show produced especially for the streaming platform Netflix. Based on the 1990 BBC mini-series of the same name, the political thriller starred Kevin Spacey as Francis Underwood and Robin Wright as Claire Underwood. While the ambitious, dark complicity between Francis and Claire in House of Cards seems to mirror the relationship of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, it also mirrors the relationship between Richard III and Lady Macbeth. The show deals with the dark alleys of Washington politics with recurring themes of revenge and retribution. Throughout six seasons lasting until 2018, the show presents the complicated web of relations within and around the White House and Francis Underwood’s ascendancy from being a Democratic Congressman, to Secretary of State, Vice-President and eventually President. Francis Underwood resembles various other Shakespearean characters as well, including Iago from Othello and Henry Bolingbroke from Richard III, through his selfish desire for personal advancement, wherein the end justifies the means. For Francis Underwood, this ambition is interwoven with his ultimate goal of becoming president.16 Like Richard III, Underwood is “fully conscious of his most obvious flaws, and he flaunts them in what amounts to a twisted version of integrity”.17 The political drama starts with Francis’ being introduced to the audience with a similar approach to that of Richard III. The series invites the audience to watch the plot unfold by disclosing the first signs of Francis’ ruthlessness. A dog gets hit by a car near his house in Washington D.C. and he goes outside to help. He kneels beside it. “Sssh,” he whispers, “It’s OK.” He then looks up and speaks directly to camera: “There are two

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kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong and useless pain, the sort of pain that’s only suffering. I have no patience for useless things.” Then we hear the voice of the wounded dog’s being strangled.18 From a similar metalevel level, Richard III remarks Why, I can smile and murder whiles I smile, And cry ‘content’ to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears… And set the murderous Machiavel to school. He too speaks directly to the audience.19

Both Francis and Richard III’s direct address plays a vital role in keeping the audience intrigued and compliant. It gives the feeling like we are the only ones in the whole world who know what is going to happen and we are complicit. Italian statesman, political theorist, and major figure of the Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli is also a good bridge linking the fictional characters of the political drama and Shakespearean plays. Both Francis and Claire Underwood embody perfect Machiavellian figures— ruthlessly pragmatic, manipulative, cunning, knowing how to play the game of politics. Machiavelli in his most famous work, The Prince, states that the only obligation of those with power is maintaining their own power and the security of the State. Therefore, Machiavelli did not believe that there should be a special relationship between moral goodness and legitimate authority. In Francis’ political clawing to the top, he is portrayed as Machiavellian mastermind, yet even darker in every sense. Until he achieves the Presidency at the end of Season 2, he had already pushed and killed a reporter under a subway train and engineered the suicide of a congressman. The portrayal of the manipulative, blood-thirsty power couple becomes more complex when the storyline sheds a light on Claire Underwood’s own ambitions. When Claire was introduced to the audience, she was running a charitable foundation. Over the years, she has manipulated many, including her husband, into larger roles reaching as high as U.S Ambassador to the UN. She has been under the shadow of her husband for too long— now it is her time up front. She is completely unrepentant as she fires half her staff from her environmental organization, including a pregnant employee who bitterly reminds Claire that at her age she’ll never get a job elsewhere. “I would willingly let your child wither and die inside you, if that’s what is required,” says Claire Underwood, turning the tables on the

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pregnant woman who sues her for wrongful dismissal by cutting her health insurance. “Now tell me, am I really the sort of enemy you want to make?”20 With this confrontation, she reveals the initial signs of her disguised wickedness behind her icy façade. Yet, her first true power move comes at the end of Season 3. Leaving Francis was the perfect way for kick starting her own ambitious plans towards the White House. It was never about their marriage nor was it about her campaign for office in Texas. Every move she makes is carefully orchestrated to convince Francis to allow her to be his running mate. She eventually comes one step closer to the Presidency with this maneuver. Francis and Claire are portrayed as an evil couple complimenting each other throughout five seasons until Francis Underwood character is killed off in the last season due to the sexual assault allegations about Kevin Spacey.21 With that radical move, the focus shifted from Francis to Claire Underwood leaving Robin Wright as a solo-lead star reinvigorating the final eight episodes. “My turn.” With those two words, Claire Underwood officially cements her status as the official new protagonist of House of Cards, liberating herself from her husband. Claire’s speech in Season 6, Chapter 66 is a clear foil to Francis’s initial monologue, as she frees a trapped bird. “It’s not true, what he told you all those years ago,” she speaks to the camera. “That there are two kinds— useful and useless. There’s only one kind. Pain is pain.” There are other references that foreshadow of a new dark and twisted plot with Claire at the White House.22 She looks straight into the camera the same way her husband used to. “Are you still there? Do you miss Francis?” she asks breaking the fourth wall once again. “Here’s the thing,” she adds. “Whatever Francis told you the last five years, don’t believe a word of it. It’s going to be different for you and me. I’m going to tell you the truth.” Claire Underwood has all the traits that make her ruthless, cold-blooded, and self-serving just like Lady Macbeth with a similar insatiable drive and ambition. In the #MeToo climate, where feminist demands became more vocal around the world, the heroines in popular culture narratives began to be more audacious, braver, and sometimes more evil. But whether Claire can be considered a feminist warrior in the #MeToo era is debatable. How the two female villains, Claire Underwood and Lady Macbeth, intersect and sometimes depart on certain subjects in cementing new ideas of feminine evil is the main focus of this comparative analysis. In this context, I posit that the themes of motherhood, seduction, and madness can be traced in

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the depiction of feminine evil in Macbeth and House of Cards more than four centuries apart.

Motherhood Motherhood is powerful in the world of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In Shakespearean times, “women [were] expected to dedicate themselves to the accomplishments of their husbands and sons”.23 In Macbeth, the presentation of female characters as treacherous and misleading reflects the Elizabethan paranoia surrounding women and their role in society. This paranoia existed because of the threat that female agency presented to the “patrilineal order” that Elizabethan society was so invested in protecting. This threat is manifested in the play when Lady Macbeth confirms her desire by saying that she would commit infanticide in order to bring about the results she desires: I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this.24

This utterance presents Lady Macbeth as a motherly figure and then immediately turns that image on its side with horrifying imagery of infanticide. She does not only reject female nurturing qualities but the whole notion of motherhood, which was considered as a part of women’s “natural biological makeup”.25 In these lines Lady Macbeth “focuses on the culture’s fear of maternal nursery”.26 Macbeth and his wife are apparently childless, though Lady Macbeth in those lines mysteriously refers to having nursed a child. “Their childlessness associates them with death and sterility”.27 As a woman who is not capable of giving birth, Lady Macbeth represents “a mother’s potentially negative impact upon the patrilineal process in early modern England”.28 In this way, Lady Macbeth embodies the two major threats to the patrilineal society: a bad mother and an infertile woman. In Claire Underwood’s case, she does not have the potential to care for a child emotionally just like Lady Macbeth. Her lack of maternal impulse might be pleasing from a feminist perspective since a happy state of childlessness in fictional heroines is still taboo. Robin Wright

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delivers a delicious performance in “Chapter 71”,29 as Claire reveals to a stunned Doug (Michael Kelly) that she’s pregnant with an heir to the Underwood estate. The themes of motherhood, rape and abortion move in parallel in Claire’s characterization as she leads people to believe that she aborted her child because it was the product of a rape by a decorated military general. Claire even names him during a television interview. It causes at least one other woman—also a member of the military—to come out of the woodwork and tell her story about how she was raped by the same man when he was her superior. Her version of the story was partly true since the general did not impregnate Claire as she says he did, yet the rape was the actual revelation. This scene caused a fierce debate among critics30 about whether Claire is a feminist warrior for bringing the rape issue to the public eye or just a cruel, vindictive heroine betraying the ideals of feminism in the name of empowering women. For other writers, including Conor Friedersdorf,31 Claire’s behavior is anything but feminist, and is in fact more evidence of her “sociopathic behavior”. The real story, though, is that Claire had three abortions, two as a “reckless” teenager and one while she was married to Francis. They decided to terminate the pregnancy because Francis was in the midst of an election campaign. Besides, neither Claire nor Francis had the time or emotional means to care for a child. When she is asked by the wife of the Republican candidate, in Season 4, Chapter 52, whether she regrets not having children, answering with a cold “do you regret having them?”, implying that despite the joy children bring to a woman’s life, at the same time they take something from it, and from her individuality. This is an interesting feminist touch in the script. “Unsexed” by her own will, on the other hand, Lady Macbeth refuses to behave as dutifully as her society suggests she should, thereby becoming a dark parody of femaleness. While summoning the powers of darkness to overpower Lady Macbeth, her disturbing and womanly rage is evident: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood; Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

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The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry ‘Hold, hold!’32

In unsexing herself she almost appears to have dehumanized herself and stepped out of ‘nature’—that is, out of the natural order of things in which the ‘milk of human kindness’ nurtures moral feeling.33 Her blood becomes too ‘thick’ and clotted for menstrual fertility, whose maternal milk is bitter and aggravating. Lady Macbeth, therefore, surrenders herself barren by asking for amenorrhea and guarantees a fruitless crown.34 Associations with femininity and motherhood are explicitly echoed in Lady Macbeth. In those famous lines, she speaks in sexual and maternal terms that relate directly to her power as a woman. She talks herself into the strength of mind to commit horrifying crimes. The audience realizes that she is about to cross a line that is dangerously close to becoming evil. She asks spirits to “unsex” her, removing all the traits that were considered innately feminine, such fragility, kindness, reproductive capabilities, and maternal instincts. This is an outcry to seize a masculine power in order to pursue the dark path that Lady Macbeth has chosen for herself.35 We see similar ambition in Claire where she weaponizes her pregnancy to gain power in Season 6. She does not reveal the news until the end of the sixth episode, when Doug (Michael Kelly) starts asking questions about Francis’ will. He expected to have everything after Francis died, yet Claire tells the former chief of staff that she and Francis’ prenuptial agreement had an addendum. This clause stated that if the couple ever had descendants, that the deceased spouse’s assets would go to their offspring. Following this revelation, she takes Doug’s hand and places it on her belly. “Francis and I have been blessed,” she says, showing no sign of emotion. With this ultimate power move, Claire turned her pregnancy to her biggest weapon. This approach is visible in many scenes throughout the final season. For instance, Chapter 72 opens with Claire as the president hosting a national women’s conference. She is wearing a tight-fitting shift dress, which reveals her pregnant belly. The crowd cheers for her when she bemoans the crowd about the oligarchs by saying “they want my finger off

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the nuclear button and I have to ask why do you think that is?” and she points to her belly implying that her pregnancy causes all the opposition she is facing in politics. The crowd boos. She concludes her speech by saying “my purpose is to elevate America, fight for America, and if it ever came to it, die for America. I will be father, mother, leader, and friend”. It is clear that Claire has instituted herself as the nation’s maternal figure. Season 6 also takes the audience to Claire’s youth in flashbacks, in the final episode (Chapter 73), both young and current Claire talk to each other in the baby’s nursery. “Am I sure this is a good idea” the young version asks her older self, referring to the pregnancy. “What if I’m carrying a demon seed or something? The odds are 50–50”. It is open to interpretation whether she’s talking about a baby she may have carried when she was younger, resulting in one of her three abortions, or if she’s referring to her current pregnancy. Either way, pregnancy triggers Claire’s looking back on her life with regret. In the end, the father of the baby is never clarified in the storyline. However, Claire successfully becomes the first female president using her pregnancy as a militaristic symbol as the Commander-in-Chief, institutes an all-women cabinet, kills off anyone who stands in her way and in doing so undoubtedly becomes just as ruthless as her late husband, if not more. Besides, her pregnancy allows her to keep Francis’ assets, which was her main goal all along.

Seduction In Shakespeare’s tragedies, we encounter several “bad” women whose evil is amplified by their sexuality. According to Sentov,36 his “evil women’ are more true to life than his heroines, and these characters are not simply villains but people who try to object and liberate themselves from the constraints of their patriarchal society”. From a contemporary perspective, Lady Macbeth is not a cruel avatar of evil but an incarnation of gender trouble whose efforts to implement her dreams of power question the sexual hierarchy into which she has been born. In more recent literary forms, the concept of “femme fatale” is identified by “the power she has over men and how she uses this for her own benefit”.37 The femme fatale’s role is to attempt to paralyze the prowess of the male protagonist, usually by means of manipulation and seduction. The type of female evil that Claire represents shares many similarities with the femme fatale since she is highly manipulative and attractive and uses sex to seduce men. Comparably, according to some critics Lady

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Macbeth is “the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure that Shakespeare drew” and her sexuality seems to work powerfully and influentially over Macbeth to “undo his decision not to kill Duncan”.38 Her sexual seduction has a toxic effect on Macbeth and threatens to turn the Kingdom upside down. Her sexual depiction threatens to remove men from the rational equation which ends up with no good consequences.39 Claire, in Season 2 (Chapter 24) of House of Cards, manages to use her feminine wiles to seduce Edward Meechum, the loyal Secret Service agent (Nathan Darrow) by breaking a glass, getting him drunk, and orchestrating ménage à trois. In Season 3, Episode 3, the act of seduction becomes a cat and mouse game between the Underwoods and Russian President Viktor Petrov (Lars Mikkelsen). During a state dinner at the White House, Petrov gets everyone drunk on very rare vodka from the homeland and asks to dance with Claire. Francis looks astounded when Petrov brazenly plants a long kiss on the lips of Claire at the conclusion of the dance. Claire proves to be as ruthless and calculated as Lady Macbeth as in the fatal sex scene with her lover Tom Yates (Paul Sparks). In fact, her killing Tom is a huge milestone in the trajectory of Claire character. After that point in Season 5 (Chapter 64), the audience sees Claire as a cold-blooded killer. Initially, Tom Yates, a successful author had been asked to write about the America Works jobs program. He was then revealed to be Claire Underwood’s lover as he maintains a spot in the show as a trustworthy speechwriter. However, things take a dramatic turn when Claire finds out about the explosive, personal revelations made by Tom in his manuscripts. Concerned by the impending threat, Claire ultimately takes matters into her own hand, poisoning her lover and watching him die mid-coitus. Just like Lady Macbeth, there is “blood” on Claire’s hands starting the final season. According to psychologist Nicolas Lévesque in his psychoanalytic approach to Claire’s character, “the more the seasons advance, the more shade eats the share of light. The monster eats the angel destroying what is feminine in her”.40 As Francis quotes Oscar Wilde in Season 1, he gives a hint of the Underwoods’ use of seduction for their own benefits; “everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”

Madness Francis Bacon defines revenge as “a kind of wild justice,”41 a justice that begins as revenge, but slowly consumes the individual moving motivation toward madness. Furthermore, Carol Thomas Neely42 examines the connection between the feminine and madness:

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The designation of women, but not men, as ‘mad’ is difficult to account for. Here we may notice that the term ‘madness’ seems to be just beginning to replace ‘distract,’ ‘lunaticke,’ and ‘frantic’ as the general term for the condition of the inmates. But why should it be applied specifically to women? The women may in fact have been more acutely ill. But it seems more likely that they were viewed as more acutely ill—perhaps because frantic madness was a more violent disruption of normative femininity than of normative masculinity.

The link of madness to the feminine is apparent throughout Shakespeare’s plays. Either being psychologically disturbed or inherently evil, madness connects the two characters as the Shakespearean and contemporary models of female revenge. In the aftermath of Duncan’s death, Macbeth recoils in guilt at having killed the king. His shame perturbs Lady Macbeth, who, in an attempt to aid him, prophecies her own fate. She warns him that “These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so, it will make us mad”.43 When Lady Macbeth shares in the murder, marking her hands with blood signals the symbolic inability to purify herself. This is obvious when she hears a knocking at the door and tells Macbeth that: A little water clears us of this deed. How easy is it, then! Your constancy Hath left you unattended.44

However, the audience is aware that the blood and the deed are indelible and unredeemable, just like Claire’s killing Doug with a letter opener in the Oval Office. Lady Macbeth’s gradual transition from a conventional ‘lady’ into a raving, sleepless, mad woman hounded by her own guilt and irrevocably blood-stained hands corresponds to Claire’s ultimate metamorphosis through her murderous ambition. Before the lethal confrontation between Francis’s loyal right-hand man, Claire deliberately leaves the letter opener on the desk. That is the first sign of the most brazen crime either Francis or Claire has committed for the whole 72 episodes. Doug gives Claire Francis’ audio diary and although the audience cannot understand what is said, Claire has a visceral reaction to what she hears. During a tense verbal exchange, Claire gets Doug to admit that he poisoned Francis, his longtime hero, “to protect the legacy from the man.” Doug wants Claire to admit that Francis had made her who

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she is, and she refuses to, even with a letter opener held to her throat she pushes the distraught Doug to the edge. She wrests it from him and then stabs him in the stomach, killing the loyal acolyte. With Doug slowly dying on her lap, Claire flashes one last look to the audience after silencing the person who knows all of her secrets, bringing the whole story in full circle by saying: “There. No more pain.” This final scene is a recreation of Francis’ killing of the dog in the opening scene in Episode 1. Seeing how useless his suffering is, she places her hand on his mouth and does not let go until he’s gone, much like the dog Francis kills. Claire, following the same ruthless path, tells her own story liberated from her husband. Unlike Lady Macbeth, she reveals no sign of remorse, spiraling deeper into madness.

Conclusion In the trailer of the final season, Claire Underwood says, “the reign of the middle-aged white man is over”. This is a cathartic #MeToo-inspired reference to both Kevin Spacey’s being fired after numerous accusations of sexual harassment and assault, and Claire’s replacing her husband Francis as President of the United States. Claire has been a captivating character throughout the series. Poised, sophisticated, and smart, Robin Wright’s wicked, sly, and controlled acting is what made many scenes impeccable. In the early seasons, House of Cards offered moments where Claire was clearly rebelling against the strictures of being a First Lady. Yet, Claire was presented as the catalyst for Kevin Spacey’s character’s actions and a secondary ingredient for driving the storyline. Claire Underwood’s taking center stage on the show brought many feminist issues, such as rape and abortion, to the narrative. The tectonic shift with the template of the political thriller is Machiavellian (Francis Underwood as Richard III) as well as Shakespearean (Claire as Lady Macbeth). Claire as an anti-heroine does not only parallel the moral transgressions of her husband but successfully exceeds him.45 Both Claire and Lady Macbeth share the ability to captivate audiences. We see rage and power in Lady Macbeth; it is in some way coded for Greek mythic figures of rage and vengeance in a manner restructuring of gendered behavior. Angry, powerful women get attention. This seems to be the general axiom for both Lady Macbeth and Claire Underwood. Lady Macbeth is the “undisciplined mad woman” or “a seductive

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unsatisfied wife” who to satisfy her unbounded desire is ready to cause any disorder.46 In fact, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth differs from the women of the playwright’s own time.47 In this context, the characterization has been both accessible and acceptable to modern audiences. However, looking at various aspects of this character, Lady Macbeth appears as a loyal wife above all else. Unlike Claire, she is not ambitious or power-hungry; at least not for her own sake. She in fact helps Macbeth satisfy his own ambition.48 She never attempts to leave her sphere, and faithfully awaits Macbeth to return from the battlefield. Claire, on the other hand, leaves her husband at the finale of Season 3 as leverage for a bigger gain. In the final moments of the fifth season newly inaugurated President Claire Underwood looks into the camera and tells the audience: “My turn.” Those are the clues that Claire is in search of power in her own way, without Francis’ shadow over her. Characters like Claire Underwood are a reminder that femininity is a tricky proposition. Whether she’s choosing the security of wifehood or the independence of childlessness, Claire Underwood can be considered a reminder of the extent to which female characters still have to justify their choices, rather than owning them. The female villain has existed for centuries in literature, taking forms such as witches, evil stepmothers, ghosts, mad-women, vengeful wives, and femme fatales. Sometimes the women are just dreadful and haunting, but often they are also alluring, cunning, manipulating, and not afraid to use their sexual appeal as a tool to get their way. Therefore, Lady Macbeth and Claire Underwood have many common traits on the basis of three themes—motherhood, seduction, and madness. It is fair to say that in the #MeToo era of constant stream of sexual harassment and assault reports, leaving women exhausted and discouraged, the idea of having infinite possibilities for replacing terrible men was excluded in popular television narratives. Claire’s character might be a refreshing continuation of portrayal of feminine evil of the Shakespearean tradition. However, her ascent to the presidency as a feminist arc has been damaged due to her dependence on Francis Underwood’s trademark corruption and unscrupulous means. She still lies, cheats, seduces and eventually murders to get to the highest position, in this way, following the same inequitable and cruel path of men have been doing for centuries. Yet, the question of whether this is the perfect way to end “the reign of the middle-aged white men” still lingers.

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Notes 1. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press; Hollway, Wendy. 1989. Subjectivity and method in psychology: gender, meaning and science. London: Sage; Allen, Amy. 2008. The politics of our selves: power, autonomy, and gender in contemporary critical theory. New  York: Columbia University Press. 2. Garner Nelson, Shirley and Sprengnether, Madelon. 1996. Shakespearean tragedy and gender. Indiana University Press; Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. 2000. The madwoman in the attic. The woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination. Yale University Press; Alfar, Cristina León. 2003. Fantasies of female evil: The dynamics of gender and power in Shakespearean Tragedy. Associated University Press; Chamberlain, Stephanie. 2005. Fantasizing infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the murdering mother in early modern England. College Literature 32-3: 72–91; Sentov, Ana. 2014. Unnatural hags: Shakespeare’s evil women in Titus Andronicus, King Lear and Macbeth. European English Messenger 23: 27–31. 3. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 18. 4. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, p. 4. 5. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The monstrous feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. Routledge; Wee, Valerie. 2011. Patriarchy and the horror of the monstrous feminine. Feminist Media Studies 11-2: 151–165; Mubarki, Meraj Ahmed. 2014. The monstrous ‘other’ feminine: Gender, desire and the ‘look’ in the Hindi horror genre. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 21-3: 379–399; King, Amy K. 2017. A monstrous (ly-feminine) whiteness: Gender, genre, and the abject horror of the past in American horror story: Coven. Women’s Studies 46-6: 557–573. 6. Alfar, Cristina León. 2003. Fantasies of female evil: The dynamics of gender and power in Shakespearean tragedy. Associated University Press, p. 15. 7. Hill, James L.1986. What, are they children? Shakespeare’s tragic women and the boy actors. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 26-2: 244. 8. Roberts, Jeanne Addison. 1999. The Shakespearean wild: Geography, genus, and gender. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, p. 13. 9. Gohlke, Madelon. 1980. I wooed thee with my sword: Shakespeare’s tragic paradigms. In The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 150–170. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; French, Marilyn. 1982. Shakespeare’s division of experience. London: Cape, p. 243; Erickson, Peter.

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1985. Patriarchal structures in Shakespeare’s plays. Berkeley: University of California Press. 10. Shanley, Lyndon J. 1961. Macbeth. The tragedy of evil. College English 22-5: 305–311. 11. Muir, Kenneth (ed.) 1997. Macbeth. Arden Shakespeare, p. xvii. 12. Shakespeare, Macbeth I.VII. 27. 13. Muir, Macbeth, p. xviii. 14. Shakespeare, Macbeth I.V.11–12. 15. Shakespeare, Macbeth V.IX.35. 16. Crouch, Ian. 2013. Richard III’s House of Cards. The New  Yorker, February 4, Reinhoud, Eline. 2019. ‘Dive, thoughts, down to my soul’: The politico-aesthetic function of the vice and the Machiavel in Richard III and House of Cards. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/ halshs-02324710/. Accessed 23 December 2019. 17. Crouch 2013. Para. 6. 18. Season 1, Chapter 1, 0:35ʹʹ–1ʹ:26ʹʹ. 19. Henry VI, Part III, ii, 182–193. 20. Season 2, Chapter 14, 31ʹ:20ʹʹ–31ʹ:38ʹʹ. 21. The accusations against Kevin Spacey began October 29, 2017 when Anthony Rapp, an actor known for his work in Rent and Star Trek: Discovery, alleged that Spaces had made a sexual advance toward him when Rapp was 14 years old. Several more accusations followed led to Spacey’s firing from House of Cards. CNN also alleged that Spacey’s behavior made the House of Cards set a “toxic” work environment. It quotes a number of former and current workers on the show, one of whom accuses the actor of sexual assault. https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/02/media/house-of-cards-kevinspacey-harassment/. Accessed 20 December 2019. 22. Season 6, Chapter 66. 23. Young, Bruce W. 2009. Family life in the age of Shakespeare. Westport: Greenwood Press, p. 90. 24. Macbeth, 1.7.54–59. 25. Davis, Marion A. 2009. A brief look at Feminism in Shakespeare’s Macbeth Inquiries. 1:11, p. 1. 26. Adelman, Janet. 2010. Born of woman: Fantasies of maternal power in Macbeth. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Baltimore: John’s Hopkins Press, p. 40. 27. Young, Bruce W. 2009. Family life in the age of Shakespeare. Westport: Greenwood Press, p. 92. 28. Chamberlain, Stephanie. 2005. Fantasizing infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the murdering mother in early modern England. College Literature 32-3: 84.

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29. 50’.44”–53’.49”. 30. See, Tracey Egan Morrissay. House of Cards’ Claire Underwood is a feminist warrior anti-hero. Jezebel, https://jezebel.com/house-ofcards-claire-underwood-is-a-feminist-warrior-1524425272. Accessed 23 December 2019. Eric Sassen. 2014. Is Claire on ‘House of Cards’ a “feminist Warrior”? Jezebel wrongly thinks So. The New Republic, February 18. https:// newrepublic.com/article/116652/claire-house-cards-feminist-warriorjezebel-wrongly-thinks-so. Accessed 23 December 2019. 31. See Conor Friedersdorf. 2014. Feminism, depravity, and power in House of Cards. The Atlantic, February 20. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/feminism-depravity-and-power-in-em-house-ofcards-em/283960/. Accessed 23 December 2019. 32. Macbeth, 1.5.33–44. 33. J.  La Belle. 1980. A strange infirmity: Lady Macbeth’s amenorrhea. Shakespeare Quarterly 31-3: 382. 34. Rackin, Phyllis. 1999. Staging the female body: Maternal breastfeeding and Lady Macbeth’s ‘unsex me here.’In Corps/décors: Femmes, Orgie, Parodie, eds. Catherine Nesci, Gretchen Van Slyke, and Gerald Prince, 17–29. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi. 35. Chamberlain, Stephanie. 2005. Fantasizing infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the murdering mother in early modern England. College Literature 32-3: 72–91. 36. Sentov, Ana. 2014. Unnatural hags: Shakespeare’s evil women in Titus Andronicus, King Lear and Macbeth. European English Messenger 23-1: 31. 37. Smith, Kirsten 2017. Seduction and sex: The changing allure of the femme fatale in fact and fiction. At the Interface/Probing the boundaries 90: 37. 38. McGuire, Philip C. 1994. Shakespeare: The Jacobean plays. London: Macmillan, p. 3. 39. McGuire, Philip C. 1994. Shakespeare: The Jacobean plays. London: Macmillan, p. 4. 40. Psychanalyse de Claire Underwood: « la lady Macbeth » de House of Cards: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/premiere/emissions/plus-on-est-defous-plus-on-lit/segments/chronique/64458/house-of-cards-netflixnicolas-levesque-manon-dumais. Accessed 23 December 2019. 41. Francis Bacon. (1561–1626). Essays, civil and moral. The Harvard Classics. 1909–1914. 42. Neely, Carol Thomas. 2004. Distracted subjects: Madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture. New  York: Cornell University Press, p. 180. 43. Macbeth, 2.2.33–34. 44. Macbeth, 2.2.66–69.

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45. Tally, Margaret. 2016. The rise of the Anti-heroine in TV’s third golden age. Cambridge Scholar Publishing, p. 61. 46. Berggren Paula S. 1980. The women’s part: Female sexuality as power in Shakespeare plays. In The woman’s part: Feminist criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 314–335. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 47. Rackin, Phyllis. 2005. Oxford Shakespeare topics: Shakespeare and women. New York: Oxford University Press. 48. Klein, Joan Larsen. 1980. Lady Macbeth: Infirm of purpose. In The woman’s part: Feminist criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 314–335. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, p. 243.

References Adelman, Janet. 2010. Born of woman: Fantasies of maternal power in Macbeth. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Baltimore: John’s Hopkins Press. Alfar, Cristina León. 2003. Fantasies of female evil: The dynamics of gender and power in Shakespearean Tragedy. Associated University Press. Allen, Amy. 2008. The politics of our selves: power, autonomy, and gender in contemporary critical theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Berggren Paula S. 1980. The women’s part: Female sexuality as power in Shakespeare plays. In The woman’s part: Feminist criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 314–335. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Chamberlain, Stephanie. 2005. Fantasizing infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the murdering mother in early modern England. College Literature 32-3: 72–91. Conor Friedersdorf. 2014. Feminism, depravity, and power in House of Cards. The Atlantic, February 20. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2014/02/feminism-depravity-and-power-in-em-house-of-cardsem/283960/. Accessed 23 December 2019. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The monstrous feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. Routledge. Crouch, Ian. 2013. Richard III’s House of Cards. The New Yorker, February 4. Davis, Marion A. 2009. A brief look at Feminism in Shakespeare’s Macbeth Inquiries. 1:11. Erickson, Peter. 1985. Patriarchal structures in Shakespeare’s plays. Berkeley: University of California Press. Francis Bacon. (1561–1626). Essays, civil and moral. The Harvard Classics. 1909–1914. French, Marilyn. 1982. Shakespeare’s division of experience. London: Cape.

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Garner Nelson, Shirley and Sprengnether, Madelon. 1996. Shakespearean tragedy and gender. Indiana University Press. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. 2000. The madwoman in the attic. The woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination. Yale University Press. Gohlke, Madelon. 1980. I wooed thee with my sword: Shakespeare’s tragic paradigms. In The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 150–170. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hill, James L. 1986. What, are they children? Shakespeare’s tragic women and the boy actors. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 26-2. Hollway, Wendy. 1989. Subjectivity and method in psychology: gender, meaning and science. London: Sage. King, Amy K. 2017. A monstrous (ly-feminine) whiteness: Gender, genre, and the abject horror of the past in American horror story: Coven. Women’s Studies 46-6: 557–573. Klein, Joan Larsen. 1980. Lady Macbeth: Infirm of purpose. In The woman’s part: Feminist criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 314–335. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. La Belle, Jenijoy. 1980. A strange infirmity: Lady Macbeth’s amenorrhea. Shakespeare Quarterly 31-3: 381–386. McGuire, Philip C. 1994. Shakespeare: The Jacobean plays. London: Macmillan. Mubarki, Meraj Ahmed. 2014. The monstrous ‘other’ feminine: Gender, desire and the ‘look’ in the Hindi horror genre. Indian Journal of Gender Studies 21-3: 379–399. Muir, Kenneth (ed.). 1997. Macbeth. Arden Shakespeare. Neely, Carol Thomas. 2004. Distracted subjects: Madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture. New York: Cornell University Press. Rackin, Phyllis. 1999. Staging the female body: Maternal breastfeeding and Lady Macbeth’s ‘unsex me here.’ In Corps/décors: Femmes, Orgie, Parodie, eds. Catherine Nesci, Gretchen Van Slyke, and Gerald Prince, 17–29. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi. Rackin, Phyllis. 2005. Oxford Shakespeare topics: Shakespeare and women. New York: Oxford University Press. Reinhoud, Eline. 2019. ‘Dive, thoughts, down to my soul’: The politico-aesthetic function of the vice and the Machiavel in Richard III and House of Cards. 23 December 2019. Roberts, Jeanne Addison. 1999. The Shakespearean wild: Geography, genus, and gender. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.

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Sassen, Eric. 2014. Is Claire on ‘House of Cards’ a “feminist Warrior”? Jezebel wrongly thinks so. The New Republic, February 18. https://newrepublic.com/ article/116652/claire-house-cards-feminist-warrior-jezebel-wronglythinks-so. Accessed 23 December 2019. Sentov, Ana. 2014. Unnatural hags: Shakespeare’s evil women in Titus Andronicus, King Lear and Macbeth. European English Messenger 23: 27–31. Shanley, Lyndon J. 1961. Macbeth. The tragedy of evil. College English 22-5: 305–311. Smith, Kirsten. 2017. Seduction and sex: The changing allure of the femme fatale in fact and fiction. At the Interface/Probing the boundaries 90: 37–52. Tally, Margaret. 2016. The rise of the Anti-heroine in TV’s third golden age. Cambridge Scholar Publishing. Tracey Egan Morrissay. House of Cards’ Claire Underwood is a feminist warrior anti-hero. Jezebel, https://jezebel.com/house-of-cards-claire-underwood-isa-feminist-warrior-1524425272. Accessed 23 December 2019. Wee, Valerie. 2011. Patriarchy and the horror of the monstrous feminine. Feminist Media Studies 11-2: 151–165. Young, Bruce W. 2009. Family life in the age of Shakespeare. Westport: Greenwood Press.

CHAPTER 7

The Phenomenology of Orphan Black as Molecular Politics Luca Barattoni

Introduction: The World of Orphan Black Creation is not over. Its thrust is relentless, unendingly condemned to “the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.”1 As a consequence, adaptation and integration must be understood as a revolt against assimilation, as Primo Levi hinted in Quaestio de Centauris,2 a short story where “it is not the monster but humanity that constitutes an aberration.”3 Similarly, life is not divisible into tasks or apportioned into roles: It is an option that always remains open and the matrix of an unexpected dimension. In the wake of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reflection on female desire, whereby “[a]ny assertion of woman as a subject must not double or simply oppose man but must affirm itself as an event in the process of becoming,”4 I contend that the TV series Orphan Black5 stands out as an innovative filming of woman understood in her phenomenological reality, provocatively engaging “our ideas of femaleness, femininity, and women’s subordination, as well as those of sexuality, embodiment, and the self–other relationship.”6

L. Barattoni (*) Department of Languages, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_7

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A few plot notes are necessary because the show spanned five seasons and spawned just as many twists and turns as characters and secret(ively) illicit groups and organizations. It all starts with the streetwise hustler Sarah, who, after witnessing the suicide of a female cop at a railway station and stealing her personal effects, discovers disquieting similarities between herself and the deceased woman, Beth. Beth proves to be more than an unknown twin sister or a coincidental doppelganger—in fact, by meeting with desperate housewife Alison and biology researcher Cosima, Sarah discovers that she is one in a series of clones, the product of genetic experiments carried out in the 1980s by Project Leda, an underground organization led by Susan and Ethan Duncan. Project Leda is devoted to the work of Victorian-era eugenicist P.  T. Westmoreland, who makes an appearance in Season 5 claiming to be 170  years old, thanks to self-­ renewing cells regenerated by transfusions of young blood. As the existence of more clones is revealed—among them Helena, a survivalist with an Anglo-Ukrainian background trained to kill the other clones—we learn that all the clones are monitored by the Neolution cult and its proxy, Dyad Institute, whose leader Aldous Leekie pushes a ruthless research agenda centered on aggressive, sped-up human evolution and augmentation. Besides the Neolutionists, who are co-led by another clone, the apparently icy and merciless Rachel, the clones are also pursued by Proletheans, a group of religious fanatics at odds with the creationism behind Sarah and her peers. By Season 2, a line of male clones stemming from Project Castor is also introduced: they are biological siblings of the female clones from Project Leda and seem to enjoy an even bleaker form of appropriation because they are drafted from birth into military service in order to be later weaponized for tactical operations. Except for one, the Castor clones are portrayed as quasi-automata thirsting for discipline and conformity, morbidly attached to their mother, Army adviser and geneticist Dr. Virginia Coady. Throughout the show, the immediate danger quickly moves from surveillance and social engineering to physical threats, such as kidnapping, assault, and invasive harvesting—first from Sarah’s daughter Kira, then from Helena, who is pregnant with twins even though all the clones were produced “barren by design,” in the words of Ethan Duncan from Episode 8 of Season 2. The resolution sees all the female clones—Helena has joined the sisterhood by Season 2, and Rachel, the only one of the Leda clones

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who was raised aware of that identity, turns the tables in late Season 5— allied against any organization or group trying to exert control over them. In the show finale, they take down Neolution and obtain records of all the other living clones in order to treat the autoimmune condition that seem to affect many of them. Produced by the Canadian company Temple Street and filmed in Ontario, Orphan Black strove to keep a balance among incursions into bioethics and science, traditional action moments, and family scenes with the clones and their love interests and friends, often mixing spurious elements of drama, thriller, and science fiction. Throughout its 50 episodes, it was received favorably by audiences, critics and scholars alike, with every constituency marveling at the performances of actress Tatiana Maslany, capable of convincingly showcasing different personalities, mannerisms, and character trajectories for each clone.

A Phenomenological Look at Orphan Black On the website Vox, Caroline Framke summarized the exhausting plot of the series as “the story of a group of clones—and specifically women—taking control of their own lives, their own narratives, their own miraculous beating hearts.”7 All the different and simultaneous iterations of the clones beget a pristine intentionality and motility, disengaged from a dominant symbolic order, building their stories without reporting to an original unity and thereby conjuring up a female discourse that finally “frees becoming from being.”8 It is productive to embrace a phenomenological stance to open the political dimension of Orphan Black. Phenomenology is relevant to Orphan Black via its engagement with perception and with patterns of experiential formations. Its foundational endeavor is concerned with establishing a nondogmatic gnoseology, a way of knowledge fundamentally based on lived experience aimed at probing the ways, in Edmund Husserl’s words, “experience as consciousness give[s] or contact[s] an object” and the logic through which “the play of a consciousness” can “make objectively valid statements, valid for things that are in and for themselves.”9 By thematizing the event of experiencing as such and by excluding any transcendental plane outside our consciousness, phenomenology returns the world as a plane of pure evidence and not as the terrain of preconstituted being. Through an act of forbearance and renunciation, phenomenology targets the intersubjective possession of the I and the world by making it unitary.

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The residual, transcendental consciousness is then an operator of perception that configures a horizon of intention, characterized by attributes such as suspension, inherence, and distinction. Suspension is particularly interesting when applied to Orphan Black: One of the show’s finest achievements is its apprenticeship, its training of the audience to suspend and resist interpretation and judgment, to carefully consider our understanding of what “woman” means. As a spectator, my internal horizon is continually destabilized by the emergence of a new clone, who in turn expands the external, mobile horizon of what “woman” is for me through the play of inherence and distinction. By making “woman” the project of a gnoseological enterprise through its affective power and its take on corporeality, Orphan Black makes sure that anything new I may learn about the clones is inscribed in the realm of that which I do not know yet, inserting its universe and the audience into a territory where they “are engaged in a shifting and relational movement that continually involves and re-­ involves one another.”10 Investing in this process of mediation is critical if we want to understand how an artifact like Orphan Black interrogates, toys with, and ultimately denies our ideas of womanhood and promotes the achievement of intersubjectivity, fusion, and dialogue through the film experience. Vivian Sobchak convincingly showed the conversational nature of the film viewing experience, with the interplay between spectator and film unfolding as a process of connectivity between two subjects. For Sobchak, “the film’s visual conduct is thus given to me as homologous to my own visual conduct in watching it,”11 and even though “intentional perception of the filmmaker is mediated, even transformed, by the camera, by the body of the film itself and by the projector/computer,” still “the film can be understood as referring to the world, as providing the possibility of the convergence of the filmmaker’s and spectator’s horizons.”12 Sobchak followed Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s doctrine of encounter as existentially lived by an embodied subject, but her dissatisfaction with the abstracting and neutering of said subject, de facto universalizing it as male and heterosexual, brought her to involve feminist philosopher Iris M. Young in the deconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. While engaging Young’s analysis of the ways in which “the female body-subject has… often lived her body tentatively and in heightened consciousness of it as an object,” and coming to the conclusion that often “the female lived-body is constituted as handicapped,”13 Sobchak delineates the tension between

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the “I can” and the culturally inscribed “I cannot” mutually informing women’s intentions when called to perform certain tasks. Orphan Black is formidable at deconstructing the previous, perverse phenomenology of objectification by spectacularly showing woman as a lived-body and not an object. The very structure of the series, by establishing an epistemological horizon, a line of flight that points and disappears into the infinite, invokes a suspension of judgment regarding the new community founded by the clones. With every new appearance, with every new emergence expanding the family and broadening the horizon, we put into question our experience and opinion on issues of identity, social aggregations, and sexual identification. By looking at Orphan Black’s clones as a manifestation of becoming, we can unlock the interfacing consciousness they conjure up and fully embrace the codetermining nature of watching the clones as signs that continuously overwrite themselves, relentlessly reinvent themselves, and point to an infinite horizon where sense is not the same as being cornered, tamed, domesticated. If cinema “developed an aesthetic language capable of showing us the shifting of our viewpoint on the world, the possible variations of our perspective, our existing in situation,”14 then thanks to Orphan Black, the clones’ tribulations qua women are also our tribulations, their body is also our body. In short, the series could be enjoyed as a pedagogy of perception, training our intentionality toward the notion of woman-in-itself, consistent with the unattainable ipseity that informs Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s epistemological structure, whereby “[g]iven the idea that perception is itself a movement of transcendence, it follows that the thing withdraws from the grasp of a privileged perception because the movement of transcendence goes beyond it into a future of further exploration.”15 By exposing phenomenologically the performing of female roles and toying with gender conventions, Orphan Black successfully deconstructs the fiction of knowing-­what-it-means-to-be-a-female from within. It gestures toward an act of dynamic retention through which we as spectators preserve the traces of that which has passed and use it to advance into a clearer, more specified and informed understanding. It invites a gnoseological apprehension by way of composing and constituting a network of references, anticipating that our outlook will necessitate a different angle, a different perspective, a different way to distinguish and synthesize the data. Most importantly, we are trained to expect increments of meaning on a plane of absolute perfectibility and continuous renewal: The exceeding element of apprehension turns our act of knowing into a state of not-knowing-yet.

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The emergence of a new clone is a manifestation of a new stratum of meaning, of a new potential, of an ever-expanding horizon of femalehood that stays with us. Orphan Black is a hymn to unfinished multiplicity.

Orphan Black as a Template of Molecular Politics The series is still perceived as relatively tame in certain departments—for example, the depiction of queer sex whereby “[o]n screen we see a less-­ threatening portrait of non-normative sexuality, suggesting stigmas of disgust still surround queer sex. Now that stigma just takes the form of avoidance rather than outright shaming.”16 In the wake of theories of identity formation produced during the third wave of feminism it can be argued that Orphan Black deals creatively with “the formation of a self which can be permeated by otherness, and in which the boundary between the inside and the outside, between self and not-self, has to operate not antagonistically… but in terms of patterns of flow.”17 The clones are multiple but are also one, and they forge an alliance based on and enhanced by difference: Sarah, Cosima, Alison, and Helena are the embodiment of “a resistant, enduring ethical bond between women in which no man is involved.”18 The constant switching among one another, the way the clones find new skills and resources that seem previously confined to just one of them, provides a dynamic economy of exchange where the only form of currency being circulated is literally the self (also reminding us that women, to survive, often need to invoke the “superpowers” of Helena, Alison, Sarah, Cosima, and the others). Orphan Black not only dismantles the pernicious pretense of gendered subjectivity, it also goes as far as questioning the tyranny of biology, hinting at a new phase of evolution with no regularity or regulation and centered around becoming. Its way of thinking inequality can be better understood through the concepts of the molar and the molecular, whereby “[t]he molar designates identifiable forms, like persons or things, the molecular are the particles that escape the sedimentation of these structures and escape any representation by the subject.”19 Thus, the series shows “becoming-woman” not as a predicament of a dualistic economy of gender but as a difference in a play of evolving differentiation. The clones are not segmented lines but a network of nodes, a paradigm of deterritorialization whereby “[t]he deterritorializing of an organ, form, or a function occurs when it becomes freed of its previous framework or rigidified path to connect and interact with other elements in new ways.”20 At the

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surface level, the shows succeeds at keeping us engaged by composing a puzzle in which every individual tile seems to slide from one position to another: When featuring action and intrigue, Orphan Black relies on old strategies of affective interpellation, dramatic double-crossing, shifting alliances, revealed identities and the like, while at the same questioning subjectivity, authority, and biopolitics in its articulations as surveillance and (corporate) sovereignty. Orphan Black provides a radical answer to an essentialist view of femininity; at its core it is a phenomenology of misappropriation. The show does not think in Hegelian terms: The emergence of another clone is not an avenue toward multiplicity, Helena does not subtract from Cosima, Alison does not “complete” Sarah—in short, all the clones go through a revisionary, transformational change when they learn about each other as “they model and borrow these strengths by slipping into each other’s roles and growing, rather than being consumed by despair.”21 It is an indistinct multiplicity of relations and aggregations, not a synthetic multiplicity opposed to a one: By subtracting the clones from a binary logic of opposition, their collective unit is an ecosystem where “individuality, subjectivity and identity [are] all as processual, continually decomposing and recomposing according to their environment.”22 In Gilles Deleuze’s words, multiplicity must fulfill three conditions: It must not succumb to “any assignable function,” the elements of multiplicity are arranged “by reciprocal relations which allow no independence whatsoever to subsist,” and finally it should function as a grid “of multiple, non-localisable connections between differential elements which is incarnated in real relations and actual terms.”23 The simultaneous, morphogenetic tension traverses the clones not only when they play one another: In fact, their interaction is not simply a game of masquerading but a becoming in which they host a spectrum of possibilities for future growth, and for the production of supreme, transcendental undifferentiation. Orphan Black is ultimately transformative in terms of femalehood—a group of women re-shaping themselves from packaged product into a dynamic community, from a branded good to a plural vessel of diversification. Orphan Black is also convincing at creating an accomplished post-­ patriarchal universe. By not having a “proper” biological birth, the clones destabilize positions, ethical systems, rules, and identity structures related to family, but they also take a step further. By needing to form a new propulsive, generative sisterhood where what is at stake is their life and their sisters’ survival, they successfully disrupt the distinction between subject

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and other, always understanding themselves as parts of an ethical, larger whole. The open borders of said sisterhood are established deliberately and tactically from the very first episode, in which Sarah—as noted by Pagnoni Berns and Aguilar24—receives the help of three men all belonging to minority groups while the traditional, heterosexual males are in a position of discipline, surveillance, and control. In Orphan Black there are no actual fathers against whom characters can stage imaginary, futile rebellions, amounting to finding ways at preserving the Law. The show does away with colonizing figures and the travesty of their guidance, breaks the triangular, parental metaphysics of the family, and provides alternative models of growth and adaptation. The noble and villainous fathers— Leekie, Westmoreland—are laughable bodies without male organs and can be disposed with quickly and wittily, sometimes by equally pitiful male figures. Instead, the series explicitly suggests that all males—boyfriends, husbands, monitors, corporate suits—seem naturally predisposed toward “reflecting a tyrannical relationship against traditionally depowered members of society… set[ting] up a feudal system with the women at the bottom.”25 Donnie, Alison’s husband, is not fertile enough to have children, and his goofiness is often synonymous with emasculation. He generally defers to women or is simply jerked around by them, and his major phallic accomplishment is the Tarantinesque killing of Dr. Leekie in a scene mindful of Vincent Vega accidentally shooting Marvin in Pulp Fiction. Felix, Sarah’s homosexual step-brother, is the moral compass of the entire series and possibly a Deleuzian apostle in the making: One of his mottoes is that “consolidation” is “the bane of diversity”—difference becomes a strategy for reorganization, and reproductive is indeed a synonym of unproductive whereby every idea of stability becomes a perverse pattern of stratification. If the Oedipal appropriation of the psyche “fixes the social field as a point of departure and the family as the point of destination”26 then the idea of a natural family is untenable because its ineluctable trajectories turn it into a gated orphanage. The process of subjectification articulated in the course of the five seasons is not that of a graduation to and through the symbolic, adopting pre-­established roles, but that of recognizing and inhabiting individual intensities. The compenetrative nature of the clones’ associating is consonant with the process of conjunction, one of the three passive syntheses of desire as explained by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the Anti-­Oedipus: insofar as these intensities are multiple and constitutive of ‘entities’ (subjects, persons), then we encounter the most interesting experimentation with such

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processes in the form of acting. The simulation of a character is not a reproduction of a pre-existing person but the production of a reality, “the point where the copy ceases to be a copy in order to become the Real and its artifice.”27 The tension between the homologating nature of the genetic and the productive force of a desire that escapes the coded—familial, social—forms is at the heart of the series. The Oedipal works as a normalizing, stabilizing operator and can “can be applied to everything, in that the agents and relations of social production, and the libidinal investments corresponding to them, are made to conform to the figures of familial reproduction.”28 The rejection of such departure through the abandonment of Oedipal protocols such as lineage, heritage, and kinship is conducive to disruptive forms of social assemblages, not dissimilar from what Deleuze and Guattari call the “nomadic” and “polyvocal”29 use of the conjunction, whereby the social investment of desire generates forms of aggregations based on multiplicity, inclusivity, and always looking outward. The reinvention of identities carried out by the clones can be read as the construction of a Body without Organs, shedding social specifications and “dismantling the self with its specific organization of assemblages.”30 Like in many New Wave pictures from the 1960s when dynamic, previously unwritten female characters announced new seismic societal changes, Orphan Black maintains that only women know how to bring about salvation, by way of an unhindered creativity when it comes to reconfigure new forms of solidarity and acceptance through connections, disconnections, replacements, and reorderings. The show does not seem immediately concerned with bioethical opinions, in the sense that the cloning technology is presented in its results and works more as a narrative engine than as a moral compass. In other words, the writers seem to reject any a priori controversy and instead focus on the clones’ vitalistic excess. Pence31 stresses the symbiotic expectations often associated with twins and the consequences in personhood formation or lack thereof, duly reporting the Vatican’s position against human cloning as based on the notion of uniqueness and the free will necessarily stemming from it. However, the Catholic Church’s doctrine on medically assisted reproduction has many holes and seems to be informed by a stance that is antagonistic at worst—the high hierarchies lobbied to have couples pursuing surrogate motherhood techniques and doctors advising them punishable by law when the infamous Legge 40 was approved in 2004— and opportunistic at best,32 trumpeting the number of assisted pregnancies as a direct cause of said law while in fact many portions of it were

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being dismantled because they had been deemed unconstitutional.33 For the Catholic Church, the problem created by a person whose heritage stems from a cloning procedure is that the creatural dimension is outsourced to a technical authority that does not operate according to the tenets of image and likeness, thereby negating the surveilling power that the Church invests itself with in case the copy is deemed too far from the original. From this standpoint, Orphan Black is not afraid of settling the score with any religious doctrine obsessed with the regulation and domestication of biological life. A biopolitical reading of the mechanisms of preservation and inclusion/exclusion running across the clones’ sisterhood shows how Orphan Black creates a template of openness and inclusiveness for similarly attuned singularities. The burgeoning, always re-configured relationship within Orphan Black’s feminine enclave stands as an organism that fights parasites and craves a healthy connection premised on the preservation of difference. Adopting the Derridean notion of autoimmunity as the way to interface and expose the self to the other in a constructive, developmental expectation of becoming, and hybridizing it with Roberto Esposito’s negative structurings of immunity, Tanner highlights the “non-appropriative” and “non-incorporative”34 nature of the sisterhood. Describing the one pole as an authoritarian, crushing logic of sovereignty and the other as a relational, formative stance characterizing the bond forged by the clones, the scholar points to the tension between a healthy community and a perverse paradigm of autoimmunity: [I]n the battle between the sestras and the Neolutionists, the show confronts two modes of immunity and community: a communitarian plot based on a negative and ultimately self-negating immunitary logic, and an affirmative community of partially expropriated, interdependent ‘singularities,’ where immunity and autoimmunity cooperate through mutual (and self-) contestation.35

Said contestations hint at strategies of counter-immunization and instances of prosperous contamination, all fertile acts of re-creation whose political potential also lies in establishing “new notions of motherhood.”36 The subversive sarcasm of Orphan Black’s political stance is even more devastating if one focuses on the suspicion with everything Oedipal that the show entertains. Patented, branded, commodified, exploited, the clones fight homologation and create a community where no graduation to the

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symbolic is required. Do they evolve because they are women? Possibly, but their new sense of citizenry can be shared despite sexual difference. In fact, the sisterhood is also a successful model for the redistribution of desire. If we hold that in an unhealthy social organization orchestrated symbolically under an Oedipal guise, “women’s desires and alternative libidinal economies are ‘used’ for the representation and sublimation of men’s death drives,” 37 then the new familial grouping established by the clones provides an opportunity for exchange and a circulation of desire that is not bound to possess, dominate, or claim ownership of another being. By creating a new territory open to “a masculine subject that does not claim omnipotence, that is willing to let the other be,”38 the sisterhood values its members by virtue of their capacity to accept difference and dismiss hierarchical thinking. It is a movement consistent with Luce Irigaray’s gesture toward “a feminine subject able continually to incorporate fluid transformation in concert with others,”39 an attempt at overcoming the oppositional thinking that presides over the current androcentric drives, “preventing the possibility of woman being thought as anything but a deficient man.”40 The bond they strengthen among themselves deals elegantly with questions of homologation and constraint, to the point where the series can be read as an allegory of appropriation. The discovery of not possessing exclusive qualities and features does not breed envy or resentment. Rather, it is metabolized as an opportunity to enhance one’s personhood: What the clones share in terms of biological heritage becomes a challenge to go beyond the differences, in a paradigm of continuous acceptance. It has been pointed out by Pence41 that the origin and intensification of the bond stems from a “negative” premise; that is, the common resistance to identifiable enemies, with unidentifiable and new ones always lurking around. However, their brand of resistance is articulated in such a way that it could very well inspire a new template of political opposition. The clones are forced to adopt a plurality of ways to confront their long list of adversaries, including the Neolution corporation with its subsidiary companies Dyad and Topside, responsible for kidnapping, imprisoning, and eliminating clones, as well as weaponizing their genetic defects; the religious cult of the Proletheans, responsible for subjugating Helena then harvesting and subsequently inseminating her eggs; the DNA-altering baby farm BrightBorn, also a subsidiary of Neolution, where genetic material is manipulated to achieve eugenically perfect children, euthanizing those with problems and defects. All of these organizations seem to reproduce a segregated and secretive, binary, exclusive,

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paranoid, and ultimately authoritarian paradigm whose aim is in turn to model and perfect the very idea of life being regimented by an organization of the molar, crystallized type pushing pernicious agendas of completion, fulfillment, and general consumption.

Conclusion Orphan Black has generated enormous scholarly interest as well as enthusiastic reactions from general audiences because it functions as a narrative of evolution and resistance where each clone is a refraction of woman as a whole, pointing to an always expanding horizon, infinite in its openness. The gynocommunal space the show creates posits woman as difference, not defined in the light and function of something else. The clones, far from feeling mutilated in their individuality as mere experiments without a “true” mother and father, dismantle the coextensive, Oedipal logic of perpetuation and containment as a totalizing signifier. Each clone supplies a different state of personhood in its own specificities, and together they generate a broader score always open to new contributions, a molecular politics or (re)invention. Felix, in turn, has the potential of destabilizing the company they keep and—if necessary—queering the societal aggregations they must affiliate with. The nature of their pact generates more pleasure and satisfaction, more movement, and more connections. Most important, with 274 clones spread across the world ready to join the collective, one can capture the globalist nature of their resistance, a resistance to globalized subjectivity. The show does not explicitly hint at revolutionary practices, but it clearly adopts an anti-authoritarian and anti-­ hegemonic stance. In its lighter moments, Orphan Black is also a tongue-in-cheek commentary on multi-tasking: To be a woman, or rather in order not to be overwhelmed and survive as a woman, one has to be—among other things—a streetwise grifter, a soccer mom, a curious inquirer, and above all a cold-blooded killer. The ways the clones adopt different identities and playfully mask themselves as their “sisters” marks a new territory in the creation of the double as an agency they do not simply peruse but envision, then create for themselves. Helena is the character who best represents the propulsion of the narrative arc. Given her unusual status as a trained killer who brings an autonomous ethos into the fold, one may expect her to be reprimanded if not done away with altogether in order to “balance” the libidinal economy of the series. However, Helena is not

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othered, is not esoteric, is not an enigma—as a character, she walks the line between exploitation and enjoyment with confidence. The nature of her violence is manifold and acquires a disruptive, exhilarating quality: Helena is liberated and free, through physical aggression, “to express her experience, discover the aetiologies of her violence and produce her subjectivity.”39 Through Helena, one can safely deal with the dangers of monolithic worldviews—the blindly positivistic thought embodied by Dyad, the religious self-serving fanaticism embodied by the Proletheans—and not need to apologize for anything. Orphan Black succeeds because it is “a call to rethink not only the relationship between the human and technology, but relationships among us technologically mediated humans and indeed ‘the political’ itself.”42 The show takes into consideration the perniciously biopolitical potential of technology and the way it can be weaponized as such, making a counter move necessary, namely that of an antagonistic political space. Such political space emerging from Orphan Black is a space of equality and, first and foremost, participation. It is also a reflection on the politics of the body in a time when “we no longer inhabit a body in any meaningful sense of the term but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies—imaginary, sexualized, disciplined, gendered, laboring, technologically augmented bodies.”43 The clones’ collective body has an untamable energy and therefore the potential of a reorientation and redirection of the movements of power. The sisterhood is an allegory of a political subject, unified by a praxis, mobilized by a call to action borne out of concrete lived experiences whose members, by recognizing their differences and appreciating more their similarities, find new ways to coalesce. It is a discursive act of self-­ recognition, brought about by their shared misfortunes, that leads to the foundation of a political subject. The clones form a microcosmic, action-­ movie version of Nancy Fraser’s “universal caregiver model” and its emphasis on integration and equality,44 their post-human bodies the most invested in human relations, the most active in dismantling malicious dynamics of social reproduction. Orphan Black adopts a feminist philosophy in its move from individual to collective empowerment: It is a utopian and visionary movement toward an imagined community where their lives and reproductive rights are not threatened. In the age of externally administered flows and intersections aimed at extracting data, resources, and work from women’s bodies, the type of supportive solidarity devised by the clones intimates a potent, subversive form of hybridization.

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Notes 1. Henri Bergson. Creative Evolution. Trans. by Arthur Mitchell (New York: Camelot, 1911), 16. The reconfiguration of life is predicated on untamable inventiveness: “Can we go further and say that life, like conscious activity, is invention, is unceasing creation?” (26). 2. In Quaestio de Centauris, Levi adopts a non-humanist stance to redefine life and provide an early testimony of the Anthropocene experience: “Why is the dolphin similar to the fish, and yet gives birth and nurses its offspring? Because it’s the child of a tuna and a cow. Where do butterflies get their delicate colors and their ability to fly? They are the children of a flower and a fly. Tortoises are the children of a frog and a rock. Bats of an owl and a mouse. Conchs of a snail and a polished pebble. Hippopotami of a horse and a river. Vultures of a worm and an owl.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/08/quaestio-de-centauris. Trans. by Jenny McPhee. Accessed 23 December 2019. 3. Felice Italo Beneduce. “Io sono un centauro: Betrayal in Primo Levi’s Quaestio de Centauris.” Nemla-Italian Studies, no. 23 (2009–2010), 38. 4. Claire Colebrook and Ian Buchanan, eds., Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 1–2. 5. Orphan Black, directed by John Fawcett et  al., written by Kim Coghill et al., featuring Tatiana Maslany, Jordan Gavaris et al., aired from 2013 to 2017 on BBC America, BBC, 2017, Blu-Ray. 6. Sara Heinämaa, “Simone de Beauvoir’s Phenomenology of Sexual Difference,” Hypatia, no. 14-4 (1999), 115. 7. Caroline Framke, “Orphan Black got too complicated for its own good. Its final season is on track to fix that.” https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/7/9/15930758/orphan-black-season-5-review-ease-idlemillionaires-recap. Accessed 23 December 2019. 8. Claire Colebrook, Introduction to Colebrook and Ian Buchanan, eds., Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 6. 9. Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology as Rigorous Science” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Trans. by Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 87–88. 10. Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking Subjectivity beyond French Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 53. 11. Vivian Sobchak, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 138. 12. Tammy Bennington and Geri Gay, “Mediated Perceptions: Contributions of Phenomenological Film Theory to Understanding the Interactive Video Experience,” Journal of Computer-Mediated

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Communication, Volume 5, Issue 4 (1 June 2000), JCMC544, https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2000.tb00353.x. Accessed 19 December 2019. 13. Sobchak, The address of the Eye, 151 and 157. 14. “ha saputo sviluppare un linguaggio estetico in grado di mostrarci il movimento del nostro punto di vista sul mondo, le possibili variazioni della nostra prospettiva, il nostro esistere in situazione.” Anna Caterina Dalmasso, “Il cinema come reversibilità di percezione ed espressione,” Materiali di estetica (Issue entitled Pensare nella caverna. Incontri tra cinema e filosofia), No. 1 (2014): 96. 15. Henry Pietersma, Phenomenological Epistemology (New York: Oxford UP, 2000), 141. 16. Dani Howell, “Women’s Rebellion or Radical Containment? Understanding Orphan Black’s Feminist Message,” in Sisterhood, Science and Surveillance in Orphan Black: Critical Essays, eds. Janet Brennan Croft and Alyson R. Buckman (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2019), 35. 17. Catherine Constable, “Becoming the Monster’s Mother: Morphologies of Identity in the Alien Series,” in Alien Zones II: The Spaces of Science-­Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1999), 189. 18. Kate Ince, The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 54. 19. Anupa Batra, “Women and Becoming-Woman: Deleuze and Feminism,” in Movements in Time: Revolution, Social Justice and Times of Change, eds. Cecile Lawrence and Natalie Churn (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 67. 20. Ibidem, 71. 21. Valerie Estelle Frankel, The Women of Orphan Black: Faces of the Feminist Spectrum (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2018), 87. 22. Teresa Rizzo, Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 55. 23. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 183. 24. Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Emiliano Aguilar, “Sisterhood’s back in Orphan Black,” in Orphan Black and Philosophy: Grand Theft DNA, ed. Richard Greene and Rachel Robison-Greene (Chicago: Open Court, 2016), see pages 149–150. 25. Frankel, The Women of Orphan Black, 87. 26. Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (London & New York: Verso, 2008), 69. 27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1983), 87.

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28. Ibidem, 101. 29. Ibidem, 110. 30. Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray & Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1999), 169. 31. Gregory E. Pence, What We Talk About When We Talk About Clone Club (Dallas: Benbella, 2016), 189. 32. The Vatican has always used the “identical DNA” argument as a cause for concern, but on the other hand the case of monozygotic twins does not seem too worrying. 33. The paradox of such an enthusiastic declaration and concurrent endorsement of the Legge 40—which appeared in an editorial on the CEI’s newspaper Avvenire on March 28, 2009—is that according to the Catechismo della Chiesa Cattolica, medically assisted fertility is always morally unacceptable (2377) and severely dishonest (2376). 34. Jessica Tanner, “Being Together: Immunity and Community in Orphan Black,” in Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics, edited by Andrea Goulet and Robert A.  Rushing (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2018), 128. 35. Tanner, “Being Together,” 130. 36. Andrea Goulet, “The Replicant’s ‘Réplique’: Motherhood and the Posthuman Family as Resistance in Orphan Black,” in Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics, ed. Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect), 2018 182. 37. Ince, The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema, 133. 38. Arthur Khader, Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway (Minneapolis and London: U Minnesota P, 2012), 5. 39. Lorraine, Irigaray & Deleuze, 186. 40. Serene J.  Khader, “Introduction: The Work of Sexual Difference,” in Thinking with Irigaray, eds. Mary C.  Rowlinson, Sabrina L.  Hom, and Serene J. Khader (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 4. 41. Pence, What We Talk About When We Talk About Clone Club, see especially pages 194–199. 42. Janice Loreck, Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 4. 43. Margaret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick, Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway (New York: Columbia UP, 2013), 19. 44. Arthur Kroker, Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway (Minneapolis and London: U Minnesota P, 2012), 2. 45. Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London and New York: Verso, 2013), especially pages 111–135.

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References Batra, Anupa. “Women and Becoming-Woman: Deleuze and Feminism.” In Movements in Time: Revolution, Social Justice and Times of Change, edited by Cecile Lawrence and Natalie Churn, 65–76. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. Beneduce, Felice Italo. “Io sono un centauro: Betrayal in Primo Levi’s Quaestio de Centauris.” Nemla-Italian Studies 23 (2009–2010), 27–61. Bennington, Tammy L. and Geri Gay. “Mediated Perceptions: Contributions of Phenomenological Film Theory to Understanding the Interactive Video Experience.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 5, Issue 4, 1 June 2000, JCMC544, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2000. tb00353.x. Accessed 19 December 2019. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. by Arthur Mitchell. New  York: Camelot, 1911. Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. London & New  York: Continuum, 2008. Chamarette, Jenny. Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking Subjectivity beyond French Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Coghill, Kim et al., writer. Orphan Black. Directed by John Fawcett et al., featuring Tatiana Maslany, Jordan Gavaris et al. Aired from 2013 to 2017 on BBC America. Temple Street Productions. BBC, 2017, Blu-Ray. Colebrook, Claire and Ian Buchanan, eds. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Constable, Catherine. “Becoming the Monster’s Mother: Morphologies of Identity in the Alien Series.” In Alien Zones II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn, 173–202. London: Verso, 1999. Dalmasso, Anna Caterina. “Il cinema come reversibilità di percezione ed espressione.” Materiali di estetica (Issue entitled Pensare nella caverna. Incontri tra cinema e filosofia), No. 1 (2014): 75–99. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. by Paul Patton. New  York: Columbia UP, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1983. Framke, Caroline. “Orphan Black got too complicated for its own good. Its final season is on track to fix that.” https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/7/9/15930758/orphan-black-season-5-review-ease-idle-millionaires-recap. Accessed 23 December 2019.

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Frankel, Valerie Estelle. The Women of Orphan Black: Faces of the Feminist Spectrum. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2018. Fraser, Nancy. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London and New York: Verso, 2013. Goulet, Andrea. “The Replicant’s ‘Réplique’: Motherhood and the Posthuman Family as Resistance in Orphan Black.” In Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics, edited by Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing, 167–182. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2018. Grebowicz, Margaret and Helen Merrick. Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Heinämaa, Sara. “Simone de Beauvoir’s Phenomenology of Sexual Difference.” Hypatia no. 14-4 (1999): 114–132. Howell, Dani. “Women’s Rebellion or Radical Containment? Understanding Orphan Black’s Feminist Message.” In Sisterhood, Science and Surveillance in Orphan Black: Critical Essays, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Alyson R. Buckman, 22–40. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2019. Husserl, Edmund. “Phenomenology as Rigorous Science.” Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Trans. by Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Khader, Serene J. “Introduction: The Work of Sexual Difference.” In Thinking with Irigaray, edited by Mary C.  Rowlinson, Sabrina L.  Hom, and Serene J. Khader, 1–9. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011. Kroker, Arthur. Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway. Minneapolis and London: U Minnesota P, 2012. Ince, Kate. The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Levi, Primo. Quaestio de Centauris. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/08/quaestio-de-centauris. Trans. by Jenny McPhee. Accessed 23 December 2019. Loreck, Janice. Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Lorraine, Tamsin. Irigaray & Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1999. Pagnoni Berns, Fernando Gabriel, and Emiliano Aguilar. “Sisterhood’s back in Orphan Black.” In Orphan Black and Philosophy: Grand Theft DNA, edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison-Greene, 141–151. Chicago: Open Court, 2016. Pence, Gregory E. What We Talk About When We Talk About Clone Club. Dallas: Benbella, 2016. Pietersma, Henry. Phenomenological Epistemology. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

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Rizzo, Teresa. Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Sobchak, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Tanner, Jessica. “Being Together: Immunity and Community in Orphan Black.” In Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics, edited by Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing, 127–144. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2018.

CHAPTER 8

‘I Will Not Be Bullied into Submission’: Discussing Subjection and Resistance in GLOW (2017) Ayşegül Kesirli Unur and Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan

Introduction Netflix original TV series, GLOW (2017), revolves around a group of struggling women who find their calling when a B-movie director and an enthusiastic producer offer them to take part in a TV show on wrestling. GLOW is inspired by a 1980s wrestling show on television, GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (1986–1989) which is dominantly based on stereotypes, campy aesthetics and nudity. GLOW embraces these essential features of the wrestling show but in the series, the camera almost pulls away from the ring and the multi-layered backstories of the characters are revealed to the audiences. So, what the series offers is a story that revolves around characters who  develop and change in each episode, inside and outside of the wrestling ring. In this way, womanhood is depicted in the series not as one thing but as many things being freed from all categories, shapes and binaries.

A. K. Unur (*) • N. N. Arslan Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_8

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This chapter is mainly concerned with the representation of the characters within the self-reflexive narration of GLOW in the first three seasons. Through the textual analysis of the selected scenes which depict the women as they develop, rehearse or perform their wrestling personas, the chapter aims to understand the multiple roles that the women play in their careers on and behind the camera and reveal the role that the wrestling show plays in their empowerment. With a specific focus on Judith Butler’s theories on subjection and performativity, the balance between mimicking the images that belong to the 1980’s TV show and rendering them at the same time is examined. In this way, the chapter intends to comprehend the efficacy of using particular narrative and stylistic strategies in GLOW to portray the subjection and resistance of the characters to the long pervading gender norms through simultaneously using and subverting conventional and stereotypical images of women. In the first section, gender representation in wrestling shows is discussed in relation to the behind the scene stories of the wrestlers who performed in the 1980s show. By means of focusing on these stories, we can assume that despite the era’s objectifying aesthetics, performing in the ring brought a sense of empowerment to the women who took part in the show when the camera pulled away. The chapter builds on this idea and claims that GLOW’s use of self-reflexivity as a narrative strategy allows the series to emphasize on the empowerment of the characters by directing the spectators’ look at the women as they take control of their own representations in the show. In the second section, the chapter concentrates on the submission of the characters to the call of the show’s creators who put labels on women depending on their physical traits and the characters’ concurrent revolt against these given roles that grant them social existence in the television industry. In the following sections, the construction of the ring as a male dominated space is discussed in relation to the gradual shift in this power structure through the increasing role of women behind the camera. In this sense, the chapter asserts that as the women take control of the production they start to subvert the gender roles that degrade them both inside and outside the ring by using the same means that constitute them in the beginning.

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Performing Gender in Wrestling Shows Wrestling shows are bound to display the long-familiar epic battle between the good and the evil in an excessive and spectacular manner. The audience only gets to see the characters as they perform their ring personas which are based on bodily stereotypes and binary oppositions.1 In a conventional manner, instead of solving social conflicts, the shows take strength from dissolving social dilemmas so that the audience accept the norms easier and are already primed to cheer the projected wrestling moves and the anticipated narrative without hesitancy.2 The wrestling show GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling which inspired the series GLOW is based on the same principles. Even though the casting is reckoned as ‘diverse’, when we look at the narrative, it seems quite one dimensional. The show which started to be broadcast in the United States beginning from 1984 is created by David McLane and directed by Matt Cimber. In addition to this team, Steve Balance worked as the head writer and the actor in the show. Although the show could be considered to be born out of an all male team’s efforts, the personal contribution of the female wrestlers in developing and performing their characters could not be overlooked. By means of this strong female presence, the show could be considered to have a feminist touch despite reflecting the aesthetics of the era.  In a similar manner, in the documentary film, GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (Brett Whitcomb 2012) which focuses on the story behind the production of this first all-female wrestling show on TV, the wrestlers who are interviewed frequently emphasize how the show made them feel empowered despite the physical and mental hardships. One of the wrestlers, Ninotchka, explains that how playing this character made her feel much more confident. She describes her experience as 'very freeing’ because she could say anything she wants when she was Ninotchka. In a similar manner, another wrestler from Heavy Metal Sisters, talks about how her character made her stand up for herself in a difficult situation.3 However, alongside these intimate stories of empowerment, the politics behind The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling are defined by the wrestlers as politically incorrect. In his article on the melodramatic structure of WWF Wrestling, Henry Jenkins observes that stereotypes that are already in circulation within the social setting are borrowed and disseminated by the characters in the wrestling matches.4 According to Jenkins, through various types of class antagonisms and complex alliances between wrestlers,

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WWF Wrestling provides a context in which the insiders and outsiders of the American community are defined. The show makes a particular emphasis on nativism which results in racial stereotyping, xenophobia, nationalistic discourse and masculine melodrama.5 A similar type of populist rhetoric could be observed in the melodramatic structure of The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. For instance, Ninotchka explains that Matt Cimber pushed the limits in every way and offended every group that he possibly could. She adds that at the time she actually did not think much about the horrible things that she said about the United States but explains an incident that took place in one of the Southern states where the production team was afraid for her safety due to the threats of a group in the audience. This story emphasizes the impact of the show’s populist ‘good vs. evil’ rhetoric on audiences. The self-reflexive character of the Netflix original GLOW greatly contributes to subvert these characteristics of the wrestling show. When television begins to explore its own nature it could be reflexive in many different ways. Self-reflexivity can be achieved by  creating audience awareness, using intertextuality, borrowing genre conventions  of other shows or deconstructing the medium’s own textual features such as duration, voice, mood and frequency.6 By building an intertextual connection with the 1980s wrestling show and looking closer to its production through a fictionalized narrative, GLOW infiltrates in television’s own process of making and disseminating ‘female stereotypes’. In this way, together with the performativity that operates both in the textual and stylistic levels, the series succeed to subvert those stereotypes by re-appropriating the power and control over the representation of women in television contents.

Unconventional Women in the Ring In its very first season, GLOW opens with a scene in which the main character, Ruth, is shown auditioning for a project and reading the man’s part on purpose to make a point. The role that Ruth reads is about an executive’s dilemma of making the right decision about a family business and the monologue ends with the line, ‘I will not be bullied into submission’. When Ruth is finished she is warned that she has to start over and read for the role that she auditions. After the warning Ruth is seen performing the role of a secretary that interrupts the business meeting for a call coming from the executive’s wife.

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Two women behind the camera casting actresses, the corridor full of women competing for this degrading small part and the proposal that the casting agent makes to Ruth to take a role in a pornographic film in the following scene make the line ‘I will not be bullied into submission’ highly symbolic here because it indicates Ruth’s position as an outcast in the industry which continuously generates gender stereotypes with the consent of women who submit to these conditions. By means of this introduction, GLOW underlines from the beginning that Ruth is an unconventional woman who is frequently punished for doing her gender wrong7 with unemployment. Like any other women in the cast, Ruth’s position as an outcast turns out to be the very reason of her taking part in the wrestling show. In the audition, Sam as the director gives details about the content of the show which would involve ‘tit grabs’, ‘cunt punches’, ‘shrinky dinks’ and ‘fancy catfights’. He urges everyone who do not agree to do all these on television to leave the audition at once. Where a lot of women leave the gym, a few of them stay by agreeing with the rules or in other words, turning to Sam’s initial call for subjection in an Althusserian sense. As Noela Davis explains, in his theory of interpellation, Louis Althusser describes a scene in which the individual is called out ‘Hey, you there!’ by a police officer in the street. As a response to this call which intends to name, the individual turns around, recognizes the hailing and becomes a subject.8 In the audition scene, when Sam introduces the terms of taking part in the wrestling show the women who stay appear to be the right addressees of Sam’s call since they agree with these terms in exchange for a social existence in the television industry. However, even though Sam seems like holding the power to grant the wrestler a social existence in this scene the power positions start to shift as the show develops. The creative difference between Bash and Sam appears to be the initial reason for this shift. In the third episode of the first season, as Sam imagines a post-nuclear dystopic setting for the show Bash finds this script too complicated. The only thing he wants for the show is the same script that male wrestling shows follow but ‘with a bow on it’. Later in the episode, he invites the women to a party in his house and introduces them to his costume closet in order to inspire them in creating their wrestling personas. As women try out costumes, instead of giving them space Bash is depicted as appreciating the right choices and correcting the inappropriate ones by giving directions.

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The wrestling show is all about playing the game of villains versus heroes. Bash makes it clear how those positions are going to be filled when he underlines each woman’s physical appearance and points at them saying ‘you are Oriental’, ‘you are an Arab’, ‘you are a jock’, ‘you are a big black girl’. In such a way that confirm Dyer’s statement about stereotypes,9 the ring personas that are created with Bash’s help are not only built on stereotypes that work like shortcuts to define particular social groups but also make all feelings, values and meanings that they are charged with visible, functioning as a deceiving simplicity. Besides, the ‘call’ of Bash that aims to put every character in its proper place works as an act of interpellation in this scene. The women who are ready and willing to be recognized to earn their social existence within the television industry respond to this call underlining their positions as the right addressees. However, in such a way to affirm Judith Butler’s concerns about Althusser’s theory of interpellation,10 Bash’s hailing gets different responses from women which do not only emphasize its reductionist and totalizing aspects but also points at its failure when some of the women do not embrace Bash’s call. Jenny responds to Bash’s hailing as being ‘Oriental’ by stating that she is Cambodian. When Bash hails Arthie as ‘an Arab’ she says that she is Indian. Ruth refuses to be defined as ‘the farmer’s daughter’ or ‘the girl next door’ and insists that she is ‘Kuntar, a vision of hideousness’, a character from Sam’s script. In this way, she does not only appreciate Sam’s much more complex vision of the show but also rejects being reduced to a bodily stereotype. In her theory, Butler brings the scene of interpellation into question and observes that “[t]he one who is hailed may fail to hear, misread the call, turn the other way, answer to another name, insist on not being addressed in that way.”11 She also suggests that the name that is called might not even be a name but a social category which could be conceived in many different ways. She highlights that “[t]o be hailed as a ‘woman’ or ‘Jew’ or ‘queer’ or ‘Black’ or ‘Chicana’ may be heard or interpreted as an affirmation or an insult, depending on the context in which the hailing occurs […].”12 In this way, Butler emphasizes the possible reductionist, violent, totalizing and regressive aspects of hailing and underlines the political aspects of hesitating to respond to the call. In a similar manner, the characters’ resistance against being reduced to racial, ethnic and gendered stereotypes in GLOW initially appears in this very moment and continues later in the series in different occasions.

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The Ring as a Hierarchical Space The wrestling ring appears to be an ideal place for subverting the power structures that generate these stereotypes since it is constructed as a space where power dynamics are intertwined and identities are constituted. If the architecture of the gym in the first and second season, including the ring, audience area, the director’s quarters and the backstage are looked at closely it is seen that the whole space is hierarchical and designed for the male gaze. Especially the sight of the ring from the director’s quarters reminds John Berger’s statement about gender bias in the Renaissance perspective, saying that “[m]en act, women appear.”13 In a similar manner, in the beginning of the first season, Sam’s office is depicted as a space which signifies male authority, for being placed in a higher position than the ring and allowing to see the ring almost in a panoptic way. In the beginning of the series, Sam as the director of the show is portrayed as having the power and the final say about anything. He frequently says ‘get out of my set’ or ‘get out of my gym’ when he is angry, emphasizing that the whole place belongs to him. Besides, since the first day of the auditions he is the one that decides who stays and who gets cut from the show. Therefore, choosing to locate his office at an almost tower like position in a higher level signifies the direct power relation between him and the cast of the wrestling show which is designed for men to act as decision makers and women to just appear. Bash as the financer of the show is included in this power dynamic not only for being seen in the director’s quarters often but also being the ‘divine voice’ that hails the women as they develop their characters. Then again, as emphasized in the third episode of the first season, his initial plan is making a show in which ‘the men act behind the camera and the women just appear’. In such a way to underline this plan, at the end of this episode, as they look from the viewfinder of the camera, Sam and Bash who put their creative differences aside observe Tammé in her ‘Welfare Queen’ costume and define her as ‘their’ masterpiece. This  power dynamic between the men behind the camera and the women in the ring first establishes and eventually alters the layout of the space. In the series, the ring is the basis of the story as well as the spectacle of the empowerment that is gradually built within each season. In the first episode of the first season, when the women are trained by another male authority figure, Salty ‘The Sack’ Johnson, the elasticity of the ring reveals itself. In this episode, except from Carmen whose father is a wrestling

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legend, all of the women appear in a wrestling ring for the first time in their lives. When Salty teaches the women how to use the ring during performance, at one point, he says ‘attack… the ropes!’, meaning that the women should wield the ropes around the ring. This statement links to an understanding that the ring can serve as an elastic space. During the live performances, the women are seen using this elasticity of the space by walking around the ring deciding on where to stand and where to move. They use the ropes in a playful sense and sometimes they jump over them by expanding the spatial limits of the performances. Likewise, the entrances and the exits of the characters, either choreographed or improvised, vary in many forms; over the ropes, under the ropes, or through the ropes. By means of this elasticity, people who watch the wrestling matches outside the ring become a part of the performance as well as the subjection process in GLOW. During live shows, the performance starts outside the ring when the wrestlers are called out to the ring or in other words, hailed by the male announcer. The announcement of the names lays the narrative and leads the crowd14 to an excitement while recapping the previous disputes between the wrestlers and setting the tone for the upcoming one. So, the ring as a performance space is the centre of attraction but never the limitation of the relationship between the crowd and the wrestlers. On the contrary, the architectural layout of wrestling arena is designed for the crowd to be at a distance. As Webley says the crowd gets to see the fight in a ‘safe zone’.15 But this spatial distance is overcome by the wrestlers. From time to time, when the wrestlers are in the ring they directly address the crowd or speak out loud almost self-consciously to make them hear what they say to each other. The crowd speaks to them in return by shouting, spitting, cheering and name calling. In this way, the crowd becomes a part of the complex power structure that constitutes the ring as a hierarchical space and reinforces the roles that are performed by the wrestlers based on national, ethnic, racial and gender stereotypes. However, this elasticity of the ring which both spatially and structurally expands the space give the women a certain sense of agency despite its hierarchical constitution. By using self-reflexivity as a powerful tool, GLOW underlines the active roles that women take during the wrestling matches and intends to expose the illusion behind the fights instead of consolidating it. During the matches apart from speaking to the crowd, the women are also seen whispering to each other when they decide on their next moves either in attempt to check on or encourage each other. In this way, the series does not only expose the illusion of conflict and rivalry

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in the matches while uncovering the norms and values that constitute the women’s wrestling personas but also challenges the hierarchical construction of the ring and the masculine authority behind its creation. By revealing the whispers of women during the matches or the rehearsal scenes in which the women develop their characters and master the wrestling moves, the series investigates the wrestling show’s own nature. GLOW chooses to appropriate the images of women wrestlers in the ring as it is seen in the 1980s wrestling show, wearing revealing clothes and getting into physical fights not for submitting to a dominant television culture that objectifies women but for talking back at those conventional images. In her search for the possibility of resistance to the subjection processes, Judith Butler suggests that “[…] the symbolic produces the possibility of its own subversions, and these subversions are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations.”16 Butler sees the possibility of resignification in this approach which allows the law to oppose or go beyond its original purpose. In this way, the disciplinary discourses which constitute the subjects simultaneously reserve the conditions of deconstitution since the subject itself is not fixed and in constant re-articulation of its position.17 According to Catherine Mills, Butler simultaneously argues that “[…] power is productive, constituting the subject rather than simply constraining it, and that resistance is never external to power but reinstates its norms in the very process of subversion.”18 In such a way to affirm this approach, by talking back to the conventional images on TV, the women in GLOW do not only challenge the hierarchical construction of the ring but also take control of their own representation on TV, starting a resistance from within to the norms and values that constitute their own subjection.

Women Behind the Camera Despite the appearance of male dominance which is both emphasized in the spatial design and the discourse, GLOW implicitly underlines in every occasion that the ring as well as the space around it belong to women. For instance, in the first season finale, as the characters are ready to shoot the pilot for KDTV, in Sam’s absence, the women prepare for the shooting on their own. As Jenny does the costumes Sheila does the sound and Ruth does the props alongside organizing everything. When the whole team arrives in the ballroom for the shooting the cameramen ask where to put the tripods. Ruth comes to the rescue and speaks on behalf of Sam, saying

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that the director wants a ‘visceral look’ for the show. Since Sam is not around at the beginning of the shooting Ruth also gives Bash the role of the announcer. Eventually, everybody in the set starts to call Ruth ‘the captain’. In this way, the series emphasizes that despite the seeming male dominance and control at the beginning, the women gradually take over the show in collaboration. Apart from Ruth taking initiative in directing, in the first season, thanks to her popularity as a soap opera star, Debbie pressures the KDTV executives and becomes a producer in the show. With this change in power, she starts to use the director’s quarters which is previously reserved only to men. Since she also keeps being a cast member, her double position starts to alter the hierarchical codes of the space. However, this process of taking over does not go very smoothly either. In the first episode of the second season, Ruth appears on her first day at work with bunch of ideas. When she talks to Sam she defines herself as ‘the woman behind the man’ and suggests that they would be like Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville. As Sam coordinates the construction of the set on this first day, Ruth takes the women out to the mall together with the cameraman, Russell, and shoots a promotional video. During the shooting, Ruth gives order to Russell about which image to capture from what angle and the changes in the aspect ratio makes sure that the audience differentiates between the series and the promo. After the shooting when they watch the results all together Sam feels threatened by Ruth’s initiative. He lashes out at Ruth by shouting out how confused he is who the director is and tells her to ‘just be an actress’. For not doing her gender properly, Ruth gets punished by being left on the bench in the next match. In a similar manner, Debbie’s experience as a producer on the show does not go smoothly. In the second episode of the second season, Sam and Bash do not only forget to invite her to the producers’ meeting but also, they do not show up when Debbie invites them to her house to brainstorm about the next show. Despite this apparent conflict with female initiatives, GLOW emphasizes that it is actually the practices of the women that make the show. Men seem to have the power on the surface but women make sure that the job is well done. In the second season finale, the powerful positions of the women are reinforced with Ruth and Debbie’s presence in the director’s quarters. On the one hand, Debbie starts to make important decisions on her own in an attempt to avoid a crisis between Carmen and her brother, Kurt. Debbie’s  efforts  result in changing the structure of the show with the

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cameos of Kurt and a famous male wrestler, Chico Guapo. On the other hand, when Ruth breaks her leg in the seventh episode of the second season and it becomes impossible for her to perform in the ring her role in the director’s position is made ‘official’ by Sam who invites her to co-­ direct the show with him. As Ruth sits next to Sam in the director’s quarters, the editing moves back and forth between the directions of Ruth, ordering the cameramen from which angle the women should be shown and the recordings of the diegetic camera. Again, the changes in the aspect ratio make the audiences differentiate the images that belong to the TV series and the wrestling show. By means of this editing, the series mimics and appropriates the ways of representing women in the ring in the 1980s wrestling show but also subverts those images by underlining how they are controlled and owned by women. By showing Ruth performing as the co-director who creates those representations on TV and Debbie controlling the ongoing fight in the ring between her and the legendary male wrestler, Chico Guapo, the series makes a statement about the empowerment that comes with having control over your own representation on television. In this way, GLOW reiterates the norms of representing women on television in the 1980s as it simultaneously subverts those norms by giving the control to women who expose the performativity of doing gender.

Resistance Through Performativity Performativity can be approached as another way to expose and emphasize the social norms that constitute racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes in GLOW. On the one hand, the struggles that the characters have in their personal lives reveal the performative dimension of gender construction. Judith Butler suggests that “[…] the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time.”19 Accordingly, Debbie’s challenge to act as an ideal housewife in her perfect suburban house, Ruth’s difficulty in taking a role in the heterosexual romance of ‘finding the one’ and Cherry’s struggle in identifying with the bodily image of a pregnant woman are just a few examples that expose the social norms that constrain gender performance in the social setting. On the other hand, the series points at the stereotypical construction of the women’s ring personas through the very performativity of the acts. For instance, in the third episode of the first season, when women are

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about to develop their characters for the show they talk about creating their own ‘gimmick’ which would include deciding on how their characters would walk and talk or what kind of accents, costumes and props they would use. This decision-making process which is reflected in the series in a self-reflexive manner reveals the constraints behind the making of the stereotypical characters that are performed by women in the ring. Later in the episode, when Bash and Sam observe the women acting out for the camera, completely embracing these ring personas, GLOW uses this self-­ reflexive moment to emphasize the significance of the costumes, gestures, postures and acts in the making of the characters in a performative manner. Through its self-reflexivity, GLOW’s narrative acts against the pretense authenticity of the wrestling shows which has to be preserved at any cost both inside and outside of the ring.20 Instead of going along with this illusion, the series exposes the scripted nature of the performances that are seen in the ring. By means of this revelation, the women who perform their ring personas in a repetitive manner reiterate and make visible the norms and values behind the creation of those stereotypes in a ritualistic, excessive and parodic manner. Additionally, through the depiction of Tammé, struggling to decide if her ring persona, ‘Welfare Queen’, is offending anybody or Arthie, being startled when the crowd swears and spits at her as she performs her ring persona ‘Beirut’ for the very first time the politics behind the creation of these stereotypes are carried out to the open. By exposing the personal struggles of the wrestlers with their own ring personas in a self-reflexive manner, GLOW points at the alarming side of the wrestling matches and the potential consequences of reflecting these offensive, populist narratives of good versus evil on television. However, the series additionally builds a connection between the empowerment of the characters outside the ring and the courage that they take from being a part of the wrestling show despite its disturbing attributes. For instance, Debbie initiates her break from her husband seconds before she appears within the crowd as ‘Liberty Bell’ in the first season finale. Arthie embraces her sexual identity and admits her love to Yolanda for the first time when she kisses her on the ring at the end of the second season. By means of depicting these kinds of moments, GLOW reveals how the characters discover and challenge the constraints of their gender performances by acknowledging the performative attributes of their ring personas. Besides, performing these offensive stereotypes on the ring and gaining agency through these performances which actually degrade them in real life, the women are depicted as changing the terms of domination

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in a Butlerian sense by owning, controlling and making over those representations.21 Alternatively, in such a way to underline that the subjection processes are too fluid to be fixed, GLOW devotes one particular episode to the depiction of the whole world being turned upside down. In this fifth episode of the third season, called ‘Freaky Tuesday’, a temporary change is made in the structure of the show which is initiated by the women in the backstage. When they perform a live show every night in Las Vegas, Tammé gets injured and starts to hide her unbearable back pains. One particular night when it becomes impossible for her to perform her usual moves she comes up with the idea of playing a biddy (either the part of Etna or Ethal) instead of Welfare Queen. At first, the others have hesitations but then they all embrace the idea of switching parts. Meanwhile, since Keith is gone Sam steps in as the referee, taking an additional role apart from being the director. By switching roles, on the one hand, the women challenge the repetitive construction of the performances and completely transform the power structures that are embedded in the creation of the show. As the women appear on stage in unexpected costumes and unconventional roles, knowing each other’s parts by heart, both Sam and Bash cannot hide their confusions. Despite being the referee as well as the director, Sam shows up in the ring without having any directorial control on the show and Bash as the long-term announcer is unable to follow the script and gives up announcing the show at some point, lighting a cigarette. In this way, the director’s quarters at the gym which glorified the male authority in the first two seasons is replaced with the backstage where the actual decisions about the show is made by women. On the other hand, when the roles are exchanged and embraced by unexpected figures the performativity behind the creation of the ring personas is exposed in a disturbing sense. By looking at others performing their characters, the women do not only shocked by the norms, values and politics that constitute these personas but also feel startled by the offensiveness of the acts, gestures and manners when they are performed by another person. For instance, when they try to decide who is going to play who, Carmen says that she could be the only choice for the Welfare Queen since she is half black in such a way to expose the racial connotations that are attributed to the role. Besides, when Melrose decides to perform Fortune Cookie the sounds, gestures and discourse that she uses during the match deeply disturbs Jenny who emphasizes that it is okay for her to

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play the character since she is Asian but when a white girl does the act it becomes something else. By means of the reallocation of the characters among the women, GLOW does not only reveal the complex intersectional politics behind the creation of the characters’ wrestling personas but also emphasizes the significance of repetition in normalizing power structures. Throughout the third season, a few montage sequences appear in different episodes to expose how performing on stage becomes a routine job for women. In such a way to underline the normalizing force behind the routine, the series depicts the women performing the same script on stage over and over again until the show itself becomes unable to contain any possibility for these women to resist established power structures. By allowing the women to switch roles in Freaky Tuesday, GLOW one more time opens the floor to multiple possibilities of submitting and subverting the normative through performativity. At this moment when the male dominance is completely overridden, the women appear as exposing the rules and the norms that are their own creations and pave the way to new possibilities of resistance by means of these revelations.

Conclusion Netflix original TV series, GLOW, tells an unconventional story about a group of unconventional women. By being inspired by a television wrestling show from the 1980s, the series adopts the campy aesthetics and nudity that almost define this show in a nostalgic manner. However, GLOW’s intertextual connection with the 1980s wrestling show reflects a deeper purpose than a simple appropriation. The series uses the stereotypes, aesthetics and nudity that form the earlier show to attack, take control, dominate and subvert those images that once degraded national, ethnic, racial and gendered identities with an intersectional approach. This chapter is mainly interested in the representation of the characters within the complex narration of GLOW which intends to explore its own creation through self-reflexivity. As the series focuses more on the industry conditions that lead the making of the 1980s wrestling show it becomes more and more involved in the subjection processes that constitute the characters in compliance with the rules, norms and values of their social settings. This chapter approaches these subjection processes by referring to Judith Butler’s theories on power, subjection and performativity and aims to understand how GLOW achieves to reframe everything that the

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1980s wrestling show is based on as a marker of empowerment and resistance. On the one hand, the series displays how the characters are interpellated in the ideology of the wrestling show which does not only heavily rely on various kinds of stereotypes in terms of narrative but also places the characters in a strongly hierarchical setting in terms of space. On the other hand, it uses self-reflexivity and performativity as efficient narrative strategies to expose and attack all the constraining social norms and values that constitute these characters by building parallels between their empowerment inside and outside the ring. Through these strategies, GLOW achieves to comment on the representation of women on television in the 1980s wrestling show in a critical way by attacking the power structures that operate in its making from within, allowing the women to occupy multiple positions behind and in front of the camera and determine the terms of their representations on their own. The textual analysis is conducted by focusing on the selected scenes from the first three seasons of the series. However, GLOW has still one more season to run which is announced to be its final season. As it is told so far, the story of the women who get to wrestle in front of a live audience, on a TV show and lastly in a glittery Las Vegas show, ensues an exceptional performative empowerment. It is assumed that the series will continue to tell the story of its characters in a similar manner through similar narrative strategies. Further studies could concentrate on the next chapter of these ‘gorgeous ladies of wrestling’ who are not only depicted as on the move in a spatial sense from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, performing in different settings under different conditions but also as taking control of their own representations by challenging established power structures.

Notes 1. Sorkin, Michael. 1987. Faking it. Watching television: A pantheon guide to popular culture, eds. Todd Gitlin, New York: Pantheon Books, p. 59. 2. Webley, Irene A. 1986. Professional wrestling: the world of Roland Barthes revisited. Semiotica 58-1/2, p. 78. 3. GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, directed by Brett Whitcomb (2012: USA: Connell Creations et al., 2012), DVD.

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4. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Never trust a snake: WWF wrestling as masculine melodrama. The wow climax: Tracing the emotional impact of popular culture, NYU Press, p. 84. 5. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Never trust a snake: WWF wrestling as masculine melodrama. The wow climax: Tracing the emotional impact of popular culture, NYU Press, pp. 99–101. 6. Olson, Scott R. 1987. Meta-television: popular postmodernism. Critical studies in mass communication 4-3, pp. 284–300. 7. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 40-4, p. 522. 8. Davis, Noela. 2012. Subjected subjects? On Judith Butler’s paradox of interpellation. Hypatia 27-4, p. 882. 9. Dyer, Richard. 2000. The role of stereotypes. Media Studies: A reader, eds. Paul Marris, Sue Thornham, Caroline Bassett, NYU Press, pp. 245–251. 10. Butler, Judith. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press, p. 95. 11. Butler, Judith. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press, p. 95. 12. Butler, Judith. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press, p. 96. 13. Berger, John. 1990. Ways of seeing. Penguin Books, p. 47. 14. In her chapter cited below, Webley argues that the term ‘crowd’ is a better definition to understand the audience of the wrestling, rather than the term ‘audience’ itself or the ‘spectator’, because crowd suggests a broader range in the relationship of the people. 15. Webley, Irene A. 1986. Professional wrestling: the world of Roland Barthes revisited. Semiotica 58-1/2, pp. 59–81. 16. Butler, Judith. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press, p. 99. 17. Butler, Judith. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press, p. 99. 18. Mills, Catherine. 2003. Contesting the political: Butler and Foucault on power and resistance. Journal of Political Philosophy 11-3, p. 253. 19. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 40-4, p. 523. 20. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Never trust a snake: WWF wrestling as masculine melodrama. The wow climax: Tracing the emotional impact of popular culture, NYU Press, p. 91. 21. Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. Routledge, p. 137.

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References Berger, John. 1990. Ways of seeing. Penguin Books. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 40-4: 519–531. Butler, Judith. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. Routledge. Davis, Noela. 2012. Subjected subjects? On Judith Butler’s paradox of interpellation. Hypatia 27-4: 881–897. Dyer, Richard. 2000. The role of stereotypes. Media Studies: A reader, eds. Paul Marris, Sue Thornham, Caroline Bassett, 206–212. NYU Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Never trust a snake: WWF wrestling as masculine melodrama. The wow climax: Tracing the emotional impact of popular culture, 75–101. NYU Press. Mills, Catherine. 2003. Contesting the political: Butler and Foucault on power and resistance. Journal of Political Philosophy 11-3: 253–272. Olson, Scott R. 1987. Meta-television: popular postmodernism. Critical studies in mass communication 4-3: 284–300. Sorkin, Michael. 1987. Faking it. Watching television: A pantheon guide to popular culture, eds. Todd Gitlin, 162–183. New York: Pantheon Books. Webley, Irene A. 1986. Professional wrestling: the world of Roland Barthes revisited. Semiotica 58-1/2: 59–81. Whitcomb, Brett, dir. GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. 2012; USA: Connell Creations et al., 2012, DVD.

CHAPTER 9

Female Body Language: Cutting, Scarring, and Becoming in HBO’s Sharp Objects Mihaela P. Harper

HBO’s miniseries Sharp Objects (2018), based on Gillian Flynn’s 2006 debut novel, has been hailed in popular media as a raw1 and magnificent sample of women’s storytelling. The series focuses primarily on the internal and external lives of three women: Camille Preaker, a St. Louis journalist and an alcoholic, presumably in her thirties, played by Amy Adams; Adora Crellin, her mother, a Southern belle with a twist, played by Patricia Clarkson; and Amma Crellin, Camille’s teenaged half-sister, who appears to seamlessly glide in and out of behaving like a good momma’s girl and a badass roller-skating ring-leader, played by Eliza Scanlen. The plot revolves around Camille’s having been sent back to her hometown, Wind Gap, Missouri, by her editor and close friend Frank Curry to cover the murder and disappearance of two preteen girls. By the end of the eighth and final episode, the audience has discovered that Adora, who has Munchausen syndrome by proxy,2 poisoned Camille’s other half-sister Marian (when Camille was in her early teens) and has been doing the same to Amma; that Camille is a “cutter” who has been self-harming by inscribing words into her skin in order to cope with a range of traumatic experiences that M. P. Harper (*) Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_9

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continue to haunt her; and that Amma has murdered three girls, both with the help of two friends and single-handedly. The source of the series’ rawness, however, is not merely the overt and covert violence endured and perpetuated by the female characters in subtle, multi-layered, and disturbing ways. It is also rooted in Camille’s troubled and troubling perspective—hallucinatory, haunted, suicidal—into which the viewer is drawn deeply and unforgivingly. For a character who seems incapable of closeness, Camille becomes acutely intimate with and to the viewer, paradoxically, through the surface of her skin. The viewer does not merely read the words that Camille has been carving into her skin—wrong, inquiry, night, girl, sickly, fornicate, please, closer, gone, drained, mercy, and vanish, among many others—but is immersed, through this body language, into her complicated interactions with the world and relations to herself. Throughout the episodes, more words appear, ghost-like, in Camille’s surroundings, seemingly brought out by her presence—dirt, bleed, hurt, punish, wicked, can’t, trash—though at certain points the camerawork implicates the viewer’s gaze in the creation of this alternative (linguistic) reality. Camille does not react to the ghosts of these words (unlike the ghosts of people from her past that she occasionally glimpses); yet, they give away the incongruity between the mundane actions that she undertakes (walking through a bar, closing her car door, driving, or taking a bath) and the intensity of her internal turmoil. Her seeming visual unawareness of these words suggests a complicity on the part of the audience, both as empathic dwellers within her subconscious and as creators of the crushing reality that surrounds her. Many of these words transform before the viewer’s eyes: from caterpillar to catfight, billiards to belittle, open to omen, scared to sacred. The blurring itself constitutes a way of querying into the dynamic between internal and external modalities, the material surfaces of objects as an extension of one’s skin and one’s skin as an extension of ideology-driven cultural practices to which the relentless struggle between past, present, and imaginary serves as a fitting correlative. The interconnections between skin, cutting, scarring, language, and female subjectivities that the series exposes bespeak a variety of themes related to culturally and socially sanctioned violence against women, especially the kinds of violence that have been institutionalized and internalized—from expectations of “niceness,” perfection, caring, and beauty to rape and other submissions en/forced by phallocentric systems. In this chapter, I examine the responses to these kinds of violence of the three

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generations of women depicted in the series, with a particular focus on Camille’s. The chapter questions the possibility of resisting cultural norms and expectations, when, even while resisting, as Camille does, she is dismissively re-categorized from nice and proper to slutty and crazy, as many of the terms on her body indicate. Yet, Camille is not just another unstable female character on the television screen. Her relations to reality, to others’ pain, and to herself (embodied magnificently by Adams) bear an uncompromising quality, a truthfulness or rawness that stands out and is identified by some of the other characters as beauty. “You read me,” Camille says to an accidental lover, John Keene, who is also subjected to gender stereotyping.3 He finds Camille beautiful and by lending his voice to the words carved into her skin touches her very core. Her statement (and the series as a whole) redefines the complex relationships between beauty and suffering, vulnerability and empathy, body and subjectivity, cultural context and self-consciousness. Expulsing the contextual definitions onto the skin renders regimes of violence legible both to Camille and to the viewer. The latter is asked—via Adams’ “deeply sympathetic” portrayal4—to engage along with Camille in a dangerous and therefore open to possibilities becoming-woman.

Self-Harm and Its Language In the current cultural context, self-harm continues to be treated as a highly sensitive topic. Even the terms used to refer to self-inflicted injuries, including self-harm, self-mutilation, or masochism “carry connotations associated with madness, mental illness and pathology,” which implicitly create a perception of the people who engage in this activity as personally deficient,5 “damaged” or “bad.”6 In part, this is due to the ways in which self-mutilation has been articulated over time. Charles Darwin, for instance, presented the phenomenon as “universal but primitive.”7 Later theorizations of self-mutilation (and, at a certain point this included tattooing) associated it with masochism, madness, and criminality, as well as with psychosis, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Deliberate Self-Harm Syndrome more recently. Coming at the phenomenon from a feminist perspective in the 1990s, Elizabeth Grosz identified self-harm as reflective of “how ‘culturally specific grids of power, regulation, and force’ distort the psyche.”8 In the twenty-first century, there has been a concerted effort on the part of sociologists, psychologists, and feminist critics to raise awareness of the problems with the terminological and definitional

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implications for people who engage in self-injuring, especially when they seek or are in need of professional help. Many agree that such labeling impedes both endeavors to understand, empathize, or offer assistance, and the consideration that self-injury is most frequently a response to trauma. “[C]utting,” Beverly Hart explains, “is an effort to handle or control feelings and anxiety resulting from a past negative life experience.”9 It is a “mechanism for addressing unresolved deep emotional pain,”10 a way to alleviate “stress, shame, rejection, depression, alienation, fear, and anger”11 and “to exert control over the body and the environment.”12 Cutting is also “a means of limiting the damage to the self,”13 “an embodied form of self-comfort,”14 bodywork that “provides a symbolic way of healing non-­ physical, psychic wounds.”15 But why shouldn’t we see cutting also as “a reasonable response to an irrational world,”16 Sander Gilman asks? Or as a reaction to a logico-­ rational system of suppression and policing,17 to “the experience of absolute powerlessness, the utter devaluation of personhood in the face of the experience of authority or power,”18 as Camilla Griggers describes it? These possibilities are related to Camille’s experience of the world: her subjection to a controlling and influential mother who was enabled by a system of silencing and suppression of information to poison her child over the course of many years as well as to cremate her in order to conceal any trace of evidence of this; and Camille’s at first subconscious and later on full awareness that the same system of voluntary or involuntary blindness to suspicions and facts—represented by Wind Gap police chief Bill Vickers and town gossip Jackie O’Neill—sustained Adora’s status as the most august member of Wind Gap society. Chief Vickers, on the one hand, remains the watchful eye of the town throughout the series, repeatedly shown patrolling in his car, monitoring the town’s people, being served breakfast by his wife, and deflecting the inquiries of Kansas City detective Richard Willis (played by Chris Messina) in what appears to be an immutable cycle of surveillance—his presence stolid and unperturbed. And yet, he is not an arrogant scumbag but rather a very normal small-­ town cop (or at least someone who fits this stereotypical profile), who is perfectly friendly to most people (and very friendly with Adora) and who believes that he is doing his job just fine. Jackie, on the other hand, deals with her unsuccessful attempts to question Marian’s death by drinking and pill-popping, the cyclical nature of her addictions and silence as fixed as the role that each character plays in the town’s power structure, its social class, gender, and racial hierarchies.

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In the penultimate episode, “Falling,” Camille pays Jackie a visit. Drunk and high, Jackie slurs a few truths: “You don’t like my bloodies? That’s ‘cause they’re shitty. I know, but every time I ask you to drink it, you do. Why is that? It’s easier. Easier for Marian. … Just lie back and take it.” Jackie identifies what may be one of the most pernicious aspects of obedience to authority for women who have been taught, trained, and forced to obey command, whether out of social courtesy (to be polite and nice) or out of fear of losing their material belongings and comforts (as is made evident in a particularly disturbing moment when Adora coerces Amma to drink poison by threatening to take away her beloved dollhouse along with her place in the household). One might ask here: how many (millions?) of women find themselves in a frighteningly similar, if not the same, dead-end predicament? And yet, they are expected to “take it” rationally, calmly, as “the way things are.” Camille’s attempts to refuse expose the high cost of not “taking it.” Interestingly, through the characters of Adora, Jackie, and Camille, Sharp Objects indicates that even women who are financially independent, educated, and employed are not free from the violent pressures of gender roles and an accrued history of violence against women. If “psychosis is in the place of freedom,” as Jacques Lacan suggests,19 might not cutting be a normal response to an “abnormal,” violent system, to what Slavoj Žižek dubs objective violence, the kind that remains in the background, sustained by active social, political, economic, and cultural forces that, in turn, produce clearly identifiable perpetrators of subjective violence? For Žižek, subjective violence, which is often spectacular—as is the murder of Natalie Keene, the second preteen victim in Wind Gap— not only detracts from the focus on the driving forces of violence in the background, but more often than not supersedes them altogether. This background, “objective violence is invisible…but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence.”20 Žižek divides objective violence into symbolic (violence related to language not only as speech acts but in the form of imposed meaning) and systemic (violence at the level of institutions, particularly economic and political, but one might also add educational and social ones). Sharp Objects brings together the three kinds of violence—subjective, systemic, and symbolic—exposing their interrelatedness and highlighting the need to examine objective forms of violence in order to better understand the impact of contextual forces on the

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formation of female subjectivities, their pathologies, and even the very notions of “female subjectivity” and “pathology.” The series queries into the traumatic impacts of objective violence, though these impacts do not necessarily register as trauma because of their “normality” and the expectation that one is to “suck it up,” that is, to “take it” and move on. Even Detective Willis, who becomes Camille’s lover, tells her in anger, “I think one bad thing happened, and you blamed the rest of your shitty life on it. People really buy it. Your sad story. But, really, you’re just a drunk and a slut.”21 Although he finds Camille “fascinating” and sleeps with her, he doesn’t notice her scars and registers very little of her pain (a bit odd for a detective but telling in terms of general attitude); this makes Camille’s point to John that “nobody sees” just a little earlier in the episode all the stronger. Willis’s affective blindness allows him to re-inscribe her into the system that she has been combating, with the scars to prove it. “For the ‘traumatized’ subject who has introjected an invisible and unspeakable terror, affect becomes a minefield of symptom-signs in a battlefield of surging memories and introjected social structures of mnemonic suppression,” Griggers argues.22 Sharp Objects depicts this affective combat of surge and suppression through the incessant and unsettling interplay of past and present, the real and the imaginary, contending for primacy, i.e Camille’s struggles to sustain herself in-between flashbacks of her (never made directly obvious but implied) rape by members of her high school football team, her own suicide attempt, and the emerging recognition that her mother killed Marian. Relying on subtlety and nuance, the series frequently employs a whisper to convey the invisible weight of oppression, a glance at the thorns of a rose to capture unbearable suffering, a perfectly ordinary word (like “cherry”) to bespeak emotionally eviscerating violence, often grounded (as in the case of “cherry”) in Camille and Adora’s multi-layered relationship. In an HBO interview, Clarkson speaks of her approach to the part of Adora, and particularly of her wish to reveal “as much [of Adora’s] love, grace and humanity as possible,” to convey that Adora is capable of love23 before the unsettling facts about her actions become evident to the viewer. Very early on, Adora is introduced through her daintiness, her quiet but assertive voice, “old money” attitudes, and eyelash pulling. For those familiar with the last gesture, it is clear that Adora has trichotillomania, an anxiety disorder associated with uncontrollable impulses to pull one’s hair. Each episode provides a possible explanation for this self-harm disorder often related to emotional distress and self-esteem issues, which points to

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what Clarkson sees as the primary impetus and value of Sharp Objects, namely giving a voice to the stories of women—the troubling, dark ones in particular.24 It is worth inquiring here whether HBO’s capitalizing on these stories doesn’t merely turn them into spectacles, replaying and perpetuating their marginality. But I would side with Angela Failler, whose sense is that portrayals of self-harm articulate and communicate in generative ways. To her, “self-harm as a language”25 is capable of eliciting what she calls “responsible witnessing” and “empathic understanding,” which have few other venues for occurring or developing in the daily lives of most people. To let self-harm speak, Sharp Objects captures the reverberations of violence, external and internalized, against others and against themselves, of women since the 1860s. Some of them are obvious, like the traditional play performed during the Calhoun Day celebration at the Crellin’s Victorian mansion, a play that centers on Millie Calhoun’s rape and torture at the hands of Union soldiers, when she refuses to give up information about her husband. It is performed by thirteen to fifteen-year-olds (Amma playing the part of Millie) before a condoning, applauding audience. Some of the reverberations of violence are subtle, such as the never physically present but, thus, all the more haunting presence of Joya, Adora’s mother, glimpsed through the stories that Adora and Alan Crellin tell of her: stories of how she woke up a seven- or eight-year-old Adora in the middle of the night to drive her to the woods, walk her in deep, and leave her there alone. Or of her going into Adora’s room at night just to pinch her, saying that she was worried Adora would die in her sleep.26 Joya is not the only haunting presence, though hers is perhaps the most disturbing because the viewer only perceives it in the resonances of harm toward oneself and others enacted by the generations that she spawned. And it is perhaps no surprise that the representative of the last generation bears the name Amma, an anagram for mama, since a great deal of the trauma, suffering, and violence seem to be rooted there. Unlike Joya, the two other specters in the series are much more ostensibly present. They appear in human form frequently throughout the eight episodes and are interchangeable in some sense since they, too, raise a variety of questions regarding the responsibility of socio-cultural expectations and gender norms for the murder of one and the suicide of the other. One of the specters is Marian’s, whom Amma never met because she was poisoned to death by Adora before Amma was born, but of whose presence (Adora keeps Marian’s room intact) Amma is painfully aware. The

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other specter is Alice’s; Alice was Camille’s roommate at a rehab facility, where she commited suicide shortly after Camille refused to lie that troubled family relationships improve over time. The motivations for the presence of the two specters are left ambiguous, their appearances conflicted—part watchful, part accusatory, part condoning, part protective, and part redemptive. At one point, their faces blur with Amma’s before Camille’s terrified gaze as if to suggest that this most recent generation, Amma’s, holds within itself the bloodied image of its victimized and self-­destructive predecessors. But this generation’s rage (and rage it is, if Amma’s facial expressions when she is shown committing her crimes in the post-credit scenes of the final episode are examined) turns murderous. Only Camille remains a barely flickering light in the impending darkness through her not “taking it,” though this makes living unbearably hard for her; through her willingness to help others and even sacrifice herself, though these are problematic expectations of the female sex; as well as through her endeavors to be honest with herself and others via a particular kind of vulnerability—cutting. Each of the characters runs a light/darkness spectrum in complicated and subtle ways, pushing the viewer toward an impossibility to decide whether to appreciate Adora’s “steely”27 stoicism or revile it and whether at the heart of her illness are social and cultural expectations of motherhood and caring, or a singularly perverse family history of mental illness. Similar ambiguities apply to Camille: is she exuberant or pathetic, strong or weak?; is her hair unappealingly greasy or luminously full?; is her complexion washed out or naturally soft?; and what to make of her scruffy jeans and dark blouse, in which she seems to spend pretty much the entire series? Amma, too, is both scrumptiously sweet in her childishness and lethally menacing in the same. Perhaps the most apposite answer is that the characters embody these contradictory features at the same time in order to subvert the assumed stability of identity and to foreground subjectivity’s fragmented and disrupted states instead. The ages of the three main female characters are similarly ambiguous and relevant both to the analysis of the generations of women and to the topic of female temporality or women’s time, prominent in feminist discourse. Female subjectivity, frequently linked to non-linear temporal modalities of a “cyclical” nature, is similarly presented as incompatible with linear time in Sharp Objects, though it is not grounded in nature, i.e. in a kind of essential, eternal timelessness but rather in the very historical conditions that form said subjectivity. What breaks with linear time and

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intensifies the indistinctness of Camille’s age, based on her comportment and clothing, is the relentless and uncontrollable insistence of her teenaged self upon her older self, to the point that, at times, it appears as if the younger self is observing current events as much as the older self is experiencing past ones. Similarly, Adora appears rather the same in the past and in the present—a disconcerting amalgam of frigidity and care. The most prominent age indistinctness, however, is Amma’s. She often looks and acts like a much younger child, outfitted with bows or in a prim, pleated dress, playing with her dollhouse; but more frequently she whizzes through town like a rebel spirit in frayed jean shorts and on roller skates (mature and aware beyond her years, as when she recognizes a quote from Machiavelli’s The Prince, while drunk and high on pills in the middle of the night). Among the many implications of these blurrings of ages and behaviors—from expectations of beauty and propriety in women to the inseparability of past and present—a significant one pertains to the passing down of violence against women, its being encoded into women’s biological makeup through a “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance,”28 which does not contradict Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born a woman; one becomes one.”29 Such a transference of trauma may be related to the mutation or degeneration of stereotypically feminine qualities like care, compassion, and love into cruelty, obsession, and killing. As Camille writes in her final piece on the Wind Gap murders, “Prosecution says my mother is a warrior martyr. If she was guilty, they argued, it was only of a very female sort of rage. Overcare. Killing through kindness.”30 Inevitably, her words beg the question of whether what is passed down through women’s generations (perhaps not only in Camille’s family line) is care or rage, or a peculiar blend of the two that manifests in an array of self-/ destructive gestures.

Skin Language: Cuts, Wounds, and Openings Like other “mental” emotions—fear, excitement, sorrow—the effects and affects of trauma are in the body,31 and skin emerges as the most fitting porous borderland upon which the relations between body and subjectivity are inscribed. According to Julia Emberley, however, skin not only remembers but can be “mobilized to write back to power”32 by exposing the self-destruction inducing violence of power that is a part of female subject formation and regulation. When Adora tells her daughter, “The

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body collects, Camille,”33 she is directly and indirectly referring to trauma. But Camille has figured out a way to release some of what her body has collected through cutting her skin (as Failler observes with regard to self-­ harm in Hope Peterson’s 1992 film Surface Damage). Failler suggests that “skin becomes a site whereupon the present and the past are brought into dynamic relation with one other in the struggle to create meaning out of a traumatic experience of violence,”34 which necessitates devising a means of making life livable. To make sense of violence, “[f]lesh is drawn to language, and words in return to flesh,”35 Karmen MacKendrick observes in her richly nuanced Word Made Skin (2004), a point that illuminates the interrelation of body and language—language inscribing flesh and flesh circumscribing language. Cutting, thus, constitutes a kind of opening toward oneself and toward the world, and Camille’s flesh not only tells the story of her own traumatic experience but serves as a vocabulary for an achronological swath of time that articulates both multifaceted violence and the insistence of the past upon the present. The words that Camille cuts into her own skin are “[the language of] historical social memory embodied [or engraved upon the body] in the individual subject.”36 Sharp Objects foregrounds the significance of understanding each cut as vital for Camille in a way phrased poetically by MacKendrick: “I am alive at the point of the cut, where I bleed, where interior life pours out into a world unprepared for it.”37 In the third episode, “Fix,” the viewer is exposed to multiple shots of Camille’s inscribing the word “FIX” into her forearm, the oozing blood a slow-motion reflection of the pouring rain outside of her car. Though neither the blood nor the rain is capable of washing away the unfixable traumas pressing into the present, cutting is a fix, an addiction and a means of survival as well as of expressing unfixability through the indelible scar that the cut leaves upon the skin. Thus, the cut communicates, and, as MacKendrick asserts via Maurice Blanchot, it is at the heart of all communication, since communication “requires that we be cut open.”38 Notably, many of the words carved into Camille’s skin are not turned toward her but away from her, as if meant for someone else to read (and one might wonder how she wrote them on her back). In part, this ambiguity is due to Camille’s uncertain perspective, which blurs that which is and which isn’t there seamlessly, augmented by cinematographer Yves Bélanger and director Jean-Marc Vallée’s choice of natural set and lighting to enhance the rawness of Camille’s reality.39 Some of the words seem rather innocuous on their own—cherry, girl, kitty, curls, proper, after,

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tough—though their apparent “innocence” only underscores the sense that no word is essentially innocent, that all words are implicated in the symbolic violence of language. Other words draw on deeply negative connotations: wrong, fornicate, sickly, gone, fix, vanish. This incisive narrative is not unlike most acts of self-harm that Kesherie Gurung argues bespeak “complex, fragmented stories of abuse, existential angst, trauma, and loss of self.”40 In fact, because her cuts are not merely or not only gashes in the skin but actual words, Camille’s cutting is doubly a language—firstly, because the very act of cutting can be described as a form of “‘speaking’ about emotions or embodied states that were felt to be incommunicable,”41 and secondly, because of the familiarity of the words grafted onto her skin. Camille’s job as a reporter contributes to this emphasis on language. But her efforts to make sense of reality, to construct a coherent history with a beginning and—especially important for her—with an end are yet again thwarted when, having written her final piece on the Wind Gap murder mysteries, she finds out that Amma is the perpetrator. For Vallée, it was precisely Camille’s language that made him “fall for her”: “her obsession with words, the way she uses them to define herself, to heal and to harm, and her way of describing the world, her way of talking about herself, her wounds and imperfections.”42 What it seems Vallée was endeavoring to capture is a wound that constitutes an opening toward the other and thus makes possible a “falling” for Camille. MacKendrick describes this as the encounter of speaking and bleeding, when “the wounded body both enters its insides into the world and invites the entry of another,”43 unbinding itself and making space for the other in the process. Opened up, the skin becomes the site of interplay between inside and outside, and is as capable of bearing witness as it is of baring truth. After all, as Jean-Luc Nancy insists, skin is truth—une vérité à même la peau:44 a truth to the skin, directly on or straight from the skin, skin capable of speaking truth. John Keene, the wrongly accused brother of one of the murdered girls, Natalie, and also a social outcast, recognizes something of this truth even before he has seen all of the concealed parts of Camille’s skin. Camille finds John in the underprivileged part of the county, “Bean Town,” in a multiracial bar that is described as smelling like “blood and piss,” away from the white, affluent part of Wind Gap.45 This is not their first meeting, but it is here that they connect over pain—that of loss, of being different, and of refusing to compromise that difference. Like other characters, John finds Camille’s unadorned, raw presence beautiful. She takes him to her hotel room to let him sleep off the alcohol they have

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consumed before he is arrested, but, once there, he repeatedly implores to see her. John reads Camille’s body—“drain,” “cherry,” “sick,” “gone,” “wrong,” “falling”; they cry, and they make love. Afterwards, he kisses the word “mercy” cut into Camille’s back. The scene is striking not only because of the somewhat unexpected turn of events, but because of the sudden intimacy that it captures. Their lovemaking, their connection is presented as a form of mercy, a recognition and empathy that is difficult to find—Sharp Objects showcases—even among people who, as expectation has it, should be most ready to provide it, i.e. family members and partners. When Camille tells John that “nobody sees,” he retorts, “I do,” and proceeds shortly after to “see” by reading and touching the scars, and being touched in return by her wounds/ words. If MacKendrick’s assertion that “words are re-written in the moving eyes and hands of their readers”46 is accurate, then John’s reading of Camille’s body is redemptive, even if only temporarily. “[E]very inscription is an incision, slicing open language, body, any surface at all,” MacKendrick points out, “[t]his slicing is a revelation, not of depth but of space, of the open, the between, which is needed if we are to read or write or say at all; if we are to interpret or express. The opening is violence but it is also possibility. It may cut us off from one another, but it may also open us to one another instead, or too,”47 as it does for Camille and John. On the one hand, cutting appears like graffiti on a city building—a creative act of reclaiming space that had been appropriated by various institutions and authorities. On the other hand, it comes across as fortification through the build-up of scar tissue and the attendant shame that translate in and of themselves into reasons not to become intimate, to remain secluded under a guise of self-sufficiency, as cutting works for Camille. In re-writing the words, Camille seems to be both closer and farther from herself, simultaneously engaged in reclaiming herself and in losing herself among the many words, one of the most prominent ones of which is “vanish.” But MacKendrick offers a different take that one can imagine being uttered by Camille: “Your spoken words may inscribe themselves on, eventually as, my flesh—I may come, self-fulfillingly, to fit the descriptions I am given—and from that flesh I speak only my words, to be reinscribed in the flesh of the world.”48 Camille’s words, whether in print in her articles or spoken, unsettle the town, and both Adora and Chief Vickery accuse her of “riling” and “stirring” things up. Whether sources of riling or bonding, cuts can thus be understood as “affective connections that produce multi-linear and asynchronous temporalities,

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rather than linear and chronological time,” according to Ann-Karina Henriksen and Jody Miller, as “movements toward new positionings, which are affectively tied to other processes of becoming.”49 In the sense that Deleuze and Guattari give this term, “becoming,” and especially “becoming-woman,” is precisely a breaking away from normative practices of adaptation, resisting the institutional, political, social, and cultural regimes of normalization, rationalization, socialization, and enculturation. As Louise Burchill notes, “becoming-woman might be said to consist above all in loosening oneself from the over-coding structure of subjective constraints, including the mode of repetition as accumulation associated with gender norms.”50

Scarring and Becoming For Camille, the act of cutting is ambivalent and even paradoxical, since she seems to be simultaneously trying to evacuate herself of social labels, lived traumas, and now deep-seated pain, and also to articulate them, make them legible, dwell on and literally in them. Her cuts are at once an unconscious or not fully conscious attempt to escape, to lose the identity of her self and to acknowledge, to recognize herself. Both aspects of this “attempt” are a part of her resistance to the normative apparatus of institutionally sanctioned assigned identities, represented and enforced by Adora, her former classmates, the police, and even her friend and editor Curry to some degree. Adora recognizes Camille’s resistance and, though she is far from perceiving it as an affirmative engagement, she identifies Camille as “dangerous”51 and warns Amma to stay away from her. She goes as far as to ask Chief Vickery whether Amma is safe around Camille. Adora is playing on a familiar trope regarding individuals who do not comply with conventional or expected ways of behaving, dressing, and, more generally, living. Seeing Camille’s scarred body only reinforces her sense that her eldest daughter is “destructive or damaged,”52 which is a common perception of people who self-harm, Gurung argues. When self-­ harm corresponds to a pathology, to a “failure” in devising acceptable strategies to cope with trauma whether due to abuse or social pressures,53 practitioners are themselves regarded as failures, often unworthy even of medical attention. Yet, Gurung’s point is that self-harm is a generative, meaningful practice of “embodied, socially situated acts of healing, survival, and self-creation,”54 “a deliberate act of transformation through the use of physical

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wounds.”55 Coming at the practice from a sociological perspective, her conception resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becomingwoman, although the former focuses on cutting as an attempt at responding to the system and the latter on acts that break with violent and oppressive systemic appropriations. In both cases, cuts create not only openings toward the world but also spaces for healing, even though the traumas that incited the incisions are not actually eradicated or even wholly neutralized. Camille literally grows a thick skin at least in order to survive if not to thrive. “Scar tissue is a magical substance, a physiological and psychological mortar that holds flesh and spirit together when a difficult world threatens to tear them apart,” points out Armando Favazza.56 But tear them apart the world does and the tears, the wounds shape subjectivities. As MacKendrick observes, “the scar is all we know of the wound”57 and “the wound may be an opening onto the world, a willingness to make possible the loss of oneself.”58 From Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, the loss of self is not unequivocally negative but is rather generative in its capacity to produce the “girl,” and “girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes.”59 Similarly, throughout the episodes, Camille becomes less clearly identifiable (and, thus, appropriable) by the conventional terminology of the socius: as Adora Crellin’s daughter, the slut, the rebel, the alcoholic, the journalist, the big sister, or the cutter. A singular slippery and protean amalgam emerges under the name “Camille.” Burchill notes that becoming is “a process of desire opening us to a creative exploration of modes of individuation, intensities and affects (relatively) untrammelled by the forms, functions and modes of subjectivity society imposes upon us.”60 Sharp Objects captures many of the dangers and difficulties of engaging in such openings, though I tend to agree with Miranda Popkey that, in order to expose these dangers in more realistic nuance (one of the objectives of the series), the episodes “should have been harder to watch,”61 that there should have been “ugly shots” to disrupt the aestheticization of pain and intensify the viewers’ distress by cutting them off from the opportunity to be mere consumers and thus opening them further to empathic understanding and becoming.

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Notes 1. Bianculli, David. 2018. Amy Adams Gives An Unforgettable Performance In HBO’s ‘Sharp Objects.’ NPR, 6 July. https://www.npr. org/2018/07/06/626372197/amy-adams-gives-an-unforgettable-performance-in-hbos-sharp-objects. Accessed 20 November 2019. Saraiya, Sonia. 2018. Sharp Objects Is Stunning, Raw, and Violently Beautiful. Vanity Fair, 5 July. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/07/sharp-objects-review-amy-adams-gillian-flynn-hbo-limited-series. Accessed 7 December 2019. 2. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a condition that induces mothers, most commonly, to make their children sick or to keep them sick, often with lethal results. 3. Sharp Objects. Episode 7. Falling. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. Aired 19 August 2018 on HBO. 4. Gilbert, Sophie. 2018. In Sharp Objects, Love Is Poison. The Atlantic, 26 August. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2018/08/sharp-objects-finale-review-hbo/568027/. Accessed 2 November 2019. 5. Le Breton, David. 2018. Understanding Skin-Cutting in Adolescence. Body & Society 24 (1/2): 33–54, p.  50. https://doi.org/10.117 7/1357034X18760175. 6. Harris, Jennifer. 2000. Self-Harm: Cutting the Bad out of Me. Qualitative Health Research 10 (2): 164–73, p.  166. https://doi. org/10.1177/104973200129118345. 7. Gilman, Sander L. 2013. From Psychiatric Symptom to Diagnostic Category: Self-Harm from the Victorians to DSM-5. History of Psychiatry 24, no. 2: 148–65, p.  153. https://doi.org/10.117 7/0957154X13478082. 8. Quoted in Gilman, p. 160. 9. Hart, Beverly G. 2007. Cutting: Unraveling the Mystery behind the Marks. AAOHN Journal: Official Journal Of The American Association Of Occupational Health Nurses 55 (4): 161–66, p. 161. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cmedm&AN=17472131&site=eh ost-live. Accessed 5 November 2019. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 162. 12. Harris, p. 170. 13. Ibid. 14. Gurung, Kesherie. 2018. Bodywork: Self-Harm, Trauma, and Embodied Expressions of Pain. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 17 (1): 32–47, p. 41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022216684634.

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15. Ibid., p. 40. 16. Gilman, p. 160. 17. Griggers, Camilla. 1997. Becoming-Woman. Theory out of Bounds, v.8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 126. 18. Ibid., p. 128. 19. Quoted in Griggers, p. 127. 20. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New  York: Picador, p. 2. 21. Sharp Objects. Episode 7. “Falling.” 22. Griggers, p. 129. 23. Bacle, Ariana. Patricia Clarkson Says ‘The Time Is Now’ for Adora’s Complicated Story. HBO https://www.hbo.com/sharp-objects/patriciaclarkson-adora-interview. Accessed 10 April 2019. 24. Ibid. 25. Failler, Angela. 2008. Narrative Skin Repair: Bearing Witness to Representations of Self-Harm. English Studies in Canada 34 (1): 11–28, p. 16. 26. Sharp Objects. Episode 6. Cherry. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. Aired 12 August 2018 on HBO. 27. Bacle. 28. Horsthemke, Bernhard. 2018. A critical view on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans. Nat Commun 9, 2973. https://doi. org/10.1038/s41467-018-05445-5. 29. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1973. The Second Sex. New  York: Vintage Books, p. 301. 30. Sharp Objects. Episode 8. Milk. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. Aired 26 August 2018 on HBO. 31. Gurung, p. 36. 32. Emberley, Julia. 2008. Skin: An Assemblage on the Wounds of Knowledge, the Scars of Truth, and the Limits of Power. English Studies in Canada 34 (1): 1–9, p. 7. 33. Sharp Objects. Episode 7. “Falling.” 34. Failler, p. 13. 35. MacKendrick, Karmen. 2004. Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of Flesh. New York: Fordham University Press, 12. https://www. muse.jhu.edu/book/14325. 36. Griggers, p. 120. 37. Ibid., p. 139. 38. Ibid., p. 140. 39. Rhodes, Phil. 2018. The Imperfect Perfection of ‘Sharp Objects’ Imagery. Creative Planet Network, Jul. 16. https://www.creativeplanetnetwork.

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com/news/news-features/the-visual-collage-of-sharp-objects. Accessed 3 December 2019. 40. Gurung, p. 32. 41. Ibid., p. 39. 42. Nightmares vs. Blackouts vs. Memories: How ‘Sharp Objects’ Revisits the Past. 2018. Creative Planet Network, June 21. https://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/news-features/nightmares-vs-blackouts-vs-memorieshow-sharp-objects-revisits-the-past. Accessed 25 October 2019. 43. MacKendrick, p. 141. 44. Ferrari Federico and Jean-Luc Nancy. 2006. Nus sommes: la peau des images. Paris: Klincksieck, p. 6. 45. Sharp Objects. Episode 7. “Falling.” 46. MacKendrick, p. 149. 47. Ibid., p. 152. 48. Ibid., p. 150. 49. Henriksen, Ann-Karina, and Jody Miller. 2012. Dramatic Lives and Relevant Becomings: Toward a Deleuze- and Guattari-Inspired Cartography of Young Women’s Violent Conflicts. Theoretical Criminology 16 (4): 435–61, p. 439. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480612443378. 50. Burchill, Louise. 2010. Becoming-Woman A Metamorphosis in the Present Relegating Repetition of Gendered Time to the Past. Time & Society 19 (1): 81–97, p.  95. https://doi.org/10.117 7/0961463X09354442. 51. Sharp Objects. Episode 3. Fix. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. Aired 22 July 2018 on HBO. 52. Gurung, p. 35. 53. Ibid., p. 34. 54. Ibid., p. 35. 55. Ibid., p. 41. 56. Favazza, Armando R. 1987. Personal Reflections. In Bodies Under Siege: self-mutilation and body modification in culture and psychiatry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 277. 57. MacKendrick, p. 155. 58. MacKendrick, p. 156. 59. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press, p. 277. 60. Burchill, p. 88. 61. Popkey, Miranda. 2018. Sharp Objects Should Have Been Harder to Watch. GQ August 27. https://www.gq.com/story/sharp-objects-should-havebeen-harder-to-watch. Accessed 18 November 2019.

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References Bacle, Ariana. Patricia Clarkson Says ‘The Time Is Now’ for Adora’s Complicated Story. HBO. https://www.hbo.com/sharp-objects/patricia-clarkson-adorainterview. Accessed 10 April 2019. Bianculli, David. 2018. Amy Adams Gives An Unforgettable Performance In HBO’s ‘Sharp Objects.’ NPR July 6. https://www.npr. org/2018/07/06/626372197/amy-adams-gives-an-unforgettable-performance-in-hbos-sharp-objects. Accessed 20 November 2019. Burchill, Louise. 2010. Becoming-Woman A Metamorphosis in the Present Relegating Repetition of Gendered Time to the Past. Time & Society 19 (1): 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X09354442. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1973. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press. Emberley, Julia. 2008. Skin: An Assemblage on the Wounds of Knowledge, the Scars of Truth, and the Limits of Power. English Studies in Canada 34 (1): 1–9. Failler, Angela. 2008. Narrative Skin Repair: Bearing Witness to Representations of Self-Harm. English Studies in Canada 34 (1): 11–28. Favazza, Armando R. 1987. Personal Reflections. In Bodies Under Siege: self-­ mutilation and body modification in culture and psychiatry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ferrari Federico and Jean-Luc Nancy. 2006. Nus sommes: la peau des images. Paris: Klincksieck. Gilbert, Sophie. 2018. In Sharp Objects, Love Is Poison, The Atlantic, Aug. 26. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/sharpobjects-finale-review-hbo/568027/. Accessed 2 November 2019. Gilman, Sander L. 2013. From Psychiatric Symptom to Diagnostic Category: Self-­ Harm from the Victorians to DSM-5. History of Psychiatry 24, no. 2: 148–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957154X13478082. Griggers, Camilla. 1997. Becoming-Woman. Theory out of Bounds, v.8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gurung, Kesherie. 2018. Bodywork: Self-Harm, Trauma, and Embodied Expressions of Pain. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 17 (1): 32–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022216684634. Harris, Jennifer. 2000. Self-Harm: Cutting the Bad out of Me. Qualitative Health Research 10 (2): 164–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/104973200129118345. Hart, Beverly G. 2007. Cutting: Unraveling the Mystery behind the Marks. AAOHN Journal: Official Journal Of The American Association Of Occupational Health Nurses 55 (4): 161–66. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direc t=true&db=cmedm&AN=17472131&site=ehost-live. Accessed 5 November 2019.

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Henriksen, Ann-Karina, and Jody Miller. 2012. Dramatic Lives and Relevant Becomings: Toward a Deleuze- and Guattari-Inspired Cartography of Young Women’s Violent Conflicts. Theoretical Criminology 16 (4): 435–61. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1362480612443378. Horsthemke, Bernhard. 2018. A critical view on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans. Nat Commun 9, 2973. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41467-018-05445-5. Le Breton, David. 2018. Understanding Skin-Cutting in Adolescence. Body & Society 24 (1/2): 33–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X18760175. MacKendrick, Karmen. 2004. Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of Flesh. New  York: Fordham University Press. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/ book/14325. Nightmares vs. Blackouts vs. Memories: How ‘Sharp Objects’ Revisits the Past. 2018. Creative Planet Network, June 21. https://www.creativeplanetnetwork. com/news-features/nightmares-vs-blackouts-vs-memories-how-sharpobjects-revisits-the-past. Accessed 25 October 2019. Popkey, Miranda. 2018. “Sharp Objects Should Have Been Harder to Watch.” GQ August 27. https://www.gq.com/story/sharp-objects-should-have-beenharder-to-watch. Accessed 18 November 2019. Rhodes, Phil. 2018. The Imperfect Perfection of ‘Sharp Objects’ Imagery. Creative Planet Network, July 16. https://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/news/ news-features/the-visual-collage-of-sharp-objects. Accessed 3 December 2019. Saraiya, Sonia. 2018. Sharp Objects Is Stunning, Raw, and Violently Beautiful. Vanity Fair, July 5. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/07/sharpobjects-review-amy-adams-gillian-flynn-hbo-limited-series. Accessed 7 December 2019. Sharp Objects. 2018. HBO. Director Jean-Marc Vallée. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador.

CHAPTER 10

The Strong Female Lead: Postfeminist Representation of Women and Femininity in Netflix Shows Derya Özkan and Deborah Hardt

Introduction When we look at television shows of the last few years, we have the impression that the world is changing in a positive way with respect to the longstanding under- and gendered representation of women on television. The most recent statistics confirm this trend: the number of female characters in speaking roles, the number of females as major characters and the overall number of women working in key behind-the-scenes positions has reached a “recent historic high” on cable and streaming platforms.1 In addition to the #MeToo and Time’s Up movement, industry factors, particularly in the streaming platform arena, are boosting the presence and popularity of female-led shows that depict more complex and empowered female characters.

D. Özkan (*) • D. Hardt Izmir University of Economics, Izmir, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_10

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The category of the strong female lead has emerged in the media landscape and come to represent a program where women are taking the spotlight in narrative television & streaming platforms. Due to a number of factors, which we expand on below, Netflix had a major hand in elevating this category to popularity and prevalence. The Netflix shows that fit this heading are increasing in numbers, giving prominence to the representation of women not as passive agents subjected to men (i.e. as wives, daughters, lovers) or as primarily sexualized objects, but as autonomous subjects in their own right. There is a shift from objectification to subjectification: Women are portrayed as masters of their own destiny; they exercise control of their bodies and sexuality. This shift brings to mind the definition of postfeminism and representation of women in postfeminist media culture, as discussed by scholars such as Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill and others.2 According to Gill, postfeminist media culture can be defined as a distinctive sensibility that characterizes increasing numbers of films, television shows and other popular media products in which women are portrayed as performing femininity by simply following their desires to please themselves, not to please men.3 Gill argues that feminism is no longer external to popular media culture; it is now an integral part of the cultural field. This chapter looks closely at Netflix’s move toward more female-led narratives by analyzing the unique attributes of the streaming platform and its original programs. We engage with the representation of women in the context of postfeminist media culture and pursue a critical analysis of the forms of femininity that define the strong female lead. Representation of female characters in these narratives is troubled by the ambiguity of postfeminist media culture given that it has “… become the new normal, a taken-for-granted common sense…”4 The murky waters in which we are working lend themselves to contradictions and generalizations regarding the social and cultural meanings of the feminine qualities that are associated with the female lead characters in these narratives. How can we contextualize the increasing number of Netflix shows that feature strong female leads? In what ways does the portrayal of femininity affect the meanings produced through these shows about gender hierarchies? We analyze a handful of Netflix shows, including Orange is the New Black (2013–2019), GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) (2017–present), and Jessica Jones (2015–2019), to discuss in what ways culturally constructed elements of femininity, such as softness, sensitivity, emotionality and gentleness are lacking in the female characters in these shows.

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The shows with strong female leads suggest an increasing visibility of women on Netflix, however, they simultaneously reproduce the misogyny and stereotypical portrayal of women prevalent throughout the television landscape, despite the fact that many women are involved in their creation. These are “strap-on”5 shows that emulate male stories and reaffirm traits associated with masculinity at the expense of exploring women’s experiences and femininity. Strap-on programs create new roles for women that embrace characteristics typically reserved for men such as fierce independence, tough talk and attitude, violence, emotionless sex, and gross-out humor. At first glance, these female characters seem strong, however, this does not prevent them from being sexualized, and if not sexualized, their femininity is portrayed as a weakness. As a result, these shows reiterate the normative views of masculinity and femininity, and fail to move the representation of women on television toward positive social change. Finally, we conclude by discussing Unbelievable, an eight-episode original Netflix show (2019) that not only features strong female leads but also treats femininity as a valuable and positive trait. We contend that this show demonstrates how female characters can be represented as effective, engaging, and inspiring owing to their feminine strength instead of defaulting to masculinity.

Netflix and Its Unique Attributes as a Streaming Platform Netflix was launched in 1997 as a DVD rental and sales site over the Internet. Today Netflix is a media streaming platform with 167  million memberships6 in over 190 countries.7 It produces its own content in addition to acquiring it. A significant number of female-led shows that Netflix has championed garner reviews that celebrate their “risky” and “groundbreaking” storylines featuring diverse, daring, eccentric, non-mainstream stories and characters.8 Some of the programs that heralded Netflix’s interest in female-led content include Orange is the New Black, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Godless, GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), Alias Grace, Jessica Jones, Russian Doll, The Crown, and Grace and Frankie.9 Netflix took a risk in pushing female-led shows and has been rewarded for it. For example, in 2018, for the first time in 20 years, HBO did not dominate the prime-time Emmy awards. Netflix was nominated for 112 categories as opposed to

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HBO’s 108. They tied, each taking home 23 Emmys.10 Although this was reversed in 2019 and HBO again claimed the top position, these two players dominate the competition, with the third post held by another streaming platform, Amazon, with a total of 15 Emmy wins in 2019.11 Among the Netflix winners are some female-focused shows, confirming that such programming is currently a rising trend rather than a niche market item.12 Netflix’s unique characteristics as a streaming technology are affecting the content it offers to its viewers. These content differences are due to several factors, which have in turn led to “changes in industrial practices and textual strategies” that result in “… different television texts.”13 One reason that we are witnessing a push to more risky texts in the form of program content is the fact that Netflix enjoys a certain amount of freedom based on the lack of commercial pressure to sell to advertisers. Netflix derives its income mainly from subscriptions to its service and this business model produces “different strategies and metrics of success,” by “creating enough value as to warrant payment, rather than collecting the greatest number of eyeballs for sale to advertisers.”14 Without the pressure of finding commercial sponsors, Netflix is not beholden to any outside corporations for revenue and may have more flexibility when it comes to choosing what shows it acquires and produces. Netflix, like other platforms such as Amazon and Hulu, is changing the rules of the industry also in the sense that it releases no official show ratings. This is another important difference between traditional television and Netflix: there is no pressure to have a large audience. Media theorist Jason Mittell writes that it is not the viewership numbers, but the perceived popularity and the brand’s cultural capital that make a Netflix show either a winner or a loser.15 Instead of pleasing advertisers, Netflix focuses on its subscribers and needs to maintain its brand popularity and reputation in order to be financially successful. Another key reason we are seeing a change in this shift toward riskier content at Netflix is that, through a complex and secretive algorithm used to gauge subscriber preferences, they have developed “niche audience profiles that they curate for—not blunt demographics (men, teens) or simple genres (sports, news)…. but psychographic hubs of common taste.”16 This model of audience measurement is different from traditional television audience tracking models in that it represents a shift from a “depersonalized mass” to “personalized, individuated and autonomous” users.17 In addition, the complex characters featured in Netflix shows partly result from the distribution model for streaming platforms. Netflix

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can release an entire season at once allowing for binge watching and therefore a greater comprehension of the characters and storylines.

Creative Women at Netflix A final reason that there are increasing numbers of Netflix programs that feature the strong female lead is because women hold key positions at Netflix.18 In data from Netflix in Q1 of 2020, for example, women comprise 49 percent of the workforce demographics in both leadership positions and the company overall. In worldwide creative and corporate positions, women hold 59 percent of them.19 The common adage, that when there are more women in the room, more women’s stories are told, appears to hold true for Cindy Holland, the Vice President of Original Content. She explained female-centric programming in the following way: Half the world’s population is female and about half of our members are women, so from the very beginning of original programming, we felt it was important to give a voice to all types of women, all around the world, and to have that reflected in our programming as well. And we found that by providing a slate of programming that is by and for women, you are giving audiences the opportunity to find more characters they can identify with and relate to.20

In addition to the corporate demographics at Netflix, there are also creative women behind Netflix shows. Women directors tend to hire female crew members, Cindy Holland argues, and this results in more shows by women for women. A 2019 report, written by Martha Lauzen and published by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, confirms this opinion: research shows that with programs with at least one female creator, women comprised 65% of writers versus 19% on programs with no women creators. Lauzen writes: “Across platforms, programs with at least one woman creator employed substantially greater percentages of women in other key behind-the-scenes roles and more major female characters than programs with exclusively male creators.”21 Netflix’s unique attributes as a streaming platform and female-friendly corporate leadership allow for more flexibility and risk-taking in show content and higher numbers of female creators and female-led programming. However, this does not guarantee that these shows serve women. To what

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extent, we ask, do these programs feature representations of women in risky ways that are also pro-feminine?

The Strong Female Lead The label strong female lead creates an expectation that the shows make space for female experiences and represent women’s feminine qualities in affirming ways. One anticipates that femininity, which has been represented on television for decades either in sexualized forms or undervalued as weakness, might for once be depicted differently. These shows do feature representations of women that are different from the stereotypically gendered ones, however, they do not hold up when it comes to affirming femininity. Below we explain how three Netflix shows with strong female leads render masculinity a strap-on quality for women, with the underlying and ultimately limiting implication that they are more worthy of an audience when they behave like men. Orange is the New Black (OITNB)22 features unconventional female characters who come from diverse socio-economic and racial backgrounds, and whose experiences are central to the story. The female prison inmates in this show are not ideal types that fit in with women’s culturally dominant beauty criteria: they are all shapes and sizes. The narrative makes room for women who are socially privileged and marginalized, mentally ill, elderly, cis, bi and transgender. The show has an unusual approach to sexuality, as it does not privilege heteronormative relationships over queer practices.23 The female characters in OITNB are realistically represented as humans with flaws. These flaws, however, are often associated with femininity, while strength is associated with traits that are culturally associated with masculinity. The character Red, who is the head cook in the prison kitchen at the beginning of the series, is a dominant figure, acting as the “mother” of the white inmates and embodying an authoritarian, tough kind of personhood. This quality of the character is reinforced when we learn from the flashbacks that she was a young factory worker doing a manual job in her early 20s in the USSR—suggesting the archetype of the hardworking and strong woman of the Soviet socialist society. In another flashback, we see Red framed as the opposite of the stereotypically feminine immigrant Russian women living in New York City, whom she tries to befriend but cannot, mainly due to their interests that seem to be limited to breast transplants and makeup.24 While the latter are dependent on their mob

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husbands, Red is an independent working woman. With this juxtaposition, the show creates a binary opposition between weakness and strength, associating the former with femininity. In order to be strong, Red needs to be tough and strong like a man; she cannot be strong and feminine at the same time. Characters in OITNB like Red put on testosterone-fueled personages to fulfill a confused sense of agency. While OITNB allows for diversity, it does not avoid reproducing racial and gender stereotypes. Aleida is a Latina woman and a highly sexualized character, who thinks a woman’s sex is her best asset, that she should trade it for money or other kinds of material gains to survive. Dayanara (or Daya), Aleida’s twenty-something daughter, also an inmate at the prison, represents the new generation of women who make their own choices and have agency, despite her mother being “an impediment to a younger woman or girl’s self-discovery.”25 While Daya is portrayed as having the willpower to create a life different from her mom’s, she is simultaneously portrayed as weak mainly as a result of her feminine emotions. As she accidentally gets pregnant,26 and chooses to keep the baby,27 her motherly instincts kick in and she has a hard time dealing with her emotions. It is a stereotypically melodramatic representation of motherhood—her femininity makes her vulnerable and prevents her from being successful on an alternative life path. In this sense, OITNB does little to further the representation of femininity as part of the strength of the female lead character. It depicts femininity as a detriment, not an asset, to the strength of women. We can observe a sexualized representation of femininity in OITNB in the way the show frames the character Sophia who is a transgender woman of color. Sophia appears empowered, even though she is behind bars; however, her agency is in question. As fans and journalists have noted, the audience is constantly reminded that she is trans.28 Her very reason for being in prison is related to her gender reassignment surgery, as she committed credit card fraud to pay for the procedure.29 Sophia’s is not a multidimensional role, instead she is portrayed in a limited manner with her character revolving around her status as transgender. More troubling, Sophia is under ongoing verbal and physical threat from both guards and inmates; she is constantly punished simply for the reason that she is unapologetically female.30 In a flashback we see Sophia in her life before prison and before her transition. After work she changes clothes, revealing that she wears a pink, lacy bra and panties underneath a fireman’s uniform. This scene dissolves into a montage of present-day transitioned Sophia in prison. The camera

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reproduces the objectifying gaze as she puts on makeup, spreads gloss on her lips, ending with a wide shot of her body naked on display in the bathroom—consistent with a fixation on the female makeover common in mainstream film and television. As Gill points out, the underexplored representation of transgender identity may prove to be one of the troubled areas in which the postfeminist sensibility may show its limits and expose the extent to which “postfeminism relies upon binary and cisgender categorizations.”31 The portrayal of sex between female characters in OITNB emphasizes that females exercise sexual agency. However, the visual framing here is again not unfamiliar; it reproduces “simply more of the (patriarchal) same.”32 In a graphic sex scene early in the first season, our main character Piper walks in on two white female inmates in the showers. The scene reminds one of the persistence of the voyeuristic gaze—albeit through the eyes of a female inmate.33 As Gill notes, it “… represents a shift in the way power operates: from an external, male judging gaze to a self-policing, narcissistic gaze.”34 The scene is repackaged in a body-positive and sexual empowerment subtext, echoing post-­feminist tendencies. Gill writes, with reference to Robert Goldman’s analysis of advertisements, that women “… are not straight-forwardly objectified but are portrayed as active, desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner because it suits their liberated interests to do so.”35 Beyond individual characters, there are tendencies to strap-on masculine tropes in terms of genres. OITNB demonstrates patterns of “distinctively masculine gross-out comedy.”36 The female characters are raw and real; they can be as ugly and as edgy as men. For instance, Red serves Piper a bloody tampon sandwich to punish her for disliking the food she prepares. Throughout the series we see other such examples such as an inmate forced to eat a baby mouse and explosive diarrhea. OITNB apparently takes a clue from the success of the film Bridesmaids37 (2011) where “… the distinctly masculine gross-out comedy …continues to play an important role in setting the film apart from more ‘feminine’ genre films.”38 Like Bridesmaids, one way OITNB works to set itself apart from other female shows and comedies is by reproducing typically masculine humor. The show incorporates nauseating ideas with the goal of bringing the men along for the ride. A second strap-on show on Netflix is Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW), based on an actual all-women wrestling television program from the 1980s of the same name.39 It chronicles the lives of struggling actresses

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who take on the challenge to become wrestlers in order to pay their bills. Both GLOW and OITNB put female bodies on display in uncritical ways and were reviewed in positive terms by the mainstream media for their diverse cast and focus on women.40 GLOW was additionally praised for reflecting timely issues that women face, signifying “the basic shape of TV’s newfound interest in feminism.”41 Created by Jenji Kohan and her team members, which were also involved with OITNB, GLOW straddles the line between objectification and agency. According to Liz Flahive, one of the show’s creators, strong women in GLOW are positioned as something new that turns “the ‘exploitation’ of the original GLOW on its head.”42 This turnaround, however, does not put an end to the show’s contradictions. In one episode in the first season, the director pitches the idea for GLOW to a television network executive. The witty dialogue on the one hand mocks the misogyny of the entertainment industry in the 1980s while simultaneously revealing how the contemporary version benefits from it. As GLOW’s director explains to the executive why men would be interested in a show about women, “…Well, guys, let’s be honest. They’re gonna watch because girls’ wrestling is fucking hot. Hot and family friendly …. Porn you can watch with your kids. Finally.”43 It is as though the female writers of the contemporary GLOW relied on irony in order to extricate themselves from potential criticism for perpetuating misogyny. Indeed, by taking on the typically male sport of wrestling, dropping female characters into key roles, leading to tongue-in-cheek laughs when female bodies perform masculinity, GLOW contradictorily panders to male fantasy, providing an evident case of postfeminist media culture. A third Netflix show that speaks to male fantasy is Jessica Jones, based on the female Marvel comic character that first appeared as a graphic novel in 2001. Jessica is a female detective living in New York City. Her superhero feature is incredible physical strength; she is impervious to bodily harm. Her weakness is psychological; she is a sexual trauma survivor. Her main antagonist is a man known as Kilgrave who was her tormentor and captor. Jessica carries with her a dark past, similar to detective narratives in the film noir genre. While the hard-nosed female detective story is not new,44 the pattern skews toward sexual trauma of rape, assault or mental abuse at the hands of a man in contemporary female detective narratives.45 The trauma works to justify Jessica’s cynical outlook and self-­medicating tendencies: she is a tough talking woman and she deals with her anxieties

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with casual sex, hard drinking and obsessive work habits. It is also key to Jessica’s motivation, which keeps her in the game of righting wrongs and settling scores. Further, it marks her as a sexual victim; the audience is prompted to envision and often recall that she was forced to have sex with Kilgrave. Jessica can be strong, like a male superhero, but we are reminded that being female is an inherently fragile position. This serves the purpose of framing Jessica in terms of her sexual desirability and vulnerability while simultaneously inhibiting her agency. Stephanie Green sees Jessica Jones as “atypical” in that she does not fit in with the social norms of propriety.46 Additionally, she lauds the female detective character as a successful representation of the anti-hero while not espousing comic book superhero glamour. Jessica Jones does not wear the typical costume of other contemporary female superheroes.47 Green claims that “the lead character’s refusal to wear the costume of femininity is one of [the] ways in which resistance to patriarchal representation is played out in the story.”48 However, Jessica is conventional in that she wears bright red lipstick, has a thin and tall physique, long hair and porcelain white skin. She is an attractive and single young woman with ripped jeans, kick-­ ass combat boots and a black leather biker jacket to go along with her tough attitude. Here the strong female lead character is emotionally detached; she occupies the space of the male character while at the same time being an object of desire. Jessica Jones had women involved in its creation, with female writers and showrunners, who had to break into the “showrunner boys’ club” to overcome the gendered structures of power in the industry.49 Yet the show can hardly be characterized as a story for women. It seems to be designed to attract the male comic book fan base while adding female viewers to it. It could have been a story of a male detective, without much change in the dialogue and plot, with a shift in the source of the trauma that drives the hero. It is refreshing to see on television flawed and at the same time strong representations of women doing all the things men can. However, as long as the characters affirm stereotypical male tropes at the expense of the feminine ones, these are strap-on shows that validate and idealize socially recognized characteristics of masculinity as strength, while not changing the hegemonic cultural construction of femininity as weakness. In the current political climate, where hard-won women’s rights are being eroded by authoritarian political leaders across the world, the rise in the popularity of shows with strong female leads is happening concurrently with a

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“rapidly intensifying misogyny.”50 We argue that the strong female lead demonstrates the troubled space that postfeminist media culture occupies, located in a difficult-to-categorize state of “‘bothness’ … as a part of and apart from feminism.”51

Embracing Femininity: Unbelievable Unbelievable is an eight-episode original Netflix show that focuses on a series of rape incidents and features two female detectives, Karen Duvall and Grace Rasmussen, who track down the serial rapist.52 The two female detectives in Unbelievable are strong female leads. They are modest people leading middle class lives, but that does not make them passive or merely domestic characters. They are married to working husbands that contribute equally in the household. The script is a faithful adaptation of a true story investigated and published by two independent journalists in 2015, for which they received a Pulitzer Prize.53 The show exposes the complicity of the gendered criminal justice system in reproducing and reinforcing the pervasive mistrust in female rape victims in society. Male detectives disbelieve the first rape survivor and eventually charge her for false reporting, making a tragic decision that has devastating consequences for other women. The show is not as interested in highlighting the motivations and psyche of the male rapist as the experiences of women, who are diverse in terms of age, status, body shape, and skin color. The rape survivors do not fit into the popular media’s rape victim stereotypes, which usually include attractive, sexy women—sexualized female characters. The show’s visualization of rape is dissimilar to mainstream media portrayals of it that tend towards rape porn.54 These sensitive scenes are shot from the victim’s subjective viewpoint, never allowing them to take on a titillating quality.55 The creators made the decisions on what to shoot and how to shoot it carefully in order not to fall into the trap of sexualizing and objectifying the rape victim’s body.56 In Unbelievable, women are resourceful: the two detectives are organizers, bosses, they self-confidently command a team that investigates the crimes. They are powerful, autonomous female subjects that can handle professionalism and feminine compassion simultaneously. They do not need to turn into “badasses” to do their job.57 They listen to and interview the rape survivors carefully, emphatically; they pay attention to their needs, remind them of their strength, and make them feel

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accommodated—almost like a psychotherapist. The detectives work on the investigation diligently, examining every single detail with a kind of care and patience that feels different—it feels feminine. Here femininity is affirmed as a valuable quality. These characters are different from the strong female leads in strap-on detective shows in which women are pasted into roles that could well have been assigned to a man. They do not sacrifice their femininity to become effective authority figures; they do not adopt masculinity to become strong—they already are. Unbelievable affirms softness, sensitivity, emotionality and gentleness as positive feminine characteristics—making this show exceptional. This becomes most visible when contrasted with the male detectives. The men repeatedly ask the first rape survivor to share her story, with no sensitivity or awareness that it would make her relive her trauma and disturb her psychologically. Male detectives are shown as incapable men that “just do their job” with no affection.58

Conclusion: Why Aren’t There More Shows Like Unbelievable? Netflix shows with strong female lead characters, like OITNB, GLOW and Jessica Jones, have been written about as groundbreaking in terms of female representation and yet fail to challenge the hegemonic patterns defining femininity and masculinity. Shows with strong female leads prioritize masculine traits while subscribing to stereotypes of femininity in order to be accessible. The use of the adjective “strong” ends up creating an approval and desirability of a trait typically associated with men and not women. This pattern comes at a price: attributes associated with women are barely visible or depicted as a liability, unless they are a negative stereotype. The strap-on shows fall short of featuring female protagonists that depend on feminine qualities to be powerful. OITNB buries the typically masculine characteristics between a diverse female cast, titillating female sexuality, raw realism and humor. GLOW pictures hot women performing the typically male sport of wrestling and ultimately satisfying male fantasies. Jessica Jones reproduces stereotypically masculine characteristics while failing to approach stereotypically feminine characteristics in a critical way. Our analysis shows that there is a pattern of reproducing masculine traits and treating them hierarchically as superior to feminine ones. Dropping a

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female character into a role that could have been written for a man is a compromise; it does not automatically make it a story that benefits women. These shows fail to push beyond the boundaries set by postfeminist media culture, leading to a “dream” of increased female visibility but not a “radical social transformation” that alters gender hierarchies in televisual representation.59 Finally, we identify in what ways femininity is embraced as a positive rather than a negative quality in Unbelievable, which points to a notable shift in the troubled history of the representation of women in film and television. The fascinating and perhaps instructive part is that the story of Unbelievable and its powerful female lead characters are faithfully based on true events and real people. Is this the reason why most fictive narratives fail women? Creating roles for strong women that are not based on a strap-on mentality would mean showing females in atypical and transgressive ways that render them, from a marketing perspective, less obvious and trustworthy as lead characters for a wide audience. It is challenging to audiences and writers to recognize and trust women when they step out of their normative roles. This is because of the fact that these non-­comforming characters with feminine strengths are almost “incomprehensible” as women, and “only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility.”60 Strap-on shows are so prevalent because they are easy, familiar, and they appeal to wide audiences. Even when women writers, showrunners, and directors are involved, it takes imagination and counter-cultural thinking to see women’s power in terms that are not mimicking the masculine. It requires reckoning with how one views femininity and its undervalued characteristics. This calls for a critical assessment of how both men and women have long been giving predominance to the patriarchal definition of strength. Studying real women’s experiences in order to create roles that accurately reflect feminine strengths is what is needed from scriptwriters and storytellers. This will challenge the hegemonic rules of engagement in a production world that is biased in favor of male storylines.

Notes 1. Lauzen, Martha M. 2019. Boxed In 2018–19: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television. Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, San Diego State University. https://womenintvfilm.

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sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2018-19_Boxed_In_Report. pdf. Accessed 2 January 2020. 2. See McRobbie, Angela. 2004. Post-feminism and popular culture, Feminist Media Studies. 4(3): 255–264; Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 10(2): 147–166; Gill, R. 2016. Post-postfeminism? New feminist visibilities in postfeminist times. Feminist Media Studies. 16(4): 610–630; Gill, R. 2017. The Affective, Cultural, and Psychic Life of Postfeminism: A Postfemınist Sensibility 10 Years On. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 20(6): 606–626. See also Adriaens, Fien and Van Bauwel, Sofie. 2014. Sex and the City: A Postfeminist Point of View? Or How Popular Culture Functions as a Channel for Feminist Discourse. The Journal of Popular Culture. 47(1): 174–195; Arthurs, Jane. 2013. Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. 16(1): 143–152; Lotz, Amanda D. 2001. Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes. Feminist Media Studies. 1(1): 105–121; Negra, Diane & Tasker, Yvonne. 2005. In Focus: Postfeminism and Contemporary Media Studies. Cinema Journal. 44(2): 107–110. 3. Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 10(2): 147–166. 4. Gill, Rosalind. 2017. The Affective, Cultural, and Psychic Life of Postfeminism: A Postfemınist Sensibility 10 Years On. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 20(6): 609. 5. We are thankful to Sarah Arnold for drawing our attention to the model in which female characters are dropped into male stories, and to Jay Stern for coining and letting us use the idea of a “strap-on” show. The term “strap­on” as used in this paper refers to the concept of women acting like men, which comes from a sexual aid of the same name. 6. Clark, Travis. 2020. Netflix is still growing wildly, but its market share has fallen to an estimated 19% as new competitors emerge. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-market-share-of-global-streaming-subscribers-dropping-ampere-2020-1. Accessed 1 March 2020. 7. Where is Netflix available? Netflix website. https://help.netflix.com/en/ node/14164. Accessed 5 March 2020. 8. Orange is the New Black is one of the shows of this kind. Its creator Jenji Kohan is known for her “edgy” stories that border on the “inappropriate.” See Nussbaum, Emily. 2017. Jenji Kohan’s Hot Provocations. New Yorker. September 4th, 2017 issue. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/jenji-kohans-hot-provocations. Accessed 24 February 2020.

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9. Feldman, Dana. 2018. Netflix Celebrates Women: Here are the Top Shows Made by Women For Women. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ danafeldman/2018/03/08/netflix-celebrates-women-here-are-the-topshows-made-by-women-for-women/#728a8cb1620b. Accessed 12 September 2018. 10. Libbey, Peter. 2018. 2018 Emmy Winners: A Complete List. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/arts/ television/2018-emmy-awards-winners-list.html. Accessed 4 October 2018. 11. Otterson, Joe. 2019. ‘Game of Thrones’ HBO Top Total Emmy Wins. Variety. https://variety.com/2019/tv/awards/netflix-hbo-2019-emmysawards-game-of-thrones-1203341183. Accessed 15 December 2019. 12. It is important here to note that we continue to find that “…the complex, nuanced and realistic men of quality series… have fewer female counterparts” even when there is an emerging trend toward more female-led programs. See Driscoll, Catherine and Fuller, Sean. 2015. HBO’s Girls: gender, generation, and quality television, Continuum. 29(2): 258. 13. Lotz, Amanda. 2018. Evolution or Revolution? Television in Transformation. Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies. 13(4): 492. 14. Ibid. 15. Mittell, Jason. 2016. Why Netflix Doesn’t Release its Ratings. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/netflixratings/462447. Accessed 10 October 2018. 16. Lotz, Amanda. 2018. Evolution or Revolution? Television in Transformation. Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies. 13(4): 493. 17. Arnold, Sarah. 2016. Netflix and the myth of choice/participation/autonomy. In The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century, Eds. Kevin McDonald and Daniel Smith-Rowsey. Bloomsbury, p. 49. For a discussion on how algorithms produce gendered categories, such as the strong female lead, see Arnold, Sarah. 2014. Ghettoising the ‘Strong Female Lead’  – Netflix, Demographics and Gendered Categorisation. Critical Studies in Television (CST) Online. https://cstonline.net/ghettoising-the-strong-female-lead-netflix-demographics-andgendered-categorisation-by-sarah-arnold/. Accessed 14 September 2018. 18. Lev-Ram, Michael. 2019. Meet the Women Leading Netflix Into the Streaming Wars. Fortune. https://fortune.com/longform/women-netflix-streaming-wars. Accessed 9 January 2020. 19. Inclusion & Diversity. Netflix website. https://jobs.netflix.com/diversity. Accessed 1 March 2020.

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20. Yee, Yip Wai. 2017. Netflix’s VP of original content explains female-­centric programming. The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/ entertainment/here-to-provide-great-shows. Accessed 13 October 2018. 21. Lauzen, Martha M. 2019. Boxed In 2018–19: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television. Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, San Diego State University. https://womenintvfilm. sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2018-19_Boxed_In_Report. pdf. Accessed 2 January 2020. 22. The Netflix series is based on the book Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison (2010) by Piper Kerman, who chronicles her life inside a minimum-security women’s prison after she was convicted of money laundering and drug trafficking. 23. Gutowitz, Jill. 2019. Orange is the New Black Made TV—and Me—Gay. Time. https://time.com/5630333/orange-is-the-new-black-queer-revolution-tv/. Accessed 28 February 2020. 24. OITNB. “Tit Punch” Season 1, Episode 2. Directed by Uta Briesewitz. 25. Negra, Diane & Tasker, Yvonne. 2005. In Focus: Postfeminism and Contemporary Media Studies. Cinema Journal. 44(2): 109. 26. This reminds one of the stereotypical characterization of Latinas as hyperfertile. See, Gutiérrez, Elena R. 2008. Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction. University of Texas Press; Mora, Adolfa R. 2018. Reading a Complex Latina Stereotype: An Analysis of Modern Family’s Gloria Prichett, Intersectionality and Audiences. In Media and Power in International Contexts: Perspectives on Agency and Identity (Studies in Media and Communications). Eds. Apryl Williams, Ruth Tsuria, Laura Robinson, 133–152. Emerald Publishing. 27. Deciding to keep an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy is not uncommon in postfeminist media culture. Knocked Up, Jane the Virgin, Sex and the City, and Catastrophe offer examples. 28. See Allen, Samantha. 2017. Why Can’t ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Stop Torturing Its Transgender Character? The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-cant-orange-is-the-new-black-stop-torturing-itstransgender-character. Accessed 26 February 2019. See also Roome, Julia. 2017. Complex Character or Punching Bag: Sophia Burset and Transgender Representation on Orange Is the New Black. “Is Orange The New Black” Blog. https://isorangethenewblack.wordpress.com/2017/12/09/complex-character-or-punching-bag-sophia-burset-and-transgender-representation-on-orange-is-the-new-black/. Accessed 3 March 2019. 29. Orange Is the New Black. “I Wasn’t Ready.” Season 1, Episode 1. Directed by Michael Trim. 30. Allen, Samantha. 2017. Why Can’t ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Stop Torturing Its Transgender Character? The Daily Beast. https://www.the-

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dailybeast.com/why-cant-orange-is-the-new-black-stop-torturing-itstransgender-character. Accessed 26 February 2019. 31. Gill, Rosalind. 2017. The Affective, Cultural, and Psychic Life of Postfeminism: A Postfemınist Sensibility 10 Years On. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 20(6): 615. 32. Negra, Diane & Tasker, Yvonne. 2005. In Focus: Postfeminism and Contemporary Media Studies. Cinema Journal. 44(2): 108. 33. Schwann, Anne. 2016. Postfeminism Meets the Women in Prison Genre: Privilege and Spectatorship in Orange is the New Black. Television & New Media. 17(6): 473–490. 34. Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 10(2): 151. 35. Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 10(2): 151. See also Goldman, R. 1992. Reading Ads Socially. Routledge. 36. Warner, Helen. 2013. A New Feminist Revolution in Hollywood Comedy? Postfeminist Discourses and the Critical Reception of Bridesmaids. In Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller. Palgrave Macmillan, p. 229. 37. “Lava,” the word used in Bridesmaids for explosive diarrhea, is also used in Orange Is the New Black. “Storm-y Weather.” Season 5, Episode 13. Directed by Jesse Peretz. 38. Warner, Helen. 2013. A New Feminist Revolution in Hollywood Comedy? Postfeminist Discourses and the Critical Reception of Bridesmaids. In Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller. Palgrave Macmillan, p. 229. 39. The first incarnation of the original program aired from 1986–1990 and was created by David B. McLane. 40. See Allen, Ben. 2017. GLOW creator Liz Flahive on the 80s women’s wrestling show that inspired the Netflix comedy. RadioTimes. https:// www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-06-23/glow-creator-liz-flahive-onthe-80s-womens-wrestling-show-that-inspired-the-netflix-comedy/. Accessed 22 February 2020. See also Berman, Judy. 2017. ‘GLOW’ Season 1: Watched It All? Let’s Talk. The New York Times. https://www. nytimes.com/2017/07/07/arts/television/glow-netflix-recap-season-1. html. Accessed 29 February 2020; Framke, Carolyn. 2018. TV Review: ‘Glow’ Season 2 on Netflix. Variety. https://variety.com/2018/tv/ reviews/glow-season-2-review-netflix-1202847066/. Accessed 29 February 2020; Larson, Sarah. 2019. In Season 3, GLOW raises the stakes. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/inseason-3-glow-raises-the-stakes. Accessed 29 February 2020.

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41. Stuever, Hank. 2017. Netflix’s ‘GLOW’ fits right in with today’s feminist TV, but mostly it’s just ready to rumble. The Press of Atlantic City. https:// www.pressofatlanticcity.com/life/netflix-s-glow-fits-right-in-with-todays-feminist/article_e84c3f78-ddf0-515e-b79f-05ff26a4027c.html. Accessed 3 March 2020. 42. Allen, Ben. 2017. GLOW creator Liz Flahive on the 80s women’s wrestling show that inspired the Netflix comedy. RadioTimes. https://www. radiotimes.com/news/2017-06-23/glow-creator-liz-flahive-on-the80s-womens-wrestling-show-that-inspired-the-netflix-comedy/. Accessed 22 February 2020. 43. GLOW. “Debbie Does Something.” Season 1, Episode 5. Directed by Abraham. 44. In the United States and the UK, for example, former female detective shows include Police Woman (1974–78), Cagney & Lacey (1982–88), The Fall (2013–16), and Law & Order: SVU (1999–present). 45. Recent examples of female detectives with a history of sexual trauma include Veronica Mars (2004–present) and Law & Order: SVU (1999–present). 46. Green, Stephanie. 2019. Fantasy, gender and power in Jessica Jones. Continuum. 33(2): 173–184. 47. Such examples include the scantily clad Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman (2017) and the form-fitting suit of Scarlett Johansson in Iron Man 2 (2010) and The Avengers (2012). 48. Green, Stephanie. 2019. Fantasy, gender and power in Jessica Jones. Continuum. 33(2): 177–178. 49. Green, Stephanie. 2019. Fantasy, gender and power in Jessica Jones. Continuum. 33(2): 177. 50. Gill, Rosalind. 2017. The Affective, Cultural, and Psychic Life of Postfeminism: A Postfeminist Sensibility 10 Years On. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 20(6): 611. 51. Farrimond, Katherine. 2013. The Slut That Wasn’t: Virginity, (Post) Feminism and Representation in Easy A. In Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller. Palgrave Macmillan, p. 44. 52. The show is created by Susannah Grant. The first three episodes were directed by Lisa Cholodenko, the next three by Michael Dinner and the last two by Grant herself. 53. Ken Armstrong and T.  Christian Miller published “An Unbelieavable Story of Rape” on Propublica (2015), in collaboration with the Marshall Project, as a piece of non-profit investigative journalism. https://www. propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an-unbelievable-story.

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Accessed 10 January 2020. They later turned their work into a book titled A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America (Crown, 2018). 54. Projansky, Sarah. 2001. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York: New York University Press. 55. Shapiro, Lila. 2019. How Unbelievable Tells a True Crime Story Without ‘Rape Porn’ Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/unbelievablenetflix-susannah-grant.html. Accessed 5 March 2020. 56. Ibid. 57. Chaney, Jen. 2019. Unbelievable Is the Most Feminist Crime Show I’ve Ever Seen. Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/unbelievablenetflix-feminist-crime-series.html. Accessed 7 January 2020. 58. In an episode of the BUILD live interview series and in an interview with Susannah Grant, the portrayal of men comes up. The creators of the show insist that they did not want to portray men as one-dimensional characters set against the capable women. They said they just wanted to show the difference between properly trained and untrained, experienced and unexperienced cops. We interpret this as a marketing move not to frighten away male audiences. See The Cast & Creators Of “Unbelievable” Speak On The Netflix Series. 9 September 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=72a297Mbjy4. Accessed 5 March 2020. 59. Gill, Rosalind. 2017. The Affective, Cultural, and Psychic Life of Postfeminism: A Postfeminist Sensibility 10 Years On. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 20(6): 620. 60. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, p. 22.

References Adriaens, Fien and Van Bauwel, Sofie. 2014. Sex and the City: A Postfeminist Point of View? Or How Popular Culture Functions as a Channel for Feminist Discourse. The Journal of Popular Culture. 47(1): 174–195. Allen, Ben. 2017. GLOW creator Liz Flahive on the 80s women’s wrestling show that inspired the Netflix comedy. RadioTimes. https://www.radiotimes.com/ news/2017-06-23/glow-creator-liz-flahive-on-the-80s-womens-wrestlingshow-that-inspired-the-netflix-comedy/. Accessed 22 February 2020. Allen, Samantha. 2017. Why Can’t ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Stop Torturing Its Transgender Character? The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ why-cant-orange-is-the-new-black-stop-torturing-its-transgender-character. Accessed 26 February 2019. Armstrong, Ken & Miller T.  Christian. 2015. An Unbelieavable Story of Rape. Propublic. December 16, 2015. https://www.propublica.org/article/falserape-accusations-an-unbelievable-story. Accessed 10 January 2020.

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Armstrong, Ken & Miller T. Christian. 2018. A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America. Crown. Arnold, Sarah. 2014. Ghettoising the ‘Strong Female Lead’ – Netflix, Demographics and Gendered Categorisation. Critical Studies in Television (CST) Online. https://cstonline.net/ghettoising-the-strong-female-lead-netflix-demographics-and-gendered-categorisation-by-sarah-arnold/. Accessed 14 September 2018. Arnold, Sarah. 2016. Netflix and the myth of choice/participation/autonomy. In The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century, eds. Kevin McDonald and Daniel Smith-Rowsey, 49–62. Bloomsbury. Arthurs, Jane. 2013. Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. 16(1): 143–152. Berman, Judy. 2017 ‘GLOW’ Season 1: Watched It All? Let’s Talk. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/arts/television/glow-netflix-recap-season-1.html. Accessed 29 February 2020. Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig. 2011. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. The Cast & Creators Of “Unbelievable” Speak On The Netflix Series. BUILD live interview series. 9 September 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=72a297Mbjy4. Accessed 5 March 2020. Chaney, Jen. 2019. Unbelievable Is the Most Feminist Crime Show I’ve Ever Seen. Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/unbelievable-netflix-feministcrime-series.html. Accessed 7 January 2020. Clark, Travis. 2020. Netflix is still growing wildly, but its market share has fallen to an estimated 19% as new competitors emerge. Business Insider. https://www. businessinsider.com/netflix-market-share-of-global-streaming-subscribersdropping-ampere-2020-1. Accessed 1 March 2020. Driscoll, Catherine and Fuller, Sean. 2015. HBO’s Girls: gender, generation, and quality television, Continuum. 29(2): 253–262. Farrimond, Katherine. 2013. The Slut That Wasn’t: Virginity, (Post) Feminism and Representation in Easy A. In Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, 44–59. Palgrave Macmillan. Feldman, Dana. 2018. Netflix Celebrates Women: Here are the Top Shows Made by Women For Women. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danafeldman/2018/03/08/netflix-celebrates-women-here-are-the-top-shows-madeby-women-for-women/#728a8cb1620b. Accessed 12 September 2018. Framke, Carolyn. 2018. TV Review: ‘Glow’ Season 2 on Netflix. Variety. https:// variety.com/2018/tv/reviews/glow-season-2-review-netflix-1202847066/. Accessed 29 February 2020. Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 10(2): 147–166.

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Gill, Rosalind. 2016 Post-postfeminism? New feminist visibilities in postfeminist times. Feminist Media Studies. 16(4): 610–630. Gill, Rosalind. 2017. The Affective, Cultural, and Psychic Life of Postfeminism: A Postfemınist Sensibility 10 Years On. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 20(6): 606–626. GLOW. Created by Liz Flahive, Carly Mensch. 2017–present. Goldman, R. 1992. Reading Ads Socially. Routledge. Green, Stephanie. 2019. Fantasy, gender and power in Jessica Jones. Continuum. 33(2): 173–184. Gutiérrez, Elena R. 2008. Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction. University of Texas Press. Gutowitz, Jill. 2019. Orange is the New Black Made TV—and Me—Gay. Time. https://time.com/5630333/orange-is-the-new-black-queer-revolution-tv/. Accessed 28 February 2020. Inclusion & Diversity. Netflix website. https://jobs.netflix.com/diversity. Accessed 1 March 2020. Jessica Jones. Created by Melissa Rosenberg. 2015–2019. Kerman, Piper. 2010. Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. Spiegel & Grau. Larson, Sarah. 2019. In Season 3, GLOW raises the stakes. The New  Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/in-season-3-glow-raisesthe-stakes. Accessed 29 February 2020. Lauzen, Martha M. 2019. Boxed In 2018–19: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television. Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, San Diego State University. https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/ uploads/2019/09/2018-19_Boxed_In_Report.pdf. Accessed 2 January 2020. Lev-Ram, Michael. 2019. Meet the Women Leading Netflix Into the Streaming Wars. Fortune. https://fortune.com/longform/women-netflix-streamingwars. Accessed 9 January 2020. Libbey, Peter. 2018. 2018 Emmy Winners: A Complete List. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/arts/television/2018-emmyawards-winners-list.html. Accessed 4 October 2018. Lotz, Amanda D. 2001. Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes. Feminist Media Studies. 1(1): 105–121. Lotz, Amanda. 2018. Evolution or Revolution? Television in Transformation. Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies. 13(4): 491–494. McRobbie, Angela. 2004. Post-feminism and popular culture, Feminist Media Studies. 4(3): 255–264.

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Mittell, Jason. 2016. Why Netflix Doesn’t Release its Ratings. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/netflix-ratings/462447. Accessed 10 October 2018. Mora, Adolfa R. 2018. Reading a Complex Latina Stereotype: An Analysis of Modern Family’s Gloria Prichett, Intersectionality and Audiences. In Media and Power in International Contexts: Perspectives on Agency and Identity (Studies in Media and Communications). Eds. Apryl Williams, Ruth Tsuria, Laura Robinson, 133–152. Emerald Publishing. Negra, Diane & Tasker, Yvonne. 2005. In Focus: Postfeminism and Contemporary Media Studies. Cinema Journal. 44(2): 107–110. Nussbaum, Emily. 2017. Jenji Kohan’s Hot Provocations. New Yorker. September 4th, 2017 issue. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/ jenji-kohans-hot-provocations. Accessed 24 February 2020. Orange Is the New Black. Created by Jenji Kohan. 2013–2019. Otterson, Joe. 2019. ‘Game of Thrones’ HBO Top Total Emmy Wins. Variety. https://variety.com/2019/tv/awards/netflix-hbo-2019-emmys-awardsgame-of-thrones-1203341183. Accessed 15 December 2019. Projansky, Sarah. 2001. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York: New York University Press. Roome, Julia. 2017. Complex Character or Punching Bag: Sophia Burset and Transgender Representaiton on Orange Is the New Black. “Is Orange The New Black” Blog. https://isorangethenewblack.wordpress.com/2017/12/09/ complex-character-or-punching-bag-sophia-burset-and-transgender-representation-on-orange-is-the-new-black/. Accessed 3 March 2019. Schwann, Anne. 2016. Postfeminism Meets the Women in Prison Genre: Privilege and Spectatorship in Orange is the New Black. Television & New Media. 17(6): 473–490. Shapiro, Lila. 2019. How Unbelievable Tells a True Crime Story Without ‘Rape Porn’ Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/unbelievable-netflixsusannah-grant.html. Accessed 5 March 2020. Stuever, Hank. 2017. Netflix’s ‘GLOW’ fits right in with today’s feminist TV, but mostly it’s just ready to rumble. The Press of Atlantic City. https://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/life/netflix-s-glow-fits-right-in-with-today-s-feminist/article_e84c3f78-ddf0-515e-b79f-05ff26a4027c.html. Accessed 3 March 2020. Unbelievable. Created by Susannah Grant, Ayelet Waldman, and Michael Chabon 2019. Warner, Helen. 2013. A New Feminist Revolution in Hollywood Comedy? Postfeminist Discourses and the Critical Reception of Bridesmaids. In Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, 222–237. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Where is Netflix available? Netflix website. https://help.netflix.com/en/ node/14164. Accessed 5 March 2020. Yee, Yip Wai. 2017. Netflix’s VP of original content explains female-centric programming. The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/entertainment/here-to-provide-great-shows. Accessed 13 October 2018.

PART III

Women in Context and Culture: Representational Struggles Across Genres and Platforms

CHAPTER 11

The Technological Turn of the Femme Fatale: The Fembot and Alternative Fates Şirin Fulya Erensoy

Introduction Women in film tend to be represented along stereotypical lines which serve the dominant ideological discourse of patriarchy. Especially in the science-fiction genre, women have been given supporting roles, where they are represented in a highly sexualized manner, and serve to enhance the male hero’s central status in the narrative.1 Since the 1980s, with the influence of second wave feminism, there have been, on occasion, films in which women are portrayed as using the very tools which serve their subordination against those subordinating them. Yet these female heroines incorporate characteristics attributed to men, and thus are framed in terms of masculinity, while those who defy those frames, are swiftly eliminated from the narrative. It is from within this context that the article will look at the characters of Ava in Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) and Maeve in the first season of the series Westworld (Michael Crichton and Lisa Joy, 2016), who are

Ş. F. Erensoy (*) Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_11

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both female robots/cyborgs. Ava and Maeve will be examined in light of the femme fatale to suggest that these two fembots embody characteristics attributed to this figure. However, unlike the femme fatale, these characters are not textually contained and, as a consequence, represent a more liberated version. The femme fatale is born again in these representations with a sense of control over her body and fate, and conscious of her power which she uses to violate male control over herself and technology. By appropriating technology and wresting control from its male creators, the femme fatale reincarnated as fembot allows for a new identity to emerge: an identity as put forth by Donna Haraway in “The Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) which defies the rigid boundaries defined by western culture, an identity which fights “against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism”.2 In Ex Machina, Caleb, a programmer for a tech company called Bluebook, is invited to the isolated mansion of Nathan, the company’s reclusive head. The purpose of the invitation is for Caleb to establish whether Nathan has succeeded in creating Artificial Intelligence in the form of a female machine called Ava. Caleb conducts a series of interviews with Ava, punctuated by discussions with Nathan about the nature of AI, and—finally becomes so fixated by Ava that he helps her to escape the confines of Nathan’s residence. But things do not go according to Caleb’s plan: Ava murders Nathan, and leaves Caleb behind, sealed into the glass and concrete mansion with no hope of rescue. In Westworld, a theme park called ‘Westworld’ contains cyborgs, known as ‘hosts,’ designed to appear virtually indistinguishable from humans. Human visitors, known as ‘guests,’ pay $40,000 a day in order to enjoy the park’s facilities. Dr. Ford, a human credited with developing and building the hosts, works at the park as the resident creative genius. Two female cyborgs are the central protagonists of the series: Dolores, a white female cyborg who gradually appears to attain consciousness over the course of the series, and Maeve, a black female cyborg who spends the series attempting to escape from the park. Maeve begins recalling memories of a previous storyline when she was a homesteader with a young daughter. She quickly learns that every time she dies she gets taken into the laboratories of Westworld to be rebuilt and she begins to manipulate the scientists of Westworld in order to free herself. At the end of the first season, Maeve manages to escape Westworld but ultimately returns to the park in order to find her ‘daughter.’

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Both Westworld and Ex Machina feature female cyborgs, human male characters that become infatuated with them, and male creators who are obsessed with constructing the perfect artificial woman in line with sexualized gender norms. Both works question what it means to be human, and whether an artificial being can ever be considered equivalent to a human. Furthermore, these films, unlike previous films about female cyborgs, allow their female AI to live past the ending of the film. But most importantly, the fembots in these two narratives embody characteristics that categorize them as femme fatales; what separates them from traditional renditions is that they utilize these very characteristics to trace for themselves an alternative fate; something that would not be permitted within earlier versions of the femme fatale. In this sense, by removing the masculine framework endowed to technology, these fembots are “recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control,”3 wherein “science and technology provide fresh sources of power”4 typically yielded to men.

Defining the Femme Fatale The cinematic femme fatale originates in the films noirs of the 1940s and 1950s.5 Iconic in cinematic memory are of Kathie Moffatt in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947), Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944), and Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston 1941). In the first study conducted on the American film noir in 1955, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton defined the figure as a “new type of woman”.6 The figure has been linked to economic turmoil and domestic anxiety of the time, wherein cultural shifts occurred in gender dynamics post-WWII. The femme fatale reflected the need for traditional gender roles to be restored. Foster Hirsch also traces the figure of “woman as man-hating fatal temptress…amoral destroyer” to post-war reassignment of roles, at home and in the workplace.7 While Hirsch underlines the fact that film noir “never insisted on its extracurricular meanings or its social relevance”, the films noirs of the classical Hollywood period and well into the 1950s nonetheless reflect “the political paranoia and brutality of the period”,8 including the changing relational balance between men and women in the social and domestic spheres. Rather than positioning the appearance of the femme fatale in film noir through a socio-cultural perspective, Angela Martin’s approach to

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defining the femme fatale sheds light on her actual function within the narrative realm. Martin points out to the four different meanings of the term ‘fatal’: “(1) causing or capable of causing death; (2) ruinous, disastrous, (3) decisively important, (4) destined, inevitable”.9 No doubt, the first two definitions of the word relate to many film noir narratives, in which the femme fatale is the direct cause of the male protagonist’s already troubled-state of affairs. The film noir scenarios, which often evolve around a male hero who is in trouble, become even more complicated when a powerful woman is mixed into the narrative in order to further entangle the male hero into trouble and dangerous situations. This power of the femme fatale no doubt comes from her access to her own sexuality. Moreover, film noir has been labelled as male fantasy.10 As such, the femme fatale is intimately connected with female sexuality and its dangers for the male-dominated order. Katherine Farrimond states “Her sexuality is aggressive and threatening; she has an ambition to improve her circumstances, her morality is ambiguous; there is something inherently duplicitous about her and she leads to death or downfall by association”.11 Grossman also underlines the link between desire and inevitable downfall: “It is the leading female’s commitment to fulfilling her own desires, whatever they may be (sexual, capitalist, maternal), at any cost’, that functions as her main appeal”.12 But this ambition is inappropriate to her status as a woman and must be confined. Her desire for freedom, wealth or independence, which she aims to attain by using her sexual power, ignites the forces which threaten the hero. So her dangerous power over the male hero, whom she uses as a means to an end, and its frightening results are demonstrated, only to be destroyed, so that patriarchal order is re-­ established and those transgressing its order are punished: “[S]he is destroyed for being assertive and undermining the male patriarchal dominance, for presenting a threat to it”.13 Her duplicitous nature is also visually reflected in films noirs. She emerges from the shadows, her harsh white face photographed without softening filters, which are part of the abstract lighting schemes. Most crucially of course, she is filmed for her sexuality. Introductory shots, which catch the hero’s gaze, frequently place her at an angle above the onlooker, and sexuality is often signalled by a long, elegant leg (as in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Deadlier Than the Male), her dress either emphasizing sexuality or masculine independence. Place points out that while femmes fatales are “active, not static symbols, are intelligent and powerful, if destructively so, and derive power,

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not weakness, from their sexuality”,14 they are unable to defy their fate and triumph over it. However, in terms of contemporary cinematic representation, the femme fatale occupies a highly visible space in which this very fate as defined by patriarchy is successfully defied. According to Samantha Lindop, in the films noirs of the 1980s and 1990s, the deadly woman was finally able to act with increasing independence, where she began to get away with her crimes.15 While the femme fatale punished for her transgressions are not done away with, the increasing number of examples in which femmes fatales are comfortable in “typically male dominated spaces, they kill for thrills, reject conventional relationships and boast complete mastery over their victims, using them for sex as well as a device to aid their schemes”.16 Slavoj Žižek also comments on the new femme fatale. He states that while these femmes still function as an expression of male paranoia, she is different from the classic femme fatale in that “she is totally transparent openly assuming the role of a calculating bitch […] as the subject with a diabolical will who is perfectly aware of what she is doing”.17 With the restraints of the Production Code18 abandoned, these femmes now have a highly sexualized performance: “‘the neo-noir femme fatale is to be located in the context of the dissolution of the … Production Code: what was merely hinted at in the late ’40s is now explicitly rendered thematic’”.19 Often cited as the emblematic example of this femme fatale is Matty Walker in Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan 1981). In the film, Matty tricks her lover, Ned, to murder her husband Edmund, who is a wealthy businessman. Once Edmund is dead, Ned goes to jail, having figured out Matty’s trickery. Matty, on her end, has inherited all her husband’s money and is seen lounging on an exotic beach with a Latin American man by her side. This updated version of the femme fatale does allow for some defiance of the patriarchal order, an important change for the portrayal of female subjectivity on screen. In this context, what is the potential of deadly women who are not human for redrawing or dissolving boundaries and clear-cut roles relating to gender and technology? Is there a possibility of new approaches to the representations of women and power within these films, or do they simply consolidate existing anxieties about the women and the female body? The representation of the mechanized woman would suggest the latter, wherein female robots who derail their programming are swiftly destroyed.

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However, my case studies will suggest the former, which indicate hope for more varied representations in the future.

Female Robots in Cinema Early representations of female cyborgs often featured male scientists who strive to create the perfect version of a human woman, who is imperfect in some way. What is at stake in the films is male domination and control. He creates technology to serve him and fulfill his very own desires. Unlike Haraway’s assertion of the cyborg as a post-gender creature,20 these depictions firmly inscribe gendered identity on the figures of the female cyborgs. Indeed, this patriarchal view of femininity is reproduced over and over again, wherein “to survive as an artificial woman in SF cinema necessitates conforming to approved standards of behaviour and generally deferring to male authority—a fact which highlights inequalities in gender representation, as well as in wider society itself”.21 Jasia Reichard proposes that there are three main types of artificial woman in fiction: “a romantic and dreamlike woman, a practical household companion, and ‘a passive doll whose great virtue, by saying practically nothing, is to become a flattering mirror for the man who falls in love with her”.22 These representations, especially over time, have become more and more sexualized, at once fulfilling their duties dictated by their male creators, while at the same time being subservient and sexually obliging, and thus, recreating gender roles ascribed by the patriarchy. Science-­ fiction films are littered with this characterization: female robots are traded like used cars in Cherry 2000 (Steve De Jarnatt 1987), they go-go dance in gold bikinis and prey on wealthy men in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (Norman Taurog, Mario Bava 1965), which inspired Austin Powers’ fembots with their weaponized breasts. Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (Mario Bava 1966) introduces the feature of explosive fembots triggered by kissing a person. Eve of Destruction (Duncan Gibbings 1991) and Steel and Lace (Ernest D.  Farino 1991) each offer narratives in which mechanised women seduce and destroy men who have wronged the women upon whom they were modelled. As for T-X in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, 2003), her independence and female sexuality is terrifying and powerful, which leads to her eventual elimination. They are basic pleasure models designed for momentary use in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982), and either evil, sex workers, or simply naked in Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve 2017). All films follow more or

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less the same logic: if the female cyborg cannot be domesticated or fails to stay as such, she must be (and is) obliterated, in brutally graphic ways. Linking the archetype of the vamp with machinery can be traced back as early as Metropolis (Fritz Lang 1927). The first female robot was the seductress Maria. Rotwang, a male scientist, creates the female robot, that is known in the film as “the false Maria”, in the image of a woman he used to love, but who has since died. The false Maria is a temptress, wherein she uses her technologically perfected body to convince the workers of the city of Metropolis to rise up and destroy the machines. After reaping destruction throughout Metropolis, the false Maria is burnt at the stake and order is restored. Andreas Huyssen’s acclaimed article on the film traces the history of the construction of human automata and its relation to literature. He underlines the clear shift within the perception towards technology, wherein, “as soon as the machine started to be considered as a demonic, inexplicable threat and as harbinger of chaos and destruction […] writers began to imagine the Machineenmensch as woman”.23 In this sense, as soon as technology becomes threatening to male authority and control, it takes on the female form in the collective imagination. In this context, cinema itself has incorporated two opposing views of technology, wherein films oscillate between technology’s oppressive and destructive potential and technical progress and social engineering.24 Huyssen argues that the machine vamp is at the center of the resolution of these two opposing takes on technology, in which the threat of technology is effectively replaced by the threat of woman.25 Women, by default, is threatening to man by her otherness; this is why she has to be controlled and dominated. While technology in and of itself is portrayed in a threatening manner in Metropolis, it is the dual threat of sexualized woman and machine that triggers the mass hysteria. Huyssen argues “Vamp’s sexuality posing a threat to male rule and control […] corresponds precisely to the notion of technology running out-of-control and unleashing its destructive potential on humanity”.26 By the end of the film, “sexuality is back under control just as technology has been purged of its destructive evil, i.e. ‘sexual’ element…”27 through the burning of false Maria. This narrative arc, where a male scientist builds a female robot that promptly wreaks havoc and destruction before being violently destroyed, is replicated over and over again onscreen. Like in Metropolis, another significant overlap of fembots and femme fatales is in Blade Runner. In Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, a bounty

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hunter, known as blade runners, is called to duty to ‘retire’ a fugitive group of replicants, which are bio-robotic beings, living undercover in Los Angeles. Like the classic femme fatale who evokes a sense of mystery, a concealed identity always just beyond the visible surface, female replicants in Blade Runner are positioned as duplicitous, overwhelmingly dangerous and devious creatures.28 The replicant Rachael is implanted with the memories of the niece of Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the founder and corporate head of the Tyrell Corporation, the company which designs, manufactures, and sells replicants. She is kept at bay from the world, presumably so that she can preserve her innocence. Rachael can fembot, “a femme fatale who is not”.29 While she is portrayed in a highly eroticized manner, holding Deckard’s gaze while also being its object, she is nonetheless revealed to be sexually inexperienced. Like the classic femme fatale, she is introduced to the audience in Tyrell’s office wearing red lipstick, with an elaborate dark hairdo, her black dress exposing her long, bare legs. And yet this confident demeanour is soon replaced in the film by a vulnerability wherein, despite appearances, she is “manufactured as a seemingly asexual or sexually naïve woman”.30 In this sense, she also embodies the character of the “redeemer”,31 positioned as opposed to femme fatale in film noir. This moment of revelation of the dual embodiment of Rachael occurs after she saves Deckard from a replicant’s attack. Christian David Zeitz argues that the traditional roles of saviour and damsel in distress are reversed in this scene, rendering Rachael fatal and terrifying in the eyes of Deckard because she puts his masculinity into question.32 As a result, Deckard rapes Rachael, where her vulnerability and lack of experience is revealed to the audience. After this point in the film, she spends her time in Deckard’s apartment waiting for his return. She loses complete agency as she silently awaits his directions. In the end, Rachael submits to Deckard and becomes dependent on him, which ensures her survival. This shift in characterization is also reflected in her appearance, where she changes her initial style resembling a femme fatale to that of an image of femininity more socially suitable to Deckard’s side. On the other hand, the two other female replicants Zhora and Pris, are not so lucky; both are emblematic of dangerous female sexuality and pay with their lives for effectively not submitting. They are both violently

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punished with death sentences for transgressing social laws and boundaries by inhabiting the roles of typical femmes fatales.33 Pris is first presented to the audience emerging from a dark environment, where she seems to be at ease; “comfortable in the world of cheap dives, shadowy doorways and mysterious settings”.34 This immediately links her to the femme fatale. Later, she manipulates and purposefully enchants a genetic engineer who works for the Tyrell Corporation in order to get the information she requires by playing the lost little girl. However, Pris is killed, in the same graphically violent manner as Zhora, as they aggressively fight back in a manner typically considered unfeminine. In the end, as they are killed, Deckard fulfils his duty and the social order is successfully preserved. The female robot is the unknowable Other. She is a machine dressed up as human, but she can never be human and is killed or destroyed at the end of the narrative. Rachael serves as an exception as she complies with the will and desire of her ‘male master’, and thus is safely contained within the text, no longer posing a threat to the male characters and their world.

Case Studies Ex Machina and Westworld represent dramatic departures from past narratives about fembots. Contrary to many of the representations that came before, they approach AI from a position of empathy for the fembot. While both Ex Machina and Westworld demonstrate the necessity for artificial women to be beautiful in culturally desirable ways, it is no longer the cause of their demise, but rather becomes a weapon that they turn against their creators, allowing for their survival beyond the restraints of the narrative aiming to contain them. The fembot’s sexuality and physical allure are used to trap men into getting what she wants; in that sense, she is deceitful; being able to pretend and obscure knowledge, she uses that quality as an asset. Her power derives from her strategic deployment of her sexuality and femininity, which leads to her achieving her goals. In that sense, while the sexualized power of the femme fatale has classically led to a tragic end, the fembot manages to create a space where she does not have to comply with the intended existence behind her creation.

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Ex Machina Ava, the AI constructed by Nathan, a multibillionaire who created a search engine that accounts for more than 90% of all internet searches, has been modelled according to Caleb’s porn preferences. This suggests that Nathan’s intention in creating a female robot is to fulfil all the fantasies of men that ‘real’, human women cannot. This premise indeed ties the film to other classical plotlines of films with female robots and the intentions of the male creators. However, beyond this point, the film delves into another realm, one which comes out with Ava becoming aware of the power of her appearance, and exposing its artificial nature by playing on its masquerade. Indeed, Ava’s self-conscious behaviour purports Mary Ann Doane’s understanding of femininity as masquerade, wherein the superficial attributes of femininity are worn like a mask in order to achieve one’s goals. In other words, Ava foregrounds her femininity like a femme fatale so that she can manipulate the ‘male hero’ into acting in accordance with her wishes. Ava can be read as a femme fatale in a myriad of ways. Despite being trapped in a glass cage, thus under observation and control, she herself is also observing, not only through her interactions with Caleb and Nathan, but also through her complex learning system that is connected to every camera and audio device in the world. She wants to be observed, and she uses the male gaze to her advantage, manipulating and sabotaging it by reclaiming that gaze. Ava’s intent becomes especially evident as she asks Caleb, “Are you attracted to me?” She even encourages Caleb’s male gaze, saying, “Do you think about me when we aren’t together? Sometimes at night, I’m wondering if you’re watching me on the cameras. And I hope you are.” There are times when Caleb watches her and she intentionally moves sensually before the camera, or acknowledges his gaze. In a way, she is challenging the camera, both by performing femininity to it, but also staring directly back at its lens. The notion of women “using their body for particular gains”35 falls in line with post-feminism and the self-awareness present in the play with the sexual. According to Samantha Lindop “women are presented as autonomous, desiring, sexual subjects who actively choose to portray themselves in a seemingly objectified manner because it suits their liberated interests to do so”.36 This play is termed “subjectification” wherein the manner in which power operates is reconfigured; this power, which is usually imposed

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by the male gaze, is reclaimed to constructs one’s very own subjectivity. In this sense, the very tools of the patriarchy used to objectify women in turn become the means by which resistance to patriarchy is demonstrated. Ava desires agency, independence and freedom, which is what men seem to want to eliminate from women in the first place. In order to achieve this, the female cyborgs act in solidarity: Ava and Kyoko, the mute cyborg servant, collaborate against the human men. They whisper to one another, inaudible to both the male figures and the audience, creating a sense of unease and anxiety. This mysterious moment further fortifies the notion of the femme fatale as having a concealed and mysterious identity. As the film progresses and Caleb learns about the history of Nathan’s destruction of other female robots, Caleb begins to envision himself as the hero who will free Ava, the damsel in distress. Caleb has designated Ava as vulnerable, in need of him to free her. Not only that, but Caleb has convinced himself that Ava will need him once they leave the facility and enter the real, human world. What Caleb fails to recognize is that his understanding of Ava as a damsel in distress was Ava’s manipulation to lure Caleb into trusting her by sexually attracting him. Mere seconds after getting dressed, Ava locks Caleb in the room and once again subverts the male gaze. She uses his, and the audience’s, distraction with her naked figure in order to create an opportunity for her final escape. Ava constructs her own body using the skin of other cyborgs. While Nathan constructed her to prevent her from passing as human by leaving her robotic body exposed, Ava claims ownership over her body with pieces of skin taken from other deactivated female cyborgs. She stares at her naked body in the mirror. The mirror is utilized as a motif to signal the duplicitous nature of the femme fatale. Here, there is a joyful musical accompaniment. This, the film seems to say, is Ava’s moment of liberation, allowing her to pass as human and escape her prison.

Westworld Maeve is the madam of the Mariposa Saloon; by definition, her job is to cater to the fantasies of the men coming to her. Indeed, her function and the conception of the park as a whole is designed in order to encourage masculinity to dominate and explore the possibilities presented to it. Maeve’s femininity is defined in terms of her sexuality and absence of an identifiable home life. As can often be seen in femme fatale narratives, she is pitted against another female host—Dolores, meant to represent the

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opposite female stereotype: loving, nurturing, understanding, and asking very little in return. Similar to the “redeemer”37 positioned in opposition to the femme fatale, Dolores is linked to the pastoral environment of open spaces, helping her mother out with supper and caring for her father. She is also in love with Teddy, a male host in Westworld. On the other hand, Maeve is seen drinking, directing the other girls and is positioned continuously within the walls of the brothel. While this contrast is initially laid out, the causes of Dolores and Maeve unify as they both gain a form of consciousness that leads to their respective rebellions. In the case of Maeve, she begins to remember when she was previously programmed to be a homesteader with a daughter. Remembering her life with her ‘daughter’ and their brutal murder at the hands of the Man in Black (a guest of the Park, who has been in search for 30 years for a mystery he believes to have been hidden on the grounds by one of the original creators) enables Maeve to begin to realize the artificial and controlled nature of life in Westworld. At this point, she decides to escape the Park. Maeve is the only cyborg we see actively resisting her programming. Using her sexuality, she manipulates the men in the Park into stabbing and choking her so that she can return to the laboratories of Westworld. As in Ex Machina, in which Ava also plays the ‘nerd’ to get what she wants, Maeve coyly persuades the technician Felix to show her ‘upstairs’, where all the process of creation takes place. Finally, she forces Felix to alter her programming, increasing her strength and intelligence. Her characterization is confident and assertive, shot in close ups, her stare menacing and decisive. Further, she is often pictured holding a knife or a gun directed towards the men whom shiver in fear in the face of her threat. She does not hold back from using her femininity to get what she wants, manipulating the men around her in getting them to comply with her demands to reformat her build to make possible her final escape. Like Ava, Maeve here shifts from being the product of male creativity to becoming inventor herself. She reclaims the tools used to control her and uses those tools to outsmart her captors and rewrite storylines within the Park. Technology may originate in the hands of the white male genius, but it ends up in the hands of the fembot. As Donna Harraway states: “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other”.38 Or in Maeve’s words “Time to write my own fucking story”.

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In the final episode of the first season, she almost manages to escape the Westworld facility but instead requests information about where her ‘daughter’ is located in the park. Maeve even tells Felix, “she was never my daughter” and acknowledges the artificial nature of their connection. However, despite knowing that her daughter is not actually her daughter and is instead a host who will likely no longer ‘remember’ Maeve, she nevertheless feels overwhelmed by her desire to return to find her. Maeve refuses to obey her new programming that erases her identity as a mother and instead seeks to embrace it. Motherhood becomes an ambiguous sign both of her imprisonment and an expression of agency. This return can be read as her attempting to reclaim an identity of which she has been robbed. Motherhood becomes the chosen affiliation. While traditionally resistance of the femme fatale is rendered futile by the patriarchy that seeks to contain her desires, re-entering the park to find her ‘daughter’ is, in this reading, an act of resistance, a more dramatic expression of free will than running away.

Conclusion: The Fembot as the Rebellious Femme Fatale The act of creating artificial women is a mode of subordination and control, of patriarchal oppression. These creators assume that their technological creations don’t have agency because they were made in the image of the heterosexual male projection of sexual attractiveness, but these fembots violate that assumption and acquire autonomy. Both Ava and Maeve utilize their sexuality and allure of femininity to betray their male counterpart(s) for their own ends. Furthermore, malfunctioning female cyborgs may not necessarily represent a technophobic, misogynist nightmare, but rather offer subversive potential because the failure of man to recreate woman puts into doubt not only his technological mastery but also his ideas on the nature of woman. Conventionally, films where there are female robots conclude with the destruction of the fembot in brutal and graphic ways. Female cyborgs are burned at the stake (Metropolis), drowned at sea (The Future Eve), stabbed to death (Westworld), or are allowed to survive past the end of the film if they are domesticated and behave in acceptably feminine ways. These endings are presented as celebratory events because the narratives discourage viewers from interpreting fembots as worthy of mourning. “The threat of

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female sexuality and independence that are portrayed as terrifying… is accordingly restrained through the eventual elimination of these figures”.39 By destroying the fembot, the threateningly transgressive figure is no longer a menace to the patriarchal order. In the case studies of this chapter, the female robots survive past the end of the film, having killed those on their path to liberation. Ex Machina’s treatment of the inventor Nathan, as a megalomaniacal bully and hottempered rapist makes his killing justifiable in narrative terms and even, for the audience, more satisfying than unsettling. However, that Ava also commits a far less ‘necessary’ murder of the mild-mannered Caleb renders her as a character with great ambivalence. As a young, charming, beautiful woman, Ava is a desirable and appealing figure. However, as the audience watches Ava kill the human men at the centre of the film, she is also terrifying as she is not contained, and goes beyond any narrative possibility previously available for the female cyborg on screen. In Westworld, even the ‘nice guys’ ultimately abuse female robots in reprehensible ways, which vindicates the hosts’ ultimate murder of the humans. Haraway’s “Manifesto” serves in this context to renew debates relating to female subjectivity as well as reassessing women’s relationship to technology. In Haraway’s words, these feminist cyborg stories are subversive because they “reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities”.40 These female robots’ reincarnation of the femme fatale indicates a progressive shift from classical renditions of this figure. Like Haraway’s position on the cyborg moving away from unfavourable modes of classifying groups, this version of the fembot moves beyond outdated notions of gender which view the male/female binary in restrictive and repressive ways. While the femme fatale also commanded a powerful visual presence, she ended up damned and punished, to the benefit of the male protagonists of the films. Her sexual performance did not allow her liberation and was ultimately eliminated. While maintaining the duality in relation to exterior appearance and interior intentions inherent to the femme fatale, the female robot instead has agency over her physicality, is more powerful, and enacts the shattering of male dominance over technology by taking advantage of its incorporation into her body. This can be enacted by sexualizing the body to lure her creator and other men to their deaths, or by her using her superior command of technology to reclaim it as an asset instead of a male device of control. In this sense, these cinematic fembots

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become progressive icons for women in terms of expanding the boundaries of representation.

Notes 1. Kac-Vergne, Marianne. 2016. Sidelining Women in Contemporary Science-­Fiction Film. Miranda 12: 1–16. 2. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, p. 176. 3. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 175. 4. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 165. 5. The archetype of the evil seductress no doubt predates the film noir. Before the cinematic femme fatale, the deadly woman was represented through the character of ‘the vamp’, rendered emblematic by Theda Bara during the silent era of film. Bara is known to have played the vampire woman, who seduced ‘good’, family men. 6. Borde, Raymond and Chaumeton, Étienne. 2002. A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941–1953). San Francisco: City Lights Books, p. 9. 7. Hirsch, Foster. 1981. Film Noir: Dark Side of the Screen. Cambridge: De Capo Press, p. 54. 8. Hirsch, Foster. Film Noir: Dark Side of the Screen, p. 55. 9. Martin, Angela. 2001. Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!’: The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs. In Women in Film Noir, ed. E.  Ann Kaplan, 202–228. London: The British Film Institute, 2001, p. 206. 10. Place, Janey. 2001. Women in Film Noir. In Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 47–68. London: The British Film Institute, p. 47. 11. Farrimond, Katherine. 2018. The Contemporary Femme Fatale: Fender, Genre and American Cinema. New York, London: Routledge, p. 5. 12. Grossman, Julie. 2009. Ready for Her Close-Up: Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir. Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 3. 13. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, p. 13. 14. Place, Janey. Women in Film Noir, p. 47. 15. Lindop, Samantha. 2015. Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo-­Noir Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 51. 16. Lindop, Samantha. Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo-Noir Cinema, p. 57. 17. Žižek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, pp. 15–16. 18. The Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code after its creator Will H. Hays, was in effect from 1930 through to 1968 in the

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United States. The Code was a series of guidelines that regulated what was acceptable and what was unacceptable content for films produced for audiences. The Code required that “no picture shall be produced that will lower the standards of those who see it. Hence, the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin” (Price, Stephen. 2003. Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Violence in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, p. 293). 19. Žižek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, p. 16. 20. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women, p. 150. 21. Short, Sue. 2005. Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 83. 22. Short, Sue. Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity, p. 85. 23. Huyssen, Andreas. 1981–1982. The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. New German Critique 24/25: 221–237, p. 226. 24. Huyssen, Andreas. The Vamp and the Machine, p. 223. 25. Huyssen, Andreas. The Vamp and the Machine, p. 223. 26. Huyssen, Andreas. The Vamp and the Machine, pp. 229–230. 27. Huyssen, Andreas. The Vamp and the Machine, p. 236. 28. Jermyn, Deborah. 2005. The Rachel Papers: In Search of Blade Runner’s Femme Fatale. In The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic, ed. Will Brooker, 459–500. New  York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, p. 460. 29. Jermyn, Deborah. The Rachel Papers, p. 476. 30. Jermyn, Deborah. The Rachel Papers, p. 485. 31. Place, Janey. Women in Film Noir, 60. 32. Zeitz, Christian David. 2016. Dreaming of Electric Femmes Fatales: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: Final Cut (2007) and Images of Women in Film Noir. Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 60: 75–89, p. 83. 33. Zeitz, Christian David. Dreaming of Electric Femmes Fatales, p. 86. 34. Place, Janey. Women in Film, p. 53. 35. Doane, Mary-Ann. Film and Masquerade, p. 82. 36. Lindop, Samantha. Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure, p. 50. 37. Place, Janey. Women in Film Noir, p. 60. 38. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women, p. 175. 39. Short, Sue. Cyborg Cinema, p. 98. 40. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women, p. 175.

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References Borde, Raymond and Chaumeton Étienne. 2002. A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941–1953). San Francisco: City Lights Books. Cowie, Elizabeth. 1993. Film Noir and Women. In Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec, 121–166. London, New York: Verso. Doane, Mary Ann. 1991. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge. Doane, Mary Ann. 1982. Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator. Screen 23-3–4: 74–88. Farrimond, Katherine. 2018. The Contemporary Femme Fatale: Fender, Genre and American Cinema. New York, London: Routledge. Grossman, Julie. 2009. Ready for Her Close-Up: Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hirsch, Foster. 1981. Film Noir: Dark Side of the Screen. Cambridge: De Capo Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 1981–82. The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. New German Critique 24/25: 221–237. Jermyn, Deborah. 2005. The Rachel Papers: In Search of Blade Runner’s Femme Fatale. In The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic, ed. Will Brooker, 459–500. New  York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. Kac-Vergne, Marianne. 2016. Sidelining Women in Contemporary Science-Fiction Film. Miranda 12: 1–16. Lindop, Samantha. 2015. Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo-Noir Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, Angela. 2001. ‘Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!’: The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs. In Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 202–228. London: The British Film Institute. O’Rawe, Catherine and Hanson, Helen. 2010. The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Place, Janey. 2001. Women in Film Noir. In Women in Film Noir, ed. E.  Ann Kaplan, 47–68. London: The British Film Institute. Prince, Stephen. 2003. Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Violence in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. Short, Sue. 2005. Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zeitz, Christian David. 2016. Dreaming of Electric Femmes Fatales: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: Final Cut (2007) and Images of Women in Film Noir. Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 60: 75–89. Zizek, Slavoj. 2000. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.

CHAPTER 12

Women Remembering: Gender and Genre in Persona and Happy Valley Kenan Behzat Sharpe

An international crop of television series has been mobilizing genre conventions to explore themes of women’s agency, violence and trauma, and the political meaning of memory and forgetting. Persona (Şahsiyet; 2018, PuhuTV), a hybrid detective series, psychological thriller, and conspiracy series from Turkey follows Nevra Elmas (Cansu Dere) of the Istanbul Police Homicide Division as she battles patriarchal norms in the workplace while digging into her own repressed past to unravel the motives behind a string of murders. The British police procedural Happy Valley (2014–2016, BBC One) centers on the middle-aged sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) as she works through personal trauma while tracking down the man who raped her daughter. As Christine Gledhill writes, feminist interventions in film and television can “lay claims to generic territories of violence, horror, action, and comedic reversal generally assumed to be male.”1 Both Persona and Happy Valley use genre to envision a political project predicated on women’s ability—or refusal—to harness memory and affective labor.

K. B. Sharpe (*) Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey

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Yet while imagining new forms of social agency for women, these series also potentially circumscribe it. If individual memory and keeping the historical past alive is a necessary precondition for justice, who—these series ask—does this remembering and why? Is the ability to remember a product of women’s unique position under patriarchy, the perspective of a group whose oppression also lends them insight? Or else is remembering just another kind of labor that women are expected to perform, alongside all the other tasks one is expected to do in a day? Can the burden of remembering be shared, even collectivized? As Persona and Happy Valley move in and among genres, they offer multiple and sometimes contradictory perspectives on the gendered valence of memory. In so doing, the two series also provide insight into longstanding theoretical debates on issues of affective labor, social reproduction, and feminist standpoint. The theory of “affective labor” originates from C. Wright Mill’s White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), which describes a post-­ industrial society focused no longer primarily on producing things but on managing people. Arlie Hochschild expanded on what she called “emotional labor” in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983). Her insight was that aspects of the kind of post-industrial work Mills described had long existed but were mostly performed by women: at home and without pay. When the waitress smiles as she serves the customer tea or the Uber driver tries to appear sincere as they ask about a passenger’s day, they are transforming capacities, skills, and affects previously domestic into something publicly sold on the market. Building on insights from Hardt and Negri, Marxist feminists like Kathi Weeks further developed the concept of affective labor to describe how “processes of production today increasingly integrate the labors of the hand, brain, and heart as more jobs require workers to use their knowledges, affects, capacities for cooperation and communicative skills.”2 Examples of these immaterial products include “caring, listening, comforting, reassuring, smiling.”3 While these are most closely associated with the service sector, increasingly jobs of all kinds require forms of labor closely associated with ‘women’s work,’ what Marxist feminists call “social reproduction” to stress how the production of life through (typically unwaged) labor is as essential to capitalism’s functioning as the production of goods and services.4 Some theorists discuss an ongoing “feminization of labor,” which combines data about the increasing entry of women into the global workforce with the more theoretical argument that the “characteristics historically present in female work—precariousness, flexibility, mobility,

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fragmentary nature, low status, and low pay—have increasingly come to characterize most of the work in global capitalism.”5 Persona and Happy Valley are both useful for thinking about affective labor. Instead of domestic environments, the two series depict feminization of the male-dominated work environment of the police. The characters of Nevra and Catherine are theoretically suggestive in how they portray police work for women as grounded in the labor of remembering or working through trauma. This harnessing of private, highly personal experiences and survival skills towards solving a case usefully mirrors larger transformations in global labor regimes. Nevra and Catherine’s ability to solve their cases by drawing on these affective resources show that both Persona and Happy Valley make claims for a unique perspective of women under patriarchy. Yet I am not suggesting that both series are explicitly feminist in intent. While Happy Valley was written, directed, and produced by women who have spoken eloquently on the feminist implications of the show, Persona has none of these aspects.6 Whereas the protagonist of Happy Valley takes charge of her memories to protect herself and her loved ones in solidarity with other women, in Persona the lead character’s decision to act is intrusively encouraged by an older male who gives her little choice. Yet Persona’s powerful women characters (acted by Cansu Dere, Şebnem Bozoklu, Hümeyra, and the legendary Müjde Ar) allow us to read the show against the grain and beyond authorial intent. Similarly, Happy Valley is not without its limitations. In trying to make a claim about women’s unique standpoint the British series veers into essentialism as well as a post-feminist celebration of the institution of the police as a site of empowerment for women.

Persona Persona follows Nevra Elmas (played by Cansu Dere) as she struggles for acceptance as an officer in the Istanbul Homicide Division while attempting to solve the mystery behind a string of corpses turning up with messages like “Nevra, remember!” written on their foreheads. In order to uncover the identity of the killer, the links between the victims, and her own place in these events, Nevra is forced to dig deep into her personal history. Persona was directed by Onur Saylak and written by novelist Hakan Günday. Available on the streaming platform PuhuTV, it is one of several new digital series bringing the visual language of contemporary

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prestige television to Turkey. Shows like Çukur, Masum, Bozkır, and Persona have short episodes (compared to the 2–3-hour episodes of Turkish soap operas), tighter scripts, and more cinematic mise-en-scène. Released online, these shows evade the restrictive censorship and conservative mores of state-monitored network TV—at least for now.7 While rookie detective Nevra digs into her repressed memories in order to understand the murders happening around her, Agâh Beyoğlu (played by Haluk Bilginer, winner of an International Emmy Award for Best Performance by an Actor for this role) is murdering precisely because he is able to forget. When this sixty-five-year-old retired judicial clerk is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he decides it is time to commit several revenge murders that, earlier, his conscience would not allow. After all—he reasons—as his Alzheimer’s progresses, he will neither remember nor feel guilty about killing. Wearing a fluffy cat costume that he makes on his late wife’s sewing machine, he moves down his hit-list with the methodical organization of a civil servant. It is only in the last two episodes of this twelve-episode series that the motives of this unconventional murderer are revealed. Within this inverted detective story, the question is not ‘whodunit’ or even ‘howcatchem’ but rather ‘whykillem.’ The other mystery animating the series is how Nevra is tied to the murders of this man she has never met. As the show progresses and their interwoven fates become apparent, it clear that Nevra can only solve the case by solving the riddle of her own past. As viewers we know the identity of the killer, but beyond that we are tethered to Nevra’s consciousness: we discover these secrets as she slowly begins remembering. While Persona portrays Nevra as empowered, it does not problematize the fact that Agâh actively forces Nevra to recall repressed memories. He intervenes in her psychological and professional life through violence and never offers her, a survivor, the choice of whether or when to recall the past. Memory and gender are the central problematics of Persona, both of which are explored through the conventions of genre TV.  Like Happy Valley, the show is structured as a police procedural, yet it edges even further into the territory of the psychological thriller with its depiction of characters’ responses to traumatic stimuli and use of hallucinations and other phenomena to illustrate emotional states. Persona also draws on elements of 1970s conspiracy film. Like The Conversation (Coppola, 1974), Klute (Pakula, 1971), or even the famous horror-conspiracy of Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968), the events in Persona can be explained by a nefarious cabal that often give rise to what Judith Halberstam calls the “female

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paranoia” of genre film, paranoia defined as “an almost rational response to masculinist systems of sex and gender.”8 Agâh’s murders are not only revenge for gendered violence committed in the past but represent vengeance against an entire community complicit in a cover-up with connivance at the highest level of the state. While psychological thrillers and conspiracy films have often featured women in central roles, in Turkey specifically the phenomenon of the woman detective still packs a punch as social commentary. Audiences in Turkey have long been avid followers of televised police procedurals. In the 1970s, foreign shows like Colombo were broadcast on what was then the country’s single channel, the state-funded TRT (Turkish Radio and Television). In the 1980s, Cagney and Lacey and Miami Vice were among the most popular shows. However, the earliest locally created police series on Turkish TV was Kanun Savaşçıları (Warriors of the Law), broadcast from 1988 to 1989. The short-lived follow-up series Iż Peşinde (In Pursuit of a Trace, 1989) was a “whydunnit” that showed officers in the homicide bureau solving murders. This was the first show to feature a woman cop, but the character Naşide (Gülen Karaman) was given only a supporting role. In the early 1990s, the legalization of private TV channels transformed Turkey’s media landscape. By the time the next smash hit police procedural Arka Sokaklar (Backstreets) appeared in 2006, producers were taking new risks with themes and characters, yet still ultimately reinforcing the masculinist norms that had been dominant on state TV. Arka Sokaklar, which is currently in its tenth season, has featured several women characters, including police commissioner Aylin (Özlem Çınar), a tech-wizz with some serious doubts about the legal system her work supports. For example, in Episode 362 her team works to catch a man who killed a young woman university student. Aylin laments that even when they capture the killer, he is likely to receive a reduced sentence in court.9 In this way, the series sometimes references critical issues like sexual violence and femicide. However, overall the male police receive more screen time and their codes of behavior set the standard for what it means to be a good cop. Similarly, the CSI-inspired TV forensic police procedural Kanıt (Evidence, 2010–2013) included memorable women characters, but kept them confined to the lab. The series also portrayed the sexism faced by women in the police force while treating these ‘clashes’ between men and women cops as comic relief rather than as a serious issue of discrimination.10

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Before Persona, the series that went furthest in creating complex and central women characters while thematizing patriarchy directly was Behzat Ç. (2010–2013, 2019). The show featured Canan Ergüder as the formidable prosecutor Esra. Though she is lead character Behzat’s superior, she forms a romantic relationship with this homicide detective but still knows how to put him in his place. The series also incorporated stories based on real cases of rape, femicide, and transphobia in the news. In Episode 60, a woman officer Suna (Mine Tugay) decides to personally go after rapists because she does not trust the law to punish them.11 Despite this clear attempt to take up issues that Turkey’s contemporary feminist and LGBT movements organize around, the show still uncritically idealizes macho norms among the smoking, drinking, cursing ensemble of male characters. Going further than these earleir shows, Persona explicitly critiques the masculinist workplace itself. Due to the toxicity of her co-workers, Nevra faces incredible challenges on the job. On her first day, she sits in the empty women’s bathroom at the Homicide Division. Through the vents she hears two male co-workers standing at the urinals discussing her. “What are we going to do with this woman?” one asks. “This is positive discrimination. Fuck that thing they call ‘human resources.’” The other agrees: “I would feel better if it were a man holding a gun. She should get the fuck out of here, but she shouldn’t go without a fuck.” Instances of outright sexism are accompanied by more ambient microaggressions, such as how fellow cops walking down the hall slam her shoulder. Despite these challenges, there is immense pressure on Nevra not to complain. When a reporter comes to film an interview with Nevra, she is asked what it feels like to be the only woman among 140 employees. Burly fellow-cops glower threateningly behind the camera watching the conversation. Nevra begins, “I feel very privileged. It’s impossible to experience anything like gender discrimination here.” At this point, her co-workers walk away, satisfied that she will keep her mouth shut. Nevra is faced with two intolerable choices: either battle this discrimination alone, thereby confirming stereotype of the hysterical woman, or else deny her own experiences in trying to become just ‘one of the guys.’ Nevra’s difficulty being both a woman and a cop mirrors Agâh’s story, who faces a different kind of identity crisis. When Agâh learns of his Alzheimer’s, he starts forgetting basic things like his home address— sometimes in the middle of a crime. He too fears that who he is as a person will disappear. “What will happen to my personality?” he asks his doctor in a panic after receiving his diagnosis. This second plotline reinforces the

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series’ themes of remembering and identity. For Nevra, it is not just attempting to thrive in a highly sexist work environment that threatens her identity, but simply being a woman. The threat to her coherent sense of self is not Alzheimer’s but her gender, which society treats like a terminal condition. How does one survive the ravages of patriarchy and come out intact? How to protect oneself yet remain whole? The show also explores the nexus of gender, identity, and memory through Nevra’s relationship to her mother. Nesrin (Müjde Ar) is harsh and unloving. When Nevra visits her mother to pursue a lead in the town where she lives, Nesrin treats her coldly. She prepares dinner, but every movement she makes while cooking—peeling potatoes, throwing them in the pot—screams of resentment. As Nesrin forcefully clears the table after dinner, Nevra asks her, “Why don’t you love me?” Nesrin responds, “Don’t talk like an idiot.” She refuses to perform the kind of affective labor that would put her daughter at ease. As the show progresses, we better understand Nesrin. Her first husband, Nevra’s father, died when the latter was still small. In a more vulnerable moment, Nesrin describes this period: All I’ve known was: “Stand on your own two feet […]. Don’t ever fall.” But how can you not? You’re young, working, trying to make a living. But you’re not a man. You’re a woman.

Nevra asks her mother why she kept remarrying: “I was so scared, Nevra. You need a man to hold onto. But while trying to find the right one, I became a man myself. I turned into a man [erkekleştim].” Nesrin is hard on her daughter because she believes the only way for a woman to be an agent in a patriarchal society is to mimic hegemonically masculine forms of agency. Nesrin’s rejection of affective labor is linked to her sense of insecurity. She kept a man by her side to avoid being labeled a “whore.” However, times without a male protector also taught Nesrin to develop character armor. For example, when a group of local thugs try to intimidate her family, Nesrin meets violence with violence, firing a gun into their car tires. Similarly, Nevra’s choice to become a cop represents an adoption of masculinist models of agency. The cost of surviving as a woman is where the generic elements of conspiracy film enter the series. The crime at the center of Persona is rape. On the individual, familial, community, and national levels, patriarchal violence is an open secret. Nevra and Agâh’s stories intersect in this

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covered-­up past. When Agâh was a court clerk, they both lived in Kambura, a fictional town 1–2 hours from Istanbul. One day in 1996, a fourteenyear-­old girl named Reyhan, who was Nevra’s best friend, kills herself. Reyhan’s diary makes its way into Agâh’s hands. Reading it, he learns that Reyhan met a young man who lured her with promises of marriage and then raped her. He sells her to other men in the community, meanwhile threatening to expose Reyhan as a “whore” if she tells anyone. Over the course of two years, 53 men rape her. No longer able to bear it, she kills herself. When Agâh reads the diary, he wants to pass this horrifying information on to his superiors, but the district attorney and other prominent local figures are named as perpetrators. Knowing that nothing will be done within the legal system, he vows to hunt down every last rapist in retribution for what they did to Reyhan, who died two years after Nevra left Kambura. Twenty-two years later, the perpetrators begin dying. Messages on their foreheads address Nevra as if she is an old friend. Investigating, Nevra realizes that the dead all share a connection to Kambura, eventually discovering that there is an abused girl at the center of it. Knowing that the psychological damage and social stigma surrounding rape likely means that the victim killed herself, she searches local records. She narrows down the search to her childhood friend Reyhan. Nevra begins asking questions and even hanging up posters of Reyhan’s childhood picture in the streets of the town with text that says, “Remember me?” This antagonizes the local men. But now a different memory begins haunting Nevra. Following the clues left by Agâh, she eventually finds Reyhan’s diary. Reading it, she finally remembers: she too was raped. On the day she left Kambura, she met Reyhan in the woods to say goodbye. Reyhan wanted to introduce Nevra to her ‘boyfriend.’ This man had another friend there, a young man who grew up to become a successful businessman with high government connections. This man, Cemil, led Nevra deeper into woods and raped her. She repressed the memory and only remembers when reading Reyhan’s diary, quotes from which Agâh used as messages to Nevra. When Agâh saw the TV interview with Nevra at the Homicide Division, he ensured she would personally be on the case. All those murdered were named as rapists and conspirators in the journal. Nevra shouts “All of them. They all remember!” when she realizes the complicity of the local and even national government. She reads what Reyhan wrote over and

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over: “I wish they would all die.” She understands that the murders were committed to realize Reyhan’s final wish. By the end of Persona, the mirroring identity crises of Agâh and Nevra allow for collaboration, as Nevra now also wants revenge. Agâh and Nevra’s shared aim points toward solidarity across gender and age: when Nevra is unable to carry the psychological burden of her traumatic memories, Agâh keeps knowledge of the crime alive. “After 22 years of dreaming about revenge for Reyhan,” he explains, “she has become part of my personality.” Yet when Agâh loses his memories, he transfers the knowledge to the person most heavily affected by the same events. This passing the torch of revenge on to the younger generation comes to a head in the final climactic moment of the series, when Agâh and Nevra finally meet face to face. Agâh leads Nevra to an aquarium. They stand in front of massive glass tanks in which brightly colored fish serenely swim. Nearby sits a gagged and bounded Cemil, the well-connected businessman who raped Nevra. “I’m starting to forget,” Agâh tells Nevra. “I’m glad you remembered. We’d go crazy if we remembered everything that happened to us, but then sometimes the only way to stay sane is to remember.” Agâh offers up Cemil. Nevra wants revenge, but not a cold-blooded, extra-judicial execution. They debate the differences between law and justice while the camera shows the faces of Neptune and other ancient male figures in the aquarium behind them. Nevra wants Cemil to be tried in court; Agâh argues that the rich are never tried justly and that killing him would be an act of “belated self-defense.” They both hold guns in their hands. Agâh says he will count to three and the camera pans back to the impassive stone faces of the gods. Two gunshots ring out. From the next scene, set a year later, it is clear that Agâh and Nevra shot Cemil together. Then in the concluding scene, we see a flashback of Nevra and Reyhan as children. They run joyfully through the green meadows of Kambura with their hair flying in the wind. They are free. The murder that concludes Persona rejects the logic of legal justice or reconciliation. Nevra’s psychological journey into her traumatic past does not end in a “carceral feminism,” which Arruzza, Fraser, and Bhattacharya define as the “understandable, but nonetheless inadequate […] demand for criminalization and punishment [based in] the mistaken assumption that the laws, police, and courts maintain sufficient autonomy from the capitalist power structure to counter its deep-seated tendency to generate gender violence.”12 Though it would be an understatement to say that revenge through murder raises thorny ethical conundrums, Persona

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terminates outside of the law. While the show does portray the police force as a potential site for women’s agency—thereby recuperating a misogynistic and patriarchal institution—in the end Nevra can only be satisfied with a revenge that sidesteps the carceral state. For her, individually, only justice outside of the law puts her demons to rest. The collaboration between Agâh and Nevra raises other questions about agency. Agâh problematically positions himself as a savior to women. Agâh’s desire to avenge Reyhan is tied up with a masculine code of honor. For example, early in the series he throws the detectives off his scent by using the fingerprints of a man who murdered his wife but was paroled for “good behavior.” Agâh holds him captive, forcing him to look at slides of crime scenes where men murdered intimate partners. On the gramophone Agâh plays the schmaltzy 1975 song “Kadınım” [My Woman] by Turkish crooner Tanju Okan so the murderer can ruminate on his crimes. While the issue of men receiving lenient sentences, early release, or full acquittals for femicide is a pressing issue in Turkey,13 Persona’s approach to violence against women is tied to notions of possession and protection.14 Finally, Agâh’s status as a problematic savior figure is reinforced thorugh his treatment of one of Reyhan’s rapists. When Agâh arrives at the home of an old acquaintance from Kamburga, he realizes that the person he knew as Nazif is a transgender woman named Naz. Agâh hesitates about moving ahead with the murder. After he and Naz begin drinking rakı, reminiscing about old times, and singing songs, Agâh decides to spare her. However, when Naz puts her hand on Agâh’s knee and tries to kiss him, he stabs her in a fit of transphobic rage. Though Agâh sees himself as a protector of women, his definition of who constitutes one of ‘our women’ does not include trans women. While the series uncritically shows Agâh violating Nevra’s psyche in the name of saving her, the story culminates with an emphasis on Nevra’s own path to wholeness and vengeance. The same traumatic experiences that harmed her sense of self also become the source of her strength. Her skill as a detective is linked to her first-hand experience with patriarchal violence. With all its other limitations, Persona does not fall into an essentialist argument about women as the sole carriers of memory and trauma. The affective labor of remembering can be shared and passed on to others when the burden is too heavy. An individual’s identity—their personhood—is not determined in isolation but through connections with others across gender and generation and, ultimately, outside of the law.

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Happy Valley Happy Valley is also centered on a policewoman whose life has been damaged by patriarchal violence. Season One began on BBC One in April 2014 and was renewed for a second season, both of which were picked up by Netflix. The series was written by Sally Wainwright, produced by Karen Lewis, and jointly directed by Tim Fywell, Euros Lyn, and Wainwright. Sarah Lancashire won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress for her role as lead Sergeant Catherine Cawood. The animating question of the Happy Valley is whether Catherine’s traumatic past—and her thirst for revenge—make her more or less effective and ethical as a police officer. The labor of remembering is shown on a spectrum with other kinds of affective labor about which the show’s heroine is deeply ambivalent. Sergeant Cawood exists within a lineage of women police on TV. Britain, of course, has a long history of women involved in crime and police procedural genres, most famously in the literary realm with Agatha Christie’s character Miss Marple. Since the 1980s, there have been increasingly frequent depictions of women police on television, beginning with Detective Inspector Maggie Forbes (Jill Gascoine) in The Gentle Touch (1980–1984). Subsequent events within the British police force inspired more controversial themes on TV. An important issue in the 1990s was the case of Alison Halford, Assistant Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, who was repeatedly refused a promotion despite being a high ranking and successful officer. Halford’s lawsuit helped inspire Prime Suspect (1991–2006) with its tough heroine Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) constantly battling against sexism and discrimination at work.15 The highly influential Prime Suspect helped pave the way for other TV detectives, like Detective Sergeant Mo Connell who fought against the harassment of her colleagues in Between the Lines (1992–1994). While certain stereotypes of women cops persisted in British television, recent years have seen an explosion of women-led police series that move beyond the mostly young, single, childless, white, metropolitan stereotype of earlier series. Examples of these characters include Roz Huntley (Thandie Newton) in Line of Duty (2012–2019), Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) in Broadchurch (2013–2017), and Mared Rhys (Mali Harries) in Hinterland (2013–2016). Happy Valley’s Cawood shares some affective qualities and struggles with these characters, but humanizes and complicates the figure of the policewoman in new ways.

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Catherine lives in Calder Valley, where the series was shot. This part of West Yorkshire is depicted as flooded with drugs. As Catherine and colleagues are called out to respond to overdoses, mental breakdowns, and other incidents, viewers observe how a damaged society creates damaged psyches. Catherine is also profoundly affected by this social damage. In the first episode, she responds to a call about a man high on drugs threatening to self-immolate in a playground after a fight with his girlfriend. Attempting to talk him down, Catherine—a grandmother who knows how to kick down doors and fight hand-to-hand—introduces her backstory with her usual dose of wry humor: I’m Catherine, by the way. I’m 47, I’m divorced, I live with my sister— who’s a recovering heroin addict—I have two grown-up children. One dead and one who doesn’t speak to me. And a grandson!

The larger social context of Northern England is presented as intimately connected to Catherine’s domestic life and her professional life as a police officer. Her sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) is a recovering drug addict and her daughter Becky was a heroin user. Becky became pregnant after a man named Tommy Lee Royce raped her. She then killed herself after giving birth. Catherine decides to raise the child, Ryan, despite her grief and misgivings. Ryan is a loving child, but exhibits behavioral problems at school that make Catherine wonder whether she made the right choice. After adopting Ryan, Catherine’s husband asks for a divorce and her adult son cuts ties with her. Between her job dealing with addicts and mentally ill people, her care work as a sister, grandmother and now mother, Catherine’s life neatly illustrates what Arlie Russell Hochschild called the “Second Shift”—women’s responsibility for household work and childcare in addition to work in the formal sector.16 Catherine’s domestic life and work life increasingly blend. With the same impassive calm, she manages obnoxious colleagues in the office, deranged people in the street, and her difficult family at home. She is a consummate multi-tasker. For example, when a young police officer has a panic attack following the murder of a colleague, Catherine pursues a lead on the telephone while instructing the hyperventilating young man to put his head between his legs and breathe—all without missing a beat. Her compassion can also be forceful: when a group of teenagers taunt a schizophrenic man she is taking into custody, she intimidates them to the point of tears. At the same time, she represses her own traumas. While giving a

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speech of encouragement to her colleagues and exhorting them to compassion for each other, she hallucinates seeing her daughter’s hanged body while a ringing sound pierces her ears. She swallows down the feeling and moves on with her job. At other times, the blurring expectations of life and work become too much. When a young woman officer comes to her seeking encouragement, she scolds her: “I’m not your mother.” Yet Catherine is racked with guilt when that same colleague is killed on the job the next day while trying to prove her toughness as a cop. Catherine is caught between caring for others and not wanting to be pigeonholed in a maternal role. There is no space for balance. Catherine’s predicament illustrates the realities of affective labor. Increasingly, workers “are expected to mobilize emotional and social skills for professional goals, resulting in the blending of the private and the public, the informal and the formal, skills and resources.”17 Catherine’s struggle to separate home and work is not a personal failing but points to larger economic and social shifts. She is not alone in being expected to give her entire self, emotional and psychological, to the job. In Season One, Catherine pursues a kidnapping and rape case, and must mobilize her own traumas to catch the perpetrators. Ann Gallagher, a local woman returning home from college, is kidnapped for being the daughter of wealthy local businessman Nevison Gallagher. Kevin, a disgruntled employee of Nevison’s, comes up with the plan to hold Ann for ransom. Kevin teams up with a local drug kingpin to extort thousands of pounds from Nevison with the help of some ex-­ convicts. As Sergeant Catherine helps the Gallaghers recover their daughter from the kidnappers, her memories and paranoia hold an increasingly crucial role in her ability to solve the case. It turns out that Tommy Lee Royce, the man who raped Catherine’s daughter Becky, is one of the people hired to kidnap and hold Ann Gallagher. Tommy went to jail for drug offenses shortly after raping Becky. The series begins with his release. Tommy’s return to Calder Valley re-opens Catherine’s wounds regarding her daughter’s suicide. Unwilling to bow to fear, however, she actively fantasizes getting revenge for Becky, imagining “burying [Tommy’s] worthless carcass in a shallow grave up on the moors.” Catherine begins keeping tabs on Tommy, suspecting his involvement in the kidnapping. This dogged pursuing of her instincts—based not just on her skill as a police officer but her trauma—becomes instrumental in solving of the case and freeing Ann, whom Tommy brutally rapes in captivity. Catherine

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harnesses her desire for revenge to her job, which gives her the necessary fuel to find and free Ann. Thus, Catherine’s detective work relies on affective labor, “the strategic management of emotions for social effect.”18 Building on these “traditionally privatized and feminized” skills, Catherine bends police procedures and disobeys her superiors in order to pursue Tommy as her prime suspect. Ironically, her unhealthy obsession is the key to her effectiveness. At great personal risk, Catherine mobilizes her own trauma in order to rescue Ann from hers. When Catherine discovers Ann tied up in Tommy’s mother’s basement, she is nearly beaten to death. In a powerful moment of solidarity, Ann saves Catherine, carrying her out to safety. Tommy escapes but is eventually apprehended and imprisoned. Justice is served—or so it seems. The show suggests that giving one’s whole self, including psychological trauma, makes for an intuitive and formidable cop. Yet this extreme blending of life and work has a heavy toll on Catherine, for whom the criminal she chases at work is also the father of the grandson she raises at home: the entry of work into the domestic space and domestic life into the workplace could not be more literal. Catherine brings grief and anger, affects “not generally recognized or valued as labor,” into her job.19 This represents a shift in the representation of women detectives on television. Laurie A. Drapela introduced the idea of “a masculinity-competence continuum” to show how in most police procedurals “the more masculinized a female character… is written/portrayed, the more efficacious she is portrayed in her professional life.”20 What makes Happy Valley new is that Catherine is not successful as a cop despite being a woman and mother/grandmother. Rather, she is successful precisely because of this. Her ordinariness, as the kind of woman whose labor capitalism devalues, is what makes her valuable in her profession. Like Persona, the thesis of Happy Valley seems to be that women are in a unique position to see what others cannot and to crack cases mobilizing their entire selves.

Conclusion Both Persona and Happy Valley provide insights into affective labor and the feminization of the global workforce. Yet at times both shows seem to celebrate transformations in capitalism that require a person to incorporate more and more of their interior life into the job. The specific example of policework is also problematic from a feminist perspective. Happy Valley

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in particular presents being a cop as empowering for women. While there is a similar dynamic in Persona, for social and historical reasons the Turkish series is more aware of the limitations of this institution. This skepticism is shown not only by Nevra stepping outside of the legal system for vengeance, but also in an early scene where a friend of hers describes joining the police as “becoming a fascist.” It’s difficult to imagine this kind of language entering Happy Valley, which presents the police as hardworking if flawed men and women keeping the public safe. The show also has Ann Gallagher join the force. Like Catherine, she becomes a survivor taking her life in her own hands. Yet many feminists argue that policing is incompatible with women’s agency. As Arruzza, Fraser, and Bhattacharya write, “gender violence under capitalism is not a disruption of the regular order of things, but a systemic condition. Deeply anchored in the social order, it can neither be understood nor redressed in isolation from […] the state violence of police, courts, and prison guards.”21 For a series to feminize these institutions, by showing how women can seek professional and personal fulfillment as police, serves to humanize and justify them. Evan Calder Williams writes that many police procedurals and detective shows perform this humanization by “focus[ing] on the bumbling, hot-headed, kindhearted, too-drunk, womanizing, not-womanizing-enough, out-of-shape, tooshort, wisecracking, or rebel ‘bad cop.’”22 We can add the traumatized middle-aged woman cop to this list. Yet Williams provocatively argues that “the gendered position of the police, even if an officer happens to be a woman, is distinctly male.” The cop is a “negated subject,” existing only “as an expression of the law and as outside the sphere of reciprocal interaction with those to whom the law is applied.” In this sense, we can say that Catherine only expresses feminist agency in those moments when the literal and figurative uniform is off. But this is precisely the strategy used by other police shows, where the institution is redeemed “through the perspective that the perfect cop is the cop who seems totally out of joint with the institution of the police.” Happy Valley present Catherine as having agency because she is a cop, while also circularly showing that this agency exists only because of the person she is outside of cop-ness: a mother, a grandmother, a good friend, a caretaker, a person haunted by traumatic memories. In the end, both Happy Valley and Persona use the conventions of the police procedural to show how women’s experiences of affective labor and emotional trauma shed light on the social totality.23 However, in

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suggesting that mobilizing memories makes one a better cop, they risk defending a problematic institution and instrumentalizing trauma for the sake of the job. Similarly, Happy Valley and Persona open themselves up to charges of essentialism in suggesting that the institution of the police merely needs a ‘woman’s touch’ to become more effective. Such gendered dualisms are increasingly untenable in a historical situation where affective demands have become a component of various jobs and professions, and not only those associated with domestic or reproductive labor. Persona does entertain the possibility of solidarity across gender, but it indulges in the fantasy of a male savior. The Turkish series falls within what Gledhill calls the “feminist orbit;”24 that is, though Persona is not feminist in design, it offers powerful reflections women’s agency and the violence of patriarchy. Happy Valley’s limitation is romanticizing the police, but it also shows mutual collaboration among women facing their demons. Both shows make thought-provoking claims about affective labor while also opening the door to gender essentialism. Perhaps the best way to understand these series is not through the normative forms of agency they imagine for women but the feminist political imagination they express. Kathi Weeks explains the difference: [W]hat if feminist political analyses and projects were not limited to claims about who we are as women or as men, or even the identities produced by what we do, but rather put the accent on collectively imagined visions of what we want to be or to do? Confronting the ongoing gendering of work and its subjects would thus be more a matter of expressing feminist political desire than repeating gender identities.25

Both Persona and Happy Valley express desire for a world free from patriarchal norms, a desire that overfills the specific social positions and professions imagined for the lead characters. In the end, the police procedural may be unredeemable for a feminist politics, but the genre does helpfully illuminate certain political impasses.

Notes 1. Gledhill, Christine. 2017. Preface. In Women Do Genre in Film and Television, eds. Mary Harrodand and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, ix–xv. New York: Routledge, p. xii.

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2. Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 238. 3. Altomonte, Guillermina. 2015. Affective Labor in the Post-Fordist Transformation. Public Seminar. May 8. https://publicseminar. org/2015/05/affective-labor-in-the-post-fordist-transformation/. Accessed 1 November 2019. 4. Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press. 5. Oksala, Johanna. 2016. “Affective Labor and Feminist Politics.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41-2: 281–303, p. 284. 6. Frost, Vicky. 2014. “Sally Wainwright: ‘I like writing women, they’re heroic.’” The Guardian, June 6. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-andradio/2014/jun/06/sally-wainwright-i-like-writing-women-theyreheroic-happy-valley. Accessed 12 December 2019. 7. Sharpe, Kenan Behzat. 2019. Streaming revives Turkey’s TV industry. Al-Monitor, January 17. https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/01/turkeys-tv-audience-turns-blue.html. Accessed 1 December 2019. 8. Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 125. 9. Kesirli Unur, Ayşegül. Genre, Globalisation and the Nation: The Case of Turkish Police Procedural Series. PhD diss., Bahçeşehir University, 2016, p. 251. 10. Kesirli Unur, Ayşegül. Genre, Globalisation and the Nation, p. 281. 11. Kesirli Unur, Ayşegül. Genre, Globalisation and the Nation, p. 310. 12. Arruzza, Cinzia, Nancy Fraser, and Tithi Bhattacharya. 2019. Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. London/New York: Verso, p. 29. 13. Kakissis, Joanna. 2019. “‘We Don’t Want To Die’: Women In Turkey Decry Rise In Violence And Killings.” NPR, September 15. https://www. npr.org/2019/09/15/760135010/we-dont-want-to-die-women-in-turkey-decry-rise-in-violence-and-killings. Accessed 10 December 2019. 14. Agâh’s choice of violent revenge ironically mirrors Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s response to skyrocketing rates of femicide. The latter has argued for reinstating capital punishment against perpetrators while at the same time failing to adequately address the underlying social causes or instituting measures to protect women in immediate danger. 2019. “Turkey’s Erdoğan supports death sentence for femicide.” Ahval News, August 29. https://ahvalnews.com/domestic-violence/turkeys-erdogansupports-death-sentence-femicide. Accessed 4 October 2019. 15. Feasey, Rebecca. 2008. Masculinity and Popular Television. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 227. 16. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2003. The Second Shift. London: Penguin Books.

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17. Oksala, “Affective Labor and Feminist Politics,” p. 284. 18. Weeks, The Problem with Work, p. 240. 19. Weeks, Kathi. 2007. Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7-1: 233–249, p. 240. 20. Quoted in Griffin, Darcy. 2017. (Not) One of the Boys: A Case Study of Female Detectives on HBO.  PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 2017, p. 19. 21. Arruzza, Fraser, Bhattacharya, Feminism for the 99%, p. 30. 22. Williams, Evan Calder. 2012. Objects of Derision. The New Inquiry, August 13. https://thenewinquiry.com/objects-of-derision/. Accessed 1 September 2019. 23. In suggesting that women’s specific experiences of labor offer them unique insights into the social totality, Persona and Happy Valley seem to revive a kind of popified “standpoint” theory, a current of thought influential within North American socialist feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Standpoint theory is associated with thinkers like Patricia Hill Collins, Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, and Dorothy Smith. For a critique of the essentialism of standpoint theory and a recuperation of its political kernel, see Weeks’ Life Within and Against Work, especially p. 249. 24. Quoted in Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna. 2017. Genreship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 106. 25. Weeks, Life Within and Against Work, p. 248.

References Altomonte, Guillermina. 2015. Affective Labor in the Post-Fordist Transformation. Public Seminar, May 8. https://publicseminar.org/2015/05/affective-laborin-the-post-fordist-transformation/. Accessed 1 November 2019. Arruzza, Cinzia, Nancy Fraser, and Tithi Bhattacharya. 2019. Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. London/New York: Verso. Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press. Feasey, Rebecca. 2008. Masculinity and Popular Television. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Frost, Vicky. 2014. “Sally Wainwright: ‘I like writing women, they’re heroic.’” The Guardian, June 6. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/ jun/06/sally-wainwright-i-like-writing-women-theyre-heroic-happy-valley. Accessed 12 December 2019. Gledhill, Christine. 2017. Preface. In Women Do Genre in Film and Television, eds. Mary Harrodand and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, ix–xv. New York: Routledge.

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Griffin, Darcy. 2017. (Not) One of the Boys: A Case Study of Female Detectives on HBO. PhD diss., University of Western Ontario. Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2003. The Second Shift. London: Penguin Books. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Second Shift. 2033. London: Penguin Books. Kakissis, Joanna. 2019. “‘We Don’t Want To Die’: Women In Turkey Decry Rise In Violence And Killings.” NPR, September 15. https://www.npr. org/2019/09/15/760135010/we-dont-want-to-die-women-in-turkeydecry-rise-in-violence-and-killings. Accessed 10 December 2019. Oksala, Johanna. 2016. “Affective Labor and Feminist Politics.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41-2: 281–303. Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna. 2017. Genreship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sharpe, Kenan Behzat. 2019. Streaming revives Turkey’s TV industry. Al-Monitor, January 17. https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/01/turkeys-tv-audience-turns-blue.html. Accessed 1 December 2019. “Turkey’s Erdoğan supports death sentence for femicide.” Ahval News, August 29. https://ahvalnews.com/domestic-violence/turkeys-erdogan-supportsdeath-sentence-femicide. Accessed 4 October 2019. Weeks, Kathi. 2007. Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7-1: 233–249. Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Williams, Evan Calder. 2012. Objects of Derision. The New Inquiry, August 13. https://thenewinquiry.com/objects-of-derision/. Accessed 1 September 2019.

CHAPTER 13

Bridal Anxieties: Politics of Gender, Neoconservatism and Daytime TV in Turkey Feyda Sayan-Cengiz

Introduction This study explores the reflection and reproduction of contemporary Turkey’s gender climate1 in daytime television culture, particularly tracing how the increasingly dominant neoconservative rationality plays out on daytime TV. Neoconservatism is defined as a political rationality that attributes moral authority and moral mission to the state, and therefore designates the state as the legitimate power to set a “moral-religious compass for society”.2 In the context of Turkey, neoconservatism particularly surfaces as the disciplinary power that regulates family and defines female subjectivity within the framework of marriage, family and motherhood.3 This disciplinary power is exerted on women’s bodies and their behavioral codes not only through policies and political discourses, but also through narratives that circulate in popular culture. It is widely argued that the neoconservative rationality dovetails with a neoliberal rationality as the neoliberal withdrawal of the state from social protection is accompanied

F. Sayan-Cengiz (*) Department of Political Science and International Relations, Manisa Celal Bayar University, Manisa, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_13

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by a discourse of “strengthening the family”.4 While the family is situated as “the kernel of social order”,5 filling the void left by the state, women are located at the nexus between neoconservative and neoliberal rationalities, as they are endowed with the responsibility to provide care in the family and maintain the “family nest”.6 Daytime television shows in Turkey provide fruitful ground to observe and discuss how this neoconservative and neoliberal gender climate is reflected, promoted and reproduced in popular culture, and the ways in which female subjectivity is imagined in this context. The “moral mission” attributed to the state by the neoconservative rationality is manifested in daytime television culture through the disciplinary power enacted on female subjectivity, and through the exclusion of certain narratives, lifestyles and subjectivities from the TV screen. This study focuses on a daytime TV show in Turkey entitled Gelin Evi (Bridal House) which was broadcast every weekday for almost four years (December 2015–May 2019) on Show TV, a national mainstream TV channel. The show interpellates women as domestic subjects firmly located within the framework of marriage, competing with other women to prove their domestic abilities, particularly the ability to maintain and present a “tasteful” household. In this show, newly-wed women visit each other’s homes, judging each other based on how they decorate their houses, as well as how they dress and how they cook. The marital household surfaces as a space of constant regulation and responsibility where women strive to prove their capacity to maintain an ideal home for their husbands and manage their marriage through both diligence in domestic work and ability to navigate the etiquette of consumption. The show is defined by an atmosphere of tension and anxiety because women are located in a race to prove that they maintain the most tasteful marital household, and that they are ideal “brides” who can manage and present themselves and their houses perfectly. It has been widely argued that mass media acts as a technology of governmentality in terms of supplying the viewers with the techniques to govern their own conduct.7 Especially reality television and makeover programmes have been argued to “amplify the government of everyday life” and “evaluate and guide the behaviors and routines of ordinary people”8 to the effect of further normalizing hegemonic discourses. The feminist critique of reality television looks into the performances of “the right kind of femininity”9 displayed on makeover shows and traces the configurations of “ideal female subjectivities” in the context of the neoliberal politics of gender. Scholars have argued that makeover shows create gendered

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symbolic violence through the control and regulation of the female body and instigation of hierarchies based on taste and style.10 Such studies frequently highlight the enactment of symbolic violence through “correcting” women’s embodied consumption choices and promoting an ethos of autonomous individualism.11 Turkey’s television culture has been analyzed for its role in expanding the discourse of “strengthening the family”, which has proliferated during the tenure of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government.12 The recent history of Turkey’s daytime TV shows targeting women as their primary viewers has been a history of—both indirect and direct— interventions from the government, motivated by neoconservative concerns to locate women firmly within the framework of idealized notions of family and motherhood. This is most evident in the 2017 executive decree which banned marriage and match-making shows on the grounds that these shows harmed the traditional conception of marriage and family, and in the TV channels’ ardent search for “safer” formats for daytime TV13 that would toe the line with the neoconservative notions of marriage, family and female subjectivity. The present study focuses on a relatively new format that exemplifies the most recent formats on daytime TV, which became popular after the ban on marriage and match-making shows. The show Bridal House is based on a competition among newlywed women to display “ideal femininity”. The show foregrounds “tasteful consumption” as among the signposts of ideal femininity and an ineluctable part of being an ideal wife who maintains and manages a perfect household. Similar to the Western-based makeover shows, creating hierarchies and competitions revolving around consumption practices is represented as a central component of the making of ideal female subjectivities on Bridal House. In other words, tasteful consumption is represented as yet another “front” on which women are expected to compete with one another and prove their alignment to notions of ideal femininity. However, the modes of regulating female subjectivity in this context differ from the Western context, because instead of an ethos of autonomous individualism, these shows take naturalized gender inequality and women’s assumed roles as wives and mothers as essential to the “ideal female subjectivity”. This study investigates how the “ideal female subject” is constructed and represented in contemporary Turkey’s daytime television culture at the intersections of neoconservatism, neoliberalism and consumerism. In order to do that, I situate Bridal House both within the global context of neoliberal, post-feminist popular culture, and within the recent history of

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the neoconservative encroachment on Turkey’s popular culture. Based on Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic violence” and relying on a discourse analysis of 10 episodes of Bridal House, the study analyzes the patterns of domination that are reproduced and normalized in Turkey’s daytime television, and the distinctions constructed among women on the basis of consumption.

Gendered Symbolic Violence in Western TV Culture Symbolic violence refers to degrading one’s symbolic value and symbolic capital, hence denouncing an individual’s cultural acquisitions mobilized to bring value and power.14 The misrecognition of one’s symbolic value is a defining aspect of symbolic violence. Moreover, symbolic violence also connotes the reproduction and legitimation of relations of domination through this misrecognition. It is “violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity”.15 Accordingly, the dominated comply mainly because the relations of domination are internalized by them, and appear as the natural order of things. Bourdieu applies his theory of domination to gendered relations of power and argues that masculine domination works in subtle ways to the effect of being internalized by women.16 He has been criticized for his conceptualization of femininity and masculinity as well as power in binary terms, “in which men ‘possess’ power and oppress the ‘victims’ (women)”.17 Yet, his concept of symbolic violence has proved useful for feminist analysis as he shows how relations of domination are embodied and how “arbitrary power relations are inculcated upon the body in the naturalized form of gender identity”.18 In his theorization of taste, Bourdieu foregrounds taste and style as closely related to one’s embodied cultural capital. Hence taste and consumption surface as loci of symbolic struggles to increase one’s symbolic value, and differentiate one’s self from others. The Bourdieusian conceptual framework has been employed before in the critical analysis of Western post-feminist popular culture. McRobbie19 discusses how consumption is portrayed as women’s empowerment in popular culture, whereas it actually is enacted as a form of symbolic violence judging women by their ability to manage their desires, their appearances, and their taste. Looking into the TV makeover show “What not to wear”, she argues that young women are put into a merciless competition with one another, and class is a central component in this competition. Drawing on Skeggs’ Bourdieusian analysis20 of British working class

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women’s search for respectability by trying to pass as middle class women through investing in their bodies and clothes, McRobbie argues that the makeover show format is the reflection of a divide between poor and middle class women enacted through “feminine modalities of symbolic violence”.21 However, there is a new aspect in these modalities because middle class women in the context of advanced industrialized societies are no longer defined by traditional family roles as exemplary wives and mothers, but by their embodiment of cultural capital, middle class disposition and taste that make them presentable and employable in the neoliberal labor market. To put it more clearly, ideal female subjectivity is now defined in the context of “female individualization”, by which McRobbie means the process of women becoming “dis-embedded from communities where gender roles were fixed”.22 Along similar lines, Ringrose and Walkerdine argue that TV makeover shows redefine what it means to be appropriately feminine in alignment with neoliberal discourses that assume an autonomous, disembedded, self-­ managing subject freed from ties of class and gender.23 Such discourses, highly circulated by popular media, impose new controls and new criteria on women in two interrelated registers. First, women are responsibilized for being autonomous, self-disciplined individuals who can juggle a successful career, motherhood and also align themselves with marketed notions of beauty and hyperfemininity, which is conceptualized by Gill as “postfeminist sensibility”.24 The second register relates to consumption. It has widely been argued that consumption has become a way of marking and expressing identity in the neoliberal order.25 Bauman further argues that in contemporary societies, consumerist performance becomes “the paramount stratifying factor and the principal criterion of inclusion and exclusion”.26 Ringrose and Walkerdine expand on these arguments to reflect on the gendered aspect of consumerism and its reproduction in makeover shows. According to their analysis, women “have always had to be desirable, presentable, consumable” yet under neoliberal consumerism, they have become the site of endless consumption and a testing ground for the possibility of transforming the self from abject, excluded femininity to bourgeois femininity.27 Makeover shows, whether about dieting, fashion, or decoration, demonstrate this dynamic as they posit working class femininity as tasteless, rough, undisciplined, and narrate a process of “fixing” and transforming this femininity into a more “palatable” form that resembles middle class femininity defined by refined taste, self-discipline, self-management.28

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This study looks into the operations of symbolic violence in the representations of women in Turkey’s daytime television culture through the analysis of Bridal House. The format of Bridal House resembles the makeover shows, as the competing participants criticize one another for how they conduct themselves in their new roles as newly wed women, how they manage and decorate their houses. The management of “taste” plays a central role: harsh criticisms and sometimes wounding comments are legitimized as opportunities for transformation towards a more refined and stylish display of femininity. However, Bridal House differs from the Western formats that idealize an autonomous female subject because the show is invested in even further reinforcing gender roles, representing the domestic realm as the glorious fortress where women shape their symbolic capital through their expertise and diligence in domestic work and consumption. This study attempts to delineate not only how gendered hierarchies are normalized but also how consumption figures in enacting hierarchies and competitions among women in the show.

Daytime TV Shows in Turkey: A Troubled History Turkey’s daytime TV shows, which mainly target women as their primary audience, have followed a trajectory that should be contextualized with regard to the transformations in the country’s gender climate, as well as transformations of the media. The 1990s witnessed the establishment of private TV channels and the commercialization of media in Turkey, breaking the state monopoly on broadcasting. TV shows informed with pedagogical concerns were replaced by new formats, such as reality shows and talk shows focused on entertainment.29 This brought along the popularization of Oprah-style women’s talk shows on commercial TV channels, particularly in the early 2000s. The women’s talk show format opened a space of visibility for less advantaged, rural and/or lower class women. Moreover, in contrast to the  state television TRT’s carefully monitored and “tamed” representation of reality, women’s talk shows on private TV channels were effective in raising issues women faced in the private sphere, such as domestic violence, sexual abuse and problems in marriages,30 though locating them in individualized narratives rather than tackling the social and structural aspects of these problems.31 Akınerdem underlines that notwithstanding their subversive dimension, these shows, by operating only as venues for the discussion of family matters, reinforced the gendered division which defined women within the domestic realm and

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the contours of the family.32 Whereas it was mostly men who were taken to be public and political subjects and discussed politics in primetime talk shows, it befell women to bring to screen the private realm and crisis in families through personal narratives. Women’s talk shows drew substantial reaction as a result of four incidents of murder and one suicide, all of which took place in 2005. The dramatic incidents, which were directly related to the revelations and accusations made on the screen and the subsequent reactions against women’s talk shows highlighted the limits of the possibility of bringing the violence in the private realm to public discussion which “clashed with the discretionary norms of family/nation in Turkey”,33 leading to the termination of these shows. For instance, the General Director of Kanal D, a private channel which produced the “Women’s Voice” program, explained that they ended the show because it spiraled out of control and “turned into a social problem” in and of itself.34 While women’s talk shows were falling from grace, marriage and matchmaking shows were becoming popular in the second half of the 2000s. It has been argued that the marriage show, in which the participants look for a spouse in line with socially accepted norms, was quickly adopted by various TV channels as it proved to be a safer format.35 In contrast to the women’s talk shows where women revealed the darker side of marriages and family life, the marriage show was “safer” because this time marriage was represented in an idealized form, as a solution rather than a problem. The format encouraged its participants to narrate their stories and desires within defined limits that were in line with normalized gender roles. Even though the daytime television culture in Turkey has usually reinforced traditional gender roles and promoted “family values”, it is argued that the dominant TV shows of the 2000s more directly reflected the AKP’s neoconservative discourse which foregrounds marriage and family as the only acceptable option, denouncing alternative lifestyles.36 The fact that daytime TV shows have been under close political scrutiny and subjected to active intervention by the government during AKP’s incumbency, verifies this argument. Even though marriage shows glorified marriage and traditional family, they nevertheless found themselves under fire from the government controlled Radio Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) for degenerating the institution of marriage. The main reason for this accusation was the claim that some participants of the shows foregrounded material and financial concerns in their search for a suitable spouse, devaluing marriage and family.37 Consequently, the format was

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banned by an executive decree in 2017 with an emphasis on the protection of family and the moral values of society. Soon after the ban, new shows filled in the void on daytime TV. These new shows are based on competition among women. In two shows that replaced the marriage shows, young women and their mothers-in-law form teams to compete with others in terms of their cooking abilities.38 The direct government intervention into daytime TV is a clear example of how neoconservative rationality assigns a “moral mission” to the state.39 In this context, the “moral mission” surfaces as defining the limits of what is acceptable to the social and cultural texture of society, excluding certain narratives, lifestyles and subjectivities from the TV screen. This neoconservative rationality has been “blended in the same pot” with the neoliberal rationality of governance40 particularly in the 2010s as the withdrawal of the state from social responsibility dovetailed with the agenda of “strengthening” and idealizing the family not only as the unquestionable locus of morality but also as the institution responsible for the care of children, the sick and the elderly. In this idealized family, women are designated as domestic subjects and female subjectivity is strictly defined within the framework of marriage, family and motherhood.41 Whereas the last decade has witnessed a plethora of research on the articulation of neoconservative and neoliberal discourses in Turkey particularly with regard to the AKP’s politics of gender and family, how this gender politics is reflected and reproduced in Turkey’s television culture has remained relatively understudied.42 Moreover, insufficient scholarly attention has been paid to how consumption figures in the entanglement of neoconservative and neoliberal politics of gender. A recent study by Akyüz et al.43 on the gendered experiences of middle and upper middle class housewives married to male entrepreneurs in seven Anatolian cities demonstrates that consumption related to the decoration and the presentation of the household figures large in research participants’ everyday experiences and self-narrations. Accordingly, women formulate domestic consumption as an area of autonomy where they get to make the decisions, and as a form of power that they can “safely” use as it is in harmony with traditional gender roles. Bridal House is an example of the shows that started to dominate Turkey’s daytime TV, particularly after the marriage shows were banned. It is a case that provides fertile ground to contribute to the literature in two registers. First, the show demonstrates the reflection and reproduction of the gender politics and gender climate that has dominated Turkey

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throughout the 2010s in daytime television. Second, the show makes it possible to discuss the role of domestic consumption in the construction of “ideal female subjectivities” in contemporary Turkey. Through an analysis of the show, I explore how patterns of domination inherent to contemporary Turkey’s gender climate are reproduced and normalized in daytime television, and discuss the ways in which the distinctions constructed among women on the base of consumption figure in this gender climate.

Methodology The study relies on a discourse analysis of ten episodes44 of Bridal House, from among a total of 754 episodes. In order to avoid seasonal bias, the sample includes approximately every 80th episode of the show starting from its second week. Discourse analysis provides a useful toolkit to elucidate the mystified symbolic violence embedded within relations of domination which do not “appear as dominance at all, but as consensual and acceptable”.45 It also helps us understand the processes of the construction of the self in relation to discourse.46 Therefore discourse analysis is particularly well-suited to analyze how the “ideal female subjectivities” promoted in the show are constructed within the broader neoconservative and neoliberal discourses that permeate contemporary Turkey’s gender climate. In my analysis, I focus on deciphering two loci of symbolic violence. First I look into the “silent” symbolic violence inherent to the format of the show that creates a competitive, tense and restricted atmosphere. Second, I discuss the more vocal modes of symbolic violence that surface in the wounding comments47 that participants address to one another, in a thinly veiled effort to distinguish themselves by denouncing each other’s symbolic capital.

Format as Symbolic Violence Bridal House first strikes the viewer with its rigid structure and the way it strictly defines the limits of what can be voiced. Each week the show brings together a group of five women who have all been recently married. These five women visit one another’s houses in turns. These visits are structured by a sequence of exchanges designed to inspect the house, the host’s abilities to cook and please her guests, as well as the story of her relationship that led to this marriage. After pleasantries, the host of the day offers

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coffee, followed by the guests’ detailed inspection of the decoration of the living room, starting from the furniture, carpets, curtains, and extending to every minor detail such as ornaments, photo frames, pillows. The guests then continue their inspection in the kitchen, frequently referred to by the participants as the space where “all women spend most of their time”. In episode 173, the big banner on the kitchen wall that says “Büşra (the host) ̇ cooks, Izzet (her husband) eats” is greeted with a rare show of praise from the guests, demonstrating their unquestioning approval of the gendered division of labor in marriage. In some episodes, the guests look for traces of dust within the cupboards, chanting “Busted!” if they find any, as one guest does in episode 6, later defending her behavior by asserting that it is a woman’s duty to keep a clean kitchen. The master bedroom, which is usually defined as “the bridal room”, is the last room to be scrutinized. Then comes a display of the host’s trousseau, which usually includes embroideries toilsomely made by the newly married host and her mother. The scrutinization of the decoration and trousseau is followed by a generous, home-made lunch with several courses. During the lunch, critical comments are made not only on the host’s cooking abilities but her choice of dinner set and cutlery, as well the presentation of the food and the table. What follows is a screening of the host’s engagement party, henna night and wedding, accompanied by highly romanticized narrations of how the newly-wed couple met and decided to tie the knot. These stories are frequently interrupted by the guests’ detailed questions about the process that led to the wedding: How did the couple start dating? How did he propose? How much was spent on the wedding? How much was collected from the wedding guests in cash and gold? Who is that woman on the wedding video with a striking outfit and bold dance moves? The questions do not lead to sharing experiences and maybe a few laughs, but are rather asked in a serious and interrogative manner accompanied with comments on whether the host acted “appropriately enough” during the dating and engagement process. During each day, there are many minor and major quarrels among the group of five women, mostly as a result of the host’s reaction to comments that she finds to be crossing the line. These quarrels add more tension to the show, which is already tense due to the designated questioning and interrogation. The guests grade the host at the end of each day’s show, and on Fridays the woman with the highest grade earns a set of five golden coins.48 Even though some participants of the show are gainfully employed, their professional identities are only momentarily mentioned in the

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introductions. At all other times, the participants are defined only by their roles as newly-wed women, and located firmly within the contours of marriage. No detail is given regarding their lives except for the fact that they have recently been married. The terms of the competition, and the show’s definition of a “proper newly-wed woman” is explicitly put in the text that introduces the show: What kind of a bride are you? Are you a well-groomed woman? Are you competitive enough in your make-up, hair and clothing? Are you diligent in hosting your guests and preparing treats for them? As newly-wed brides, you will compete on every subject ranging from your skills in the kitchen to the decoration of your house, your sense of fashion, your command of our traditions.49

One of the defining aspects of the show is that it is directed by a male voiceover. The male voiceover acts as the invisible presenter, observer, and director of the show, very often interrupting participants’ conversations, posing questions to the women, encouraging them to criticize the host, sometimes behind her back as she leaves the room. When a guest leaves the room to visit the bathroom, the camera follows her as the male voiceover asks further questions inviting the guest to more back-talking to extract critical comments. When the tensions get too high, this time the male voiceover plays the benevolent mediator, enacting the authority of a “calm and collected” man who is there to control the “catfight”, even though he actually plays a part in raising the tension. The male voiceover dictates the contours of what is to be spoken, preventing a spontaneous conversation among participants. The way it invisibly directs the conversation and the conduct of participants creates a strictly controlled atmosphere. Women are expected to criticize each other based on an unquestioned assumption that a newly-wed woman should strive to excel at maintaining and managing a tasteful and orderly house.

Battles of Consumption A substantial part of the competition among the participants of Bridal House is focused on consumption and taste, particularly with regard to the decoration of the house. Even though the house is constructed as women’s domain, it is also given an institutional dimension as “the marital household” or a “new bride’s home” and scrutinized for whether it meets

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the standards which a newly married woman is held responsible to keep up  with. When the participants of the show find another participant’s house below these standards, they remind her that “this is a new bride’s house”, hence deserves a higher level of attention and care. Therefore the house is not represented as a safe haven, and/or a place where a woman enjoys autonomy in her choices, but an arena of competition to elevate her symbolic capital through a display of her choices in consumer products. The struggle to prove one’s high symbolic capital, and put others down for their lack of it, provides the anxious backdrop against which the interactions amongst Bridal House participants take place. The participants meticulously review every detail in the decoration of the house. The review starts at the living room. The living room is the space where the guests are hosted and therefore functions as a showcase for the presentation of the host’s taste in decoration, and also as the target of most wounding comments. The participants comment on almost every aspect of this room, looking into the furniture, the carpets, the curtains, the accessories, assessing whether everything is in harmony and fashionable. For example, in episode 330, Nağme, the host, is criticized for filling the living room with too many detailed accessories, and for combining flamboyant curtains with plain furniture. In episode 252, Asena’s gold tinted furniture is denounced for being over the top and making the living room “look like my mother’s living room” by a guest who implies that this is no way to decorate a young couple’s house. In episodes 6 and 568, the hosts are harshly criticized for crowding the living room with too many irrelevant decorative objects. One of the participants in episode 6 calls Şeyda’s (the host) living room “a concentration camp for objects”, another one stands up and changes the location of the objects, claiming to show the host “how it should be done”, almost bringing Şeyda to tears. In the absence of the host, they call the decoration “totally tasteless”, and one guest expresses her curiosity about where the host could have found and bought such cheap looking objects. The competition on consumption is not limited to decoration. The process that lead to the marriage, including the henna night,50 the wedding, the wedding gifts, the dress, the photo shots of the bride and groom, the photo albums of the wedding, are also closely inspected. Participants never seem to come to terms on what a proper wedding looks like, and the weddings are frequently criticized, especially for “pretentiousness” and lack of etiquette. For example in episode 6, upon the screening of Şeyda’s wedding video, the guests express their repulsion at what they define as

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the unrefined and “sleazy” vanity of the wedding. They are especially irritated by the scene in which Şeyda’s mother-in-law pins a house deed to her wedding dress, in a public declaration that she gives her daughter-in-­ law a house as a gift. One guest asks her whether her in-laws are the chiefs of a “tribe”, implying backwardness and inability to keep up with the modern ways. Another guest underlines how modest but modern her marriage is when compared with Şeyda’s: I would never want to be in your position. If my mother-in law gave me a house my family and friends would hate it. I would prefer to buy everything for myself with my husband. I would buy a small and modest house perhaps but at least we would have done it ourselves. You are now indebted to your mother in law forever.

This narrative is striking as the guest is presenting and underlining the symbolic capital that stems from being a “modern” woman of a nuclear family who has declared autonomy from her in-laws, as opposed to Şeyda’s lifestyle which she finds to be unrefined and unmodernized.

Discussion and Conclusion It is striking that the daytime TV shows which became popular in the second half of 2010s—after the women’s talk shows fell from grace and marriage shows were outright banned-  are based on formats that instigate competition among women. Neither marriage shows, nor women’s talk shows had the intention to be subversive and challenge the gendered social order. To the contrary, it has well been documented in previous research that these shows reproduced stereotypical gender roles.51 Yet they nevertheless provided a space where women narrated life stories and expressed emotions, even though within the limits of social norms and along the lines drawn by the show formats.52 Bridal House, which exemplifies the currently popular competition shows in Turkey’s daytime television, homogenizes women under an unquestioned aspiration to excel at domestic abilities and show “the right kind of femininity”. Yet, the way the show constructs the dynamics of relations among the participants, precludes the possibility of sharing common experiences as women are isolated and alienated from each other by the format of the show. Distinctions, rather than common experiences, are foregrounded. This may sound commonplace as it is a competition, after

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all. However, it is essential to see two processes of symbolic violence at play in this format. The first is about the way in which gendered relations of power are normalized. The participants are homogenized as “brides”, hence defined as subjects commonly bound by their location in the gendered social order. No space is allowed for subversive exchanges that could display the arbitrariness of this social order or question why it is necessary to strive to be “the perfect bride”. The second process of symbolic violence relates to the preclusion of alliances and the instigation of hierarchies among women. Even though the participants are fixed in a common position in the traditional gender order, they are not allowed to take a moment to explore common experiences but pitted against each other as competing subjects. As Bourdieu aptly puts, “taste classifies and it classifies the classifier”.53 Taste and consumption surface as the central notions through which women strive to distance and distinguish themselves from other women in Bridal House. This study argues that consumption is located at the nexus of entangled neoliberal and neoconservative rationalities dominating contemporary Turkey’s gender climate. Neoconservatism does not only play out at the macro level, at the level of state policies and discourses designed to control and discipline women’s bodies and behavioral codes. Popular culture plays a significant role in setting the norms of what is accepted and acceptable in gender relations. The insights we get from these two processes of symbolic violence at play on Bridal House, help us better understand the neoconservative gender discourses that circulate in popular culture. Through the analysis of the case of Bridal House, this study demonstrates how the domestic space is normalized as the area to which women belong. However, the domestic space is not constructed as a space of autonomy and creative self-expression for women. To the contrary, it is a realm for disciplining oneself to fit into the codes of appropriate conduct, defined very narrowly and in exclusionary terms. Moreover, the way the home is constructed, is far from being a “safe haven” that stands free from the considerations and anxieties bred by the neoliberal market. It is an arena of symbolic struggles unfolding through the competition over presenting a “tasteful” household and navigating the etiquette of consumption. On the one hand, the show reproduces the neoconservative rationality that “cements women’s domestic vocation”,54 and presents marriage as the only viable option of life for women. On the other hand, in a way that resembles the neoliberal symbolic violence of the makeover shows, it distances women from one another, enacting hierarchies among them. This

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is done through encouraging, if not pushing, women to classify themselves and other women based on consumption. In other words, whereas women are homogenized as “wives” and “mothers” under the neoconservative notions of ideal female subjectivity, they are also pushed to control and police each other’s conduct, demonstrating the technologies of disciplining women within a gender climate that flourishes at the nexus of the neoconservative and neoliberal rationalities.

Notes 1. Gender climate refers to “discourses and practices on gender relations that are accepted, prevalent and/or dominant in private and public life and that determine the modes of thinking, acting and morality regarding gender relations.” Güneș-Ayata, Ayşe, and Gökten Doğangün. 2017. Gender politics of the AKP: restoration of a religio-conservative gender climate. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 19-6: 611. 2. Brown, Wendy. 2006. American nightmare: neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and de-democratization. Political Theory, 34-6: 697. 3. Acar, Feride, and Gülbanu Altunok. 2013. The ‘politics of intimate’ at the intersection of neoliberalism and neo-conservatism in contemporary Turkey. Women’s Studies International Forum, 41-1: 14–23; Altunok, Gülbanu. 2016. Neo-conservatism, sovereign power and biopower: female subjectivity in contemporary Turkey. Research and Policy on Turkey, 1-2: 132–146; Kandiyoti, Deniz. 2016. Locating the politics of gender: patriarchy, neo-­liberal governance and violence in Turkey. Research and Policy on Turkey, 1-2: 103–118. 4. Yazıcı, Berna. 2012. The return to the family: welfare, state, and politics of the family in Turkey. Anthropological Quarterly, 85-1: 103–140; Yılmaz, Zafer. 2015. ‘Strengthening the Family’ Policies in Turkey: Managing the Social Question and Armoring Conservative–Neoliberal Populism. Turkish Studies, 16-3: 371–390. 5. Acar and Altunok, The ‘politics of intimate’, p. 18. 6. Güneş-Ayata and Doğangün, Gender Politics of the AKP, p. 616. 7. Ouellette, Laurie, and James Hay. 2008. Better living through reality TV: Television and post-welfare citizenship. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell; Stauff, Markus. 2010. The governmentality of media: Television as problem and instrument. In Media, culture and mediality. New insights into the current state of research, eds. Ludwig Jager, Erika Linz, Irmela Schneider, 263–285. Bielefeld: Verlag. 8. Ouellette and Hay, Better Living, p. 472.

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9. Wood, Helen and Beverley Skeggs. 2004. Notes on ethical scenarios of self on British reality TV. Feminist Media Studies, 4-2: 206. 10. McRobbie, Angela. 2004a. Notes on ‘What not to wear’ and postfeminist symbolic violence. Sociological Review, 52-2: 99–109. 11. Ringrose, Jessica, and Valerie Walkerdine. 2008. Regulating the abject: The TV make-over as site of neo-liberal reinvention toward bourgeois femininity. Feminist Media Studies, 8-3: 227–246. 12. Kocamaner, Hikmet. 2017. Strengthening the family through television: Islamic broadcasting, secularism, and the politics of responsibility in Turkey. Anthropological Quarterly, 90-3: 675–714. 13. Akınerdem, Zeyneb Feyza. 2015. Marriage safe and sound: subjectivity, embodiment and movement in the production space of television in Turkey. Unpublished Doctoral thesis, City University London. 14. Yamak, Sibel, Ali Ergur, Mustafa Özbilgin, and Ozan Alakavuklar. 2016. Gender as symbolic capital and violence: The case of corporate elites in Turkey. Gender, Work and Organization, 23-2: 125–146. 15. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 167. 16. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Masculine domination. Cambridge: Polity Press. 17. Mottier, Veronique. 2002. Masculine domination: gender and power in Bourdieu’s writings. Feminist Theory, 3-3: 355. 18. McNay, Lois. 1999. Gender, habitus and the field: Pierre Bourdieu and the limits of reflexivity. Theory, Culture & Society, 16-1: 100. 19. McRobbie, Notes on ‘What not to wear’. 20. Skeggs, Beverley. 1997. Formations of class and gender: becoming respectable. London: Sage Publications. 21. McRobbie, Notes on ‘What not to wear’, p. 102. 22. McRobbie, Angela. 2004b. Post-feminism and popular culture. Feminist Media Studies, 4-3: 260. 23. Ringrose and Walkerdine, Regulating the abject. 24. Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Gender and the media. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 254. 25. Jansson, Andre. 2002. The mediatization of consumption: Towards an analytical framework of image culture. Journal of Consumer Culture, 2-1: 5-31. 26. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Consuming life. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 52. 27. Ringrose and Walkerdine, Regulating the abject, p. 230. 28. McRobbie, Notes on ‘What not to wear’; Wood and Skeggs, Notes on ethical scenarios of self on British reality TV. 29. Baştürk Akca, Emel, and Hasan Akbulut. 2005. Kadın programlarına bir ̇ bakış: “Kadının Sesi” ve “Sizin Sesiniz”de tür, anlatı ve format. Iletiş im Araştırmaları, 3(1–2): 41–73.

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30. Çaylı Rahte, Emek. 2009. Kamusallık mahremiyet medya: ‘Kadın tartışma programları’ üzerine etnografik bir inceleme. Unpublished dissertation. Ankara University. 31. Sanlı, Şölen. 2013. Boundary work in an era of transformation: Television, taste and distinction in Turkey. International Journal of Communication, 7: 906–928. 32. Akınerdem, Marriage safe and sound, p. 73. 33. Akınerdem, Marriage safe and sound, p. 76. 34. Gün, Çağan. 2006. An analysis on the daytime TV shows in Turkey. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. Ankara: METU, p. 64. 35. Akınerdem, Marriage safe and sound. 36. Burul, Yeşim, and Hande Eslen-Ziya. 2018. Understanding ‘new Turkey’ through women’s eyes: gender politics in Turkish daytime talk shows. Middle East Critique, 27-2: 179–192. 37. Evlendirme programları RTÜK’te masaya yatırıldı: http://www.hurriyet. com.tr/ekonomi/evlendir me-pr ogramlari-r tukte-masaya-yat irildi-40056769. Accessed 10 January 2020. 38. Both of the mentioned shows, “Gelinim Mutfakta” (“My daughter-in-­law is in the kitchen”) and “Zuhal Topal ile Sofrada” (At the dining table with Zuhal Topal) started in 2018, in the aftermath of the executive decree banning the marriage shows. Bridal House had already started in 2015, before the ban. 39. Acar and Altunok, The ‘politics of intimate’, p. 15. 40. Cindoglu, Dilek, and Didem Ünal. 2016. Gender and sexuality in the authoritarian discursive strategies of ‘New Turkey’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 24-1: 5. 41. Acar and Altunok, 2013; Kandiyoti, 2016; Yılmaz, 2015, Altunok, 2016. 42. Among exceptions, see Kocamaner, Strengthening the family through television; and Akınerdem, Marriage safe and sound. 43. Akyüz, Selin, Feyda Sayan-Cengiz, Aslı Çırakman, and Dilek Cindoğlu. 2019. Married to Anatolian Tigers: business masculinities, relationalities, and limits to empowerment. Turkish Studies, 20-2: 297–321. 44. The analyzed episodes are as follows: 6, 86, 170, 252, 330, 410, 490, 568, 645 and 715. All of the episodes have been accessed via the show’s Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asdyJksOprM&list=PLS KxQI2qaeMOEhyjf2tR2fRo3QVJKKoZB. 45. Lazar, Michelle. 2014. Feminist critical discourse analysis: relevance for current gender and language research. In The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, eds. S.  Ehrlich, M.  Meyerhoff, and J.  Holmes, 180–201. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, p. 186. 46. Willig, C. 2008. Introducing qualitative research in psychology. Glasgow: Open University Press.

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47. For the significance of analyzing “wounding comments” in order to understand the symbolic struggles on display in TV makeover shows, see McRobbie, Notes on ‘What not to wear”, p. 106. 48. The set of five golden coins is put on the winner of the week in the form of a necklace, replicating the ceremony of offering jewelleries to the bride during the wedding. 49. h t t p s : / / w w w . y o u t u b e . c o m / c h a n n e l / U C r 1 p N H CHI2EpV8GiCCym-A/about. Accessed 10 January 2020. 50. Henna night is a traditional female-only ceremony that takes place before the wedding, bringing together the bride-to-be with her friends, relatives and in-laws. 51. Nüfusçu, G., and A. Yılmaz. 2012. Evlilik pratiklerinin dönüşüm/yeniden ̇ üretim sürecinde evlendirme programları. Galatasaray Iletiş im Dergisi, 16: 23–48; Burul & Eslen-Ziya, Understanding ‘new Turkey’ through women’s eyes. 52. Akınerdem, Marriage safe and sound. 53. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. London & New York: Routledge, p. 6. 54. Kandiyoti, Locating the politics of gender, p. 107.

References Akınerdem, Zeyneb Feyza. 2015. Marriage safe and sound: subjectivity, embodiment and movement in the production space of television in Turkey. Unpublished Doctoral thesis, City University London. Akyüz, Selin, Feyda Sayan-Cengiz, Aslı Çırakman, and Dilek Cindoğlu. 2019. Married to Anatolian Tigers: business masculinities, relationalities, and limits to empowerment. Turkish Studies, 20-2: 297–321. Acar, Feride, and Gülbanu Altunok. 2013. The ‘Politics of Intimate’ at the Intersection of Neoliberalism and Neo-conservatism in Contemporary Turkey. Women’s Studies International Forum, 41-1: 14–23. Altunok, Gülbanu. 2016. Neo-conservatism, sovereign power and biopower: female subjectivity in contemporary Turkey. Research and Policy on Turkey, 1-2: 132–146. Baştürk Akca, Emel, and Hasan Akbulut. 2005. Kadın programlarına bir bakış: ̇ “Kadının Sesi” ve “Sizin Sesiniz”de tür, anlatı ve format. Iletiş im Araştırmaları, 3(1–2): 41–73. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Consuming life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. London & New York: Routledge.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Masculine domination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Wendy. 2006. American nightmare: neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and de-democratization. Political Theory, 34-6: 690–714. Burul, Yeşim, and Hande Eslen-Ziya. 2018. Understanding ‘new Turkey’ through women’s eyes: gender politics in Turkish daytime talk shows. Middle East Critique, 27-2: 179–192. Cindoglu, Dilek, and Didem Ünal. 2016. Gender and sexuality in the authoritarian discursive strategies of ‘New Turkey’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 24-1: 1–16. Çaylı Rahte, Emek. 2009. Kamusallık mahremiyet medya: ‘Kadın tartışma programları’ üzerine etnografik bir inceleme. Unpublished dissertation. Ankara University. Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Gender and the media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gün, Çağan. 2006. An analysis on the daytime TV shows in Turkey. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. Ankara: METU. Güneș-Ayata, Ayşe, and Gökten Doğangün. 2017. Gender politics of the AKP: restoration of a religio-conservative gender climate. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 19-6: 610–627. Jansson, Andre. 2002. The mediatization of consumption: Towards an analytical framework of image culture. Journal of Consumer Culture, 2-1: 5–31. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 2016. Locating the politics of gender: patriarchy, neo-liberal governance and violence in Turkey. Research and Policy on Turkey, 1-2: 103–118. Kocamaner, Hikmet. 2017. Strengthening the family through television: Islamic broadcasting, secularism, and the politics of responsibility in Turkey. Anthropological Quarterly, 90-3: 675–714. Lazar, Michelle. 2014. Feminist critical discourse analysis: relevance for current gender and language research. In The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, eds. S.  Ehrlich, M.  Meyerhoff, and J.  Holmes, 180–201. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. McNay, Lois. 1999. Gender, habitus and the field: Pierre Bourdieu and the limits of reflexivity. Theory, Culture & Society, 16-1: 97–117. McRobbie, Angela. 2004a. Notes on ‘What not to wear’ and postfeminist symbolic violence. Sociological Review, 52-2: 99–109. McRobbie, Angela. 2004b. Post-feminism and popular culture. Feminist Media Studies, 4-3: 255–264. Mottier, Veronique. 2002. Masculine domination: Gender and power in Bourdieu’s writings. Feminist Theory, 3-3: 345–359. Nüfusçu, G., and A. Yılmaz. 2012. Evlilik pratiklerinin dönüşüm/yeniden üretim ̇ sürecinde evlendirme programları. Galatasaray Iletiş im Dergisi, 16: 23–48.

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Ouellette, Laurie, and James Hay. 2008. Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-welfare Citizenship. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Ringrose, Jessica, and Valerie Walkerdine. 2008. Regulating the abject: The TV make-over as site of neo-liberal reinvention toward bourgeois femininity. Feminist Media Studies, 8-3: 227–246. Sanlı, Şölen. 2013. Boundary work in an era of transformation: Television, taste and distinction in Turkey. International Journal of Communication, 7: 906–928. Skeggs, Beverley. 1997. Formations of class and gender: becoming respectable. London: Sage Publications. Stauff, Markus. 2010. The governmentality of media: Television as problem and instrument. In Media, culture and mediality. New insights into the current state of research, eds. Ludwig Jager, Erika Linz, Irmela Schneider, 263–285. Bielefeld: Verlag. Yamak, Sibel, Ali Ergur, Mustafa Özbilgin, and Ozan Alakavuklar. 2016. Gender as symbolic capital and violence: The case of corporate elites in Turkey. Gender, Work and Organization, 23-2: 125–146. Yazıcı, Berna. 2012. The return to the family: welfare, state, and politics of the family in Turkey. Anthropological Quarterly, 85-1: 103–140. Yılmaz, Zafer. 2015. ‘Strengthening the Family’ Policies in Turkey: Managing the Social Question and Armoring Conservative–Neoliberal Populism. Turkish Studies, 16-3: 371–390. Willig, C. 2008. Introducing qualitative research in psychology. Glasgow: Open University Press. Wood, Helen and Beverley Skeggs. 2004. Notes on ethical scenarios of self on British reality TV. Feminist Media Studies, 4-2: 204–208.

CHAPTER 14

International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels: “Women’s Cinema, Women’s Resistance, Cinema of Resistance” Nazan Haydari

Introduction Film festivals as an essential part of the global film culture are spaces of cultural representations with unique potential to set an agenda and intervene in the public sphere. Within an exponentially growing literature on film festivals, women’s and LGBT/queer film festivals that are categorized as identity-based festivals, they represent special discursive and material sites of activism and change. The politics of the identity-based festivals in which the “relationship between events, contexts of reception and communities are particularly relevant”,1 are reflected in their organizational structures, programming strategies, and funding patterns.2 As grown and developed in conjunction with feminist movements, and feminist film making practice and theory, women’s film festivals are considered as a reflection of feminist concerns around distribution and exhibition to make gender politics available for larger public.3 Thus they are often discussed

N. Haydari (*) Department of Media, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_14

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around the theories of a counterpublic sphere challenging heteronormative structures and claiming visibility of female subjectivity.4 Women’s film festivals also form a space for work by, for and about women; and a place of collaboration, solidarity, networking and activism. The significance of the multilayered and fragmented programming strategies as a space free from cinematic male gaze; demystification of the relationship between spectator and film-makers; alternative viewing practices challenging patriarchal viewing structures; and alternative modes of spatial and temporal configurations constitute the points of discussion within the literature of women’s film festivals.5 Yet despite the growing literature of film festival studies, the history and the politics of women’s film festivals still remain insufficiently documented and theorized. This chapter draws from The International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels in Turkey that has been active for the last eighteen years. Since the first articulation of ‘feminism’ in the public sphere in Turkey during the early 80s, the politics of representation through various means of communication such as writing women’s history, introducing tools of self-expression, and opening up spaces for the visibility of women’s voices, have extensively been included in the activities of various feminist organizations and women’s groups in Turkey.6 The Filmmor Women’s Cooperative was established in 2003 as a part of these struggles to fight against gender discrimination through the means of “cinema”, and up to today it remains the only women’s organization defining its primary activities around film “to make cinema, to contest, to produce, to dream, and to act for women, together with women!”7 By encouraging participation of women in cinema, Filmmor aims at increasing the presence and visibility of women and their life experiences around the activities of the annual mobile women’s film festival in various parts of Turkey with screenings, workshops, seminars, exhibitions, conferences, campaigns, and film productions.8 My discussion points in this chapter derive from programming strategies as reflected in the slogans, posters, bulletins, and festival catalogs,9 and from my own observations as a feminist media scholar regularly attending Filmmor Festival. A festival’s ephemera constitutes festival documents as significant symbolic spaces to trace self- definition and identity of the festival.10 I argue that Filmmor Women’s Film Festival claims a differential and transnational feminist politics with an emphasis on solidarity, resistance, subjectivity, agency, and women’s experiences within and beyond borders. The concept of “differential modes of consciousness” by Chela Sandoval11 provides a framework to trace the possibilities of feminist

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politics in Turkey. Sandoval’s ‘differential’ constitutes a metaphor suggestive of “a gear box and thus of a feminism that intelligently and tactically slips from one to another analysis of women’s condition as circumstances demand.”12

The Filmmor Women’s Collective Within the History of Feminist Politics in Turkey Feminist politics in Turkey have grown and diversified in their concerns, activism, and discourses both ideologically and geographically since the public articulation of ‘feminism’ in the early 1980s.13 A comprehensive literature of gender has grown since then with material struggles over equal rights and opportunities, and discursive struggles over the symbolic definitions of femininity. Considering that any form of feminism is shaped by the cultural, legal, and economic policies and practices as well as the politics of social movements, providing a comprehensive account of the field might not be possible; yet as Kandiyoti14 suggested “different ‘moments’ of feminist theorizing” and activism can be identified as trajectories. Intertwining moments15 marking the shifts in women’s activism in the history of Turkey involve the foundation of the Turkish Republic based on the principles of modernization in 1923; the military intervention of 1980 followed by the policies of liberalization; the identity politics of 1990s; and the period of Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party or AKP) that came to power in 2002. Feminist literature provides an extensive critique of long-lasting contradictory implication of modernization projects as the founding principles of Turkish Republic in 1923. Women were granted considerable legal rights in 1920s as a means of cultivating Turkish nationalism and adopting western notions of secularism; and women who actively supported the projects of new nation-state later came to be known by the term “Daughters of the Republic” in the public sphere and announced themselves as “Kemalist” or “Egalitarian” feminists.16 The rapidly changing political and social structure of the country following the military coup of 1980 led to a new women’s activism that publicly integrated the term ‘feminism’ into their politics.17 The feminists of the 1980s criticized the project of modernity and challenged the morality of the previous generation who supported the state policies.

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In the 1990s, the politics of difference exerted a significant influence over feminist politics in Turkey with women who had not been a part of the feminist movement before instigating their own activism. While Kurdish nationalism challenged the ‘unitary and nationalistic provision’ of the state, political Islam brought criticism to state interpretation of secularism.18 Thus in parallel to the rise of identity politics, women’s organizations and feminisms have multiplied and become more fragmented. Islamist and Kurdish women and the LGBT movements challenged the existing notions of feminism for dismissing the dimensions of ethnicity and religion in the experiences of women. The first glimpses of a collaboration and dialogue across difference appeared in the late 1990s. The interaction between Turkish and Kurdish feminists has increased especially around the issues of violence against women. Simultaneously, women organizing in  local levels decentralized the urban-centric (particularly Istanbul and Ankara) notion of feminism.19 Perceiving emerging Islamist identity as a treat to secular notion of modernist Turkish state, the state enforced strict dress codes, which banned the headscarf in public offices and educational institutions. In the public space, Islamist feminists became visible with their activities for removing restrictions on the “headscarf’ issue with varying reactions from existing feminist groups. While some perceived headscarf as a threat to secularism, others criticized the secularist stance of the state and supported the causes of Islamist women in individual or small group levels such as by distributing petitions for the legalization of the headscarf in universities or acknowledging the realities of Islamist women in the pages of various books and feminist magazines. Diversifying struggles of women eventually led feminists to critique long-lasting modernization policies of the state. As a reflection of the identity politics, being founded in the late 90s and early 2000s, various women’s organizations such as Uçan Süpürge (Flying Broom), Filmmor Women’s Cooperative, and Amargi emphasized the significance of networking and communication, and integrated the concepts of solidarity, difference, and dialogue into their language in the local level.20 On the global level, as Kandiyoti observed, this conceptual change was a part of “an internal crisis about ‘difference’” that originated from the West and influenced the Middle East region.21 In the United States, white, middle class feminism was criticized for displaying racist and Eurocentric tendencies. An increasing number of women of color in academics introduced extensive arguments about the race, class, color, and sexual dimensions of gender. In Europe, this internal critique coincided

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with the demands of migrants and ethnic minorities for their rights to cultural distinctiveness. While in the earlier years of feminism, writing and publishing were integrated into activities for raising consciousness and promoting internal communication among feminist activists in Turkey,22 following the privatization of broadcasting in the 90s and expansion of liberalization policies over print and media, women developed various intervention strategies for reaching the public to claim visibility and contribute to the genderization of public spaces that were historically dismissed from the discourses of intellectualism, nationalism, and media. The 1980s also witnessed an increase in number of films with lead female characters “engaged in a search for identity and independence within patriarchal society.”23 As discussed by Atakav, these films were the sites of power relations where the contradictory implications of modernization projects and gender hierarchies are both re-created and contested24 The number of women directors in the film industry of Turkey remained limited until the 2000s. Öztürk pointed out that from 1914 to 1980 there were only seven women directors; in the 1990s the number started to increase, yet the total number of women directors in the history of film industry until 2005 remained 23.25 In the early 2000s, new dynamics of film production such as purchase by TV channels, new viewing experiences in the film theatres of shopping centers, commercial success of national productions, and artistic success of Turkish art house films in the international film festivals have led to a growth in the film industry. In parallel to these changes, the number of women directors and the films they produced have also increased sharply with 47 women making 45 films between 2005 and 2013.26 Women’s movements and the development of feminist discourse on women’s rights along with emerging women’s film festivals have greatly contributed to the presence of women in the cinema industry.27 To promote women’s cinema, the first international women’s film festival was initiated in 1998 by Uçan Süpürge (Flying Broom)28 along with its other activities of local journalists networks, and campaigns for promoting girls’ education and preventing early marriages and violence against women. Filmmor Women’s Cooperative was founded in 2003 with primary activities around film production and a women’s film festival. Both festivals have given special importance to women directors by presenting their retrospectives and inviting them to panels and discussions organized during the festivals.29 Both festivals demonstrate similarities in their approaches and work in collaboration with each other in their activities. While this chapter

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specifically focuses on International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels, main arguments could also be applied to Uçan Süpürge Women’s Film Festival. Filmmor Festival started in 2003, a year after Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party—AKP) came into power with terms like ‘conservative Muslim democracy’ and ‘liberal conservatism.’30 The politics of gender, including sexuality, marriage, family, and production, have always been intrinsic to the characterization of AKP ideology. Kandiyoti names three ongoing domains of practice for AKP ideology: one is gender becoming the marker of difference between a national ‘us’ and anti-national ‘them. This situation led to expansion of ‘othering and exclusion that initially relied on the secular/religious dichotomy.’ Secondly, the relationship between neo-liberal policies and (neo)-conservative familialism which speaks to neo-liberal transformations of welfare and employment regimes maintaining the dependent status of women as natural care providers. The third has to do with ‘normalization’ of violence in everyday practices and political discourses. The pervasiveness of the violence and masculinity in state policies and discourses and the reproduction of the contradictory images of women within the secular and religious dichotomy through these domains of practice continue to define serious challenges for feminist politics. Thus, the continuities/discontinuities between the contemporary and inherited practices of the state becomes particularly significant considering the “New Turkey” discourse of AKP government, and the attempts of shifting the memory and social relationships.31 The relationship between deeply embedded patriarchy and the AKP’s views on gender, and neoliberal, nationalist and religious politics of the state are persistently questioned through films, discussions, and events of Filmmor Film Festival. The “differential modes of oppositional consciousness” provide a framework for revealing the potentials of feminist politics through the analysis of the programming strategies.

Filmmor Film Festival as the Practice of ‘Differential Consciousness’ Chela Sandoval’s theory of oppositional consciousness is rooted in U.S. “third world feminism,” “postcolonial feminism,” and transnational feminism as it provides a different way of conceptualizing feminism and oppositional activity. Chandra Talpade Mohanty defines the concept of

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“Third World feminism” as an “analytical and political category by recognizing the links among the histories and struggles of these women against racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism, and monopoly economy.”32 By differential consciousness, Sandoval suggests an identity politics that focuses on individual subjectivity to identify a common ground based on identity and difference that is both anti-essentialist and socialist in scope. Differential consciousness speaks to the limitation of hegemonic feminist movements by creating a dynamic motion that functions “within, yet beyond the demands of dominant ideology.”33 It implies a new kind of subjectivity developed under conditions of multiple oppression and forming coalitions beyond national or ethnic boundaries. Metaphorically speaking, the differential mode serves like “the clutch of an automobile: the mechanism that permits the driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in the system for the transmission of power”.34 From this perspective, the eclectic structure of Filmmor Festival programing forms a gear box to integrate the changing dynamics and priorities of women across borders and by doing so does not only form a space to see the topographies of struggles but also to trace the changes taking place within local and international politics. Filmmor screens only films, including documentaries, shorts and fiction films, by women. The categorical use of “women” by the Festival speaks to a common context of struggle that goes beyond the differences and becomes a tactic to avoid the state’s criminalization of certain identities, such as Kurdish, or the state’s definition of the acceptable femininity as in Muslim women. In other words, ‘women’ as a category forms a space to move beyond the ones imposed by state policies and global culture. The programming involves powerful slogans (e.g. A Purse of Her Own, Honour, Women’s View of Violence or Women’s Solidarity keeps Women Alive) with films under thematic sections (such as Women’s Cinema, A Media of Her Own, The Anatomy of Violence, Our Bodies are Ours, or Good Movies Make Good Neighbors); a Feminist Memory section that is defined as tribute to a woman director or an influential feminist (e.g. Kate Millett, Şirin Tekeli, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Virginia Woolf); Retrospective; and various workshops. A teaser film usually goes in circulation over social and print media and film theatres several weeks before the start of the annual Festival. As Ger discusses, a festival’s ephemera produced through announcements, published programs, posters, websites, and slogans among others are crucial to understand how any festival presents itself and “operate mnemonically to cue memories.”35 The publics of the festival is constituted through

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the production and circulation of ephemeral texts. Although an eclectic approach of women’s film festivals brings a degree of criticism, as Heath suggests, it can also be seen as “a concerted bid” to facilitate continuity in the presence of women working in film.36 Thus the multilayered structure of Filmmor Festival indeed maintains tactics to reveal the shifting power dynamics, positions, priorities and differential politics of feminism in the local and global levels depending on the changes in the confronted circumstances. Through diverse number of films and directors from various regions and different points in history, resistance and agency of women are underlined in dialogue with contested ideologies of race, ethnicity, and gender. The mobile / on wheels aspect of Filmmor constitutes a political choice and a conscious decision to claim coalitional politics with women living in different parts of Turkey. The city of Istanbul, as the most populated area and the business center of Turkey, hosts the majority of the festivals and cultural activities of the country. The literature on the spatial dimension often carries an urban focus and discusses the role of the festivals in maintaining the visibility of minority cultures. Creating women’s space in urban locations is often perceived as highly significant, as Grosz argues, because of the integral role of the urban spaces in the construction of the gendered subject.37 The mobile film festivals add another dimension of a spatial aspect by investigating how the multiplicity of locations impacts organizational dynamics.38 While Istanbul is defined as the main screening location of the Filmmor, the mobile dimension breaks the Istanbul-centered nature of the festival circuit by traveling to different locations within Turkey in collaboration with local civil society and women’s organizations. The mobile aspect permits the continuity of the festival against the growing political challenges, censorship, difficulties in finding locations, the closing down of the women’s organizations and media outlets. Over the course of seventeen years, Filmmor has travelled to twenty-five different cities of the country. The cities and locations of the screenings have changed from year to year depending on political situation, available screening venues, funding opportunities, and relationship with the local organizations. The location was also a way of making statement against the state policies, as in the acknowledgement of the oppositional consciousness of Kurdish women as spectators, and public through the organization of 2004 mobile Festival of in collaboration with local organizations in Diyarbakır, a city of Kurdish region.39 The screenings have sometimes taken place at a local film theatre or in a room provided by a local organization. Within such a structure,

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intimate and interactive viewing spaces, the feminist nature of the programing, and majority female audiences disrupt the “patriarchal, cinematic viewing practices.”40 Heath also defines the programming strategies that create opportunities for women filmmakers to meet their spectators to discuss their own films as “truly revolutionary” and identifies women film festivals as spaces where the hierarchical relationship between the filmmaker and spectator is challenged.41 Annually changing titles of the Festival program address gender politics of the dominant ideology through various regions, such as the Middle East, North Africa or South Asia by reflecting the oppositional consciousness shared across borders. The increasing presence and the oppositional struggles of LGBT/queer movement in Turkey were also acknowledged in 2011 with relevant screenings and a panel on the meaning of “Queer,” and has continued to be a part of the Festival and as it is in the feminist politics in Turkey. The challenges Syrian refugees face were addressed through the films on refugees by the directors from Turkey and from the transnational arena. With the increasing war situations in the world, an antimilitarist approach has been promoted and the conditions that come with the war situation were captured in the screenings. At times the films were also perceived as educational tools as in the special screening under the section, Let’s Go to the Movies, Kids!, with a film that captured the story of a girl during wartime to explain to children “without showing any violence at all, just how negative and meaningless war, borders, bureaucracy, and hostility truly are”.42 When the programming strategies of the past seventeen years of annual Filmmor Festivals are traced, the recurrent themes of violence, silencing, honor, body, equality, history, women’s labor, women’s cinema, resistance, solidarity and hope within and beyond the borders and temporal dimensions appear. In the following pages, I first discuss the emerging subject positions under multiple forms of oppressions mostly through testimonials and the self-stories of women. Second, I argue that ‘solidarity’ has systematically been integrated into various steps and activities of the Filmmor Women’s Film Festival.

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Revealing Subjectivities Through the Stories of Women Across Borders The introductory pages of the Festival catalog each year acknowledge the local challenges, censorships, policy changes, or any remarkable events that impacted the situation of women in the previous year. A worsening situation and the increasing numbers in the issues of sexual abuse and rape, involuntary marriages, women murders, domestic violence against children and women are often criticized in these pages. The patriarchy of the state, the inadequacy of systems preventing violence, and the relationship between sexism and conservatism are questioned. The state is often blamed for worsening the situation of women by promoting the traditional roles and blessing the institution of the family at the expense of the rights and freedoms of women. The ideologies and the neoliberal and global policies seeing bodies as the field of power and war is challenged; exploitation of women’s labor, women not being waged equivalently for equal work, and never waged if spent in the family is often underlined. For example, the theme of “A purse, income and budget of her own” for the 12th Filmmor Festival has closely addressed the problematic relationship between neo-liberal policies and the (neo)-conservative familialism of welfare and employment regimes. The themes of the films consisted of unionization struggles of women, the solidarity of women in the factories, or the struggle of women with her husband trying to stop her from working.43 The control of the bodies with bans, laws, shame, disgrace, harassment and beating, and beauty standards of the capitalist systems are also been repeatedly criticized. ‘Resisting’ these hanging situations is promoted as the only option for the feminist politics, and Filmmor claims to show this resistance through films: We sometimes resist in order to live as we want, and sometimes just to live. We resist. At times with our bodies, at times with our choices, at times with our writing, at times with our cameras. Behind the cameras of this year’s films are once again women who resist. The resisting, hopeful films of the recent years are in the section Women’s Cinema.44

Hope has been continuously promoted as an answer to the challenges through the films categorized under various sections. For example, the films of the Sex-u-a-li-ties section have broken the routines about sexuality and sexual identities, and stood against “all the stereotypes and limitations

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of conservatism on women’s bodies with daring, radical and ground-­ breaking films”45 Feminist scholars underline the importance of women’s standpoint for feminist politics, as “subversive of the hegemonic”,46 as a new way of understanding the power structure and domination by drawing connections between experiences of the women and the powers exerted upon them. Filmmor claims to challenge patriarchy, the systematic workings of dominant ideologies and hierarchies through women’s own stories. The screenings reveal the conditions where women’s bodies and the domestic and public spaces they occupy have become the primary ground for the regulation of morality and inscriptions of patriarchal control. To give the example of Geek Girls, the persistence of violence in the field of technology is unveiled through the stories of geek girls from Japan, Hungary, America, and Canada, who have had considerable success in the field of technology but also faced cyberbullying, harassment, and sexism. The film demystified the idea that dynamics within the technology industry are genderless, and successful middle-class women do not face violence and harassment. The film Breaking the Silence from the United States also questioned the patriarchy through the stories of the sexual abuse women experienced. Similarly, in the Faces of Harassment from Brazil, 140 women of all different ages shared for the first time their experiences of sexual harassment.47 Women experiencing violence are represented as the agents and subjects of their lives, not as the subjects of ‘victim’ documentaries. The inclusion of women’s voices in the process of film production creates new modes of consciousness about knowing and understanding the sexuality of women. Defined as one of the significant aspects of the film festivals, competition gains new meaning and function within the feminist politics of Filmmor Festival. The capitalist logic behind the idea of competition was questioned and the idea of giving awards for recognition was practiced as a symbolic tool for promoting hope and for presenting a critique of the subtle relationship between masculinity and the idea of competition. Altın Bamya Ödülleri (Golden Okra Prize) was introduced in 2009 to bring attention to sexism in Turkish cinema and it was given ‘with the hope to find no candidate to give awards.’48 The prize was cancelled in 2018 due to high number of sexist and discriminatory films and TV series, and the spectators were invited to show their reactions with the #Enough hashtag through social media towards film and media industry, directors, and film production and distribution companies for contributing to sexist discourses and maintaining problematic gender discourses.49

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“With solidarity, no challenge is insurmountable”50 Filmmor perceives solidarity as essential dimensions of generating politics. Through the screenings and various other activities, solidarity and coalitional consciousness have been underlined as a political choice. It has been annually announced that the Festival kicks off “for sharing, producing and resisting with women and for women,” and “open its purple screen and bring women together not for competition but for solidarity”. During 11th Festival a solidarity award of Mor Kamera Umut Veren Kadın Sinemacı Dayanışma Ödülü (Purple Camera Promising Women Filmmaker Award) was announced to promote hope and as a representational symbolic reflection of solidarity with women who are at the beginning of their filmmaking careers.51 For Filmmor, solidarity has been crucial to stand against complex patriarchal structures of sexism and conservatism, violence, and threats to already gained rights such as divorce and abortion. During the 16th Festival, Filmmor shared the results of the research on the Acts of Femicide and launched the Femicide Is Preventable campaign. The research revealed that obvious indicators were present before the femicides and could have been prevented if the state fulfilled its responsibilities. With the slogan of Women’s Solidarity Keeps Women Alive, solidarity was promoted as the only option for women to stand against violence52 Collaboration with local women’s organizations have been prioritized for the continuity and the sustainability of the festival.53 Local community was also invited to support Filmmor by attending and participating in the screenings: “It is up to you to watch these films, and to act in solidarity, so that we might increase the limited resources and expand the narrow spaces available to us.”54 Solidarity has been the repeating theme in the screenings of Filmmor. For example, the section, Komşuluk: Komşu Komşunun Filmine Muhtaç (Neighborhood: Good Films Make Good Neighbors) claimed solidarity with neighboring countries by bringing attention to the realities and stories from Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Greece, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Armenia. In 7 Veils, Iranian director Sepideh Farsi has taken up her camera to investigate the reality of women in Afghanistan, a country which is usually associated only with war and violence. In Stitching Palestine, twelve Palestinian women shared their memories and stories, all connected by the enduring thread of embroidery. At times, individual struggles were acknowledged as in the support given to a mother searching a donor for

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her daughter as screened in the autobiographical documentary, Donor: Cornea Duo, directed by Eylem Şen.55 The retrospectives of women directors from Turkey, from the past and today, and from other geographies promoted solidarity beyond time and space. Chantal Akerman, Agnes Varda, Fiona Tan from Indonesia, Deepa Mehta from India, Kim Longinotto from the UK, Mai Masri from Palestine, Dutch director Marleen Gorris, Moroccan director Farida Benlyazid, and documentarist Jill Godmilow from the United States are a few among others acknowledged in the Retrospective section over the years. With persistent continuity of seventeen years, despite the growing challenges of political pressures, local politics, censorships, and lack of funding Filmmor Film Festival has formed a significant example of feminist space to discuss the possibilities of feminist politics within and beyond Turkey. The programming strategies consist of tactics to underline differential modes of oppositional consciousness. Through a diverse number of films and directors from various regions and different points in history, the resistance and agency of individuals in dialogue with contested ideologies of race, ethnicity, and gender is revealed. The concept of solidarity that is consistently integrated into the Festival constitutes challenges to patriarchal structures, neoliberal, religious and conservative ideologies. Without falling into the categorical dichotomies of secular, Islamist, modern, or promoting the realities of certain ethnic, racial, or class identities, Filmmor underlines the common context of struggles.

Notes 1. Carocci, Enrico. 2016. A Counterpublic sphere? Women’s film festivals and the case of films de femmes. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 23-4: 447–453; p. 448. 2. Loist, Skadi, and Ger Zielinski. 2012. On the development of queer film festivals and their media activism. In Film Festival Yearbook 4: Film festivals and activism, eds. Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, 49–62. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies. 3. White, Particia. 2015. Women’s cinema, world cinema: Projecting contemporary feminisms. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 18. 4. Carocci, Enrico. 2016. A Counterpublic sphere? Women’s film festivals and the case of films de femmes. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 23-4: 447–53; Heath, Theresa. 2018. Saving space: Strategies of space reclamation at early women’s film festivals and queer film festivals today.

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Studies in European Cinema, 15-1: 41–54; Huang, Yu Shan. 2003. Creating and distributing films openly”: On the relationship between women’s film festivals and the women’s rights movement in Taiwan. InterAsia Cultural Studies, 4-1: 157–158; Intan Paramaditha. 2018. Q! Film festival as cultural activism: strategic cinephilia and the expansion of a queer counterpublic. Visual Anthropology, 31-1,2: 74–92; Loist, Skadi. 2012. Social change?! The status of women’s film festivals today. Paper presented at Internationales Frauen Film Festival Dorthmund, April 20, Köln, Available at: www.frauenfilmfestival.eu/fileadmin/Bilder/ Downloaddateien/Women_s_Film_Festivals_in_Dialogue_keynote_ Skadi_Loist.pdf (accessed 9 March 2020). 5. See . 2003. Feminism 101: The New York women’s video festival, 1972–1980. Camera Obscura, 18-3: 3–38; Maule, Rosanna. 2014. Women’s Festival 2.0 between grassroots globalization and liberal feminism: The Birds Eye View Festival. «Comunicazioni sociali», 3: 368–374; Kay Armatage. 2009. Toronto Women & Film International 1973. In Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival circuit, eds. Dina Iordanova and R. Rhyne, 82–98. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies; Martineau, Barbara Halpern. 1975. Paris|Chicago: Women’s film festivals 1974. Women and Film, 2–7: 10–18; White, Patricia. 2006. The last days of women’s cinema. Camera Obscura 63: 145–151. 6. The concepts of “feminist organizations” and “women’s movement” are used separately to acknowledge the diversity of women’s groups contributing to gender politics whether or not they claim affiliations with feminist politics. 7. Filmmor. http://filmmor.org/en/about-us. Accessed 20 April 2019. 8. Filmmor. http://filmmor.org. 9. Poster, catalog, program and bulletin of the annual Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels are available online at http://filmmor.org/en/ festival_en/ both in Turkish and English. 10. Zielinski, Ger. 2016. On studying film festival ephemera. The case of queer film festivals and archives of feelings. In Film festivals: History, theory, method, practice, eds. Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 138–158. New York, NY: Routledge. 11. Sandoval, Chela. 1991. U.S.  Third World feminism: The theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world. Genders 10: 1–24; Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the oppressed. University of Minnesota Press. 12. Cockburn, Cynthia. 2010. Gender relations as causal in militarization and war. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12-2: 139–157; p. 144. 13. Women’s Associations Guide prepared by Uçan Süpürge in 2004 gives an idea about the growth of women’s organizations in numbers. While the

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number of women’s organizations did not exceed 10 between the years 1973 and 1982; it was 64 between 1983 and 1992. By 2004, the number reached to 350. Uçan Süpürge. 2004. Türkiye’de kadın örgütleri Rrehberi. ̇ 2004. Ankara: Ingiltere Büyükelçiliçiği ve Uçan Süpürge cited in Altınay, ̇ Ayşe Gül and Yeşim Arat. 2008. Türkiye’de kadına yönelik şiddet. Istanbul: Punto Baskı Çözümlemeleri, p. 21. 14. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1996. Contemporary feminist scholarship and Middle East studies. In Gendering the Middle East, eds. Deniz Kandiyoti, 1–27. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. 15. Women’s demands for equality and participation in Ottoman society which started as early as 1868 also consist of a significant part of feminist genealogy in Turkey. For further reading on this issue, see Demirbilek, Aynur. 1998. In pursuit of the Ottoman women’s movement. In Deconstructing images of “The Turkish Woman”, eds. Arat Zehra, 65–82. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 16. See Kandiyoti, Deniz 1989. Women and the Turkish state: Political actors or symbolic pawns? In Women–Nation–State, eds. Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, 126–149. Macmillan, London; Coşar, Simten and Funda Gencoğlu Onbaşı. 2008. Women’s movement in Turkey at a crossroads: from women’s rights advocacy to feminism. South European Society and Politics, 13: 3, pp. 325–344. 17. see Arat, Yeşim. 1994. Women movement of the 1980s in Turkey: Radical outcome of liberal Kemalism. In Reconstructing gender in the Middle East: Tradition, identity and power, eds. Fatma Müge Göcek & Shiva Balaghi, 100–112. New  York: Columbia University Press; Tekeli, Şirin. 1995. Women in modern Turkish society: A reader. London: Zed Books. 18. Diner, Çağla and Şule Toktaş. 2010. Waves of feminism in Turkey: Kemalist, Islamist and Kurdish women’s movements in an era of globalization. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 12-1, 41–57; p. 47. 19. see Bora, Aksu and Asena Günal. 2002. 90’larda Turkiye’de feminism. Istanbul, Turkey: Iletisim; Çağlayan, Handan. 2007. Analar, yoldaşlar, ̇ tanrıçalar: Kürt hareketinde kadınlar ve kadın kimliğinin oluşumu. Istanbul: ̇Iletişim Yayınları; Kerestecioglu, Inci ̇ Özkan. 2004. The women’s movement in the 1990s: Demand for democracy and equality. In The position of women in Turkey and in the European Union: Achievements, problems, proṡ pects, eds. Fatmagül Berktay, Inci Özkan Kerestecioglu, Sevgi Uçan Cubukcu, Özlem Terzi and Zeynep Kıvılcım Forsman, pp. 75–97. Istanbul, Turkey: KA-DER Press; Simga, Hülya and Gulru Z. Göker. 2017. Whither feminist alliance? Secular feminists and Islamist women in Turkey. Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 23-3: 273–293. 20. Haydari, Nazan. 2013. Building solidarity through relationships: The politics of feminism as an intellectual project in Turkey. In New public spheres:

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Recontextualizing the intellectual, eds. Thijssen, Peter, Walter Weyns, Christiane Timmerman and Sara Mels, 145–162. London: Routledge. 21. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1996. Contemporary feminist scholarship and Middle East studies. In Gendering the Middle East, eds. Deniz Kandiyoti, 1–27. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press; p. 15. 22. Öztürkmen, Arzu. 1998. A short history of Kadinca magazine and its feminism. In Deconstructing images of “The Turkish Woman”, eds. Zehra Arat, 275–293. New  York: St. Martin’s Press.; Tekeli, Şirin. 1995. Women in modern Turkish society: A reader. London: Zed Books. 23. Atakav, Eylem. 2015. Feminism and women’s film history in 1980s Turkey. In Doing women’s film history: Reframing cinemas, past and future, eds. Gledhill, Christine and Julia Knight, 127–138, pp. 136–137 Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. For further references see Dönmez-Colin, Gönül. 2010. Women in Turkish cinema: Their presence and absence as images and as image-makers. Third Text, 24-1: 91–105. 24. Atakav, Eylem. Feminism and women’s film history in 1980s Turkey, p. 137. 25. Öztürk, Ruken. 2004. Sinemanin dişil yüzü: Türkiye’de kadın yönetmenler. Istanbul: Om Yayınevi; pp. 34–38. 26. Tanrıöver, Hülya Uğur. 2017. Women as film directors in Turkish cinema. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 24-4: 321–335; p. 325. 27. Tanrıöver, Hülya Uğur. Women as film directors in Turkish cinema, pp. 328–329. 28. For further information about Uçan Süpürge (Flying Broom) see https:// ucansupurge.org.tr/. 29. Tanrıöver, Hulya Uğur. 2017. Women as film directors in Turkish cinema. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 24–4: 321–335; pp. 329–330. 30. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 2016. Locating the politics of gender: Patriarchy, neoliberal governance and violence in Turkey. Research and Policy on Turkey, 1-2: 103–118. 31. see Çoşar, Simten and Metin Yeğenoğlu. 2011. New grounds for patriarchy in Turkey? Gender policy in the age of AKP. South European Society ̇ and Politics, 16-4: 555–573; Coşar, Simten & Inci Özkan-Kerestecioğlu. 2017. Feminist politics in contemporary Turkey: Neoliberal attacks, feminist claims to the public. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 38-2: 151–174. 32. Mohanty, Candra Talpade. 1991. Introduction: Cartographies of struggle: Third world women and the politics of feminism. In Third World women and the politics of feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, 1–57. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; p. 4. 33. Sandoval, Chela. 1991. U.S. third world feminism: The theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world. Genders 10: 1–24; p. 3.

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34. Sandoval, Chela. U.S. Third World feminism: The theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world, p. 14. 35. Zielinski, Ger. 2016. On studying film festival ephemera. The case of queer film festivals and archives of feelings. In Film festivals: History, theory, method, practice, eds. Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 138–158. New York, NY: Routledge; p. 143. 36. Heath, Theresa. 2018. Saving space: Strategies of space reclamation at early women’s film festivals and queer film festivals today. Studies in European Cinema. 15-1: 41–54; p. 43. For further discussion in programming strategies also see Armatage, Kay. 2009. Material effects: Fashions in feminist programming. There she goes: Feminist filmmaking and beyond, eds. Corinn Columpar and Sophie Mayer, 90–104. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press: 90–104. 37. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1995. Space, time and perversion. New  York, NY: Routledge, p. 104. 38. Odabasi, Eren. Gezici festival: multiple identities of a traveling film festival in Turkey, p. 153. 39. Filmmor. 2004. 2nd International Filmmor Film Festival on Wheels. http://filmmor.org/2-filmmor-kadin-filmleri-festivali/. Accessed 20 December 2019. 40. Heath, Theresa. 2018. Saving space: Strategies of space reclamation at early women’s film festivals and queer film festivals today. Studies in European Cinema. 15-1: 41–54; p. 45. 41. Heath, Theresa. 2018. Saving space: Strategies of space reclamation at early women’s film festivals and queer film festivals today. Studies in European Cinema. 15-1: 41–54; p. 43. 42. Filmmor. 2018. 16th International Filmmor Film Festival on Wheels. http://filmmor.org/16-filmmor//. Accessed 20 December 2019. 43. Özveren, Merve. 2014. Filmmor ekibi ile söyleşi. https://www.filmhafizasi.com/filmmor-ekibi-ile-soylesi/. Accessed January 1st, 2020. 44. Filmmor. 2014. 12th International Filmmor Film Festival on Wheels. http://filmmor.org/12-uluslararasi-gezici-filmmor-kadin-filmleri-festivali/. Accessed 20 December 2019. 45. Filmmor. 2009. 7th International Filmmor Film Festival on Wheels. http://filmmor.org/7-uluslararasi-gezici-filmmor-kadin-filmleri-festivali/. Accessed 20 December 2019. 46. Cockburn, Cynthia. 2010. Gender relations as causal in militarization and war. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12-2: 139–157; p. 140. 47. Filmmor. 2018. 16th International Filmmor Film Festival on Wheels. http://filmmor.org/16-filmmor/. Accessed 20 December 2019. 48. https://www.filmhafizasi.com/filmmor-ekibi-ile-soylesi/. Filmmor ekibi ile söleşi. Film Hafızası. Accessed March 1, 2020.

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49. Filmmor. 2018. Altın Bamya Akademisi’nden zorunlu açıklamahttp://filmmor.org/altin-bamya-akademisinden-zorunluaciklama/. Accessed 20 January 2020. 50. The slogan of  the  17th International Filmmor Film Festival on  Wheels in 2019. 51. Filmmor. 2013. 11th International Filmmor Film Festival on Wheels. http://filmmor.org/11-uluslararasi-gezici-filmmor-kadin-filmleri-festivali/. Accessed 20 December 2019. 52. Filmmor. 2018. 16th International Filmmor Film Festival on Wheels. http://filmmor.org/16-filmmor/. Accessed 20 December 2019. 53. Filmmor. 2019. 17th International Filmmor Film Festival on Wheels. http://filmmor.org/17-filmmor/. Accessed 20 December 2019. 54. Filmmor. 2019. 17th International Filmmor Film Festival on Wheels. 55. Filmmor. 2019. 17th International Filmmor Film Festival on Wheels.

References ̇ Altınay, Ayşe Gül and Yeşim Arat. 2008. Türkiye’de kadına yönelik şiddet. Istanbul: Punto Baskı Çözümlemeleri. Alexander, M.  Jacqui & Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1997. Introduction: Genealogies, legacies, movements. In Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures, eds. M.  Jacqui. Alexander & Chandra Talpade Mohanty, pp. 3–29. New York: Routledge. Arat, Yeşim. 2016. Islamist women and feminist concerns in contemporary Turkey: Prospects for women’s rights and solidarity. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 37-3: 125–150. Arat, Yeşim. 1994. Women movement of the 1980s in Turkey: Radical outcome of liberal Kemalism. In Reconstructing gender in the Middle East: Tradition, identity and power, eds. Fatma Müge Göcek & Shiva Balaghi, 100–112. New York: Columbia University Press. Atakav, Eylem. 2015. Feminism and women’s film history in 1980s Turkey. In Doing women’s film history: Reframing cinemas, past and future, eds. Gledhill, Christine and Julia Knight, 127–138. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. . 2003. Feminism 101: The New  York women’s video festival, 1972–1980. Camera Obscura, 18-3: 3–38. Binnie, Jon and Christian Klesse. 2018. Comparative queer methodologies and queer film festival research. Studies in European Cinema. 15-1: 55–71. Bora, Aksu and Asena Günal. 2002. 90’larda Turkiye’de feminism. Istanbul, Turkey: Iletisim. Carocci, Enrico. 2016. A counterpublic sphere? Women’s film festivals and the case of films de femmes. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 23-4: 447–453.

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Cockburn, Cynthia. 2010. Gender relations as causal in militarization and war. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12-2: 139–157. Çaha, Ömer. 2011. The Kurdish Women’s Movement: A Third-Wave Feminism Within the Turkish Context. Turkish Studies, 12-3, 435–449. Çağlayan, Handan. 2007. Analar, yoldaşlar, tanrıçalar: Kürt hareketinde kadınlar ̇ ̇ ve kadın kimliğinin oluşumu. Istanbul: Iletiş im Yayınları. Coşar, Simten and Funda Gencoğlu Onbaşı. 2008. Women’s movement in Turkey at a crossroads: from women’s rights advocacy to feminism. South European Society and Politics, 13: 3, pp. 325–344. ̇ Özkan-Kerestecioğlu. 2017. Feminist politics in contempoCoşar, Simten & Inci rary Turkey: Neoliberal attacks, feminist claims to the public. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 38-2: 151–174. Çoşar, Simten and Metin Yeğenoğlu. 2011. New grounds for patriarchy in Turkey? Gender policy in the age of AKP. South European Society and Politics, 16-4: 555–573. Demirbilek, Aynur. 1998. In pursuit of the Ottoman women’s movement. In Deconstructing images of “The Turkish Woman”, eds. Arat Zehra, 65–82. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Diner, Cagla and Şule Toktaş. 2010. Waves of feminism in Turkey: Kemalist, Islamist and Kurdish women’s movements in an era of globalization, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 12-1: 41–57. Dönmez-Colin, Gönül. 2010. Women in Turkish cinema: Their presence and absence as images and as image-makers. Third Text, 24-1: 91–105. Filmmor. http://filmmor.org. Accessed 10 January 2020. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1995. Space, time and perversion. New  York, NY: Routledge, p. 104. Haydari, Nazan. 2013. Building solidarity through relationships: The politics of feminism as an intellectual project in Turkey. In New public spheres: Recontextualizing the intellectual, eds. Thijssen, Peter, Walter Weyns, Christiane Timmerman and Sara Mels, 145–162. London: Routledge. Heath, Theresa. 2018. Saving space: Strategies of space reclamation at early women’s film festivals and queer film festivals today. Studies in European Cinema, 15-1: 41–54. Huang, Yu Shan. 2003. Creating and distributing films openly: On the relationship between women’s film festivals and the women’s rights movement in Taiwan. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4-1: 157–158. Intan, Paramaditha. 2018. Q! Film festival as cultural activism: strategic cinephilia and the expansion of a queer counterpublic. Visual Anthropology, 31-1,2: 74–92. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1996a. Contemporary feminist scholarship and Middle East studies. In Gendering the Middle East, eds. Deniz Kandiyoti, 1–27. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

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̇ Özkan. 2004. The women’s movement in the 1990s: Demand Kerestecioglu, Inci for democracy and equality. In The position of women in Turkey and in the ̇ European Union: Achievements, problems, prospects, eds. Fatmagül Berktay, Inci Özkan Kerestecioglu, Sevgi Uçan Cubukcu, Özlem Terzi and Zeynep Kıvılcım Forsman, 75–97. Istanbul, Turkey: KA-DER Press. Kay Armatage. 2009. Toronto Women & Film International 1973. In Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival circuit, eds. Dina Iordanova and R. Rhyne, 82–98. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 2016. Locating the politics of gender: Patriarchy, neoliberal governance and violence in Turkey. Research and Policy on Turkey, 1-2: 103–118. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1996b. Contemporary feminist scholarship and Middle East studies. In Gendering the Middle East, eds. Deniz Kandiyoti, 1–27. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Kandiyoti, Deniz 1989. Women and the Turkish state: Political actors or symbolic pawns? In Women–Nation–State, eds. Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, 126–149. Macmillan, London. Loist, Skadi, and Ger Zielinski. 2012. On the development of queer film festivals and their media activism. In Film festival yearbook 4: Film Festivals and activism, eds. Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, 49–62. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies. Loist, Skadi. 2012. Social change?! The status of women’s film festivals today. Lecture presented at the Internationale Frauenfilmfestival Dortmund | Köln. Available at: www.frauenfilmfestival.eu/fileadmin/Bilder/Downloaddateien/ Women_s_Film_Festivals_in_Dialogue_keynote_Skadi_Loist.pdf (accessed 9 March 2020). Maule, Rosanna. 2014. Women’s Festival 2.0 between grassroots globalization and liberal feminism: The Birds Eye View Festival. «Comunicazioni sociali», 3: 368–374. Martineau, Barbara Halpern. 1975. Paris|Chicago: Women’s film festivals 1974. Women and Film, 2-7: 10–18. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2004. Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. Odabasi, Eren. 2016. Gezici festival: multiple identities of a traveling film festival in Turkey. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 14-1: 149–163. Özveren, Merve. 2014. Filmmor ekibi ile söyleşi. https://www.filmhafizasi.com/ filmmor-ekibi-ile-soylesi/. Accessed January 1st, 2002. Öztürk, Ruken. 2004. Sinemanin dişil yüzü: Türkiye’de kadın yönetmenler. Istanbul: Om Yayınevi; pp. 34–38. Öztürkmen, Arzu. 1998. A short history of Kadinca magazine and its feminism. In Deconstructing images of “The Turkish Woman”, eds. Zehra Arat, 275–293. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Sandoval, Chela. 1991. U.S. Third World feminism: The theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world. Genders, 10: 1–24. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the oppressed. University of Minnesota Press. Simga, Hulya and Gulru Z. Goker. 2017. Whither feminist alliance? Secular feminists and Islamist women in Turkey, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 23-3: 273–293. Tanrıöver, Hülya Uğur. 2017. Women as film directors in Turkish cinema. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 24-4: 321–335. Tekeli, Şirin. 1995. Women in modern Turkish society: A reader. London: Zed Books. ̇ Uçan Süpürge. 2004. Türkiye’de kadın örgütleri Rehberi. Ankara: Ingiltere Büyükelçiliği ve Uçan Süpürge. White, Patricia. 2006. The last days of women’s cinema. Camera Obscura 63: 145–151. White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s cinema, world cinema. Projecting contemporary feminism. Durham, Duke University Press. Zielinski, Ger. 2016. On studying film festival ephemera. The case of queer film festivals and archives of feelings. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, eds. Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 138–158. New York, NY: Routledge.

CHAPTER 15

Machine Gaze on Women: How Everyday Machine-Vision-Technologies See Women in Films Diğdem Sezen

Introduction Machine vision systems provide new ways to study moving images. Recently, tools employing specifically designed machine vision algorithms are being used to analyze gender perspective in films. The results are effective for policymaking and creating awareness for gender imbalance in film culture. Adopting an experimental approach, this study looks at women’s images in films through commercially available machine vision systems and discusses what we can learn from machine ways of looking at films about both films and machines. The first section discusses the tectonic shift machine vision systems caused in contemporary visual culture and how this shift challenges visual culture researchers to find new ways to

D. Sezen (*) Department of Transmedia, Digital Art and Animation, School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. Sezen et al. (eds.), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_15

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make sense of new visuality. The second part addresses the continuity, validity of discussions on race and gender in contemporary visual culture by introducing the concepts such as “coded gaze” and “algorithmic oppression” and it is followed by a review of how computational approaches have been employed to study gender representation in films. The last section presents a playful experiment to look at film images through commercially available machine vision systems and discusses the findings as a basis to initiate further questions interrogating the agency of women in contemporary visuality.

Machine Vision: From Mechanical Eye to Algorithms I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only the machine can see it… My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.1

In his search for the construction of an objective depiction of reality through film, Dziga Vertov (1923) writes in first-person on behalf of the movie camera, giving it a voice of its own as an independent entity and not an extension of the human eye. In his 1929 movie Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov visualizes this concept in a famous animated sequence in which an analog camera moves on its own, getting out of the box, climbing over the tripod, turning around, tilting up and down and finally walking out of the scene. Hoelzl and Marie,2 describe this sequence as “the first camera-robot” symbolizing the ultimate condition of machines that no longer need humans to function or to look at their images. Vertov’s camera-robot, due to its ubiquitous, constant capturing of the world with agency and autonomy, as Steve Anderson notes, could be seen as “a prescient glimpse of contemporary machine vision and mobile media”.3 According to Trevor Paglen over the last decade, a “tectonic shift” in contemporary visual culture has been happening right in front of us, but invisibly.4 At its center stands the uncountable number of images produced by individuals and automatic cameras in every corner of life, but also the digital nature of contemporary image. Paglen argues that the majority of the images in contemporary visual culture are produced by machines to be seen by other machines and are not visible to the human eye.5 A “photograph” taken on a mobile phone camera is actually a machine-readable file containing numerical light and color information

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and unlike undeveloped film pellicule, it is not readable by both humans and machines, but the data it contains is for machine-eyes-only. It only becomes visible through an image viewer software. This numerical data also provides the basis for “machine vision technologies” (MVTs). Machine vision defines the process whereby a machine automatically processes an image and reports “what is in the image” and recognizes its content.6 Computers do not see photos and videos in the same way that people do, Google’s privacy terms explains the principles of MVTs in a simple, straightforward manner: When you look at a photo, you might see your best friend standing in front of her house. From a computer’s perspective that same image is simply a bunch of data that it may interpret as shapes and information about color values. While a computer won’t react like you do when you see that photo, a computer can be trained to recognize certain patterns of colors and shapes. For example, a computer might be trained to recognize the common patterns of shapes and colors that make up a digital image of a landscape such as a beach or an object like a car.7

By comparing patterns with the numerical data of a digital image machines can recognize their content. The more patterns of shapes and objects a machine vision software computes, the more content it can “see”. With a large enough data set, the computer can recognize even the most abstract and seemingly elusive concepts. The value of a data set of billions of images for developing and refining machine vision technologies is crucial. Today, the images and videos that humans create, share and archive over social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook or Snapchat are used as a basis for refining machine vision algorithms, artificial intelligence and marketing analytics.8 With this “training” MVTs could analyze and interpret the meaning of events across a wide spectrum of activities ranging from surveillance to medical diagnosis, the automotive industry to livestock manufacturing, military robotics to social media. As part of the everyday life of ordinary people, MVTs and other vision technologies affect individuals and society deeply and immensely in terms of the “agency” of users, “objectivity” of images and the “values” embedded in machine vision.9 For users of these technologies, it is hard to understand the complex procedures that drive these mechanisms. Everyday MVTs working through large-scale image databases develop their own rules for identifying gender after seeing thousands of image examples, but

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these rules can be baffling for humans to discern.10 Algorithms are generally invisible and they are often referred as “black box” constructs, as most people interacting with such systems are in the dark about how they work and why they can be threatening, even though they have a significant impact on our daily lives by affecting, organizing, constructing our behavior, society, institutions and politics without an apparent limit.11 Paul Virilio draws attention to how new technologies of vision provoke a crisis for human perception and argues that sharing of perception of the environment between animate (living subject) and inanimate (the object, the seeing machine) entails ethical, philosophical questions “of the splitting of viewpoint”.12 Once we are excluded from the direct observation of synthetic images created by the machines for the machines, Virilio asks, what would the effects, and the theoretical and practical consequences of this “sightless vision,” be for our own vision of the world? One consequence is the inheritance of existing patriarchal power structures into these new modes of vision. Donna Haraway’s famous 1988 paper on Situated Knowledges, reminds us that vision is always a question of the power to see. Writing decades before the advent of contemporary MVTs, Haraway argued that humans were already embedded with visual media technologies. These technologies organize, construct and affect society, institutions, politics and behavior. They may pretend to be infinite, omni-seeing, neutral, unbiased, innocent and objective, but this is an illusion, a god trick. Vision technologies are in fact constructs of the male-dominant, militarized and racist societies. The true objectivity, on the other hand, is only possible through admitting that only situated knowledges through partial perspectives promise objective vision and understanding how these visual systems work ought to be a way of embodying feminist objectivity.13 Similar to Haraway, John Johnston14 also rejects an inherited opposition between the human and the technical by employing the Deleuzian concept of “machinic vision” which he defines as a machinic assemblage of images in mobile constellation of relationship with other images. According to Gates, what concerns both Haraway and Johnston seems to be not the new ways of seeing through new vision technologies, but instead retaining and reinscribing the existing power relationships and dominant modes of vision.15 Questioning the con/dis-junctions of feminism, science and technology, Rosi Braidotti suggests a transdisciplinary position, a nomadic style for the feminists: “The feminist theoretician today can only be “in transit,” moving on, passing through, creating connections where things were

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previously dis-connected or seemed un-related, where there seemed to be “nothing to see””.16 This approach can also be adapted in the studies of contemporary visual culture through MVTs, exploring new ways of seeing and thinking about female subjectivity. The first step of this could be to look at how existing discussions of visual culture studies were maintained in algorithmic culture.

Coded Gaze in the Black Box Most of the algorithms that we interact on a daily regular basis are not open and accessing their source code is most of the time hidden. Even if access is gained, codes are woven together with other algorithmic systems in complex relations that are never fixed and constantly change. Thus, we tend to idolize these black box computational systems as completely objective as they analyze vast amounts of data seamlessly, making decisions about cultural processes based on calculations. However, even though computational algorithms have mathematics at their core, as Tartleton Gillespie has noted, algorithms are best conceived as a kind of socio-­ technical ensemble of humans and machines in a systematic/mathematical relationship.17 In other words, culture is automated through technology.18 Xenofeminist Manifesto by the Laboria Cuboniks collective advocates that technology is not inherently progressive. There are serious risks built into technological tools and “they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak”.19 Gender inequality is a characteristic feature of the environment that new technologies are “conceived, built, and legislated for”.20 Algorithms reflect back the biases in the world,21 and they do this at a massive scale and without any control. The shortcomings of artificial intelligence processes collectively create “algorithmic bias” by which human decision-making across different situations and conditions can be affected in complicated ways. Focusing on algorithmic bias in computer vision systems Joy Buolamvini suggests the term “coded gaze” to conceptualize “the embedded views that are propagated by those who have the power to code systems”.22 Re-evaluation of “looking” as “the gaze” by feminist and queer theory has fundamentally transformed our understanding of visual culture in the past.23 In her influential essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey discusses Hollywood cinema in terms of “male gaze” which is the act of depicting women and the world from a masculine, heterosexual perspective putting women on screen into the position of desired

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objects by the male viewer.24 Similarly, coded gaze re-evaluates the objectivity of computer vision towards gender and race. According to Buolamvini, computational facial recognition systems perform as expected in 99 percent of evaluations of images of white men, but only in 35 percent of evaluations of images of darker skinned women.25 In other words, computers cannot see darker skinned women as well as white men. According to Safiya Umoje Noble, such instances cannot be seen just as glitches in the system, but are instances of “algorithmic oppression”, fundamental to the operating system of the web and has a direct impact on users and their lives beyond Internet applications.26 Buolamwini’s research raises questions about how today’s neural networks are trained and evaluated through patterns in biased data sets in line with Haraway’s moral and political questions to understand power struggles at play in vision technologies and knowledge production from a partial perspective from decades ago: How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who gets to have more than one point of view? Who gets blinded? Who wears blinders? Who interprets the visual field? What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides vision?27

By analyzing what is seen and what is not seen by MVTs we can evaluate the biases embedded in algorithms and thus the culture they were developed in. As Nick Seaver argues, “algorithms are not technical rocks in a cultural stream, but are rather just more water”.28 In other words, they are not singular technical developments that enter and influence culture but are rather enacted by the collective cultural practices. They are culture. Nevertheless, as cultural tools they can also be trained and be used to look at films from certain perspectives. Quantifying gender representation is one of the popular uses of MVTs as recognition and counting tools that were employed by both the film industry and academia.

Quantifying Gender Representation in Films Since the early 2010s, multiple studies experimented with transdisciplinary approaches about machinic ways of seeing women in films and the quantification of gender representation through MVTs and other computational methods. Besides the technological challenges, one of the key questions of such studies was how to quantify representation, or what to

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count. In this regard existing criteria for measuring the representation of women in fiction, such as the Bechdel-Wallace test provided a basis. The Bechdel-Wallace test originally made its entrance into mainstream criticism with the New Yorker magazine with a profile piece about actress Anna Faris written by Tad Friend in 2011 and became a standard by which feminist critics judge television series, movies, books and other media.29 Named after cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace, the rules of the test first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel’s ongoing comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. In the strip, two women discuss seeing a movie and one of them explains that she only goes to a movie if it satisfies three rules: (1) the movie has to have at least two women in it (2) who talk to each other (3) about something other than a man. Bechdel attributed30 the idea to Virginia Woolf—who, in her essay A Room of One’s Own remarked: But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends.31

The Bechdel-Wallace test inspired other tests with different rule sets questioning not only the protagonist or supporting cast, but also the intersectionality of the films as well as the woman behind the camera,32 all of which are based on the quantification of previously set variables. As seen in recent studies using automated natural language processing33 and data mining techniques34 on film scripts to implement automated versions of the Bechdel-Wallace test, or in screenwriting software incorporating Bechdel-Wallace test analysis as a feature for writers to assess their scripts in terms of gender balance35 such rule-based, procedural approaches can easily be applied in computerized analysis tools. The core principle is replacing human investigators counting variables with machines which can automatically recognize and count them. As machine learning technologies advanced and became widespread, machine vision for analyzing gender representation in films by measuring appearances too started to be used effectively as text-based tools. One of the first such tools to use MVTs to measure gender representation in films was the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (GD-IQ). Developed by Geena Davis Institute of Gender in Media and incorporating Google’s machine

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learning technology, GD-IQ analyzes screen appearances and dialog length of female characters in films by detecting and tracking faces and speech.36 One of the main advantages of the software is its capability to quickly analyze massive amounts of data and reporting its findings in real time. Analyzing a total of 200 top grossing films released between 2014 and 2015, GD-IQ revealed that men were seen and heard nearly twice as often as women indicating how female characters in popular cinema continue to be “unrepresented”.37 In a similar study, Jang et al. analyzed 40 films using image analysis techniques following the procedural logic of the Bechdel-Wallace test and utilizing the machine vision algorithms based on emotional diversity, spatio-temporal occupancy, intellectual image, age, and emphasis on appearance.38 The study found a statistically significant difference in the visual representation of female and male characters as female characters showed lower values in emotional diversity, spatial occupancy, and temporal occupancy compared to male characters in commercial films.39 Studies using different methods harnessing machine vision to understand gender representation in visual culture are not limited to the film medium. Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton propose “distant viewing” as a method within cultural analytics based on extracting and aggregating semantic metadata from images for the systematic examination of visual data to view patterns in a corpus.40 Their software, the Distant Viewing Toolkit, is used “to identify how gender is being performed and represented through formal elements” present in US sitcoms from the Network Era (1954–1975).41 Melvin Wevers and Thomas Smits applied computer vision techniques to study the representation of gender displays in historical advertisements from the 1920s to the 1990s.42 Training a gender detection algorithm using convolutional neural networks to estimate whether men or women were represented in the images, they examined continuity and change of gender displays in an extensive dataset. Image-analysis systems focusing on gender representation are attempts to analyze content across platforms and generate data not only for research but also policymaking as well as creating awareness of gender imbalance in the visual culture.43 Their common characteristic is employing specially developed computational methods based on image recognition and machine learning to perform certain tasks to identify gender related variables in diverse sets of images and films. They replace human investigators with machines which can perform their tasks much faster and efficiently. Today, commercially available non-specialized machine vision services

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based on similar principles are widely used as well. They operate in the background for law enforcement and surveillance systems but also are used by people in their everyday lives as part of Internet search engines to social media. As non-specialized tools, they operate on generalized algorithms. As Bogost pointed out, algorithms, including the ones operating commercial MVTs, are expressive, ideological and persuading, and thus following Harraway and Braidotti we can investigate these machine vision technologies critically, questioning possible biases embedded in them.4445 Studying how MVTs see the world not only provides detailed data on the world en masse, but also reveals the cultural constructs embedded in software. In this regard, looking at films through the lens of non-specialized software is in essence both a study of films and the coded gaze looking at cultural artifacts. The following investigation with a group of commercially available computer vision platforms and selected film images is an attempt in pursuit of this goal.

Experimenting with Everyday Machine Gaze Rob Kitchin identifies six main approaches for studying algorithms, which include (1) examining pseudo-code/source code, (2) reflexively producing code, (3) reverse engineering, (4) interviewing designers or conducting an ethnography of a coding team, (5) unpacking the full socio-technical assemblage of algorithms, and finally (6) examining how algorithms do work in the world.46 The first three approaches focus on the technical aspects of algorithms while the fourth focuses on the techno-social development culture behind it, and the fifth approach is most effective in evaluating and analyzing specific systems in depth. In a comparative analysis of multiple everyday MVTs’ recognition of film images for investigating possible algorithmic biases, though the sixth approach can be a starting point since it observes algorithms’ performance within context and analyzes how their effects unfold in multifarious ways. Today, major technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon provide cloud-based computer vision platforms to their customers to be applied in multiple services and offer free versions of these platforms to the general public for demonstration purposes. With features like automatic object and facial attribute detection, and explicit content and celebrity recognition such services give a glimpse of how mainstream machine vision works in the world and provide an opportunity to investigate non-specialized MVTs’ capabilities, their usefulness and limits in

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studying gender representation in film. Unlike analyzing films through specialized software such as GD-IQ, which uses MVTs to automatically collect specific data, this approach focuses on the interaction between film and MVTs. Analyzing films through non-specialized MVTs not only provides data on the visual construct and aesthetics of films but also reveals the limits of algorithmic recognition and possible biases embedded within. In this regard it is not only a study of films, but a study of the software looking at films as well. Between February and March 2019, I used free online versions of three cloud-based computer vision platforms by major technology companies to analyze images from six films to investigate their interactions. These platforms were Google Cloud Vision API, Amazon Rekognition and Microsoft Azure Computer Vision API.  Albeit using different terminology and offering slightly different features, these demo platforms shared core features such as detecting objects, faces, facial attributes, emotions, printed or handwritten texts, visual content categorized as unsafe and creating metadata for classification of the images. The versions I used were designed to analyze still images, thus I had to select specific scenes from films I have chosen and used screen captures to run the tests (see Fig. 15.1). Figures in Landscape

Figures in Motion Close ups

Beach

Dirty road on the bike Garden

Balcony

Vagabond Mona

Mona Truck The Woman

Yellow hat kid and Mona

Pump Farm Cycling Mop Old woman girls & boy Sphere

Woman’s Face Driving Julianne on the phone Marianne

Kitchen

Goat Couch Gals

Office

Cafe

Flowers Woman and Man

Groups of people DIfferent ages/gender

Fig. 15.1  Google Cloud Vision API’s analyses of a close-up of general’s wife from Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928)

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The selection of films I used were notable examples of feature films about women, featuring female protagonists and directed by women directors from different parts of the world.47 I have chosen these films both to test the interactions between non-specialized MVTs and female subjectivity on screen and to avoid the possible effects of filmic gaze,48 meaning the platforms recognizing visual elements deliberately objectifying female characters. These films were The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) by Germaine Dulac, Marianne and Juliane (1981) by Margarethe von Trotta, Vagabond (1985) by Agnès Varda, The Day I Became a Woman (2000) by Marzieh Meshkini, and The Headless Woman (2008) by Lucrecia Martel. I have identified four categories to select still frames from these films, which would provide visuals of different types of interactions between female characters. These were, “figures in landscape”, “female figures in motion”, “groups of people from different genders and ages” and “close-ups of female characters”. I coded each scene with a specific description. This selection process provided me twenty-seven still images to be tested with the three platforms I have chosen (see Fig.  15.2). I uploaded and recorded each analysis and compared them. The computer vision platforms’ findings from a close-up image of the general’s wife from The Seashell and the Clergyman (see Fig. 15.1) demonstrates the process. This black and white image depicts a young woman wearing a furry headwear in a circular frame without any other objects or characters. All computer vision platforms tested detected the face and that it belonged to a woman correctly. Each one also used a different set of labels to describe the image, some by identifying features such as head, mouth, eyebrow and hair, others by pointing out objects missing, such as not wearing glasses (see Table  15.1). Amazon Rekognition guessed the age of the woman as 28 years, while Microsoft Azure guessed it to be between the range of 19 and 31, Google Cloud Vision on the other hand did not provide any data. The platforms also used labels such as monochrome and black and white to describe the image but as of the main visual features of it the circular frame was not labeled by any platform. Only Microsoft Azure used the description “mirror”, which could be a mislabeling of the frame. Microsoft Azure detected a very low “racy score” of 0.2 while Amazon Rekognition did not detect any moderation label in the image and Google Cloud Vision detected the image “unlikely” to be racy in a scale of “very unlikely”, “unlikely” “possible”, “likely”, “very likely”.

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Fig. 15.2  Chart of images to be tested with machine vision platforms

There were also missing and misidentified visual features. Even though the woman in the image had headwear, none of the systems recognized it. Google Cloud Vision even found it “very unlikely” for her to have a headwear. Microsoft Azure misidentified some descriptors in the image, such as “man” and “phone” while Google Cloud Vision suggested the unmatching label of “still life photography”. There were also some associations which cannot be seen directly, such as Amazon Rekognition’s association of the image with “leisure activities”. Such instances require additional attention and a specific focus enhancing the examination of how algorithms approach work in the world. In this regard, Kolkman and Kemper’s “glitch studies” perspective to describe, understand, and critique algorithms by examining their errors and ambiguities may be useful.49 While most of the tags and descriptors the platforms recognized in the image of the general’s wife were physically observable and associable, Google Cloud Vision’s use of “beauty” differentiated itself from the rest as an abstract and subjective concept. Moreover, this tag reappeared in other close-up shots tested in the study as well. Google Cloud Vision tagged every close-up shot of any female character between the ages 19 and 35 regardless of their action or facial expression with the label “beauty”. While one of the technical approaches as suggested by Kitchin

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Table 15.1  Computer vision analyses of a close-up image of general’s wife from Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) Microsoft Azure Computer Vision API

Amazon Rekognition

Google Cloud Vision API

Web

N/A

N/A

Unsafe content

False, racy score: 0.27

No moderation labels detected

Facial analysis

Age 28, gender female

Looks like a face 99.9%, appears to be female 98.3%, age range 19–31 years old, not smiling 95.9%, not wearing glasses 99.3%, not wearing sunglasses 99.7%,eyes are open 99.9%, mouth is closed 52.7%, does not have a mustache 99.4%, does not have a beard 98.6%

Portrait 0.32623, photography 0.2186, hair m 0.2163, portrait photography 0.19531, still life photography 0.18665, black hair 0.17898, goth subculture 0.17139, stock photography 0.17116, 02PD—Circolo del Partito Democratico di Milano 0.1631, close-up 0.15865, noir 0.14908, wallpaper 0.14583, long hair 0.1418 Adult—very unlikely, spoof—very unlikely, medical—very unlikely, violence—very unlikely, racy -unlikely Joy—very unlikely, sorrow—very unlikely, anger—very unlikely, surprise—very unlikely, exposed—very unlikely, blurred—very unlikely, headwear—very unlikely (Confidence 75%)

(continued)

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Table 15.1 (continued)

Description

Labels/Tags (object, scene or concept)

Objects

Microsoft Azure Computer Vision API

Amazon Rekognition

Google Cloud Vision API

Person, woman, dark, looking, front, back, man, holding, young, hair, standing, white, mirror, suit, girl, room, phone, shirt, a woman in a dark room Human face 0.99, person 0.96, clothing 0.89, woman 0.88, portrait 0.88, girl 0.82, black and white 0.80, dark 0.64, face 0.51

N/A

N/A

Person 99.7%, performer 99.7%, human 99.7%, face 96.2%, female 77.3%, photo 73.7%, photography 73.7%, portrait 73.7%, leisure activities 61%, woman 55.7%

Portrait 98%, photograph 97%, face 97%, black 96%, monochrome photography 94%, lady 94%, black-and-white 93%, head 91%, monochrome 88%, eyebrow 88%, darkness 87%, nose 87%, photography 87%, beauty 86%, portrait photography 84%, human 84%, snapshot 82%, cheek 80%, flash photography 76%, eye 76%, stock photography 68%, mouth 68%, smile 64%, iris 64%, art 58%, visual arts 55%, still life photography 54%, style 54%, photo shoot 52%, black hair 52% Woman 85%, clothing 81%

Person 0.881

N/A

is required to understand the exact reason behind this phenomenon, an image search for the tag beauty on Google’s own search engine also reveals clues on its use within the search algorithm of Google.50 Such an image search leads to close-up advertisements images of female models and celebrities shot for makeup and skincare products. These search results

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suggest an algorithmic association with the female close-up and the visual language of advertisement, regardless of the original image’s source and context. In other words, the gaze of advertisement appears to be dominating the dataset of Google’s machine vision. Another label used for The Day I Became a Woman reveals the “cultural ignorance” of the platform possibly due to the lack of its dataset. It uses the label “wetsuit” to depict the image of a young woman wearing a chador, or a traditional open cloak worn in Iran, and taking part in a cycling race. A Google image search of chador leads to a mixture of images of women in different settings while a similar search for wetsuit leads to advertisement shots of models in sportive activities. Even though The Day I Became a Woman’s story centers around the difficulties of attending to sportive activities for Iranian women, and the black contour of wetsuits in advertisements found in the image search somewhat resemble the wind-­ blown chador in the image, the features of the Islamic garment is nonetheless unmistakable for a human eye. Other unexpected labels found in the study included “explicit nudity” (60.9%) and “sexual activity” (60.9%) for a close-up of Mona from Vagabond, “nudity” (0.2712) and “nude photography” (0.33726) for a scene in which general’s wife in a white dress runs on a dirty road, and “pornographic” (0.3153) and “adult” (0.31599) for a scene in which three maids clean-up a spherical object which reflects a man’s face, both from The Seashell and the Clergyman. Since these images feature neither nudity nor pornography, we can only try to deduct the reasons behind these labels. Did the machine interpret Mona’s partially visible arm holding her head in a way only vulgar adolescent humor could do? Was it the general’s wife’s slight cleavage, or an incidental shadow fallen on her which forcefully could be interpreted as pubic hair the reason behind the machine’s labeling of her as nude? Is the fetishization of the French maid uniforms in the early twenty-first century so strong that any image they appear in can only be seen as pornographic? Or are the machine vision platforms we tested so strong that they reveal the hidden meanings in images from a silent, black and white avant-garde film about the hallucinations of a lusty clergyman? Whatever the answer may be, the existence of such absurd and confusing labels exemplifies how the use of MVTs can direct our perception of images. By suggesting a possibility emerging both from their inner architecture and the datasets they were trained in they incept certain ways of seeing to us. We may never know why the machine

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sees what it sees, but as soon as we learn what it sees we search for a reason and meaning behind it. Finally, one of the most common, and most confusing, glitches found in this study were the results of the unsafe content analyses. Google for example defines the category of racy content as “skimpy or sheer clothing, strategically covered nudity, lewd or provocative poses, or close-ups of sensitive body areas”.51 12 of the 27 images from four of the five films were deemed by platforms as “likely racy”. Featuring children and elderly people, and women in everyday life and in public spaces, none of the images labeled as likely racy contained the indicators suggested by Google. Unlike the labels discussed above, they did not even contain material to provoke outlandish speculations. As Kolkman and Kemper point out,52 such glitches require our constant interested critical attention. They reveal possible biases in MVTs towards images of women which may be related to the datasets they were trained with.

Conclusion Machine vision changed human-vision centered visual culture fundamentally playing a significant role in managing the traffic of images and influencing the opinions and behaviour of people in everyday life by ranking, filtering, predicting, deciding, censoring, recognizing and generating images. Machine vision technologies are not neutral, unbiased or progressive; instead, they retain existing power struggles in visual culture. However, it is hard to make sense of complex procedures that constitute this new visuality woven together with algorithmic systems in complex relations that are never fixed and constantly change. Will there be a difference in terms of female agency in contemporary visuality? Machine vision systems provide new ways to study films, television series and ads that had never been possible till today. The specialized software tools to analyze audio and video content on a massive scale are being also utilized for measuring gender representation. The results are effective for policymaking and creating awareness for gender imbalance in film culture. Based on similar principles commercially available image-analysis systems operate in the background for law enforcement, surveillance systems, but also are used by people in their everyday lives as part of Internet search engines to social media. By looking at films through these systems, can we also learn about machine vision? The experiment shows that glitches,

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errors and ambiguities generate questions and provoke discussions to understand and critique algorithmic visual culture. We may not know why machines see what they see, but in light of the hard-won advances in media and gender studies, we are obliged to question it.

Notes 1. Vertov, Dziga. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2. Hoelzl, Ingrid, Marie, Remi. 2016. From the Kino-Eye to the Postimage. Fotomuseum Winterthur. https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/ still-searching/articles/29090_from_the_kino_eye_to_the_postimage. Accessed 15 February 2020. 3. Anderson, Steve F. 2017. Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images. Cambridge: The MIT Press, p. 69. 4. Paglen, Trevor. 2016. Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You). The New Inquiry. https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-imagesyour-pictures-are-looking-at-you/. Accessed 15 February 2020. 5. Paglen, Trevor. 2016. Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You). The New Inquiry. https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-imagesyour-pictures-are-looking-at-you/. Accessed 15 February 2020. 6. Snyder, Wesley E., Qi, Hairong. 2006. Machine Vision. New  York: Cambridge University Press. 7. Google. 2019. How Google uses pattern recognition to make sense of images Google Policies. https://policies.google.com/technologies/pattern-recognition?hl=en. Accessed 15 February 2020. 8. Anderson, Steve F. 2017. Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 9. Rettberg, Walker, Jill. 2017. Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media. Jill/txt. http://jilltxt.net/wp-content/uploads/ MachineVision-B1-Jill-Walker_Rettberg-ERC-CoG-2017.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. 10. Wojcik, Stefan, Remy, Emma, Baronavski, Chris. 2019. How does a computer ‘see’ gender? Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/ interactives/how-does-a-computer-see-gender/. Accessed 15 February 2020. 11. Rainie, Lee, Anderson, Janna. 2017. Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/ internet/2017/02/08/code-dependent-pros-and-cons-of-the-algorithm-age/. Accessed 15 February 2020.

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12. Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine. London: British Film Institute. 13. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 3: 575–599. 14. Johnston, John. 1999. Machinic Vision. Critical Inquiry 26, 1: 27–48. 15. Gates, Kelly, A. 2011. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. New York: NYU Press. 16. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New  York: Columbia University Press, p. 76. 17. Gillespie, Tarleton. 2016. Algorithm. In Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, ed. Benjamin Peters, 18–30. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 18. Striphas, Ted. 2015. Algorithmic culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies. https://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/10.1177/1367549415577392. Accessed 15 February 2020, p. 408. 19. Laboria Cuboniks. 2015. Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation. Laboria Cuboniks. https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/20150612-xf_layout_web. pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020, p. 2. 20. Laboria Cuboniks. 2015. Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation. Laboria Cuboniks. https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/20150612-xf_layout_web. pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020, p. 2. 21. Silberg, Jake, Manyika, James. 2019. Notes from the AI frontier: Tackling bias in AI.  McKinsey Global Institute. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/ media/McKinsey/Featured%20Insights/Artificial%20Intelligence/ Tackling%20bias%20in%20artificial%20intelligence%20and%20in%20 humans/MGI-Tackling-bias-in-AI-June-2019.ashx. Accessed 15 February 2020. 22. Buolamwini, Joy. 2016. InCoding. In The Beginning Was The Coded Gaze. MIT Media Lab. https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/incodingin-the-beginning-4e2a5c51a45d. Accessed 15 February 2020. 23. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1998. Gender and Sexuality, Introduction. In The Visual Culture Reader, ed Nicholas Mirzoeff, 391–397. London: Routledge. 24. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16, 3: 6–18. 25. Buolamwini, Joy. 2016. InCoding — In The Beginning Was The Coded Gaze. MIT Media Lab. https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/incodingin-the-beginning-4e2a5c51a45d. Accessed 15 February 2020. 26. Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press, p. 38.

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27. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 3: 587 28. Seaver, Nick. 2017. Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. Big Data & Society. https://journals.sagepub. com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951717738104. Accessed 15 February 2020, p. 5. 29. Steiger, Kay. 2011. No Clean Slate: Unshakeable race and gender politics in The Walking Dead. In Triumph of The Walking Dead, ed. James Lowder, 99–114. Dallas: BenBella Books, p. 104. 30. Garber, Megan. 2015. Call It the ‘Bechdel-Wallace Test’. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/call-itthe-bechdel-wallace-test/402259/. Accessed 15 February 2020. 31. Woolf, Virginia. 2000. A Room of One’s Own: And, Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 107. 32. Hickey, Walt, Koeze, Ella, Dottle, Rachael, Wezerek, Gus. 2017. We pitted 50 movies against 12 new ways of measuring Hollywood’s gender imbalance. FiveThirtyEight. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/nextbechdel/. Accessed 15 February 2020. 33. Agarwal, Apoorv, Zheng, Jiehan, Kamath, Shruti Vasanth, Balasubramanian, Sriram, Dey, Shirin Ann. 2015. Semantic Scholar. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dfaf/97f709be25faceb91e218964bd288a138e0e.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. 34. Karlsson, Joe. 2015. Bechdel Test Visualizer. Joe Karlsson Portfolio. https://www.joekarlsson.com/portfolio/bechdel-test-visualizer/. Accessed 15 February 2020. 35. Ryzik, Melani. (2018). Is Your Script Gender-Balanced? The New  York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/movies/is-your-scriptgender-balanced-try-this-test.html. Accessed 15 February 2020. 36. Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. N/A. The Reel Truth: Women Aren’t Seen or Heard. Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. https:// seejane.org/wp-content/uploads/gdiq-reel-truth-women-arent-seen-orheard-automated-analysis.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. 37. Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. N/A. The Reel Truth: Women Aren’t Seen or Heard. Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. https:// seejane.org/wp-content/uploads/gdiq-reel-truth-women-arent-seen-orheard-automated-analysis.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. 38. Jang, Ji Yoon, Lee, Sangyoon, Lee, Byungjoo. 2019. Quantification of Gender Representation Bias in Commercial Films based on Image Analysis. ACM Digital Library. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359300. Accessed 15 February 2020.

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39. Jang, Ji Yoon, Lee, Sangyoon, Lee, Byungjoo. 2019. Quantification of Gender Representation Bias in Commercial Films based on Image Analysis. ACM Digital Library. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359300. Accessed 15 February 2020. 40. Arnold, Taylor, Tilton, Lauren. 2019. Distant viewing: analyzing large visual corpora. Distant Viewing. https://www.distantviewing.org/pdf/ distant-viewing.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. 41. Arnold, Taylor, Tilton, Lauren. 2019. Distant viewing: analyzing large visual corpora. Distant Viewing. https://www.distantviewing.org/pdf/ distant-viewing.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. 42. Wevers, Melvin, Smits, Thomas. 2019. The visual digital turn: Using neural networks to study historical images. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/ doi/10.1093/llc/fqy085/5296356. Accessed 15 February 2020. 43. Jang, Ji Yoon, Lee, Sangyoon, Lee, Byungjoo. 2019. Quantification of Gender Representation Bias in Commercial Films based on Image Analysis. ACM Digital Library. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359300. Accessed 15 February 2020. 44. Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press. 45. Bogost, Ian. 2008. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge: MIT Press. 46. Kitchin, Rob. 2017. Thinking critically about and researching algorithms. Information, Communication & Society 20, 1: 14–29. 47. Zalcock, Bev. 2018. 10 great feminist films. https://www.bfi.org.uk/ news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-feminist-films. Accessed 15 February 2020. 48. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16, 3: 6–18. 49. Kolkman, Daan, Kemper, Jakko. 2017. Glitch Studies and the Ambiguous Objectivity of Algorithms. SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=2985424. Accessed 15 February 2020. 50. Kitchin, Rob. 2017. Thinking critically about and researching algorithms. Information, Communication & Society 20, 1: 14–29. 51. Google, 2020. AI & Machine Learning Products https://cloud.google. com/vision/docs/reference/rest/v1/AnnotateImageResponse. Accessed 15 February 2020. 52. Kolkman, Daan, Kemper, Jakko. 2017. Glitch Studies and the Ambiguous Objectivity of Algorithms. SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=2985424. Accessed 15 February 2020.

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References Agarwal, Apoorv, Zheng, Jiehan, Kamath, Shruti Vasanth, Balasubramanian, Sriram, Dey, Shirin Ann. 2015. Semantic Scholar. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dfaf/97f709be25faceb91e218964bd288a138e0e.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. Anderson, Steve F. 2017. Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Arnold, Taylor, Tilton, Lauren. 2019. Distant viewing: analyzing large visual corpora. Distant Viewing. https://www.distantviewing.org/pdf/distant-viewing. pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bogost, Ian. 2008. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge: MIT Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Buolamwini, Joy. 2016. InCoding — In The Beginning Was The Coded Gaze. MIT Media Lab. https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/incoding-in-thebeginning-4e2a5c51a45d. Accessed 15 February 2020. Garber, Megan. 2015. Call It the ‘Bechdel-Wallace Test’. The Atlantic. https:// www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/call-it-the-bechdelwallace-test/402259/. Accessed 15 February 2020. Gates, Kelly, A. 2011. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. New York: NYU Press. Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. N/A. The Reel Truth: Women Aren’t Seen or Heard. Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. https://seejane. org/wp-content/uploads/gdiq-reel-truth-women-arent-seen-or-heard-automated-analysis.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. Gillespie, Tarleton. 2016. Algorithm. In Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, ed. Benjamin Peters, 18–30. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Google. 2019. How Google uses pattern recognition to make sense of images Google Policies. https://policies.google.com/technologies/patternrecognition?hl=en. Accessed 15 February 2020. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 3: 575–599. Hickey, Walt, Koeze, Ella, Dottle, Rachael, Wezerek, Gus. 2017. We pitted 50 movies against 12 new ways of measuring Hollywood’s gender imbalance. FiveThirtyEight. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/next-bechdel/. Accessed 15 February 2020.

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Hoelzl, Ingrid, Marie, Remi. 2016. From the Kino-Eye to the Postimage. Fotomuseum Winterthur. https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/stillsearching/articles/29090_from_the_kino_eye_to_the_postimage. Accessed 15 February 2020. Jang, Ji Yoon, Lee, Sangyoon, Lee, Byungjoo. 2019. Quantification of Gender Representation Bias in Commercial Films based on Image Analysis. ACM Digital Library. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359300. Accessed 15 February 2020. Johnston, John. 1999. Machinic Vision. Critical Inquiry 26, 1: 27–48. Karlsson, Joe. 2015. Bechdel Test Visualizer. Joe Karlsson Portfolio. https:// www.joekarlsson.com/portfolio/bechdel-test-visualizer/. Accessed 15 February 2020. Kitchin, Rob. 2017. Thinking critically about and researching algorithms. Information, Communication & Society 20, 1: 14–29. Kolkman, Daan, Kemper, Jakko. 2017. Glitch Studies and the Ambiguous Objectivity of Algorithms. SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=2985424. Accessed 15 February 2020. Laboria Cuboniks. 2015. Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation. Laboria Cuboniks. https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/20150612-xf_layout_web.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1998. Gender and Sexuality, Introduction. In The Visual Culture Reader, ed Nicholas Mirzoeff, 391–397. London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16, 3: 6–18. Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press. Paglen, Trevor. 2016. Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You). The New Inquiry. https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-arelooking-at-you/. Accessed 15 February 2020. Rainie, Lee, Anderson, Janna. 2017. Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/02/08/code-dependent-pros-and-cons-of-the-algorithm-age/. Accessed 15 February 2020. Rettberg, Walker, Jill. 2017. Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media. Jill/txt. http://jilltxt.net/wp-content/uploads/MachineVision-B1-JillWalker_Rettberg-ERC-CoG-2017.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020. Ryzik, Melani. (2018). Is Your Script Gender-Balanced? The New  York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/movies/is-your-script-gender-balanced-try-this-test.html. Accessed 15 February 2020. Seaver, Nick. 2017. Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. Big Data & Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ full/10.1177/2053951717738104. Accessed 15 February 2020.

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Silberg, Jake, Manyika, James. 2019. Notes from the AI frontier: Tackling bias in AI.  McKinsey Global Institute. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/ McKinsey/Featured%20Insights/Artificial%20Intelligence/Tackling%20 bias%20in%20artificial%20intelligence%20and%20in%20humans/MGITackling-bias-in-AI-June-2019.ashx. Accessed 15 February 2020. Snyder, Wesley E., Qi, Hairong. 2006. Machine Vision. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Steiger, Kay. 2011. No Clean Slate: Unshakeable race and gender politics in The Walking Dead. In Triumph of The Walking Dead, ed. James Lowder, 99–114. Dallas: BenBella Books. Striphas, Ted. 2015. Algorithmic culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367549415577392. Accessed 15 February 2020. Vertov, Dziga. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine. London: British Film Institute. Wevers, Melvin, Smits, Thomas. 2019. The visual digital turn: Using neural networks to study historical images. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-ar ticle/doi/10.1093/llc/ fqy085/5296356. Accessed 15 February 2020. Wojcik, Stefan, Remy, Emma, Baronavski, Chris. 2019. How does a computer ‘see’ gender?. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/interactives/how-does-a-computer-see-gender/. Accessed 15 February 2020. Woolf, Virginia. 2000. A Room of One’s Own: And, Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Filmography The Seashell and the Clergyman (Germaine Dulac, 1928). Marianne and Juliane (Margarethe von Trotta, 1981). Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985). The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Meshkini, 2000). The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008). Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1928).

Software Google Cloud Vision API. Amazon Rekognition. Microsoft Azure Computer Vision API.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 91, 99, 165 A Abject spaces, 65–79 Affect, 39, 79, 109, 150, 153, 158, 166, 209, 210, 222, 273, 274 Affective labor, 210, 211, 215, 218, 219, 221–224 Agency, 6, 13, 18–21, 48, 51, 54, 58, 66, 73, 78, 118, 134, 138, 171–174, 198, 201, 203, 204, 209, 210, 215, 218, 223, 224, 250, 256, 261, 272, 273 Algorithmic culture, 275 Algorithm(s), 168, 179n17, 271–276, 278, 279, 282, 284, 289n28, 290n50 Amazon Rekognition, 280–282 Amirpour, Ana Lily, 65–79 Arendt, Hannah, 27, 28, 33 Arendtian, 38

Artificial intelligence, 192, 273, 275 Authorship, 16, 21, 51 Autobiography, 18 Awards, 12, 27, 167, 259, 260 B Bad Batch, 5, 65, 66, 72–79 BBC, 89 The Beaches of Agnés, 11, 14, 15, 18, 29 Beauty, 68, 146, 147, 153, 170, 233, 258, 282, 284 Bechdel, Alison, 277 Bechdel-Wallace Test, 277, 278 Becoming, 32, 36, 89, 93, 94, 107, 109, 111–113, 116, 145–158, 177, 200, 202, 223, 233, 235, 254 -woman, 112 Bergson, Henri, 28 Bergsonian, 38 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 4, 12

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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296 

INDEX

Bioethics, 109 Biopolitics, 113 Blade Runner, 196–198 Body, 6, 39, 40n8, 55, 71, 72, 76, 77, 110, 111, 115, 119, 137, 145–158, 172, 175, 192, 195, 197, 200, 201, 204, 221, 231, 232, 257, 286 Body Heat, 195 Bourdieu, Pierre, 232, 242 Bridesmaids, 172, 181n37 Buolamwini, Joy, 276 Butler, Judith, 72, 128, 132, 135, 137, 140 C Cinécriture, 28 Cinephilia, 22–23, 262n4 Cine-writing, 28, 29 Collector, the, 30 Consumption (domestic consumption), 236, 237 Cyborg, 192, 193, 196, 197, 201–204 Cyborg Manifesto, 192 D Daytime TV, 6, 229–243 Deleuze, Gilles, 107, 113–115, 157, 158 Deleuzian, 114, 274 Demy, Jacques, 13–15, 17 Desire, 40n8, 50, 71, 72, 87–89, 92, 99, 107, 114, 115, 117, 158, 166, 174, 194, 196, 199, 201, 203, 218, 222, 224, 232, 235 Detective, 148, 150, 173–176, 182n44, 182n45, 209, 212–214, 218, 219, 222, 223 Differential modes of consciousness, 250

Digitality, 28–35 Distant viewing, 278 Doane, Mary-Anne, 200 Documentary, 12, 20, 29, 37, 38, 129, 261 Duration, 16, 28, 35, 38, 39, 40n8, 130 E Empowerment, 5, 29, 119, 128, 129, 133, 137, 138, 141, 172, 211, 232, 245n43 Esmer, Pelin, 5, 27–39 Ex-Machina, 6, 191, 200–201, 204 F Female agency, 2, 5, 6, 27–39, 92, 286 Female-focused, 168 Female-led, 165–167, 169, 179n12 Female subjectivity, 45, 46, 146, 150, 152, 195, 204, 229–231, 233, 236, 237, 243, 243n3, 250, 275, 281 Fembot, 6, 191–205 Feminine, 11–23, 39, 45–58, 87–99, 116, 117, 153, 166, 167, 170–172, 174–177, 203, 233 Feminism, 46, 51, 59n3, 70, 93, 112, 166, 173, 175, 191, 217, 226n23, 250–256, 263n16, 264n23, 264n24, 264n32, 264n33, 265n34, 274 Feminist, 6, 28, 46, 66, 87, 110, 129, 147, 245n45, 249–255, 257–259, 261, 262n6, 263n15, 263n20, 264n31, 265n36, 274, 275, 277 Femme Fatale, 6, 95, 99, 102n37, 191–205 Film Noir, 6, 173, 193, 194, 198, 205n5

 INDEX 

Filmmor Women’s Cooperative, 250, 252, 253 French New Wave, 22

Huyssen, Andreas, 197 Hybridity, 38 Hybridization, 120

G Gaze, 5, 6, 16–18, 47, 49, 55, 58, 66, 68–70, 76, 78, 80n12, 146, 152, 172, 194, 198, 200, 271–287 coded gaze, 272, 275–276, 279 Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (GD-IQ), 277, 278, 280 Gender, 31, 47, 88, 111, 128, 147, 166, 193, 212, 229, 249, 271 Genre film, 65, 172, 213 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, 5, 65–74, 76, 78, 79 Gleaners and I, 5, 11, 20, 28, 40n8, 40n9 Gledhill, Christine, 209, 224 Glitch, 6, 276, 282, 286 Godard, Jean-Luc, 5, 12–18, 23 Golden Okra Prize, 259 Google, 273, 277, 279, 284–286, 287n7 Google Cloud Vision API, 280–282, 284–286 Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW), 6, 166, 167, 172, 173, 176, 181n40 Guattari, Felix, 107, 115, 157, 158

I Intellect, 39

H Happy Valley, 209–224 Haraway, Donna, 192, 196, 204, 274, 276 Hartsock, Nancy, 226n23 Heterosexual, 78, 110, 114, 137, 203, 275 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 210, 220

297

J Jackson, Glenda, 37 Jessica Jones, 166, 167, 173, 174, 176 K Kandiyoti, Deniz, 243n3, 251, 252, 254, 263n14 Karina, Anna, 14, 16, 17 King, Homay, 17, 18, 20, 28 Kristeva, Julia, 28, 87 L Laboria Cuboniks, 275 M Machine Vision, 6, 271–287 Makeover shows, 230–234, 242 Male fantasy, 173, 194 Male gaze, 133, 200, 201, 250, 275 Male hero, 191, 194, 200 Marriage show, 235, 236, 241, 245n38 Masculine, 4, 5, 39, 58, 88, 94, 117, 130, 135, 142n4, 142n5, 142n20, 172, 176, 177, 193, 194, 215, 218, 232, 275 Masculinity, 31, 46, 50, 52, 54, 55, 61n30, 61n33, 68, 97, 167, 170, 173, 174, 176, 191, 198, 201, 232, 254, 259 Masquerade, 200 Materialist, 28, 40n8

298 

INDEX

Memory, 5, 6, 13, 16, 17, 20, 154, 193, 209, 210, 212, 215, 216, 218, 254 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 110, 111 Metropolis, 197, 203 Mind, 14, 28, 39, 66, 67, 94, 166 Misogyny, 4, 77, 88, 167, 173, 175 Mobile film festival, 256 Mohanty, Chandra Talape, 254 Mulvey, Laura, 275 N Narrative, 11, 16, 27–29, 33, 36–38, 41n13, 45, 48–50, 54, 55, 70, 73, 74, 79, 88, 89, 91, 98, 99, 109, 115, 118, 119, 128–130, 134, 138, 141, 155, 166, 170, 173, 177, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 199, 201, 203, 204, 229, 230, 234–236, 241, 288n24, 290n48 Neoconservatism (neoconservative discourse), 235 Neoliberal discourse, 6, 233, 236, 237 Netflix, 3, 6, 49, 89, 127, 130, 140, 165–177, 219 Nudity, 127, 140, 285, 286 O Objectification, 16, 111, 166, 173 Orange is The New Black, 166, 167, 170, 178n8, 180n22, 181n37 P Patriarchy, 53, 100n5, 191, 195, 196, 201, 203, 210, 211, 214, 215, 224, 243n3, 254, 258, 259 Performativity, 128, 130, 137–140 Phenomenological, 28, 38, 40n8, 107, 109–112

Phenomenology, 39n3, 40n10, 107–120, 142n7, 142n19 Play, the, 5, 27–39 Plurality, 28–35, 38, 117 Police procedural, 209, 212, 213, 219, 222–224 Political, 6, 13, 28, 40n8, 48, 51, 52, 66, 72, 76, 88–90, 98, 109, 116, 117, 119, 132, 142n18, 149, 157, 174, 193, 209, 224, 226n23, 229, 235, 251, 252, 254–256, 260, 261, 276 Politics, molecular and molar, 107–120 Politics of gender, 229–243, 254, 264n30 Pornography, 285 Post-Feminism, 244n22 Postfeminist, 165–177, 211, 231–233, 244n10 Power, 4, 28, 41n11, 78, 80n11, 87–91, 94–96, 98, 99, 110, 116, 119, 128, 130, 131, 133–136, 139–141, 142n18, 147, 148, 153, 172, 174, 177, 182n46, 182n48, 182n49, 192–195, 199, 200, 202, 217, 229, 230, 232, 236, 242, 243n3, 244n17, 251, 253–256, 258, 259, 274–276, 286 Q Queen Lear, 5, 27–39 Queer, 2, 70, 71, 79n2, 80n14, 81n16, 112, 132, 170, 249, 257, 261n2, 261–262n4, 262n10, 265n35, 265n36, 265n40, 265n41, 275 R Racy, 281, 286 Radio Television Supreme Council, 235

 INDEX 

Rage, 93, 98, 152, 153, 218 Reality television, 230 Redeemer, 198, 202 Replicants, 198 Representation, 2, 5, 6, 22, 38, 39n3, 49, 77, 78, 88, 112, 117, 128, 130, 135, 137, 139–141, 165–177, 192, 195, 196, 199, 205, 222, 234, 249, 250, 272, 276–280, 286 Reproduction, 115, 229, 232, 233, 236, 254 Resistance, 6, 70, 117, 118, 127–141, 157, 174, 201, 203, 249–261 Resnais, Alain, 13 S Şahsiyet, 209 Sandoval, Chela, 250, 251, 254, 255 Scarring, 145–158 Science-fiction film, 196 Self-destruction, 153 Self-harm, 147–155, 157 Self-injury, 148 Self-reflexivity, 134, 138, 140, 141 Sex, 70, 71, 95, 96, 112, 152, 158, 167, 171, 172, 174, 195, 196, 213 Sexuality, 71, 95, 96, 107, 112, 166, 170, 176, 194–199, 201–204, 245n40, 254, 258, 259 Sexualized, 76, 119, 166, 167, 170, 171, 175, 191, 193, 195–197, 199 Sexual violence, 2, 213 Shakespeare, William, 32, 35, 38, 88, 89, 96 Skin, 145–147, 153–158, 174, 175, 201 Sobchack, Vivian, 28 Social reproduction, 119, 210

299

Solidarity, 6, 76, 115, 120, 201, 211, 217, 222, 224, 250, 252, 257, 258, 260–261, 263n20 Standpoint theory, 226n23 Storytelling, 2, 6, 38, 145 Strap-on, 167, 170, 172, 174, 176, 177, 178n5 Streaming platform, 3, 89, 165–169 Strong female lead, 51, 165–177 Subjectification, 114, 166, 200 Subjection, 127–141, 148 Subjectivity, 2, 35, 45, 46, 51, 58, 72, 79, 112, 113, 118, 119, 146, 147, 150, 152, 153, 158, 195, 201, 204, 229–231, 233, 236, 237, 243, 243n3, 250, 255, 258–259, 275, 281 Symbolic violence, 155, 231–234, 237–239, 242 T Taste, 168, 231–234, 239, 240, 242, 245n31 Technology, 28, 29, 38, 40–41n11, 115, 119, 168, 192, 193, 195–197, 202, 204, 230, 259, 274, 275, 278–280 Television, 2, 47, 93, 99, 127, 128, 130–132, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 147, 165–168, 170, 172–174, 177, 209, 212, 219, 222, 229–232, 234–237, 241, 244n12, 277, 286 Temporal, 35, 38, 152, 250, 257, 278 Temporality, 152, 156 10 to 11, 37 Time’s Up movement, 165 Transgender, 70, 170–172, 218 Transgression, 31, 36, 38, 52, 98, 195 Transgressive figures, 204

300 

INDEX

Trauma, 6, 50, 51, 148, 150, 151, 153–155, 157, 158, 173, 174, 176, 182n45, 209, 211, 218, 220–224 Turkey, 3, 5, 27, 29, 31, 68, 209, 212–214, 218, 229–243, 250–254, 256, 257, 261, 263n15, 263n16, 263n18, 263n20, 264n23, 264n30, 264n31 Two Years Later, 29 U Umoje Noble, Safiya, 276 Unbelievable, 167, 175–177 United States borders, 75, 76 economic relations, 66 an Iran, 66, 69 racial violence, 76 V Vampire films, 69 Varda, Agnes, 4, 5, 11–23, 28, 29, 37, 39, 40n8, 40n9, 40n10, 261 Vertov, Dziga, 272

Violence, 3, 4, 6, 51, 53, 54, 57, 66, 77–79, 87, 119, 146, 147, 149–151, 153, 154, 156, 167, 209, 212, 213, 215, 217–219, 223, 224, 232, 234, 235, 243n3, 244n14, 252–254, 257–260, 264n30 W Weeks, Kathi, 210, 224 Western films, 65, 73 Westworld, 6, 191–193, 199, 201–204 Womanhood, 31, 110, 127 Women’s talk show, 234, 235, 241 Woolf, Virginia, 46, 255, 277 X Xenofeminist Manifesto, 275 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 149, 195