Unknown Speaker 00:11 My name is Tamar Kaplan and I'm the director of the Women's Center and I want to welcome you here. I hope we can start this very long. It's my pleasure to introduce them to Barnard who welcome you in earnest. Unknown Speaker 00:49 I don't know if I can work in earnest, but I can welcome you very warmly. And I'm delighted to do so on behalf of Barnard College. This is the 13th annual scholar in the feminist conference, our lucky 13th for the conference, which is sponsored by the Barnard College Women's Center. As I'm sure most of you know, the Women's Center was founded in 1971. And from its beginning, it is served as a link between the college and scholars and feminists working for the advancement of women in society. Each year, the conference provides a forum for discussion of issues of importance, and attracts participants from throughout the United States, as well as from overseas. The theme of today's conference, women's images and politics is a broad one, which encompasses a number of critical issues. topics which will be discussed cover a wide range, images of women and film, images of women's studies in Spain, women in science fiction, women in anti nuclear politics, and the image of black women and in films, you will be asked to consider such topics as the impact of technology on women, the problems of teenage pregnancy, and the politics of reproduction. Even other issues that will be considered here today are not easy. For all of you will come away from today's conference, better informed and more able to deal with problems that confront everyone, and holding critical social issues to the wider audience that attends the scholar in the feminist conference each year. The Barnard Women's Center performs an important service for all of us, for men, as well as for women. The burning community is proud to have the center as part of the college and welcomes all of you who are listening on board today. Unknown Speaker 02:55 We'll have to figure out what to do myself as well. I want to say today we are launching the Bernard Occasional Papers on women's issues some of you have seen out in the lobby. Over the years, over 30 years that the scholar feminist has taken case, over 50 articles in over three books of proceedings have been published from the conference papers, the occasional papers, Mark effort, which is to try to present tensions that are given in all of us, including conversations about women, the women's issues luncheons, the seminar, as well as the scar on the feminist and perhaps some occasional rude lecture. So we will look at the occasion papers, perhaps by one or maybe even subscribe to talk further. We've also marked another first which is that this year we have our first scholar feminist T shirts, which some of you have seen the t shirt during feminist Modern Woman cross Statue of Liberty who has become our emblem for today. And she was designed by Martin Weissman, who is October at the moment, Scar, scar over his images and politics is an attempt to define some of the major issues that have Machiavellianism in the past 20 years and to future issues for scholars or activists. We will not since the rebirth of the women's movement in the 60s had so many issues within feminism, there's so much contention, and not since then feminists been so conscious of attacks funded out feminist scholars and activists who learned in bloody battles over the past 20 years that nothing is what we say it is until painted and filmed. Make it sound. And this conference is dedicated to establishing the context we want for the issues that we've raised. There's no way I can think of you I'd rather have to find. A girl when Catherine Stinson would take a morning to list her ciments were creations. But I want to start with a few of them. At the moment she is the professor of English or acting graduate. at Rutgers New Brunswick, she's also chair of the New York State Council and nationalities. She's an academic liaison with North magazine. She's on the board of the National Council for research I'd like to just be accepted as a member of the National Council for Research on Women. She's the founding editor of silence. She's also the editor of a series on women at the University of Chicago. She was also the first board of director of the Barnard Women's Center. We're very proud to introduce the two Katherine's this morning, Katherine Stinson and will be followed by Katharine Hepburn Well, I suppose I ought to thank my good friend came up for giving me the best spot I have ever had on any program, which is warm up the warm up act Unknown Speaker 06:38 for Katharine Hepburn. Unknown Speaker 06:42 And I want to thank Ellen to Ellen Unknown Speaker 06:44 for her for being with us in support of women's studies and the Women's Center. Today we are in a room of our own, but we are living in a very special, even a peculiar room. And its specialness tells us something about our enterprise. First, this room despite these curtains, this room is a part time gymnasium. And the gymnasium is the Greek word Juno's meaning naked, and I trust the Catalan with trackers will correct my pronunciation. In classical Greece, the gymnasium first meant a place in which to train naked. It then expanded to the place in which to train, to exercise and to practice. But in Greece cited in civic space, the gymnasium was also real space, it was borrowed to respectable woman. And we have adapted this gymnasium in three ways. First, for better or worse, we are closed, not naked, we are observing certain proprieties Next, we are exercising consciousness. We're flexing the mind. We are wrestling with ideas, beliefs, and prejudices, not with a body. For this day, we are transforming the gymnasium into the symposium. And we have feminized the gymnasium and the symposium. We have claimed the idea of both the gymnasium and the symposium for women's interests. The second thing about this room, it is a part of a woman's College, a guy in a cave. This moon belongs to an institution created for women and their concerns. If I can tell you about an experience I have in this room devoted to women's concerns. About 10 years ago, when I was a member of the Barnard faculty, we are indulged in an act of masochism. The Women's students play and the faculty and given my choice of playing for the women students are the male faculty. Caught between gender and profession I chose gender and play for the women students. I was fired I found out I want you to know in the second quarter, and I turned to the to the referee who was a woman I said how can I find out how can we make this game? She said if I called everything that you downloaded you would have been out the first five minutes but in terms of space, the student cheerleaders were dressed as witches Unknown Speaker 09:44 and they came out they were waving pom poms they were waving brooms, and external faculty hex Unknown Speaker 09:51 the male faculty likes to Unknown Speaker 09:57 have them alone philosopher no longer with us, Robert McGahn fell to the floor after one of a chance Unknown Speaker 10:04 with a sprained ankle. Unknown Speaker 10:09 And as he was carried out, limping, limping boldly as he Unknown Speaker 10:14 was carried out on the cheerleaders turned to each other and said, Oh my god, what have we done? The evocation of a women spirit the rich turn to nasty middle class goat. But we have also transformed the game of cam food is not a secluded part of the house. It is not a veiled quarters for women, on the contrary are going to comb is a part of the university and of the city of the polis. It belongs to the swans in the subways, the Ruzic and monstrosities of the city. And this city need to remind us is New York. We have Los Angeles. This is the center of the mass production of images of the mass construction of those videos in theaters, that we will then interpret as reality. And if we were to seize these great studios, we would see is Los Angeles and New York. And finally, this one, I don't have to tell you this room is an acoustical bugbear this room is an acoustical nightmare, literally and symbolically one the strain to speak and strange to hear. One must an indicative of the mid 1980s wordless labor to connect oneness labor to reconnect, what must labor to establish a community of understanding. Now in this room, I wish to tell a story. I wish to tell a story about contemporary scholarship and feminism in the United States. I will not be gullible, I will confine my stay to us. And because of the conferences that have gone on here, my story is partly about this room as well. It is about the struggles and the collections that have been in this gymnasium diner Calum symposium. I am as you fabulist both a professional scholar and a passionate feminist. And indeed I would resist that way of speaking that severs the scholar on the feminist. Because I am primarily a literary scholar, but not every English department would admit that biomaterials will be mostly from literature, I have to say the bonded English department had a hard time with it for several years. However, I hope that my script will have lines from and for other disciplines. My story will have the beginning the late 1960s. My story will have a middle the 1980s but I am a postmodernist. And that means that even though my speech will have to stop, my story will have no certain end, it will have no tight closure, it will have no happy ever after paragraph. However, as I end I will try to outline the plot for the next chapter. My focus is to be the representations of women, photos, pictures of women that individuals and groups create, transmit, and store. And like every great word representations is a mess. It seeds up several meanings that one once it is a scrambled menu. For a representation that can be an image, a visually verbal image or an all image. Think of a hat or a representation can be a narrative, a sequence of ideas and images of the sentence. Nancy Reagan wore a hat when she visited a detoxification clinic in Florida. Or a representation can be part of the radiology, a vast scheme for showing the world and justifying its dealings. Think of this sentence. Nancy Reagan in her hat is a proper woman. Unknown Speaker 14:43 But as to the beginning of my story about these representations, and you may disagree with my story that is the point of being here. In the late 1960s in the United States, feminists began to share consensus about the representation of women. And in this room are some of the marvelous intellects. I can go row by row and name you some of the barbless intellects and imaginations that helped to shape that consensus. And that consensus, which still has validity and value. That consensus had five terms. And please stay with my echoes mo postmodernist meanings intended just LaTroy ones, please stay with my Eccles, will I work through the five terms of the cultural consensus that we had. First, we agree that many of the most dominant and dominating representations of women are misrepresentations, and often viciously so well, as well as put Shecky we'll take that up this afternoon. These dishes will often vicious misrepresentations pop up in literature and the arts, history philosophy, psychology and science and religion, law, medicine and sociology. And these representations occur and at least two ways. First, the picture or the narrative or the ideology may be false. In authentic distorting, it may do a blower, a smear or next there may be no picture at all of certain realities. Maybe for a few winners builds fewer no women of color. And when great represent reason we went on for the existence of misrepresentations is the fact that men have created and maintain them on both a wholesale and retail level. And if you forgive me, I want to make a pawn on wholesale and a pawn on retail. I want to spell wholesale both would have H and O H. And I want to spell retail as Retail T A IL and retail or eta LME, we literary critics get vO cute. Having done so, men like God like to gaze at their handiwork after images. And as men gaze at their images, women can have one of two responses, they can believe they exist to be gazed upon to be looked at to be an appearance or at the same time they have and at the same time, they have to gaze upon themselves. They have to look at themselves to make sure they are keeping up appearances. As John Berger, the marvelous Marxist art critic now feminists to vote in 1972 We must come to consider themselves both the surveyor and the surveyed. But that was our first term. The second term of our consensus was an IRS that one of the great tasks of feminism is to confront these misrepresentations and emotions of misrepresentation of confrontation, might race back and forth and do race back and forth between cool distain in hot anger. Today, I am representing cool disdain. Always a lady. Confrontation then itself demands for important activities. When is the exposure the detailed exposure of the way in which misrepresentation works, why it occurs, and exactly how it keeps on occurring. The second activity of confrontation is the restoration of the past. The first is exposure. The second is restoration of the past, have an accurate history of work play homes, arts, crafts and costumes, and recent events very painful to many of us associated with Barnard and Columbia. Recent events have proved that the restoration of the past is no longer merely an academic matter. Unknown Speaker 19:25 And the field activity of confrontation is creation in the present the creation of accurate representations. And these representations include secondary regions of the body of the self, of intimacies of the family and of larger social groups, among them women's groupings. And I must say, although often ridiculed sometimes by me, some of the most daring feminists have sought to really represent not the secular but the sacred, not the historic I call that the divine to search for the sacred has actually been to searches when taken by Rosemary, visa and others to see if established monotheism might be redeemed for feminism. The other search to see if a goddess and empowering force, a woman's spirit might lie outside of those patriarchal monotheism aims. And so Audrey mode has sought block goddesses. Others have sought matriarchy. These are like those cheerleaders in that basketball game. They're witches. And it is no accident that the first root covens of the new witches began to happen around 1969 1970. Despite this divergence in the quest for representations of the Divine, those searches desire the invisible beyond history, and invisible beyond history that might reveal itself present itself in history. And the fourth activity of confrontation is the projection of the future to make visible or now invisible future feminist dystopias picture our fears, feminist utopias, our hopes then in 1976, in women on the edge of time, Marge Percy gave us both dystopias and Utah appears through the mental scape of Kearney, or poor, abused urban Chicana. Now our third term, we stitched together our third term, the third term of our consensus slowly, often grudgingly, with unconscious resistances. Indeed, that stitching is still going on. And the third term is the necessity of making the representation of women far, far more representative for the representations of women must show differences among women. Difference is not simply of race and class essentially, are the differences of national experience, of colonial experience, of religion, of ethnicity, of sexual preference of the body. And showing in these differences among women is a more political, social, and aesthetic necessity, and necessity because women want it a necessity because the representation of reality demands it. But as we all know, showing differences was and is painful. For some women who have dominated other women. Some women have used other women as the other. Some women do not like other woman's color. Some women find other woman's sexuality, revolting. Some women think other woman's politics threatening. Here, for example, insufficient vision of a Native American poet from Alaska, attuned to that woman who wants to continue the practices of subsistence culture. And here is a poem she wrote called genocide. Quote, picketing the Eskimo Whaling Commission. And overfed English girl stands with a sign, let the photos live. And of course, if our laboral should live, the subsistence culture of the Eskimos would die. Unknown Speaker 23:44 I believe that the recognition of differences in theory and in practice is one feminism's great gifts to culture and politics. And I call this recognition Hutto. jenaya T. clumsy, awkward, awful, it's heavy originality with a third letter. Now on our Hurco jenaya T. I find the concept of heterogeneity, it can go either way, is I found it important enough that I debated whether I should place it and stick to it in any part of my story, in the beginning, in the middle or in the end. And what is heterogeneity? What does it represent? First begins with the fact that feminism itself begins with the irreducible acknowledgement of sexual differences between female and male between their bodies. It goes on to acknowledge gender differences between feminine and masculine patterns of gender difference that appear in history and in contemporary societies. But feminism does not stop with the abolishment of sexual differences or object Under differences it dwells to with the many differences among women and the representations of many differences. It deals with the representation of family clubs, tribes, classes, races, ethnicities, Creed's crazes emotions. And because of this, feminism instructs us, not only with the disabilities of monolithic thinking, but in the disabilities of binary thinking of dualistic thinking of either or thinking. And because feminism encourages through heterogeneity, the recognition and multiplicities of many others, it provide the consciousness necessary for the politics of pluralities. And now the fourth term of the consensus, and here I am going to drift into a kind of theory that I'll keep returning back to, I'm not sure I explain it very well. And if I don't I know books that do and people in this room that do this well. The fourth term of the consensus has to do with the way in which we judge the legitimacy, the accuracy and the cogency of representations of women. For we have assumed matter of factly assumed that a representation could be legitimate, could be accurate, COBie, cogent. Unless that representation, forthrightly declared itself to be a fiction, a story or novel, a fantasy or a speculation. We asked of an image or narrative, we asked to be a representation only whether there was not it seemed true to women's experience. Only whether or not a woman clothed or bored or had served as its witness. And you she could the representation was acceptable. And if not, not remember that 1977 collection of essays, the authority of experience, and we're running a bit late, so I will not tell you an anecdote from pm reported by Miriam schneer, who was at the first part of Scotland feminist conference. Remember the recent Pam conference for Norman Mailer, that Daffy combination of adrenaline and masculinity, whomever ducks the masculinity. of sheer talking about the women organizing said we had all had experience, and it was experience that led us to what we did. Now, our faith in women's experience inseparable from powerful strains in American culture, such as Protestantism and pragmatism. This belief in the authority of experience supported much of our writing and art and filmmaking. It's supported the autobiography, The biography, the self portrait, the confession, and the revelation. And the notion of experience, as Ethel Klein has told us, in her book, gender politics, was also the basis for women's involvement in politics themselves. And there was sort of fourth term of our consensus was if a woman's experience testified to it, a representation was valid. And a shift term of our experience of our consensus had to do with the relationship of culture, and politics. Unknown Speaker 28:43 We saw a balance of connections between culture and politics. We saw that the activities of culture tended to reflect the arrangements of the powerful that pan reflected Norman Mailer. We also saw that the powerless need not be passive, that the powerless can have their own culture of resistance, survival and delight. And we saw that cultural work could change politics, even if that change might seem marginal, unpredictable and obscure. A recent example, they've just done a study of a women's studies course at USC, for both men and women. And at the end of the course, everybody from the west Rand put chauvinist to the most considered, feminist, everybody's attitudes about sexism have lowered in favor of equality for women. This may seem small victory, but in these days, there is no victory too small to disdain. And both feminist and politics showed something they shared a sense that they began in the roof usal to accept women's pain, another pawn in the refusal to accept the hurt in her shirt genericity in the produce care about Soph I even declares that he cannot believe in God because he sees children being beaten on Earth, because he has seen parents force a five year old girl eat excrement feminists revised or revise Ivan, for feminist declare in culture and in politics, that they cannot believe in men, because they see me as long as they see children and women deemed beaten on Earth by men. Now, in the late 1960s, we also began to build a political consensus that excluded certain things. I'm going to skip that. But I would say that the political consensus came to its apotheosis at the Houston conference, the National Women's Conference in November 1977. But back to the cultural consensus, now a consensus is like a contract. A consensus reflects an agreement of opinions, necessarily any consensus leave some opinions out. Unknown Speaker 31:23 In the cultural consensus, which was always better than the political consensus. We, for example, our cultural consensus, we included Marxism in a way that the political consensus never did. But in our cultural consensus, we also excluded some opinions. And in the 1970s, particularly in the late 1970s, these opinions did not steal away, frightened by the apps of the consensus. On the contrary, these excluded opinions gained force and presence. And the momentum reflected a collision between an ongoing collaboration among various postwar European philosophies of the 1950s and 1960s. and European and United States a feminist theory of the 1960s and 1970s. So let me give you a symbolic bibliography that might lie behind the opinions that began to emerge in the late 1970s from the 1950s and 60s. Between 1963 and 1969 Betty Ferdinand published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 Hans your Garber and you're going hobbles, the German philosophers began their debate about the possibilities of interpretation in 1967. When on board published the death of the author in 1968, now Elman published thinking about women in 1968, Michel Foucault published what is an author in 1969. And in the 1970s, the strands of European and American thought began to converge. And in 1979, the barn and scholar and the feminist conference, the future of difference, breeding will be represented some of the results of this inquiry and Gene merger, that was to challenge the cultural consensus that had been forged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result of these new ideas coming to America in the 1970s That worked out here to the cultural consensus of the late 1960s and early 1970s, loosened slack and stirred, turned restlessly even turned fretfully. Now, what were these newer ideas? Briefly, to oversimplify, forgive me for what I am about to do. The first new idea had to do with a status of representational codes that purported to give us a picture of reality that purported to be realistic. Much of the challenge to representational realistic codes in the 1970s came from film critics. And Kaplan, I am going to work with your history now, and don't turn on awful shade and fade away at what I'm about to do to a subject you are far better than I filmed. nutritions for example, challenge the belief that film documentaries could ever tell us the truth, whatever that word meant about women, even if feminists like key word or Joe Is Chopra directed those documentaries falooda still went on the very premise of the documentary, The very premise there was a window on reality that he showed us real people, that there was a controlling shaping intelligence behind it. Yes, very premise was an illusion. So he, the job of the filmmaker, was not to perpetuate an illusory notion of realism. But the job of the filmmaker was to give us all of our guard films that would reveal the lies of the patriarchy about women, and reveal the illusions of the realistic representational genre that both patriarchs and women have practice. Okay, thank you. Unknown Speaker 35:53 Well, such skepticism about representation was a shocker and is a shocker to many. Now, of course, no one who believed in the cultural consensus in the late 1960s, and 1970s was a village idiot. This said, we all know, by the way, there's an essay, this just came out in Tulsa studies Bollin Shoalwater, writer who's now been attacked for believing in representation. And she says very quietly, but quite firmly, none of us are as dumb as people say we were. So everybody knew that the connections between the signifier and the signified that odd couple the sign, we're marriages of convenience. And everybody knew that the connections between the sign and the referent that have about there were other marriages of convenience. Some of these marriages of convenience worked out. Others were hostile to the point of separation and divorce. They will after all, we'll just have convenience. And of course, everybody knew that when I added the phrase, Nancy Reagan's hacked, our listener could only understand me because he received us into the same linguistic community, because we shared linguistic conventions and codes, and cultural experiences. However, even though everybody already knew all this, the suggestion that we had to subvert representation as usual with alarming feminists might not have trusted what man said. But they were not always prepared to distrust the grammar and syntax that men would use to say things with. In brief, feminists still tended to prefer Charlotte Bronte, to Gertrude Stein, and Georgia O'Keeffe to the conceptual artist, Mary Kelly, and I suppose the historian Mary Kelly to the conceptual artist, Mary Kelly. Now, the second set of questions have to do with the status of psychoanalysis, as an explanation of the construction of the self, of subjectivity, of language and of the experience of gender. Was psychoanalysis hopelessly patriarchal, as Kate related said, and as the cultural consensus in formalism said, submitted, or when psychoanalysis especially the revisionary psychoanalysis of Lacan, or object relations, a valuable guide to the creation of the subject in culture, and so in 1974, by God 12 years ago, in psychoanalysis and feminism, Jude Micho, have encouraged district to Barnard help to make psychoanalysis respectable, as a theory for feminists. And so as she was translated, that one of the great intellects of contemporary Western culture, Julia Kristeva. Now the food sort of questions in this new set of ideas, the third set of questions how to deal with the status status of sexual difference as a constant of human experience. As we all know, the cultural consensus had tended to play down sexual differences. One of the themes the first Barnard scholar in the feminist conference was androgyny. Now, cultural consensus had also hoped that we were playing sexual differences and gender differences out on the edges of the cross cultural consensus on the edges was the wild your poetry of radical cultural feminism, seeding of its guiding ecologies, but it was on the edge of the cultural consensus. Below as I have said, the cultural consensus also demanded that we express and represent the amazing maze of differences among women. medically, Jane Eyre was no longer every woman's novel, especially if the woman leader like Gayatri Spivak was not an English daughter of the British Empire, but a phone daughter of the lions Britannia ruled. However, the new ideas tended to play up in very problematic ways. The similarities in women's experience, the focus on the female spread itself out in tangle. Unknown Speaker 40:31 After Jean Baker Miller in 1976, some people among them Alice Walker, asked if we will not develop a different and precious set of values. A feminine female has more practice after Mary beard and gold alone was praised. Many people asked about a woman's culture, a female historical practice after Jessie belonged in 1974, every Bucha 1976 And Nancy choto in 1978, some people asked about the place and representation of the mother that most specific of women's roles and the consume the mother helped to supplement the obsession of psychoanalysis with mothers and daughters with mothers and sons, with an interest in mothers and daughters. And after 1,000,006, Seuss, and other French writers, some wondered about a female language, and accurate her feminine and six Seuss, however, is tricky a point that will reemerge because she prompts two things which are contradictory, a female language rooted in the female body, or a feminine language, rooted in the experience of language itself that both men and women could practice giving this preparatory ferment, we ought not to have been surprised by the reception that Carol Gilligan got in 1982 for a different voice. Gilligan did not appear out of nowhere, the emerging the new set of ideas, the challenge to the cultural consensus, about representation had prepared us for a representation of the difference between the moral reasoning of women and men. Now these three questions are the 1970s. The first set about representational codes is epistemological. What do we know? And how do we know what we know? The second set about psychoanalysis was epistemological, psychological and linguistic. The third set about sexual difference was epistemological, psychological, linguistic, historical, and ethical. And all three questions provoked, partially answered, and then left drifting over into the 1980s. Still another question that each of us must know confrontive far more explicitly, and far more directly. What politics do each of these things entail? If a particularly theory seems to be alluding to here and persuasive, her practice doesn't demand a brief each of us must now say explicitly indirectly, what two or three things mean for feminism. Now, my next chapter, and I'm going to do two chapters in 10 minutes. My next chapter, the 1980s. Now, obviously, the political consensus has suffered. It has mostly supported the presidency. Nancy Reagan doesn't love us like she could be defeated. Surprise, surprise, surprise, the defeat of equal rights amendment if I'm trouble with a nasty wound, or inability to stop the obscene increase in the popularization of women and children. That ability has painfully reminded us of our political and economic weakness. However, I would suggest to you our cultural consensus, or agreements, both during the 1960s and 1970s, and the new consensus that emerged in the 1970s that cultural consensus these agreements have fragmented far more dramatically, but political consensus for reasons when you have a model image of the classroom, what is your choice? Do you want me to do the medical image arcane? Are you prepared? My first example of fragmentation is from the domain of theory. And in the 1980s, the theories of preference for some of the most brilliant of the United States feminists are those things that were pushed up around and through the 1970s Cultural consensus. Among the most brainless are people who explore the things that call into question the status of all representational codes that deploy revisional cycling out psychoanalysis, and that investigate even to deny the healing of sexual difference. Unknown Speaker 45:26 These brilliant these wonderful theoreticians are variously called modernists, post modernists or post structuralists Nancy Miller is among them, very subtly, LS que Jardine, the author of diagnosis, the exploration of the place in the feminine and the symbolic contract is wonderful among them. In film theory, to feminist postmodern this, wouldn't you agree and include Teresa de Montes, Lotus the author of Alice doesn't feminism, semiotic cinema. In the arts, you can see these things still petitions in the contributors to the show in Chicago 95, to show difference on representation and sexuality. In total, we can see these theoreticians in a fabulous group to which Rachel Barbara Plessis belongs to however group largely in San Francisco, but not without its the work in Philadelphia outposts. These mutations differ among themselves, but then we're seeing territory are signifying practice. They tend to find Gertrude Stein far more interesting and Charlotte Bronto. And not just because of her relationship with Alice B Toklas. And what it means, but among the post structuralist Alice is the word of choice. Alison's a word as popular as Jennifer and Christopher used to be in the name of Brandon's. Alice dancing Alice B. Toklas, Alice in Wonderland on the go. But as these poststructuralist question, just what are representational codes of representing? They also question that lovely gift of Western humanism, the notion of a conscious self that generates texts and a substantive identity. According to this notion, our identity exists in part because we consciously use language to generate texting meaning, a cop said Cognito goes soon. But for the post structuralists, what is the sneering delusions? What if we are inextricably enmeshed in our own language, our own set of content subs? What if the thrush like stranded fish within the hermeneutic circle, and as a result, we never will be fully aware enough of our own perspectives to use them? We will never be aware enough of what constructs our experience to make experience to experience meaningful Manvir conscious writes our scripts If so, these are not arrogant and silly to think about what the self is inviting system and integrate itself that is the center of the world. How do you feel segmented, do centered? Can we not be postmodern enough to accept even to enjoy this, by the way these ideas are the most recent description of these ideas is in a harder edge book and are referred to in a minute called Sexual touch with politics by a woman Norwegian who spends venture over London went toe to toe more now to attack shoulder to Marcus JLo, the whole set crew of US American girls and those who are under attack, so that is Unknown Speaker 48:59 attacking myself. Unknown Speaker 49:02 That's just nasty gossip perfect. Example of the move from the cultural consensus to post structuralism in a good increase in Western thought. The metaphor of the cave in Plato's Republic, is a powerful representation of the Center for the circle place. In the cave we see in the shadows. Fueled from the prism of the cave, we move outside if lonely at first and see the sun of truth and form. However, there is an alternative myth of the cave. This is the crevice in which the Sibyl dwells the Delphic Oracle, or the q&a and Sybil, who want hers, prophetic and often obscure speech. Let us jump from the classical period to the Romantic period. In 1880, Mary Shelley visited Naples with Essentially they visited Maples as well and the landscape of the command Scible. Aliens made her a widow. In 1826 Mary Shelley wrote a novel that everybody hated and helped to do things her imagination, a Marvel called the last round. And if you read the introduction to the last man, you will see this. There is a narrator who's writing partly autobiography with Mary Shelley and partly fiction. And this narrator tells going to Naples in 1818. On a beautiful December day with a beloved companion, and it's a scheme across the Bay of Naples. The water is so beautiful, that she thinks she might be Galatea or Cleopatra. To enter the civils cave, and and page after page they dug deeper and deeper into a group their way into the cave itself. A room or stone bench with a floor strewn with looms, bones and bits of bark. And his companion sees that writing into modern covers these leaves from from time to time to to return to the cave to read the inscription. They go home to companion dies, and know the narrative thorns the story she's about to tell from those inscriptions. She adds to them, she adapts them, she translates them when humans jumped to the new feminists period. In 1979, Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Ghidorah took on the metaphor of the cave in a woman in the attic. A goober Buddha had been among the most powerful shapers in the 1960s and 70s as a cultural consensus. There you saw the que se representation of women in patriarchy. They said for the patriarchs a change shaped anatomy is women's destiny. How many of you know went on we will come out with our destiny and what is sad about my show is she owns partially realized our power anxious about Indian culture during shelling sneer at what's her million compelling identify the writing on the news. That happening really show to a boy also seizes cultural power. She stitches together, the dismembered disremember disintegrated pieces of her precursors out. And now, a jump to post structuralist new feminism and tow who takes on quite brilliantly Dilbert indie bar. Why she sardonically to insist that a woman artist gather up the civils leaves. Why did he want to hold text? And again, representation is this not ironically, and this is my job, not hers, a follow up desire to have an organic representation. Why can't do them do not approve of disconnections or dismemberment. The post structuralist adds, quote, parallel to the wholeness of the text, is the wholeness of the human self, and integrated humans to individual is to them the essence of our creativity. Our third neighbor conception of self consciousness would seem to be able to improve over soon with a sick or diseased self. It says, to give physicians heal thyself and now simultaneously with a post structuralist is another group of younger women writers, chronological sisters of the post structuralists, they assume that men can have preferred professions, they assume that women can write and heal the resemblance. Unknown Speaker 54:02 For this group of professional women, distress all feminists still believe the cultural consensus or two visionary texts seems to precede the differences among them. The most obvious one is the neoconservative witch doctor in your writing what her political snuggle chastity and other arguments against women's liberation that is not against Bernina she dedicates her book to her mother. The woman seems such a worthy adventurer, she dedicates the book to show who makes jokes, and to Jacqueline who scattered oh my god, a post structuralist icon who scatters blessings represent paternal happy, cheerful, giving generous and that to stimulus we feel used to see several trees the mochi ones were meant to be heterosexual mothers had moms. They really have equality and justice and emotional victims feminists are fearful of the struggle of public success entails don't want to partner with witch doctor little drug. starters, the anti sisters of the post structuralists doctrines daughters scrub away abductor stone lists. Let's skip them. But you can find them Rachel flick. Now in the Bible as you can find the following pages in the public interest. You can find less criticizing meaning show Walter in the new criterion. I mocked up to his daughters and I'm going to snotty road aneurysm. I make them a comic interlude in my story. For I wish to talk about two other points where the feminist cons cultural consensus broke down or shouting that had serious political consequences for the consensus do not break down in a comparatively remote cultural region where the consensus broke down in the world of politics in the realm of legislators and courts. And are there I'm not going to talk about the Sears Roebuck case I debated whether to or not, but we've talked about it so much already. In legislatures and courts, people have to make actual choices and about representations of women. We could no longer debate. Often those people who were choosing on representations of women, legislators, judges, juries, were not accountable to and for feminism. Indeed, they were often not even sympathetic to feminism. One case in point is the struggle over pornography. I will admit my position. I am a supporter of the feminist anti censorship Task Force. I signed on to its amicus curiae brief in the Indianapolis case. But speaking as should I be an old fashioned into the cultural consensus, speaking as objectively as possible. I believe the struggle over pornography provoked these arguments about the representation of female sexuality. A struggle that burst out as we all know, or many of us know a struggle that burst into full gorgeous, painful flower at the Barnard scholar in the feminist conference in 1982. Should feminists picture women's bodies is exploited at risk danger, are sure this caravan says should feminists put forward not only a sexuality of danger, but a politics that resists deprivation and supports pleasure, Unknown Speaker 57:57 a secondary of struggle all since the relationship of specific images of a work for example, to the narrative as a whole and the mucus cure a brief talks about a rape scene and what was good novel, which may seem to support the subordination of women. But at the end with the narrative, the rape scene is seen as the subordination of women. A third struggle, the relationship of images to actual behavior, a third struggle, the ability to recognize a representation of sexual subordination, a fifth struggle, the extent to the right of everyone to produce and to consume whatever he or she desires in terms of imagery, and 66 struggle which brought it down has brought to our attention. The possibility to focus on pornography. And the representation of the doll list of sexualities permits us now to look at the vilest of social conditions such as poverty. The focus on pornography displaces attention. A second point where the cultural consensus has broken down the general thought trial. I don't know my position. I've written a skeptical review of whether guilty whether free her autobiography. I have been criticized forward and I have defended myself wrongly. To an Italian working class family focused me no ultimately became president of California now. In 1983. She was charged with murder. Apparently another member helped to evolve the charging legal authorities. The only evidence of her putative guilt was the road of her beautiful alcoholic probably schizoid ex husband, Jack's adult career clinic. A jury found her innocent, more effective default case environment terms of argument in terms of breaking apart of a cultural consensus. The accuracy of the representation of women is essentially innocent, essentially good, for the very least to show mando the women who helped to turn forward in had bad motives. Secondly, we split on the accuracy of the representation of women as victims. And they were inseparable from that of their essential goodness and innocence to the media, in court, and in her autobiography of folk presents herself as a victim of women, Ruth society, family, husband in prison, and in part, this is believable. However, this month, a new book by feminist Ellen hawks will come out about before trial. She pokes and prods at false narrative that fold styles of willfulness, have low enough strength. She asks again and again, five foot forgot. Amidst all she remembered that evening in New Orleans in 1965. A fee breaking of the cultural consensus that thought represents is the ways in which the media and some feminist reporters represent feminism and feminists in trouble. For instance, the media was horrible to her hawks talks to the reporters and thinks the main members of the media were current. affair with Scott struggling the cultural consensus before trial was the ways in which feminism represents itself in trouble. So the responsive mind thought was complicated. And so was thoughts defense. And a fifth, breaking apart of the cultural consensus and the fourth trial is the over divide of any feminists to present yourself as the representative of all women. Blacks, whites, the Jews who feed vote, they simply did so not because she'd suffered as a victim of patriarchy and hurt really do odious with the patriarch, the freedom because there was a reasonable doubt about her guilt. After her trial, folk declared the verdict of victory for all women. But one of the jurors, a female juror that thought had insisted the jury said, Well, I didn't elect her to speak for me. Unknown Speaker 1:02:45 I do not believe that our cultural consensus can be restored. I do not believe we can restore our contract upon my opinion, opinions or contract about opinion. And my last brief chapter of my story, is about what our responses should be. I believe two responses are unacceptable, when you start flat is unacceptable is to imitate the new modernists, who don't again, laminated fragmentation. I believe in blood in tragedy. But I feel we cannot speak his heart he did have the ache of modernism. We cannot agree these young stood because our center will not hold. We cannot picture as Elliot did. The world is a wasteland filled through fragments. Nor can you imitate their imagining and representation of the restoration of hierarchical owners that they mourn and dispose. Way over if we were to fly. On spawns would have a chilling effect that United States public opinion generally supports feminist issues. There's a recent proof of college undergraduates. Increase of one to 2% of them likely to present themselves as liberal middle of the road or only moderately conservative in your heart out Jack Kemp. Over 75% of women should have freedom of choice about abortion, some conflict about pornography about pornography. I will report to him sadly, but the number who wanted to go out to graduate and professional education in women's studies, like the number of who wants to go on to graduate education in botany, geography and the Foundations of Education is so small that we cannot measure it. A second unacceptable response is to have a feminist post structuralists to accuse him of burning up tomorrow intellectual masters. Probably I just read someone who's a very good critic, and poet. Somebody had just read this and said, Oh, this just returns us to the male masters. Hello was married, and I would see so we can get out of bed with her husband, and then go attack all this joy do for women man. Unknown Speaker 1:05:14 You cannot hold the feminist post structuralists, and say they betray political commitments, saving David skilling saying they are ungrateful to us elders. For these feminists post structuralists are making two gifts. Firstly, investigation of how our signifying practices work can help us cultivate open and subversive spaces within all cultures including feminist culture. For investigation, simplifying practice can help us forestall representation and reputations in conformity as a feminine language which both men and women might speak, what if we which is polymorphous poly dimensional policies, without knocking keep us all men and women alike? From the the pretty pile of pallets of patriarchy. We match up so for me, mystical armaments. Next, despite defenders of low cultural consensus, say the post structuralist wish to create a boundary for sophisticated new ways of thinking about the self and society. I feared, for example, but the lessons of Hortense J spillers. About the discourse of black woman, or I think of a conclusion of Teresa de Leyva since book Aristotle, where she says what must we do, we must find the specificity of a failing school. And in our political, theoretical Sobhan Nonsan practice, we will articulate the emotions of the subject, in social reality, from the historical experience of women, and she learns something we all must understand, but very much is still to be done. Among that much much is to try to understand why our cultural consensus is broken down. I think it is much more than a matter of turning against each other, because that is easier than organizing against organism with some ideas about the sources of our rupture. I think in part, our cultural consensus had to break down. There were too many practitioners, we were too large, too diverse, too varied, new consensus, could anyone to accommodate all the theories, ideas and perceptions about women of a postmodern world? Could it accommodate all the generations of feminism, the images and narratives of one generation, no longer the next. And it's the children always keep telling me. And this is true of representation after representation, including the representation of women the spectrum. And it is the work of the first cultural consensus, that restoration of women's history, their creation of women's voices, which inspired Word of God, cultural consensus, that showed how strong women could be. And that broke the representation of women in the spectrum, woman as perpetually broken back. There is of course, we don't have time to go into it an obvious political consequence of the loss of the representation of women as victim. Secondly, our cultural consensus had to break down because we have no organization with which to test, refine one, five and sustain it. But do we have, we have a number of cultural groups who have come into these organizations, caucuses and disciplinary interests, and where they struggle, and they must struggle, a woman's struggle to beat issues of gender, race and class together? In the same way feminism, the National Movement has no national party. They will systematically bring together representatives in the political sense of the word and I cut a bit that discuss the difference between representation as a cultural word and representation is a political world. But we will systematically bring together political representatives of our committees, organizations, caucuses, and discipline for them to speak up about and work out our points of disagreement. And what we must develop in school by dreamer is what I call an ethics of collection and ethics the combined charter We add clarity. Unknown Speaker 1:10:02 And what's one question we can look at as we practice the ethics of connection. So post modernism is right, Sadie's the longer humanistic picture the coherent individual self. But that picture justified in legitimized human rights. If we lose that university picture, how will we justify an ethic of respect for the individual person to find out, or cultural consensus had to break down because of our historical moment in the United States. For 10 years, we are wishing profound transition to the profit of song and at the sacrifice of many others. We will lead you towards as Florida's keeps telling me a service economy at home and above the national economy abroad. No others claim they have no idea what this jargon means and information society. But one of the great changes we're experiencing is gender roles. And if we need to do at the representations of gender, as good as the landscape from the satellite, we will see contradictions profusely tumbling over each other. There are contradictions about the right representations of gender. And I will spare you a wonderful story about Robert, June 10. He and his colleagues and carbs, citizens organize for better schools who don't like a textbook, and you told me to Pat cooks before we go gym cooks before a little girl named Pat. The schools have been sued for this blasphemy. Contract contradictions are no representations of gender. And over the span of a New York Times of this week, with pictures of race for heartless, Nancy Reagan, Sarah Ferguson, and the two women who have become a majority in the professions that are labor or landscape of contradictions that cabling and mostly syndrome. Unknown Speaker 1:12:19 Who told me to put it in don't talk me who told me how to interpret it. For you to showcase you may see our friends. They work in that citadel of masculinity the police station, but both women are white. And they work among men. Other than Cagney and Lacey and an occasional victim, the shoulders very few women. A symbol of this contradiction is the fact that carry symbol and Mason's married between the rich and couple represent domestic alternatives used by the from the radical by mostly for being in feminist studies of 35 feminist studies, who she talks very persuasively about a reason for the appeal of harlequin romances. As she says, if you read them now, what you will see is they have working women in the center and they are speaking to a mass audience about the reconciliation of intimacy and work of the private and public spheres. The mass media seem to contain the contradictions, to balance them to hold them in check. All responsibility is to deconstruct the contradictions in them to explore them to push them out of your way to send you a free what a famous bite out if cake we received the rope if they realize beans or even occasionally to the Duchess. However, simply because such explosive feminist activity can happen in STEM isms will move from internalizing the contradictions that pulsate around us. Murder such deconstructive and explosive activity. You from Nanjing still another contradiction. internalizing the belief in the worse the Hurly burly competitive marketplace of ideas, even while I call for representative groups that would see that competition through discourse of virtue of course through standard practice. Even from an article we have theorized that practice understanding must end in action even if we believe that we have corrupted understanding. Women stration Mr. stration and I do not mean simply the demonstrations of logical proof even if we believe that our remonstrate shins have been empty or unpersuasive? Do we need a consensus about what a form of a switching point will be? Through trade practice, I believe that we reached this far the switching point between theory and practice, when we confront survival issues for women, children, almost any woman, certainly any child survival issues, food, water, shelter, health, education and protection from violence, to recognize the survival issue or its representation, and not to act on the survivor of survival is immoral. Man story was to be an act of speech so largely cold to him, I tried to do what he told me to do, I have largely called for more speech, for more about the languages of representation, I have learned in the game and in the symposium. However, I wish to leave with one final image that of the gymnasium for the children's rooms, a training ground for action. And I hope today that we shall think of images in order to act for instance, to make you even more invisible, to be even more visible or invisible, to make visible Simon has been visible to make audible that has been inaudible to make audible some of which has been audible and even to ask that all we wish to create and to bring the invisibility of the future into visibility Unknown Speaker 1:17:06 and now for Katharine Hepburn. I said applause and we made an attempt which was 10 minutes of applause to the man of Milan shot thank you again for listening Could you please go Unknown Speaker 1:18:03 back to your seats we'll begin the second part we'll just stay online and the people starting to come back to your station so Unknown Speaker 1:18:21 where she teaches Unknown Speaker 1:18:34 as a college of Rikers where she teaches in the Department of English which include women in better articles or have actually turn to look at so much hashing. Today was going to speak to her before the cancer that data show is the author of women and women and she was one of the leading feminist critics eyes so much has she influenced the way feminists perceive the subject? The brand's support actually, I'm not sure my voice is stronger. I'm struggling from a lot over have a cold today seems to be the remains not Catherine. If kassabian was honored to be here. On after Katharine Hepburn I'm your position between two sets. Katherine's feel very honored by that. I'm going to talk hopefully just for about 15 minutes before the film. And then hopefully there will be time for questions or I can make some more comments afterwards. briefly why we chose to show our business Christopher strong today. Our conference title women's images and politics basically means to me the politics of female images. And we started looking at this first through the film, looking at the representing of the female body and discourse in Christopher strong. Now this question of the female body and discourse in film has been very much an issue in recent feminist criticism. One question is how does the production of the female body on film come to connote certain patriarchal sexual politics? Another one is, and this one unfortunately, we can't go into depth in this session in the workshops, I think it will be treated is what possibilities are there for other kinds of female representational politics. feminist film critics have long been discussing woman's relegation to silence, absence and marginality on the screen of the internationally dominant cinema that we call the classical Hollywood film. And this is the type that Christopher strong belongs in. We've also been concerned about the absence of women from directors within Hollywood as an institution, there will be much you will know only very few women directors a tool in the history of Hollywood, particularly in the so called Classical period, from 1930 to 1960. There were actually several foreign direct million film directors in in the silent era in the tombs. And of course, in the post classical period, which we're in now there are now newly emerging women directors. This is an absence fostered by the critical establishment who ignored us now, until very recently, the most quoted example is Andrew Cyrus's influential American cinema, where he relegated us on a Friday simply to amend his own auxilary at the end of the book. So And one reason for choosing a Dorothy Rs in a film today was to bring one of these filmmakers to the foreground to look at a part of our history often neglected, which is also a history of our mass imaging, scanner Johnston mo to the radium 719 75. We do not want to simply introduce women into an established microfilm history. Since Unknown Speaker 1:22:57 the accumulation of facts and the construction of chronologies may not get us very far. She also argued against simply setting up an ultimate female pantheon. Because such a pan from would not tell us very much about the relationship of women directors, or of their films to patriarchal ideology. Women and film, she said, can only become meaningful in terms of a theory in the attempt to create a structure in which forms such as ours, this can be examined in retrospect and of quote, It is such a structure that feminist film theorists have been trying to develop over the past 10 years. One of the things we've tried to avoid is a notion that simply because the director is biologically female, means that her walks must be feminist. And interestingly enough, the few male critics that mentioned female directors in Hollywood somehow immediately assume they must be feminist excited by their discovery and they're, they're treating them somehow this means they're a feminist. We've all been concerned to problematize the whole issue of what it means to be woman within patriarchy, to see women as very much constrained by the codes laid out for the feminine in a patriarchal culture. And this involves situating women very precisely in their historical contexts. And I'm talking here of the sense of trying to read back into past to cage the hidden cultural connotations, codes, myths, assumptions that function very much on a level behind, beyond accumulation of concrete document documents and empirical evidence. In other words, where the terrain where we try to decipher the discourses that structure, cultural and especially gender relations, looking at the very language that people use and documents that are available, such as reviews, diaries, interviews, publicity materials, Unknown Speaker 1:25:01 bought around the turn of the century in Hollywood awesomeness father owned a famous Hollywood restaurant next to a theater. I was the was only familiarized with the theater famous actors and directors, and obviously intelligent young woman. This is what I was reading between the lines and in this were interview, she aimed to become a surgeon, which was a pretty gutsy idea for the period, although it did reflect the results of the first wave of feminism in the 20s, which had precisely opened up the professions and higher education to at least upper class and white women. By Betsy Ross is evident in this interview by Kay and Perry in which she describes how she got into Hollywood, and how she had to push her away to being allowed to direct. She realized immediately on getting into Hollywood that one had to be a director, there was simply no other role that was a minor importance of tall. She made several silent films in the late 20s. The most famous is the wild party with Clara Bow about gutsy college women, most of which are not in distribution. But we chose Christopher strong, which was made in 1933. Because we thought it evoked interesting and important questions around what it was possible for a woman director to achieve within the constraints, those of a highly male dominant and hierarchical organization like Hollywood in the classical period, and within Hollywood realist codes, we must remember also that it was the 30s and that Hollywood was itself functioning in a period of severe depression, which had put an end to the exuberant 20s in which women had been granted many new freedoms. So the depression meant a pulling back of these advances, although I would argue, one can explain a film like Christopher strong in terms of a cultural subtext where what's been evoked, keeps on moving. Now, I think it's precisely here that the issue of gender discourses is important. And what Tony Bennett has called leading formations, obviously, as women in the audience here are situated within the recent feminist discourses that Katie Simpson has now so well outlined for us we bring to Christopher strong reading formations totally unavailable to either Eisner herself, or the woman looking at the film in the 30s. So the task for us is partly to read back from the film, the code that structure its discourses, and to see why Eisner was possibly challenging some of the dominant gender discourses of her period without necessarily realizing fully, consciously what she was doing. I think a second task is to see how our own contemporary feminist discourses illuminate what, what limits there are to our business efforts on all the levels that I've I've alluded to. Now I want to just point out some of these possible limits that you can be looking for and thinking about as we watch the film