{"id":5602,"title":"Feminist Video: Reiterating the Difference","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/feminist-video-reiterating-difference","version":"e461ce6417a4def4685a344dedbcfe666366ff700851020dd4372dc2db1441f7","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.441021+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Marita Sturken"}],"authorKeys":["Sturken, Marita"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"April 1985","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"12","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"9","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0866","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Feminist Video: Reiterating the Difference.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/feminist-video-reiterating-difference.","publication":"Marita Sturken. Feminist Video: Reiterating the Difference. Afterimage. vol. 12, no. 9. Visual Studies Workshop. April 1985.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5602.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0866","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":31919},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":600},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":813},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0866","generated":false,"characters":612}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Revising Romance: New Feminist Video Distributed by the American Federation of Arts Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, September 1 - December 31, 1984 University Gallery of Fine Art, Ohio State University, Columbus April 1985 Northwest Film Study Center, Portland, OR July 1985 Cornell Cinema, Ithaca, NY September 1985 Diference: On Representation and Sexuality Videotapes curated by Jane Weinstock New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC December 8, 1984-February 10, 1985 Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago March 3 - April 7, 1985 Institute of Contemporary Art, London July 19-September 1, 1985 Those who attempt to establish a cultural mythology that is different than the Western patriarchal view of the world comprise the social \u0022other.\u0022 Women, minorities, gays, and sometimes even artists, often raise issues that the dominant culture has suppressed in order to survive intact. Women do perceive the world differently than men, yet these differences can be subtle and so pervasive in the texture of our lives that they are difficult to isolate. Nevertheless, there are numerous topics-the domestic cultural domain, media representations of women, and the struggle of women to change well-entrenched, discriminatory social values-that are deeply important to women artists, topics which are threatening and hence ignored by their male counterparts. To define videotapes by women, or by feminist women, as comprising a specific isolated genre risks a reduction of the work and a denial of its diversity. For an art medium that developed during the \u0022sexually liberated\u0022 yet deceptively sexist \u002760s, video art contains an impressive number of female voices. While the medium also sports its quota of \u0022old boys\u0027 clubs,\u0022 these are balanced by highly visible women curators, administrators, and well established women artists. Two recent shows of video art attempted to define issues of feminist video. While neither succeeded absolutely in its definition, both shows attested to the presence of strong feminist videotapes and revealed the variety of issues being dealt with by women artists. The first, \u0022Revising Romance: New Feminist Video,\u0022 is a traveling exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA). It was curated by Linda Podheiser, assistant professor at Emerson College, and Bob Riley: video curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The second, \u0022Difference: On Representation and Sexuality,\u0022 was at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and included a film and video program curated by film critic Jane Weinstock. Although their intents were different, both of the shows were predicated on the premise that there is a particular feminist aesthetic, or message. The New Museum exhibition explored the question of sexual difference and emphasized psychoanalytical approaches to discussing art. The AFA show broaches the issue of romance-a subject associated, of course, primarily with women-and asks, in effect, \u0022What are the psychological, political, and aesthetic consequences of popular ideals of eternal passion and transcendent love?\u0022 These videotapes analyze stereotypical sexual roles and address the use of romance in popular culture to exploit women\u0027s dissatisfaction with themselves and their bodies, but they also tend to parody romance rather than propose any alternative to this brand of consumer culture. Perhaps these videotapes represent the first stage of a revisionist perspective: identify the structure of the opposition\u0027s hierarchy and the inherent vocabulary of his language, then attempt to replace it. \u0022Revising Romance\u0022 is an admirable attempt to isolate one topic within a panoply of issues relevant to women working with the narrative form. It is also a risky attempt to construct a specific premise out of a broad group of tapes. The work is divided into four parts: \u0022Domestic Drama,\u0022 \u0022Revisionist Romanse,\u0022 \u0022The Double Bind,\u0022 and \u0022Video Picaresque.\u0022 \u0022Domestic Drama\u0022 is comprised of three tapes that explore the reality of housework in juxtaposition with the domestic ideals presented in daytime television soap operas and advertisements. The housewife, the quintessential victim of the consumer culture, provides these artists with ample fodder for examining the consequences of confining women to the cultural domain of the home. In Deans Keppel\u0027s Soap, Keppel sits in uncomfortably close range before the camera that assumes the place of her television. Sniffling and blowing her nose, she bemoans a failed romance while dialogue from soap operas is intercut with her attempts to perform domestic duties, such as cleaning the bathroom and mending a pair of pants. The paralysis effectively portrayed by Keppel is offset by her humor: comic interplays between her inner voice and the dialogue of the soaps, and her deliberate overdramatization. However, the tape ultimately reads more like a personal catharsis than a commentary on romance. Ann-Sargent Wooster\u0027s House, shot in an equally claustrophobic style, also uses the audio tracks of soaps and game shows as a backdrop for a view of housework. Wooster combines spoken text on the sociology and mythology of housewives and the domestic domain, ranging in tone from the angry to the poetical, with scenes of a pair of hands roughly performing household tasks-feeding a baby doll, washing dishes, cutting vegetables, arranging things-on miniature dolls or in a real-life setting. While the logic of Wooster\u0027s shift from make-believe props to actual settings is unclear to me, and her visual metaphors often seem too obvious, her interweaving of feminist commentary and fragmented visuals can be persuasive. Barbara Broughel goes beyond the rather straightforward style of Keppel and Wooster in Lesson I: Trouble in Paradise to create a disjointed, unusual narrative. This tape is so laden with references to daytime commercials that it creates an eerie kind of alter-world. Everything resembles an advertisement: shirts talk back to a housewife whose husband goes to work in his underwear; stains constantly reappear on the carpet after they have been cleaned; and coffee boils over as the housewife (predictably defeated by her appliances in the end) is beset by salesmen. Broughel calls these crises in the tape the \u0022external disruptions issued by a world of men and commerce\u0022 and pushes her style even further with a soundtrack that is either out-of-sync or backwards, and a loose, hand-held camera style. (The tape was originally shot in super-8, giving it a very grainy, fuzzy look.) Unfortunately this style gets increasingly irritating as the tape progresses, undermining the intelligent and original images Broughel constructs. While her assaults on classic narrative style and male economic dominance are admirable, her style is counterproductive. In Lesson ll: The Frigid Heiress, Broughel takes a stab at the use of eroticism and romance to sell products, defining \u0022commercial advertising as the Romance genre\u0027s most recent and most available formal manifestation.\u0022 Broughel constructs a conniving character who tries to \u0022trap her man\u0022 in a kind of Cosmopolitan magazine act of desperation. She adds elements of plot intrigue and juxtaposes shots of the \u0022real\u0022 thing-erections and dramatic blood stains-with the fake eroticism of perfume and liquor ads. Once again, the \u0022lesson\u0022 of the title is a play on words: the lessons of advertisements and women\u0027s self-improvement magazines, as well as the lessons each heroine should have learned at the end. Broughel is dealing innovatively with key issues, and while I am impressed by her ideas, the abrasiveness of her style undermines both works. With Love From A To B, by Nancy Buchanan and Barbara Smith, is a charming, one-shot sketch that pokes fun at the cliche of unrequited love. Two hands enact this drama with simple props,-a ring, a glass of wine, flowers-in such a way that they are humorous, yet poignant. She does her nails, for example, while he offers her gifts. The tight, introverted style of this tape, like that of Keppel and Wooster, is echoed in Ilene Segalove\u0027s Why l Got Into TV And Other Stories, a humorous autobiographical tape in which we see none of the characters\u0027 faces, only their torsos. The consistent recurrence of this claustrophobic stylistic device, which is apparently uncontrived, is worth noting. Are domesticity and female introspection mutually dependent? Segalove, for instance, has made a series of autobiographical tapes in this fragmented style, which she narrates in a humorous, somewhat self-deprecating tone. She pursues self-analysis via the popular culture and TV addiction of her youth: watching JFK shot on TV; falling in love with the TV repairman; being glued to the tube while suffering from the requisite bout of mononucleosis; and associating the memory of watching her parents kiss with the soundtrack of Dragnet. Segalove\u0027s particular narrative style, with its use of static, often stiffly comic visuals, and flat delivery, resembles the tradition of stand-up comedy and carries with it that genre\u0027s quality of self-mockery. The stylistic simplicity of these tapes is in marked contrast with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto\u0027s Vault, a sophisticated, well-crafted piece that interweaves an-advertising-image romance with cliched old movie scenes. The Yonemotos, who depart in this work from their usual soap opera format to create a nonlinear, disjunctive romance, are at their best when deciphering rather than imitating the soap opera/ melodrama styles of television and movies. They combine classic juxtapositions such as flashbacks and hackneyed romantic scenes (the young couple embracing in the great outdoors) with Bunuelian non sequiturs. Two exceptionally wooden actors enact a starcrossed romance of a cowboy/ artist and a pole-vaulting cellist. Revamped Freudian symbols (she pole vaults her way out of the romance to a new job, and he is left standing next to-you guessed it-a phallic oil rig), humorous mimicry of advertisements, and campy style make Vault a wonderful play on romance. Assuming the role of revisionists, women must also contend with the issue of their compliance with the social norms that have allowed the patriarchal mechanism to remain intact for so long. This is a difficult and complex issue, one which Podheiser addresses in this exhibition with a program called \u0022The Double Bind.\u0022 Here, as she writes in the program notes, \u0022Romance is treated as a sadomasochistic exchange, part of a larger psycho/social dialectic of power within which the protagonists are unwittingly trapped.\u0022 Perhaps the most interesting example of this mode is the work of Cecelia Condit, a video artist from Ohio who has been noticed recently for her tape Possibly in Michigan. Condit uses a dense, convoluted style to construct macabre, often unnerving narratives. While Possibly in Michigan and Beneath the Skin, both of which were included in this show, might be easily categorized as feminist tapes, closer scrutiny reveals that neither work is so simple or straightforward. In Beneath the Skin, a young woman describes in an incredulous fashion how she discovered that her boyfriend had been arrested for the murder of his previous girlfriend. This convincingly naive narration is heightened by Condit\u0027s elusive visuals that intercut morbid images of corpses with images of a young woman lying on a bed. This technique underscores her identification with the dead girlfriend, and heightens her excitement with her proximity to danger, while the singsong soundtrack that characterizes Condit\u0027s work chants, \u0022Tell us about Barbie and Ken and how their friendship never ends . . . .\u0022 Possibly in Michigan takes these thorny issues even further with two women who \u0022have two things in common--violence and perfume.\u0022 The tape begins in a shopping mall, where the two women try out perfumes and are pursued by a man who alternately bears the head of a wolf, rabbit, or frog. When he pursues one of them home, they band together and kill him, eventu","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":31919,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}