Abstract
Review
What do the Rape of Lucretia, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, Alfred Hitchcock’s obsession with actress Tippi Hedren, Pedro Almódovar’s taboo breaking portrayals of gender roles and Alfonso Cuarón’s recent acclaimed Netflix production Roma have in common? They all shape and, simultaneously, break the depiction of female agency in our socio-political imaginary. In Beyond the public sphere -Film and the feminist imaginary, María Pía Lara takes us on a dazzling journey through the history of women’s position in our repertoire of visual representations of gender.
The motivation—or rather the necessity—of this book is clearly owned to what Lara has identified as the “lost promise” of a new concept of feminist agency and our contemporary challenges within ethics and political theory. The author is well-versed in that topic: having dedicated her previous book Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere to an effort of presenting women’s appropriation of the public sphere that included a dialogue with theorists such as Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Bonny Honig, and Iris Marion Young, she contributed to feminism with her theory of agency and her narrative proposal. Yet Lara makes the claim that even after a great amount of important interventions from these theorists, who have made public their criticism to mainstream political discourses, most women’s problems and situations are still invisible. They are, she insists, still part of hidden secret abuses due to male privilege and patriarchal institutions. In the same token, portrayals of women inside the hegemonic male imaginary are dangerously distorted. This is the reason why claims of abuse from men—like the case of Christine Blasey Ford—who claimed she was assaulted sexually by the now Justice Brett Kavanaugh, still are not enough to place doubts on the moral character of her abuser. Lara convincingly argues that, notwithstanding decades of long struggles against the patriarchal-capitalist imaginary, in which we are immersed, women are still lacking credibility. Thus, our conception of agency needs to be both radical (in the true sense of the word: radical as grasping a problem by its root) and useful for our emancipatory agenda. Lara, to counter this invisibility, is leaving the narrow terrain of Political Theory, reaching beyond the Public Sphere in direction to the precise realm where those models of identity and gender discourses emerge and shape our subjectivity: the dimension of modes of representation of women in mass media, and of the aesthetic production of stories that are engaged in representing the normalizing of violence exercised to women in the past and in our present.
Needless to say, cinema is the privileged space of such a journey, as it harbors the sites and counter-sites of an imaginary that situate ourselves within society’s own perspective. Lara provides us with tools to analyze images, representations, and narrative structures that are part of our imaginary related to the patriarchal social construction of gender roles, and, in consequence, she directs us to the possibility of figuring out how our own position as social and political agents demands from us to claim for the sovereignty of our bodies, for the proper recognition and end the exploitation of our labor, and to see the radical steps that we need to take to stop the internal and external violence directed against us.
When Lara talks about a concept of agency, she does not mean that we lack a concept under which we can subsume different phenomena, but rather, that such a concept relating to women being considered as moral agents has never existed. Without possibilities of conceiving ourselves as moral agents, it is clear that we cannot have a concept of political agency. Thus, she thinks that agency must be seen as relational and cannot be done without becoming engaged with others in emancipating all of us. By agency, she understands the possibility to transform, and to challenge how institutions and laws, norms, and practices, support a patriarchal and capitalist oppression. A feminist concept of justice must be about how we establish all our relations with others. And any individual action must be organized with others so only then can an action express its echoability: it has to resonate in how other agents realize that they are also the subjects of injustices (gender, sex, race, and class intersect as realms of the experiences of exploitation and domination).
In order to do so, it is crucial to dismantle the way in which bourgeois subjectivity has been historically constructed. A patriarchal institution has been reinforced by the capitalist system and the division of labor. After focusing on some institutions such as the laws from the patriarchal-capitalist imaginary, the task that Lara faces is the construction of the topography of a new feminist imaginary where the political will be enlarged. The images, the cultural products are now seen as material institutions (not only as the superstructure); and by considering narratives as societies’ self-descriptions, we can find ourselves facing how the historical construction of women and their bodies became the manuscripts of men’s power, female bodies were sites of messages and properties. Thus, we can realize how women and their bodies represented messages that objectified us as pieces or fragments of a larger political discourse of sovereignty: numerous narratives of rape and conquest of cities where women merely served as metaphors of how political territories were founded, won, or dominated.
This is the reason why the concept of the public sphere must allow us to expand the limits of its political dimension and draw a topography of gender relations dealing with the axes of power and domination. A mapping of these relations and tensions between political structures of gender allows us to figure out how the structural plots have constructed the norms of these relations of domination. They were based on using us as territories instead of relating to us as human beings. Thus, it becomes a pressing task to build up a new feminist imaginary: one that considers women as the owners of our own bodies, and that provides us with images by which we can design how we are able to become the agents of the most radical transformations. The central question that Lara is concerned about is—“how social imaginaries have given us potential ways to envision a feminist political agenda with radical transformations” (13). As we learn to imagine how a feminist world would really look like, she guides us through the territory of our collective imaginary towards the need to develop a radical critical thinking that can help us to raise the question: How can our social and political institutions become feminist by changing all norms and institutional orders?
Inspired by Cornelius Castoriadis, Lara conceives the imaginary as a creative realm that help us see ourselves as agents who can transform social norms and practices, while simultaneously, transforming ourselves. We can call her topography, in all conscience, a dialectical one. Thus, it implies the interaction between the individual capacity of imagination (imagination as a faculty, as it was conceived by Kant), and the social imaginary that shapes how individuals enter the social order in an intersubjective fashion. To these components, Lara adds the dimension of the imaginal, a concept taken from Chiara Bottici: the imaginal can be understood as a pictorial dimension that, in a way, bridges the separation between the individual faculty of imagination and the social imaginary as images of “actors’ self-conceptions of the world and their conscious and unconscious understandings of social and political situations” (12). In this perspective, the imaginal dimension provides us with “scripts,” which we can follow in our day-to-day existence.
As Lara convincingly argues, these scripts have been constructed, until now, along the lines of white male sovereignty. The esthetic products that emerge from this patriarchal hegemony often use women and their bodies to represent precisely this political and territorial concept of male sovereignty. How these scripts work is shown masterfully in what I consider one of the key chapters of the book—chapter 3—which begins with the genealogy of the concept of rape, or, in the words of the author—“the lack of such a genealogy”—of a concept that describes the moral harm aimed at destroying female subjectivity (93). It is noteworthy that rape as a crime is precisely defined originally as a crime against the man, and it has never been about the woman’s subjectivity and about her bodily harm. Her sexuality is understood as a male territory or property. None of the concepts we use refers to this kind of violence describing the physical or moral damage endured by women, or the crime of not being considered a human worthy of bodily self-determination. The artistic representations of female bodies being raped—which are abundant, because frequently those acts are constitutive parts of foundational myths of cities, wars, invasions, and colonial adventures—concentrate only on the shame of how the dishonored victim could perhaps have felt pleasure at being raped (in the words of Agustine). Lucrecia, after having been raped by Sextus Tarquinius, takes her own life invaded by guilt and shame. This is how she is depicted on numerous paintings throughout art history. Lavinia’s tongue is cut off in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus—women are silenced because the mere mention of rape dishonors their male owners. But Lara notices that shame and dishonor serve as metaphors or metonymies of something more complex, which can be described as a fundamental part of the patriarchal conception of the politics of colonialism: as how the conquerors saw themselves as creating empires, while those who were subjugated thought themselves as being raped by their conquerors. Thus, as being feminized. Another norm allowing men to consider themselves superior that still persists in the social patriarchal imaginary is how rape can be considered as the strategy of a seducer, like the historical figure of Casanova, and how women are depicted as secretly enjoying while being “possessed by their seducer.” This role of the seducer is, of course, a constitutive one in how the patriarchal myth justifies a logic according to which a woman’s “no” is actually read as a “yes.” As such, this myth survives well into the scripts and representations of our contemporary films and of our imaginary.
As a “pharmakon,” Lara calls for an imaginal deconstruction of these myths, namely not as “falsehoods in epistemic terms, but [as] distortions that we are not entirely aware of” (85) because we have been colonized by patriarchal norms. These myths constitutively shape the way we interpret the world and our role within it. This framework presents a thoughtful “critical interpretation” of a variety of films from different epochs and cultural contexts, detecting the way in which they correspond to how the patriarchal imaginary constructed human violence as well as how our feminist imaginary can now help us gain a critical perspective. When we are capable of seeing how patriarchal myths still appear in our present representations, the new feminist imaginary is able to shine a critical light by questioning how rape, seduction, and the normalizing of violence have been justified by male’s norms.
Often, these critical interpretations can be surprising, as the example of Claudia Llosa’s acclaimed film The Milk of Sorrow (2009) shows. Confronting common interpretations, Lara thinks that this film is not about the women who were raped by the militaries during the civil war, but how despite describing acts that point to the previous, the film director uses these narratives in order to construct her message of reconciliation between doers and sufferers. This film scores badly in terms of the construction of a feminist agency, since the native women of Peru are portrayed as passive, ignorant, and naïve. The movie won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, and triggered a debate on a much-avoided topic about the sexual violence during the civil war in Peru recorded by anthropologists. The number of rapes by militaries and the need for a reparation for hundreds of women who have suffered sexual violence during the civil war are not even considered here. In Beyond the Public Sphere, the story of Fausta, a young Quechua woman who inherited her mother’s trauma of rape during the Peruvian civil war, is critically interpreted by Lara as a representation of a passive victimhood. Lara powerfully critiques the final shot of the film in which the root once placed in the vagina of a daughter of rape is planted on the ground: it represents the paradigmatic discourse of national reconciliation. One that opts for burying the criminal accountability of the perpetrators who should be held as being responsible for their criminal deeds.
Inevitably, a doubt emerges as the reader might ask: If women during the war did not have agency, how can we demand from a movie to depict them as empowered agents? But changing the reality of oppression for a beautiful fairy tale is not what Lara is aiming at. Her politicized perspective claims that Llosa’s responsibility of making such a movie must deal with how these women can be represented as constructing a new way of resisting their erasure since they lived the worst violence possible, one that aims to objectify women as mere tools of male pleasure. A critical perspective should re-educate our ways of representation.
The most stunning example of this procedure is maybe her reading of The Patience Stone (2012), a coproduction between Afghanistan and France by director Atiq Rahimi, an Afghan citizen now exiled in Paris. In its portrayal of a young woman who has to take care of her husband wounded in the war, and who is now in coma, the film does not embellish the crude reality of the civil war, and the advance of the most fundamentalist version of Islamism (that Afghan women had to endure and are going to live today once more). In her discourse, the nameless protagonist tells her ailing husband how she was able to survive, have children with another man, and resisting the violence of his family. The young Afghan woman challenges a society who supports a system of oppression. She and her prostitute aunt, who provides advice and guidance, represent “those who are capable of coming up with solutions and strategies because they are already outsiders.” But they are capable of understanding that agency is relational, that no one can be successful at surviving without the help of others. In Lara’s feminist social imaginary and in her topography of the landscape of the patriarchal imaginary, “there is always an outside and an inside” in how we relate to things and to others (52). And there is also our imagination as a weapon against this kind of representations of sexual violence.
Agency as depicted in The Patience Stone, is a radical one—in a world ruled by the Taliban’s refusal to consider women as equals—women’s agency is performed by breaking all the rules and norms established by the oppressors. Those women have to save themselves by renouncing to being considered as “honorable.” Free women become prostitutes or adulteresses. Our perception of how the gender relations are constructed by how these images about the conflicts and problems of women in Afghanistan can be defied or fought. Such a film can be a way of relating critically to a reality by developing a critical imaginary about female agency not as being impossible in the direst contexts. Without embellishing a difficult site of patriarchal oppression, the film creates a space for a new public, for the “feminist postliterary public sphere” in its re-educational role as films are representations about how we see and understand the world.
The question about Kant’s concept of agency as autonomy is posed in another entirely different set. Individual agency and particular responsibility are enacted as actions as we relate to others as agents. The gap between the society and individual is entangled in the social imaginary. Moral and political agency require both individual imagination and social critical understanding. One cannot happen without the other. This is why the role of the social imaginary is fundamental. The instruments of critical analysis that Lara provides allow us to see that individuals are socially constructed by patriarchal institutions. To escape the social construction of this male privileged status and positions, we must build up our feminist imaginary.
The most vivid account of this process is given by Lara’s interpretation of Hitchcock’s Marnie. Some critics argued that Marnie is a movie in which Hitchcock lost control of himself. This is due to his problematic relationship with actress Tippi Hedren, who incarnates the role of Marnie: Hedren was sexually harassed by Hitchcock during the shooting, and her firm rejection made Hitchcock ruin her professional career. Following Lara’s interpretation though, Hitchcock did not lose control of his movie since he was one of the very few film makers who even decided to portray rape in marriage when no one thought of this act as rape. In the plot, Mark is obsessed with the beautiful and vulnerable Marnie. He thinks of himself as her savior. Mark is portrayed along the line of the myth of the male hero, and simultaneously, he is depicted as pathologically obsessed with Marnie. His justification is that he wants to save her from her illness or neurosis. Within this mythical patriarchal script, we can see enough evidence that he is indeed the typical predator-hero: his first commentary about Marnie is about her “good legs.” Mark is aware of Marnie’s trauma that causes her an aversion to any physical contact with men. Nevertheless, he rapes her during their honeymoon. Yet he insists that he wants to help her by confronting her with the knowledge of the traumatic event that led her to her psychosis. Marnie never really believes this. However, she accepts Mark only because the other possibility is going to jail. Hitchcock truly knew how to deconstruct the myth of the savior.
To capture the different layers of the social imaginary that Marnie as a representation allows to, Lara proposes to rehabilitate the concept of anachronism that Reinhart Koselleck rescued from its pejorative meaning (in a similar fashion than when Gadamer helped to give a positive meaning to prejudices). In Koselleck’s conception of anachronism, we are always situated in our own time. Our horizon of understanding meaning is contextual and historical. This opens up the opportunity to see Marnie’s attitude, and her resistance to Mark’s advances, as radically questioning her position as the victim of Mark’s heroic plot. It makes her an agent—however, opaque she might be to herself—who understands what Mark really wants from her since the beginning—to own her. She is able to refuse being taken as his sexual object. This puts Mark in a “lose-lose situation” as he will end up becoming a failed seducer. The movie thus articulates “the patriarchal imaginary of the strategy of seduction.” Hitchcock was very clear about the meaning of rape in his plot. In this sense, the movie did not slip out of his control, Lara insists. Quite the contrary: it represents a story of rape “as a myth of the hero as seducer” and by allowing Marnie to see through it, Hitchcock depicts Marnie as a person who refuses to accept Mark’s desire of her as his justification to possess her. “The real action of violence and rape” was perfectly clear to Hitchcock, despite him being in the situation of harassing his actress as the norms of Hollywood have always allowed men to do. (137)
Lara presents her critical analysis as a way to demonstrate how images operate for a long time in our minds, and how it is possible that they make us aware of who we are and why. The critical point is then to propose a shift of perceptions about how certain representations can be distortions of how the relations between men and women are representations that justify violence done to females. Lara’s central claim is that the movies shape our social imaginary. Beyond the Public Sphere can give us a clue about how movies have taken a central role in our times: if such narratives are powerful, filmic images are key to our most unconscious desires, hopes and dreams. If the spectator’s perspective undergoes a critical shift, however small, a change of angle, these changes can unblock our minds. And it is here where the new topography of the feminist imaginary begins to take shape.
ORCID iD
Stephanie Graf https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0827-7536