Sex Roles, Vol. 29, Nos. 1/2, 1993
B o o k Reviews
The Difficulty of Difference. By D. N. Rodowick. New York: Routledge, 1991, 162 pp., $13.95.
Rodowick continues the raging debate in film theory on the nature of the relationship between the viewer (the spectator) and the viewed (the text or film), specifically the relationship between the gender orientation of the viewer and the alleged "gender orientation" of the narrative and cinematic systems of the film. Arguing against a binary, "totalizing" model and theory of film narrative, which Rodowick feels would condemn women to the very gender definition and position from which they seek to escape, he proposes a rereading of Freud's analysis of phantasy as a model of narrative form. Rodowick believes that Freud's model allows a flexible role for the spectator, free from society's insistence on binary sexual definition. He sees phantasy as an attempt by the subject to resolve the binary contradictions of ideology and suggests that film viewing serves a similar function. He acknowledges that contemporary film theory has often confused "identity" and "identification" and understands that films "do not produce subjects but symbolic positions of subjectivity, and these positions are virtual not actual" (p. 134). He discusses problems of gender in the psychoanalytically oriented film theory and writings of Mulvey, Doane, Lacan, Silverman, Lyotard, Williams, Bellour, and others, and offers Freud's analysis of phantasy in "A Child is being Beaten" to support a theory of the "utopian function of phantasy" (p. 69). In the oddly heroic tone and elaborate jargon of contemporary theory he states, "Here the Oedipus complex will be understood as the Maginot line of patriarchal culture and the discursive structure of phantasy as a site of resistance and revolt" (p. 69). Rodowick contributes to gender studies by offering a broader role for the film viewer in film theory than many psychoanalytically oriented and feminist critics have allowed. It seems to me, however, that the search for a "primal" model for film viewing is an unnecessarily grandiose project and fails to make clear enough distinctions between the conditions, participants, and nature of the two experiences. Even acknowledging the repetitive force of phantasies through the lifetime of a person, which 141 0360-0025/93/0700~)141507.00/0
© 1993 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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Rodowick likens to movie genre viewing, there still seems to be a qualitative difference between the "child being beaten" phantasy and my viewing of The Crying Game last week. Although the author understands a difference between identification and identity, between "phantasy" and "fantasy" on one level, his theory insists on a primal model, as if the legitimacy of film theory depends upon a respectable scientific analogy. I can recommend Noel Carroll's Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), which provides a philosophically sophisticated and humorous rejoinder to this obsession of contemporary film theorists. The role of the movie viewer seems much more clear-cut than the ambivalent shifts in phantasy representations, which are subjective projections of the one who experiences, "acts," and "directs" the phantasy sequences. The viewer's subjectivity may float and attach to characters in the world of the film, and he or she may "edit" a fantasy from the film's readymade materials. The pleasure of film viewing is the opposite of phantasy and dream experiences in the relative freedom and awareness of the viewer and the availability of imagery outside the usual subjective inventory, although our "scripts" may follow a usual, predetermined pattern. More attention needs to be paid to the director and screenwriter's creation of the film, which is truly their imaginary material. These theories do not distinguish sufficiently between the infant and the adult, the primal and the subsequent. At least Rodowick acknowledges the complexity of the process of the meeting of means and meaning in cultural readings, citing the work of Barthes in S/Z as a precursor, and struggles with the enormous force and popularity cinema has in our culture. The melodrama and density of the jargon ("reading as a sanctioned epistemophilia"--p. 135) are off-putting for the general reader and speakers of ordinary language.
Lindley P. Hanlon Brooklyn College Revolutions in Knowledge: Feminism in the Social Sciences. Edited by Sue Rosenberg Z a l k and Janice Gordon-Kelter. B o u l d e r / S a n Francisco/Oxford: Westview Press, 1992, 170 pp. $48.50.
This book is advertised as a "progress report" on feminist research in the academic disciplines, and all the essays in this volume except one, on education, were part of a lecture series sponsored by the Center for
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the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate School of the City University of New York in 1987 and 1988. The editors, Sue Rosenberg Zalk and Janice Gordon-Kelter, have performed a real service for graduate students and scholars in the field by collecting these historic essays in one slim volume. Overall, they summarize some of the inherent biases that are being overcome and the new perspectives that are emerging in what has become a virtual revolution in the social sciences and humanities. Hopefully, some enterprising academic will be inspired by this book to begin an annual review series of status reports on the academic disciplines similar to The American Woman: A Status Report published each year by W. W. Norton (New York). In the brief review that follows, I can only give highlights of the editorial efforts of Zalk and Gordon-Kelter, who obviously worked hard to keep the size of their book manageable, which meant that each individual author had to compress over 20 years of scholarship into a brief essay covering one of eight different disciplines: anthropology, economics, education, history, philosophy, politics, psychology, and sociology. The editors set the tone for this book in their introductory comments: "We know of no movement in the social sciences that can boast as rich, rapid, and revisionary body of scholarship as can women's/feminist studies. And we know of none more challenging to the practice of social science or more suggestive of transformations in knowledge" (p. 11). Virginia Held begins the individual disciplinary reviews in the book with the field of philosophy. She asks why philosophy, supposedly the most rational and impartial of inquiries, has been so oblivious for so long to the realities of gender domination. In her essay she notes that a number of feminist philosophers are now trying to explore what an ethic of care might look like if it were worked out as a moral theory and she uses Carol Gilligan's work as a central theme in her review. Mary Brown Parlee also seems to have been inspired by Carol Gilligan's early work because she devotes much of her essay to an analysis of how Gilligan has challenged mainstream psychology and how other scholars have responded to this work. Parlee argues that there is a missing feminist revolution in psychology and in her view, women as subject matter and as professionals have been "grafted onto" psychology but the field has not been transformed the way early feminist scholars anticipated when they began their revolution in the late 1960s. In a brief introductory essay to the sociology chapter, Susan Farrell analyzes the field as an objective science and discusses the search for a feminist methodology. Sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes follows with a case study of the African American experience. She tells us she is purposely using the hyphenated term "race-ethnicity" in the title of her essay as an important reminder of the ethnic dimensions of the black experience and
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to counter those who discount the cultural traditions of black people as a sole product of racial oppression. Ryna Rapp focuses on the ways that feminist anthropologists have developed new techniques or "toolkits" to discover hidden dimensions of women's lives. One of the examples she uses is the work of Ximena Bunster, who studied marketing women in Lima, Peru. Experts warned Bunster that she could never use traditional survey instruments with these women because they were recent migrants, usually semi- or nonliterate, inarticulate, preoccupied with the chores of daily survival. Bunster was able to empower these "inarticulate" women with picture books that depicted their daily lives and, as a result, they told her marvelously detailed stories about home, love, pregnancy, children, work, politics, and many other salient topics hidden from the view of other researchers. Political scientist Joan C. T r o n t o points out that the literature on women and politics is now so extensive that it constitutes a separate subfield in the field of political science. The journal Women and Politics was founded in 1980 and since the mid-1980s there has been a separate section in the American Political Science Association for Organized Research on W o m e n in Politics. Rutgers University offers a Ph.D. in women in politics and there are burgeoning numbers of courses on women in politics and in political thought. As Zalk and Gordon-Kelter warn in their introduction, Rebecca M. Blank is the minority voice in this book as she presents her pessimistic findings on the field of economics. The Committee on the Status of W o m e n in the Economics Association has collected figures on women in economics for almost 20 years and as of 1989 only 3% of the full professors in economics were women. As she sees it, women are becoming increasingly more likely to leave academic jobs after completing the doctorate and the women who remain feel very little conflict about their lack of a feminist consciousness. Not surprisingly, this chapter on economics has the shortest list of references of any in the book. Historian Dorothy O. Helly focuses much of her essay on the 20 years of the recent renaissance in women's history marked by the first Berkshire Conference on the History of W o m e n in 1973. As she points out, many feminist historians no longer claim that their goal in doing history is "objectivity"; instead, most try to reveal the multiple layers of perspectives that affect their interpretation of historical events and social change. The last essay in the book is one by Jane Roland Martin on education entitled "The Contradiction and the Challenge of the Educated Woman." One theme in her chapter concerns John Stuart Mill's two-part program for educating women: giving women access to men's education, and changing society's practices and attitudes so that women who read and write, do
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history, philosophy, and mathematics will not be viewed as contradictions. A second theme concerns the work of Virginia Woolf, who cast w o m e n as agents of change in a culture attached to war.
Mary Roth Walsh University of Massachusetts, Lowell
