What is it about?
Feminist documentaries consistenly put gendered violence on the national agenda. In the transnational films I take up here, I ask questions about the nature of translation. The filmmakers have to balance many voices in their quest to tell the stories of women and families who have been affected by gendered violence: their own, the families, and the survivors. How do these voices come together to get us to feel something, do something, think something new about these problems? What are our ethical commitments to the women represented? To each other? These are some of the question I try to answer in this essay.
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Why is it important?
Who can speak for whom has been a consistent question in both documentary and feminist studies. Here I examine two films -- The Price of Sex and Señorita Extraviada -- that offer important solutions to that question. I compare them to Performing the Border, which I find less convincing about its ethical commitments. These films help me revisits key debates in feminist and documentary studies about form, ethics, and the political nature of filmmaking.
Perspectives
In this essay I was trying to work on the problem of identification in feminist documentary. How do we identify and relate to the extreme experiences of brutality faced by these women? How does the filmmaker handle these delicate stories of abuse? In feminist film theory identification has often been discredited because of the way it makes us passive rather than active viewers. But I think documentaries force us to think differently about identification. I think identification (as a form of love and being with) is crucial to the political and ethical projects in these films, and perhaps in documentary more broadly.
Dr Shilyh Warren
University of Texas at Dallas
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This page is a summary of: The Mysteries of Voice: Love and Transnational Identification inPerforming the Border, The Price of Sex, andSeñorita extraviada, Camera Obscura Feminism Culture and Media Studies, January 2016, Duke University Press,
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-3592488.
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