Portrayals of Female Professionalism in Wanda and Girlfriends (an excerpt)
Second-wave feminism is typically described as the reemergence of awareness for inequality based on gender in political, social, and economic spheres. Although there is debate as to whether there are concrete dates to when this movement began and ended, scholars generally perceive it to have originated in the late 1960s, and ended towards the late 1970s and early 1980s (Dottolo). During this time, one of the most prominent goals of the women’s movement was economic equality for women, for women to work alongside men. Further, the women’s movement also emphasized the presence, or lack thereof, of women in elements of culture; thus, it would appear that New Women’s Cinema and the second wave feminist movement are inherently intertwined. This paper will analyze representations of female professionalism in Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) and Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978) through looking at both the progression of second-wave feminism, and the birth of feminist film theory. In Loden’s film, opportunities for employment seem especially bleak for Wanda after she divorces from her husband and leaves the role of the domestic mother/wife behind. In Girlfriends, Weill starkly contrasts the lives of Susan and Anne, as Anne initially fulfills a more domestic, family-centered role, while Susan continues struggling to pursue photography. Later, Weill reveals that Anne is, in fact, jealous of Susan’s independence and ability to pursue the work she loves. In contrasting these two films, one can find that the portrayals of female professionalism at the beginning and end of the 1970s parallel the work second-wave feminism had done to reconstruct work opportunities for women.
In order to consider cinematic portrayals of women and work, it is necessary to first address the feminist ideology of the 1970s. As described by Bell Hooks, feminist scholar and cultural critic, there were two types of contrasting feminist ideology in the United States in the 1970s: reformist and revolutionary. On the one hand, revolutionary feminism strove not for equal rights of men and women, but strove to abolish larger patriarchal structures as a whole. Despite the efforts of revolutionary feminists, the patriarchal mass media had no interest in this vision. Instead, Hooks explains how the media latched on to a different vision of women’s liberation, which represented women as wanting what men had. Further, “Changes in our nation’s economy, economic depression, the loss of jobs, etc., made the climate ripe for our nation’s citizens to accept the notion of gender equality in the workforce” (Hooks 4). These factors all contributed to the rise of reformist feminism, which focused on achieving economic equality between men and women, which resulted in an emphasis of the rights of predominantly white, upper-class women. As Hooks explains, “We can never forget that white women began to assert their need for freedom after civil rights, just at the point when racial discrimination was ending and black people, especially black males, might have attained equality in the workforce with white men” (Hooks 4). The prevalence of racism in the United States, coupled with the patriarchal mass media created an environment that readily accepted the reformist view of women’s liberation.
The Effect of Lockean Principles in Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (an excerpt)
Michel Gondry’s 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind follows Joel and Clementine, two lovers who face such tumultuous events in their relationships that they are each provoked to undergo a procedure that will permanently remove their partner from their memories, or so they believe. Nevertheless, as the film progresses, it becomes clear to the audience that Joel and Clementine are still very much drawn to one another despite their respective memory erasures; Gondry thus makes bold implications about the notions of love, attraction, and the inner workings of the mind and memory. Although the premise of Eternal Sunshine seems to depend upon Descartes’ concept of mind/body dualism—the idea that we can separate parts of our mind from the rest of our lives and bodily experiences—the film works to undermine the effectiveness of this process and seems to insinuate that we cannot separate ourselves from our experiences and thus, our relationships. In this way, the film casts doubt on Cartesian principles and instead evokes ideas from Locke and phenomenology. This paper will examine Clementine and Joel’s relationship in conjunction with repeated use of bodily imagery and settings that include high sensory inputs to explore the implications that the mind reflects based on experience and sensation.
About this content:
These essays were written for the University of Richmond film department in 2019. Research was conducted under Dr. Abigail Cheever.
Katherine Murbach 