Sharon Lin Tay,
Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-21776-8
US$80.00 (hb)
208pp
(Review copy supplied by Palgrave Macmillan)

Contemporary feminist media scholarship is indebted to the significant intellectual contributions of 1970s and 80s feminist theorists. Indeed, decades-long scholarly discussions surrounding conceptual frameworks such as “the gaze” and “women’s films” have had so great an impact that they can, at times, seem inescapable. Yet in recent years, both film and media conferences and feminist journals have been a space for scholars to come together and ask whether these frameworks continue to be the most relevant for contemporary feminist film scholarship and practice. With Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices, Sharon Lin Tay makes a compelling contribution to this conversation. Tay’s critical intervention can be found in her efforts to situate a feminist ethics at the center of feminist media studies. The book is fuelled by her desire to see feminist film scholarship remain both relevant and innovative for our contemporary media environment, a desire that is made evident as Tay rethinks women’s cinema as contemporary political practice, and positions feminism as more than capable of addressing the “new challenges thrown up by our increasingly complex and globalized world” (p. 4).

The scope of Tay’s project is undeniably ambitious. The notably disparate filmmakers and practices examined in Women on the Edge range from Ursula Biemann to Sofia Coppola, and from transnational filmmaking practice to community-based digital media projects. By explicitly (re)framing the works of twelve women filmmakers as political practice, Tay unifies her diverse selection of filmmakers under a theory of a “sustainable feminist ethics” – one that is “politically aware, contingently grounded, and politically infused,” and that when taken up in feminist film scholarship “does not merely respond to a phallogocentric given, but charts new grounds for women’s filmmaking as political practices” (p. 21). Throughout the book, Tay maintains that ethics is (and should be) at the very core of feminist methodology – both for feminist scholars and filmmakers. In each chapter, Tay provides background information on the filmmaker(s) in question, analyzes a range of her films, delineates the ways in which her oeuvre as a whole can be (re)envisioned as a political practice characterized by feminist ethics, and makes relevant though necessarily sparing connections between filmmakers’ strategies discussed in other chapters. In reading each filmmaker’s body of work through the lens of feminist ethics, Tay advocates a number of alternative frameworks for feminist film scholarship, particularly with regard to transnational, transcultural, interdependent, and digital media practice. By bringing together the filmmakers’ diverse strategies and a number of scholarly frameworks, Tay seeks to situate their films in new contexts that she says would “allow for their reception and perpetuation…as works that enable and sustain a feminist imperative in the contemporary globalized film and media culture” (p. 171).

It is significant that Tay’s deft critical analysis departs from concerns that have long preoccupied feminist film theorists, including both the problematics of psychoanalytic theory (namely female sexual difference), and the conflation of feminist politics with attention to the feminine and domestic. Tay argues that by segregating female difference, psychoanalytic theory has limited the impact that feminist politics can have to only those spaces and concerns that are considered “female” or “feminine.” Likewise, she critiques the way in which film scholars have adopted and misinterpreted the familiar feminist adage “the personal is political,” arguing that a fixation on the “themes such as domesticity, feminine stories, issues, and concerns” has left feminist film theory “ill-equipped to respond to the range of issues that fall outside the personal” (p. 133). Tay convincingly posits that these tendencies have in turn limited the possible understandings for what might constitute feminist filmmaking practice, and ultimately restricted the influence that a feminist filmmaker or scholar’s position can have in the public sphere.

Women on the Edge will likely prove useful to scholars not only for its theoretical intervention, but also for its potential as a pedagogical tool; the corpus of filmmakers and texts discussed would be helpful to anyone crafting a course on feminist film theory/practice, particularly one that integrates discussions of globalization and digital media convergence. But the usefulness of Tay’s project is perhaps most apparent in the applicability of its central focus on feminist ethics. Through the lens of feminist ethics, Tay is able to coherently bridge a discussion of film practices across historical periods, genres, industrial contexts, and technologies. However, the versatility of that lens does not come without its own set of complications. For example, while “feminism” itself does not have a singular meaning, some of the filmmakers discussed do seem to sit more comfortably within her framework than others; Tay is fairly reflexive, though “unapologetic,” about the hesitancy some readers may have in embracing her rereading Sofia Coppola’s films for their feminist ethics (p. 129). The mission of Women on the Edge also relies on a contested though still pervasive notion of stable authorship, which Tay acknowledges in the book’s conclusion. Thus, scholars driven to theorize film collaborators rather than auteurs may find difficulty in linking the ethics of a media text with those of the director alone – though Tay does address this concern to some extent in her final discussion of interdependent and community-based media production. Yet any issues taken with the book’s form or the fit of Tay’s framework for particular strategies can only further her productive discussion of what might constitute feminist ethical practice in filmmaking and scholarship.

Ultimately, Tay’s project makes a meaningful critical contribution to the field of film and media studies: by pushing feminist film theory out of its comfort zones, Tay is better able to articulate the continued relevance and importance of feminist media scholarship. The intellectual moves made in Women on the Edge have the potential to further invigorate discussions of how feminist film and media-making and scholarship can be reimagined for the complexities of our contemporary mediascape.

Ryan Noelle Bowles,
University of California, USA.

Created on: Thursday, 4 November 2010