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The Maternal Imagination of Film and Film Theory

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The Maternal Imagination of Film and Film Theory

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Abstract

The historic idea that the pregnant woman’s imagination could manipulate foetal appearance intersects with the European and American witch-hunts and the invention of proto-cinematic technologies. This history forms a suggestive, cinematic analogy for presuppositions about the patriarchal power of cinema and media. While there have been numerous criticisms of the male gaze, most notably that the idea of its unconsciousness naturalises patriarchy, heterosexuality and sexual difference (Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London/New York: Routledge, 2013; Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York: NYU Press, 2000; Evans and Gamman, The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer Viewing. In A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, ed. Paul Burston and Colin Richardson, 13–56. London/New York: Routledge, 1995), and reduces racial difference to a secondary category (Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007; Hooks, The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators. In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones, 94–105. London/New York: Routledge, 2003), the notion of the reality of the patriarchal unconscious has not been subject to a critique that alternatively locates the origins of this reality in the history of the maternal imagination and the witch.

This introduction calls into question the ubiquity of visual culture and its pedagogical impact (Jay, Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn. Journal of Visual Culture 1 (3): 267–278. https://doi.org/10.1177/147041290200100301, 2002), defined here by both the linguistic turn in philosophy (Fraser 1995) as well as the feminist mantra that the “personal is political” (Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity, 2007). It will argue for the value of knowingly imperfect and disorderly figurative analogies for film theory.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also the dialogue between Butler and Adam Phillips in response to this article, which begins with Phillips’ “Keeping it moving: commentary on Judith Butler’s refused identification”.

  2. 2.

    Lennon considers the worth of Castoriadis’ revision of Kant’s thesis, which also worked as a critique of Lacan’s egoistic model. For Castoriadis, the imagination is bound to acts of invention as well as processes of realisation, ensuring it can be approached as something not axiomatically structured by an external reality to which one is passively subject. The imagination is, in this view, a category that can be seen as something that is not in opposition to “reality”; rather, the imagination is the condition upon which reality is generated. Castoriadis’ point was not addressed to film theory but to the limitations of the Marxist world view in the wake of the horrors of Stalinism. His immanent model of the imagination is perhaps another relevant approach here as it aimed to show that the imagination was not inherently structured by power or other ideological forces.

  3. 3.

    See also Patrick Ffrench (2017).

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    Lauren Bliss

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Bliss, L. (2020). The Maternal Imagination of Film and Film Theory. In: The Maternal Imagination of Film and Film Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45897-3_1

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