Documenting Gendered Violence: Representations, Collaborations, and Movements 9781628929997, 9781501304521, 9781628921038

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Documenting Gendered Violence

Documenting Gendered Violence Representations, Collaborations, and Movements Edited by Lisa M. Cuklanz and Heather McIntosh

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Lisa M. Cuklanz, Heather McIntosh, and Contributors, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Documenting gendered violence : representations, collaborations, and movements / edited by Lisa M. Cuklanz, Heather McIntosh. – 1st Edition. pages cm ISBN 978-1-62892-999-7 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-62892-300-1 (ePub) – ISBN 978-1-62892-103-8 (ePDF) 1. Women’s studies. 2. Women–Violence against. 3. Violence in mass media. 4. Women in mass media. I. Cuklanz, Lisa M., editor. II. McIntosh, Heather, editor. HQ1180.D63 2015 305.4 – dc23 2014037655 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2999-7 PB: 978-1-5013-1999-0 ePub: 978-1-6289-2300-1 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2103-8 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain

To Fulvia

Contents

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: The Intersections of Documentary and Gendered Violence Heather McIntosh 2 Creating a Sense of Reality in Sex Crimes Unit Lisa Cuklanz 3 Calling the Consumer Activist, Consuming the Trafficking Subject: Call + Response and the Terms of Legibility Annie Isabel Fukushima and Julietta Hua 4 “The Nation Wants to Know!”: Documenting Sexual Violence on Indian Prime-Time Television News Swati Bandi 5 When Solidarity Melts into Air: Philippines-Born Women Migrants in Australia Shirlita Africa Espinosa 6 Global Sex Work, Victim Identities, and Cybersexualities Wendy S. Hesford 7 “This Is about Way More than Bullies”: User-Generated Video, Narrative Multiplicity, and LGBTQ Youth Identity Lauren S. Berliner 8 A tráves de mis ojos: Fototestimonios with Children Growing Up in Immigrant and Migrant Communities in Northern California Natalia Deeb-Sossa 9 Staging Gender Violence in the Congo: Reading Lynn Nottage’s Ruined as a Documentary Drama Phyllisa Smith Deroze 10 Making The Invisible War Visible Laura Vazquez

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11 The Committed Documentary and Contemporary Distribution: A Look at Sin by Silence Heather McIntosh 12 Anatomy of Filmmaking Practice: Documentary and Gendered Violence Ruth Goldman Select Filmography and Distributors List Index

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Acknowledgments Collaborations such as these always involve the contributions of many more than those named on the book cover. We offer our heartfelt appreciation to the many colleagues, friends, and family members who assisted us in the process, supported our work with their energy and insight, and gave feedback on the many drafts along the way. First of all, we would like to thank our contributors for their hard work in researching their chapters and keeping up with our many instructions and deadlines. We were consistently impressed with their willingness to work within our time frame and respond to our suggestions and queries with energy and substance. We also would like to thank several scholars, including Alexandra Juhasz, Mary L. Gray, Laura Vazquez, and Michael Keith, for their help in the recruiting process. Without their kind efforts, we would not have been able to represent such a range and quality of works in this collection. This project was in many ways made possible through the generous support of Boston College, where we were both faculty members during most of the phases of development and production of this volume. Grants for Undergraduate Research Fellows at Boston College allowed us to benefit from the insightful and productive efforts of Emily Mervosh and Christine S. Suchy, who assisted in background research and in developing the filmography. The initial stages of the project were also supported by a Research Expense Grant from Boston College. We would both like to thank Sanchali Biswas for her encouragement and support throughout the project. This work could not have been completed without the professional judgment and careful attention to detail of Katie Gallof, Mary Al-Sayed, and Laura Murray at Bloomsbury Publishers. They seemed to have an answer to every question, no matter how intricate or obscure, and we are most appreciative of their guidance throughout the process. Sincere appreciation is due to members of our immediate and extended families for their patience and kindness during the long process that brought this volume to fruition.

Notes on Contributors Swati Bandi is an independent film scholar with a Ph.D. in Transnational Studies from the University at Buffalo, USA. She also taught as an Instructor of Film and Media Studies at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, USA, from 2010 to 2014. Her research examines the impact of neoliberal practices on rights-based cultural representations. She has published essays in FeministWire and other magazines and newspapers. In addition, Swati is a documentary filmmaker whose films have been screened in India and the United States. Lauren S. Berliner is media activist, filmmaker, and Assistant Professor of Media and Communication and Cultural Studies at University of Washington Bothell, USA. She is currently developing a book project based on her work with queer youth that examines discourses of digital media empowerment in relation to the institutional structures and intersubjective dynamics that are shaping contemporary youth media production. Her documentary and experimental films have been screened internationally, and she is also co-curator of the Festival of (In)Appropriation, a festival of experimental found footage films. Lisa M. Cuklanz is Professor and Chair of the Communication Department and former Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Boston College, USA. She is author or editor of three books on gendered violence and media, and has published scholarly articles on the subject in journals including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, Journal of Gender Studies, and Communication Quarterly. Natalia Deeb-Sossa is Associate Professor in the Chicana/o Studies Department at University of California, Davis, USA, and has conducted research in medical sociology, social psychology, symbolic interaction, race, class and gender, and methodology. Her work makes contributions to substantive issues in inequality. In Doing Good, through participant observation and in-depth interviews, Deeb-Sossa analyzed how workers at a private, not-for-profit health care center reproduce—or resist reproducing—inequalities of race, class, and gender in their interactions with each other and in their daily work with the poor, especially Latinas/os. Her current research focuses on women’s reproductive rights. Phyllisa Deroze is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Drama at the United Arab Emirates University, UAE. Her research investigates black women’s communities of healing as sites of empowerment from literary and theoretical

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perspectives. By applying black feminist and womanist aesthetics to American drama, Deroze has published works that highlight the depiction of women’s healing process on the stage. Her approach to the intersection of race, sex, and health is noteworthy beyond closing gaps as she provides a way to frame black women’s healing in literature and popular culture as an always already counterhegemonic, if not outright revolutionary, gesture. She is currently working on a book project on chronic illness and she maintains a blog DiagnosedNOTdefeated.com Shirlita Africa Espinosa currently holds a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellowship at the Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg, under the Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg, working on the topic of diaspora philanthropy and development as promoted in the European Union. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, Australia, and was supported by the Ford International Fellowship, USA, from 2009 to 2011. She was born and raised in the Philippines. Annie Isabel Fukushima is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Associate with the Institute for Research on Women and Women’s and the Gender Studies Department at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA. Fukushima has published a variety of articles and encyclopedia entries on immigration, human trafficking, militarism, and intimacy. Her current research examines homosocial forms of violence through a relational examination of Asian and Latina/o immigrants in the Americas. Ruth Goldman works professionally and on a volunteer basis as a filmmaker, film programmer, community activist, and educator and combines all four whenever possible. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at SUNYBuffalo State, USA. Ruth’s scholarly and artistic interests include humanitarian storytelling, identity, media literacy, documentary film, and community media. Passionate about promoting the multitude of women working in non-fiction film, Godlman’s next big undertaking will be a multimedia project on North American women documentary filmmakers. Wendy S. Hesford is Professor of English at the Ohio State University, USA. Her areas of research and teaching interest include modern and contemporary rhetorical theory, human rights studies, visual culture, and transnational feminist studies. She is the author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Duke University Press, 2011). Her current research project “Children’s Human Rights and States of Exception” examines international and national news and advocacy media representations of children’s human rights. Julietta Hua is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University, USA. She teaches courses on immigration, citizenship, human rights,

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and law. She is the author of Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (2011) and has recently published articles on care work, and the politics of precarity. Heather McIntosh is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore, USA. Her research focuses on documentary, gender, and media distribution. She also writes as a blogger for PBS’s P.O.V. series. Laura Vazquez is currently Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University, USA, where she teaches media theory and production courses. Vazquez has produced several award-winning documentaries including On the Edge (2010). In 2012, Vazquez was a co-recipient of a $200,000 grant from the Wyncote Foundation to oversee the student productions that would address the issue of sexual assault on college campuses.

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Introduction: The Intersections of Documentary and Gendered Violence Heather McIntosh

Gender-based violence often occurs out of the public eye, reinforcing perpetrators’ actions with tacit impunity. Yet its representation in documentary forms presents a potential means of bringing hidden or private issues to a broad-based audience. Though documentaries frequently generate less revenue than more commercial fare, they have often had a great deal of influence on people, politics, and policy. The recent proliferation of documentaries about gender-based violence has the potential to transform public consciousness on a range of issues that present challenging subject matter for filmmakers, subjects, and audiences. Once appearing primarily in smaller art and educational venues, these documentaries are starting to show at mainstream film festivals and theaters, and on mainstream television. Due, in part, to the development of thoughtful and innovative techniques of representation, these documentaries provide growing visibility for issues and points of view that have often been discursively silenced. Documenting Gendered Violence: Representations, Collaborations, and Movements stands at this turning point in the representation, production, and advocacy of documentaries on gender-based violence. Through the set of chapters assembled here, we hope to advance the discussion of challenges and innovations in both production and representation of this complex and emotionally charged area. Gender-based violence involves the subjugation of a person or group because of their gender. While males do become targets of gender-based violence, females make up the overwhelming majority of its victims. With its “Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women,” the United Nations defines “violence against women” as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.”1 The experience of gender-based violence affects not only its survivors, but also their children, families, and communities. Gender-based violence includes a wide range of harmful acts such as rape, domestic violence, human trafficking, forced marriage, femicide, female genital mutilation, and sexual and other forms of harassment. Perpetrators are individuals, such as spouses; communities, often through patriarchal traditions; and even nations or states, such as through rape

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during wartime. Gender-based violence presents challenges in the production and representation of documentaries. The production of these works requires careful attention to the style and practices used in order to represent these sometimes unrepresentable truths and to avoid re-victimizing or re-traumatizing the survivors involved in the original violence or subsequent production. The awareness-raising efforts connected with these documentaries require balancing issues of representation against engaging audience interests. Documenting Gendered Violence: Representations, Collaborations, and Movements interrogates the intersections and boundaries of documentary and genderbased violence. While many studies focus on a specific type of violence within a specific medium, the chapters in this volume offer a range of perspectives on these intersections. Whereas several authors address film and video, others address printed autobiography, theatrical performance, photography, and digital video. Some authors analyze documentary as texts, while others engage aspects of documentary production and raise questions about distribution in a multimedia, multi-channel environment. In addition to the breadth of coverage for documentary as a form, these chapters interrogate a range of gender violence types, including rape, domestic violence, and human trafficking. These chapters focus not only on the survivors, but also on the witnesses, the advocates, the producers, and the systems within and outside which they operate. This examination of the range and breadth of production that can be understood within the general rubric of documentary is one central goal of this volume. We also incorporate a number of critical approaches. Several chapters engage in grounded textual analyses, while others base their analyses in interviews and other methodologies. Most importantly, these various analyses together provide insights into ways in which myriad representational styles can provide subtle and complex revelations about the operations of gender-based violence. Some common themes that emerge from these varied analyses include institutional limitations and controls, intersectionalities of gender and other identity categories, the relations of power among those involved, and the strength and resilience shown by many survivors in rebuilding their lives beyond trauma. Although gender-based violence presents many challenges for ethical and meaningful treatment in documentary, this volume elucidates innovative means of challenging stereotypes, privileging the points of view of survivors, and resisting elements and modes that can be experienced as revictimizing. It also highlights some of the ways in which documentary efforts can fall short of these ambitious goals. This introduction will outline some of the key ideas central to discussions of gender violence in documentary film and video. Many themes raised within these media recur across the other forms. The chapters addressing written autobiography, photography, documentary theater, and digital video offer more in-depth and medium-specific literature reviews. This introduction also analyzes key ideas about documentary as a cultural form and explores the motivations and developments of both the committed documentary and feminist documentary. It addresses questions

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of form and representation through divergent styles, and the roles that these styles play in ideological interrogation with the eye toward valuing both the realist and the experimental. Questions of power dynamics inherent in the filmmaker–participant relationship are outlined, and the insights of trauma theory offer ways to consider the unrepresentability of many instances of gender-based violence. The later sections address questions of audience, examining how documentaries position audience members within the processes of political engagement and the construction of witnesses. A brief overview of the key players and challenges in contemporary documentary production is provided.

Defining documentary The definition of documentary is contested among makers, participants, audiences, and institutions. This definition of documentary is usually based on the ideas of reality and its construction, and incorporates debates about what constitutes reality and how it can be represented. While fictional works draw on elements of the fantastic and art draws on the elements of the expressive, documentary is based in the everyday worlds that humans create and occupy. However, creating this connection between documentary and reality tethers and collapses two complex ideas that frequently defy concise definition. As Spence and Novarro write, “it has always been easier to recognize a documentary than to define the term.”2 Since attempts to represent reality require judgments about what to include and exclude, as well as decisions about elements such as emphasis, approach, and point of view, the lines among documentary, fiction, and art become blurred. Understandings of documentary forms often start with a document or a record. The earliest attempts to capture motion on film offer records of movement, of such images as horses running or people walking.3 In the 1890s the works created by the Lumière camera operators and Thomas Edison capturing people leaving work or sneezing are illustrious examples.4 Documentaries consist of multiple components, including documents themselves. Other conventions in documentary film and video include observational footage, or footage captured in the moment; participant interviews, or staged conversations; voiceover narration, or the disembodied voice describing events and details; re-enactments, or stagings of events otherwise unavailable to the camera; and archival materials, or materials from other sources such as television news and family photographs. These conventions facilitate the construction of a documentary’s argument, or “truth claim,” which refers to the claim of truth that the documentary makes about reality. The truth claim remains problematic and highly debated among scholars, practitioners, and audiences, who have expressed a range of opinions about its rigidity, validity, and usefulness. The rigidity of the truth claim often appears as a point of critique of documentary texts within the popular press reactions to them. If the documentary fails to uphold the viewers’ ideas of what that reality is—even

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if some viewers know nothing of the reality shown—then the documentary’s claims to truth are oftentimes viewed as false. Stella Bruzzi describes this rigidity further: “Repeatedly invoked by documentary theory is the idealized notion, on the one hand, of the pure documentary in which the relationship between the image and the real is straightforward and, on the other, the very impossibility of this aspiration.”5 Documentary in practice rests between these two extremes. Bruzzi’s comments pinpoint a second problem with the truth claim: the impossibility of achieving it. Defining a “straightforward” relationship between what appears in a documentary and what appears in reality results in a binary: “objective” versus “biased.” If the relationship appears (note the slippery word) straightforward, then the documentary is perceived as objective. If the relationship appears other than straightforward, then the documentary is perceived as biased. The objective-versus-biased-limits-discourse “argument” provides a more useful term for analyzing the relationship between documentary and the reality it constructs. Nichols asserts the inseparability of these concepts: “what films [documentaries] have to say about the enduring human condition or about the pressing issues of the day can never be separated from how they say it, how this saying moves and affects us, how we engage with a word, not with a theory of it.”6 Arguments about realities provide the sense-making about meanings within documentaries, and through these arguments, realities become accessible to audiences who exist outside them. The notion of “argument” distances documentaries from the limiting binaries and shifts them into the realm of discourses.

The committed documentary and social change While documentary appears within education and industry, it has long played a role in social issues, awareness, and activism. John Grierson, who first applied the term “documentary” to the film form, connected documentary with social issues and social institutions.7 Housing Problems (1935), for example, addresses the issues of the Victorian slums and the struggles people face in living there.8 People in the film speak about their experiences with rodent infestation, structural issues, overcrowding, and lack of amenities. Such documentaries attempt to raise awareness of social issues, but Brian Winston raises an important question about this and similar documentaries’ limits: “But if it is the case that housing problems are unaffected by fifty years of documentary effort, what justification can there be for continuing to make such films and tapes?”9 These films often show the issues, but their arguments stop short of engaging further political analysis or action.10 The “committed documentary,” a term defined by Thomas Waugh, pushes past these limitations. The committed documentary grounds its truth claims within political viewpoints and provides an analysis and critique of the underlying ideologies, structures, and systems that inform what appears as a “normal” or “natural” part of society.11 The committed documentary attempts to do more than just show, however: It motivates change, drives actions, and sustains both.12 The

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“committed documentary” dates to the 1920s with the works of Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub and in the 1930s with the works of Joris Ivens.13 Film and photo leagues grew throughout the 1930s to address such issues as labor and workers’ rights.14 A member of The Workers Film and Photo League, Nancy Naumburg worked with James Guy to create Sheriffed, which addresses the challenges of farm labor, and Taxi, which documents a New York City taxi drivers’ strike.15 Into the 1950s and 1960s, Shirley Clarke engaged in social issues with her documentary works. Her short A Scary Time (1960) juxtaposes the fun of Halloween in the United States with the horrors of starvation and other issues facing children around the world.16 A more contemporary example of the committed documentary is Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman), which investigates the situation in Juarez, Mexico, wherein hundreds of women have disappeared or have been brutally murdered. This femicide counts at least 450 murders, yet misinformation about the female victims, such as claims about their deviance, their “asking for it,” and their overall lesser value as human beings, is often believed. RosaLinda Fregroso describes how Portillo calls attention to the systems that enable these murders and to the victims, reframing their identities and correcting for misinformation.17 The growth of committed documentary production in the 1960s and 1970s parallels the growing strength of the women’s, peace, and civil rights movements. Along with these movements, three other changes influence the growth of documentary during this era. One key change involves an ideological shift in the understandings of politics. Prior to this era, many documentaries represented politics and political issues from a distance, using experts, data, and omniscient voiceovers. The shift moved to understand these issues through a person’s lived experience and to place value on that lived experience. The understanding of a larger social issue comes through the placement of an individual’s experiences within those contexts. A common phrase evoked here is “the personal is political,” a phrase attributed, though not unproblematically, to Carol Hanisch in her 1969 essay.18 The phrase permeated the women’s movements during that time,19 though it created some tensions between the Left and the emerging women’s movements.20 The second change is technological. During the 1950s and 1960s, cameras became lighter and quieter, and the new technology enabled syncing of video and audio during filming. These changes enabled shifts in style, notably toward the cinema vérité approaches that position the documentary maker as a “fly-onthe-wall” capturing events as they unfold.21 Cinema vérité representation claims an intimacy and even an objectivity unavailable through other documentary forms, and it provides a rejection of the more mainstream institutional forms that embraced omniscient narration, distances itself from expert testimony, and moves away from institutionally driven interests on various issues. Prominent practitioners of cinema vérité included Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, David and Albert Maysles, and Frederick Wiseman in the United States. Multiple female documentary makers of the time, including Barbara Kopple, Joyce Chopra,

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Madeline Anderson, and Shirley Clarke, learned from Drew and Associates or through the Maysles brothers.22 Clarke raised some questions about the philosophical underpinnings and intentions of cinema vérité that point toward the important representational shifts to come. As she engaged cinema vérité through her association with New York– based Filmmakers Inc., Clarke came to question the form’s premises, particularly the documentary authority imbued in the practices. Though documentary already carried a “cultural weight,”23 the cinema vérité approach suggested a “natural” authority, and it gained further authority through discussions on its aesthetics and content, as well as the insights the two provided in contrast to previous modes of documentary.24 Clarke opted for greater self-reflexivity in her work as a means of engaging audiences.25 According to Rabinovitz, “her assault on the cinema vérité filmmaker’s belief in the natural authority of his or her position is no less than a challenge to the patriarchal nature of the cinematic gaze.”26 Clarke’s views reflect one of the representational issues driving feminist documentary as it emerged and flourished during the 1960s and 1970s.

Challenging ideologies through form in feminist documentary Like Clarke, feminist film theorists of the 1970s offered critiques of cinema vérité and its reproduction of dominant ideologies. In their introduction to Feminism and Documentary, Janet Walker and Diane Waldman trace some of the intellectual underpinnings that emerged in 1970s feminist film theory, which, with a few notable exceptions, focused on fiction film. Even then, representational concerns informed much of the discussion. Walker and Waldman cite Claire Johnston as a pioneer.27 In her essay “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” Johnston asserts the importance of recognizing the ideological underpinnings of cinema vérité, which builds to her claim that “the idea of non-intervention is pure mystification.”28 In other words, the placement of an observing camera within a situation in order to record events that later become an objective documentary is myth, not truth. Johnston explains further, “the ‘truth’ of our oppression cannot be ‘captured’ on celluloid with the ‘innocence’ of the camera; it has to be constructed/manufactured.”29 Walker and Waldman further cite Eileen McGarry’s “Documentary, Realism and Women’s Cinema,” which they claim “is notable for being one of the few feminist works of that period to actually confront and engage with the tradition of documentary studies.”30 McGarry’s essay deepens Johnston’s criticism of cinema vérité, but she also points out how some feminist documentary makers returned to techniques dominant before the cinema vérité movement, such as voiceover, re-creations, and music.31 Despite the foundations these essays provided for feminist documentary, the turning point in feminist theorizing came in the form of a redirection back into fiction instead of a refinement in non-fiction film. In her foundational article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey calls for feminist focus

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on classical Hollywood cinema through the insights of psychoanalytic theory as a fundamental tool for analysis.32 This call changed the direction of feminist film theory in general and shifted inquiries away from “the realist” documentary more specifically.33 Walker and Waldman note several negative impacts of this move, including the development of feminist documentary film without the concurrent feminist documentary theorization to accompany it. Feminist film theory also shifted toward an emphasis on sexuality at the expense of other intersectionalities. Walker and Waldman further discuss the lack of preservation systems for early feminist documentaries and the resulting physical loss of these films. All of these issues, and their implications for production of subsequent films, tended to be overlooked.34 The debates surrounding the implementation of established documentary techniques in feminist documentary, then, suggest the importance of the dialectical interrogation of both subject and form. Reality is not neutral, nor is its representation, even though some documentaries suggest otherwise through their form and style. As noted by McGarry, some feminist documentary makers used the techniques established by previous documentary traditions, most often relying on the talking head. According to Barbara Halpern Martineau, “early women’s liberation cinema used images of women talking in close-up to validate the concept of selfexpression, a crucial concept for women used to being objectified, interpreted, eroticized and generally discounted by the mass media.”35 The talking head provided cinematic validation that visualized and affirmed the “personal is political” mantra. For example, The Woman’s Film (1971) features women talking about their experiences without interpretation from experts, as “each woman is validated as the expert of her own experience, witness to her own transformation, and evidence for women beyond the frame of a newly possible subject of feminist politics.”36 These talking heads frequently appeared within the more “realist” forms of documentary, the very forms rejected by feminist film theory as complicit with and reproductive of patriarchal realities.37 The feminist documentaries that engaged in this dialectical interrogation of documentary conventions, that engaged in critical self-reflexivity, and that pushed the boundaries of the documentary form into the realms of experimental film drew the most attention from feminist film critics. By pushing against the representational conventions of cinema vérité and older documentary modes, these films called attention to the normative constructions of realities in ways that “realist” documentaries failed to achieve. Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite (1980), for example, incorporates both home movie footage and documentary footage. The home movie footage comes from Citron’s own family films, which she manipulates through various techniques such as repetition and changes in playback speed. The documentary footage features two young women talking and as they talk, one of them shares a story of rape. Viewers assume connections between the home video footage and the women, and they assume that the young women speak truthfully about their experiences. Ultimately, though, no connection exists between the two types of footage, and the interview footage is revealed as staged. According to

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Citron, “the overall style of the film asks the question, ‘Is there a difference between narrative fiction truth and documentary truth?’ ”38 Julia Lesage argues for a valuing of both realist and reflexive approaches in her article “Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics,” wherein she analyzes a documentary that represents the realist approach and one that represents the self-reflexive approach. The film Self Health (1974), about the movement toward self-care outside the medical industry, follows the realist tradition, while Rape (1977) consists of women talking about the subject in an empowered way through decentering the filmmaker’s relationship with the participants. Visuals in Rape consist of conversation, inter-titles, and illustrations, while the soundtrack consists of the subjects’ conversations about their experiences. The inter-titles contribute an added “voice” in the conversations represented in the film. According to Lesage, both films invite political response even though their styles differ significantly. She summarizes their importance this way: Both realist and experimental documentary forms have been politicized by feminist filmmakers who see their work as coming out of and having an audience in the women’s movement. And in return, the exigencies, methods, and forms of organization within that ongoing political movement have profoundly affected the aesthetics of documentary film.39

Both the experimental and realist styles of feminist documentary persist into the twenty-first century. The realist style dominates mainstream documentary, while the experimental style exists at the margins. Fewer feminist documentary makers, whether they identify themselves as feminist or not, take risks in their style. Writing in the mid-1990s, feminist documentary scholar and maker Alexandra Juhasz observes, “it is true that more and more feminist makers now attempt to work within standard forms, have institutional sanction, or constrain their content.”40 Her observations hold true as of this writing.

Filmmaker–participant relationships The relationship between filmmaker and participant (also often called subject) is at the root of the power relationships and ethical concerns in documentary production and representation. These concerns center on the filmmaker’s potential exploitation of the subject and on the nature of a subject’s consent to appear in the film. In terms of production, the interview situation proves unique and novel for the subject, while for the production crew this scenario is routine. Therein lies an important dynamic of the power in that situation.41 For consent, criteria consist of “(1) conditions free of coercion and deception; (2) full knowledge of procedures and anticipated effects; (3) individual competence to consent.”42 In other words, the person can only meaningfully agree to appear in the documentary with the full understanding of why she appears and what happens afterward. The production

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process JoAnn Elam used in Rape illustrates a feminist intervention designed to address this power imbalance in documentary production. Instead of a setup involving the director asking questions of women in the group, the group members pass the camera among themselves, making it unclear who is the cinematographer, and closing the distance between filmmaker and subjects. Here, “the filmmaker’s relation to her subject is participatory and non-hierarchical.”43 The film refuses to allow these women to be represented as disempowered or as victims, and the unconventional form enables this refusal. Another form of the power occurs through the editing of the interview into the overall documentary. In most cases, consent means the subject has no say in how she appears in the final product, and her voice becomes only one among many. Returning to the example of Housing Problems mentioned earlier, the slum dwellers speak about their experiences in their dilapidated homes and about the wonders of their new, better housing. Their stories alone potentially represent the socioeconomic situation of those housing standards, but in this case these people became victims to the film production process.44 The filmmakers incorporated their stories alongside two other, more powerful voices: the chairman of the Housing Committee and the collective industrial interests. These voices spoke from a position of authority about the issues, and while the interview subjects gained the opportunity to speak, their voices became part of the documentary’s overall argument and worked in the interests of the funders. This situation is not unique in documentary production. Yet another dimension of power lies in the filmmaker’s privileged position in making the documentary. Differences in sex, race, class, and/or other identity categories often separate filmmaker from subject.45 This privileged position cuts across national borders as well, showing how some makers gain access and support for making documentaries while others do not. Kim Longinotto’s documentary Sisters in Law considers the issues of spousal abuse and sexual assault, and the ineffective legal system in Cameroon, through the eyes of two women who attempt to find justice for these issues. Patricia White observes, “Longinotto has successfully adapted cinema vérité filmmaking as transnational feminist practice over her career” in a way that expresses the feminist solidarity model advocated by Chandra Mohanty.46 Differences of opinion are often voiced on the question of who gains, or should gain, the opportunity to represent some specific issues. In her analysis of documentaries about female genital mutilation, White notes how multiple documentaries on the subject distributed by Women Make Movies speak from different positions, ranging from rhetorical to advocacy. Women Make Movies is a United States-based educational distributor that focuses on work by and about women’s issues. These power dynamics can reinforce the subject–object binary between filmmaker and participant. They can create a situation that has the filmmaker speaking for the subject, even if the subject speaks for herself in the documentary. Like reality and its representation, this notion of speaking for another is constructed, contested, and politicized. Further, it is raced, classed, and gendered. One of the primary critiques of the 1970s feminist movements and of feminist theory called attention to the whiteness of both, and these critiques extend to feminist

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documentary as well.47 The interests of African American documentary makers, for example, center on conveying the realities of their experiences to audiences otherwise uninformed about them.48 Aishah Shahidah Simmons created NO! The Rape Documentary (2006) to challenge the raced assumptions underpinning the stereotyping of rape victims. Simmons explains, “I wanted people to see a face when they think of a survivor of rape, the image of a black woman.”49 In her article analyzing Indian feminist documentary through Deepa Dhanraj’s Something Like a War (1991) and Reena Mohan’s Skin Deep (1998), Madhumeeta Sinha concludes, “in Deepa Dhanraj’s film, we are invited to witness women as being subjected to medical and social violence, while in Reena Mohan’s film, we are made aware of how, and why, and the extent to which women themselves participate in the violent body images that make them into subjects.”50 Feminist documentary attempts to bridge these power gaps by decentering documentary production through collaboration.51 In this situation the “subjects” become “participants” or even “co-creators.” They assume greater voices in the documentary’s production beyond their roles as interview subjects. For example, the participants might view rough cuts52 and offer their observations and suggestions. These practices emerge from ideas in ethnography and visual anthropology. As part of his fieldwork, for example, Jean Rouch would show the images to his participants as the productions progressed.53 While collaboration provides a starting point, it still warrants some critique. Documentary makers retain primary control over the production. Attaining a true collective voice through the incorporation of multiple voices about multiple experiences still results in a collapsing of complexities.54 Walker and Waldman, however, maintain that feminist documentary’s addressing of these issues allows inclusion of diverse voices and remains pragmatic about the power balances these practices can achieve.55 Even with the attempts at balancing power in collaborative production, one ideological tension must be noted here: the balance of the individual’s story against the committed documentary’s imperative toward institutional critique. Social, economic, and legal institutions influence understandings—and misunderstandings—of gender violence issues. For example, just as a documentary possesses the potential to inform about the issues of human trafficking through survivors’ stories, it also has the potential to address economic and other systems enabling the trafficking in the first place.56 In their study about New Zealand documentary television representations of gender violence, Michele and Weaver analyze how the documentaries focus on the victims and their experience while overlooking the institutional forces that remain complicit in the situation.57 Which approach the documentary takes within this balance provides some indication of the ideological underpinnings informing the representations.

Trauma theory and representations of gender violence The insights of trauma theory offer meaningful ways to address the representations of gender violence and documentary. Trauma “is understood as an experience of

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violence that immerses the victim in the scene so profoundly that it precludes the kind of specular distance necessary for cognitive knowledge of what has happened.”58 The trauma occurs in response to violence that is too overwhelming or too deep for victims to completely process or even know what they have experienced. As with violence, traumas occur in numerous circumstances, both public and private, from war to rape. Trauma theory is applied extensively throughout the social science research on gender-based violence.59 A centrally agreed-upon concept is the “originary moment,” or an experience with violence that overwhelms people in ways beyond their usual means of coping.60 This moment lodges deep in the mind, and there it remains inaccessible. Traumatic memories manifest as pieces of an incomplete mosaic, fragmented and incoherent. Trauma theory follows two lines in understanding how people access these memories and try to make sense of them. First is mimetic theory, wherein the person who experienced the trauma imitates, recreates, or repeats aspects of the originary moment. This repetition prevents cognitive recognition, and it limits belief in the veracity of people’s experiences.61 Second is antimimetic theory, wherein the person who experienced the trauma distances her understanding of what happened from herself.62 While mimetic theory suggests an arrest in the person’s recovery in that the mimesis becomes a trapped cycle, antimimetic theory suggests the person’s potential to recover from the trauma.63 Within questions of culture and representation, trauma theory addresses the dialectical relationship between memory and the writing of history. Memory offers the only way to access traumas buried within the psyche, although it is nonetheless a problematic way of doing so. Unlike a camera and other electronic devices, memory makes no record of events.64 At best, memories remain incomplete and discontinuous. Emotions color various memories as well, adding another layer to their interpretation.65 History writing attempts to make sense of disparate happenings, rendering them into a linear and causal order based on various types of evidence. Trauma-related memories force a rethinking of that process in that the memories recovered and repeated offer no complete picture and can even contradict external facts in the situation. Further, for those who have experienced trauma, a “common response to real trauma is fantasy.”66 Those recalling traumatic memories will create their own versions of events that fail to align with the commonly held understandings of those happenings. On the surface, that separation of traumatic memory and factual history suggests an invalidation of the person’s experiences as suitable evidence. What that separation allows, though, is room for emotion to become a different means of sense making. The connections between trauma and documentary might seem counterintuitive, then, in that documentary focuses on the representation of reality, while the foundations of trauma lie in the unrepresentability of events in either the highly problematic nature of the visuals, of the unavailability of those visuals, or the accessibility of these events through the lenses of emotion and fantasy. Overall, they become a way of understanding, but they require understanding on new terms and in new ways. This new way of understanding offers forms of validation for those who experience trauma. One form of validation occurs through giving voice to those

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who previously have been oppressed or repressed. This validation aligns with feminist documentary inquiries into women and women’s experiences through letting women tell their own stories. Another form of validation occurs through the shift away from the circumstances of oppression, focusing on memories instead.67 This shift offers the potential for challenging the myths and stereotypes associated with different types of gender violence. This processing of memories offers the potential to work through the attendant issues in order to move on.68 This replaying of events offers a chance for not only individual, but also cultural catharsis.69 Casting survivors as witnesses who deliver testimony about traumas can facilitate challenges to stereotypes. In documentaries witnesses and witnessing assume greater rhetorical and advocacy functions. According to Hesford, “within the context of human rights documentaries, victims’ testimonies bear witness to incommensurable events, and also function rhetorically as empathetic markers in an effort to create the viewer as witness.”70 Leshu Torchin argues that a witness is both a role and, more usefully, “a process, an encounter that implicates speaker and listener alike. The transformative and ethical possibilities of testimony reach well beyond the therapeutic to multiple social and political venues.”71 The witness and her story become not just representative of traumatic events, but also agents of them and the changes they might bring.72 In becoming a witness, a person becomes a potential catalyst for changes not only for herself but also for others—an important form of empowerment for survivors of gender-based violence. A witness bears testimony, either from firsthand experience in the case of gender violence survivors, or from more distanced watching in the cases of journalists, advocates, and others. The testimony becomes part of the process for social and political change.73 The witness to trauma’s testimony also becomes a means for representing the unrepresentable. As Sarkar and Walker write, “[t]ruth may also be ‘proximate’ in the cases of misremembering.”74 Representations of trauma in documentary function differently depending on the forms used. The realist traditions smooth over these complexities and render them into causal relationships. This process potentially reinforces or obscures the dominant ideologies at work. It also potentially re-victimizes those witnesses. The role of collectivity in feminist documentary offers an alternative. According Juhasz, “video and feminism see women as complex, worthy selves—they produce subjects.”75 In the traditional representations, the victim tells her story, revealing her weaknesses, and thus reinforcing her position as victim. In these cases the filmmaker–subject relationship reflects the subject–object binary, and thus fixes the witness’s testimony as product. Their value lies in their stories and not in their person, an unfortunately very common approach in documentary production. Collaboration offers a means to prevent victimhood and re-victimhood in documentary representation. This prevention is important when addressing survivors of gender-based violence, particularly those working through trauma, in that it allows them agency on their own terms. JoAnn Elam’s Rape, as discussed above, offers an example of how this collaboration might function within a documentary about gender violence through sharing the camera among the participants.

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The director as subject Documentary representation usually refers to the process of creating and assembling images of others toward a particular argument. Though strongly addressed by feminist theorists and documentary makers, this representational process facilitates the construction of usually the filmmaker’s authority and the distancing between filmmakers and subjects. Since the 1960s, however, documentary makers have turned the camera on themselves and recorded their own lives. While the technique has become popular since the 1980s through documentary makers as Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, and Ross McElwee, feminist documentary makers regularly took themselves as subjects a decade or more earlier. For example, Joyce Chopra created the autobiographical documentary Joyce at 34 (1972), which represents the intersections of her life, career, and children. Amalie Rothschild’s Nana, Mom, and Me (1974) offers a portrait of three generations including the filmmaker, and their interactions and tensions. Though autobiographical documentary collapses the distance between filmmaker and subject, the “I” represented in the documentary does not automatically equal the “I” of the documentary maker. This subject position and subjective approach raise questions about the validity of the truths represented in documentary. While this approach might suggest the narcissistic exercise of ego inflation, Jim Lane writes that autobiographical documentary shows “the status of a historically verifiable author who also functions as the textual narrator and focal point of the story.”76 In other words, the documentary maker’s own story is representative of larger social, cultural, and political issues. It becomes a way of rethinking or challenging history, and of thinking about the role that can be played by feminist documentary in writing that history. Autobiographical documentary removes the private from its safety (and, sometimes, its power) and makes it public. The hidden becomes revealed. In doing so, the hidden threatens the status quo and even the social order.77 Multiple feminist autobiographical documentaries start with the idea of “women’s fragmented consciousness.”78 Lesage offers four frameworks for attempting to structure these fragments, including prose narration, diaries/ home videos, autobiographical fiction, and computer/digital animation.79 This range of frameworks allows trauma to play an important role in that history and reality within feminist autobiographical documentary. According to Walker and Waldman, “feminist thinking [ … ] conceives of reality as having always been traumatic and conceives of traditional realistic historiography as having always been descriptively inadequate to anything but the thinnest crust of historical reality.”80 Trauma engenders the practices engaged in the experimental documentary that manifest the self-reflexivity, which is particularly important for autobiographical documentary. Experiences with gender-based violence frequently motivate feminist documentary makers. Margie Strosser’s Rape Stories (1989) is an autobiographical documentary that represents her experience following her rape. Strosser addresses multiple aspects of what Wendy Hesford labels as “rape

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trauma syndrome,” but Stosser’s conclusion shifts the documentary into the realm of autobiographical fiction.81 In the end she includes a revenge fantasy sequence wherein she kills her rapist, slices his body to pieces, and mails those pieces to other rape victims as forms of apologies.82 This fantasy sequence allows Strosser agency in representing and rewriting her experience.

Constructing audiences and making impacts As representations construct their subjects, they also construct their audiences. The theoretical and applied understandings of audiences consuming entertainmentbased, mainstream media are well developed and well researched. Studies grounded in active audience theories engage audiences through questions about their motivations, interests, and learning in order to determine how those media impact them in some way. Some scholars call for more studies on documentary’s connections with audiences, but outside reality television, the theoretical and critical explorations of audiences and documentary film are few.83 Some recent studies have begun to address documentary ideas within audience studies.84 Annette Hill’s research uncovers connections between audiences and television, while Thomas Austin’s work engages cinematic and television documentary.85 These works explore how audiences engage documentary as compared with fiction programming, as perceived reality, and as learning. Psychoanalytic theory offers another approach to theorizing audiences. Combining feminism and historiography, Walker and Waldman call for the further application of psychoanalysis within the studies of documentary.86 The contributions of trauma theory to the study of documentary also suggest this use value, which can be understood in relation to audience expectations and readings of documentary. According to Belinda Smaill, “psychoanalysis can be taken beyond the limits of the cinematic apparatus and brought to bear on the social expectations, perceptions and discourses of cinema and documentary in particular.”87 Emotions, particularly desire, intersect with these expectations. Elizabeth Cowie provides the most sustained application of psychoanalytic theory to documentary in her book Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. Audiences desire from documentary what is knowable and the certainty of that knowability, rendering (quite impossibly) the split between reality and non-reality, between true and false, between fact and fiction.88 The documentary requires audiences to undergo a process of identification. According to Cowie, “identification is not only with the seen and heard but also with the position of the addressee of the documentary as narration, a telling, through the speech it presents, both on-screen and off-screen, as voiceover.”89 The audience desires to see themselves within this knowledge, to understand themselves in relationship with what the documentary brings to them. With this identifying, just as audiences come to know aspects of the world around them and gain reassurances that the world is knowable, they also come to know more about themselves both physically and psychologically.90

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This identification informs the process of witnessing, which Torchin describes as bearing witness, a process that involves both the speaker and the audience.91 The process of witnessing testimony through media also transforms the audience into witnesses themselves.92 Hesford, for example, describes how witnessing functions rhetorically within human rights documentaries.93 These practices, however, create limits for the audience’s identification. One of those limits comes back to the believability of the witness’s testimony and the witness’s credibility. In her article examining Defending Our Lives, Elizabeth C. Britt suggests that survivors of domestic abuse who murder their abusers pose a particular challenge because of the nature of their stories, the myths of domestic violence, and the audience’s knowledge about convicted prisoners.94 Britt argues that Defending Our Lives encourages audiences to engage with the women’s unique stories, carefully setting up the inevitability of the murders.95 Further, the documentary positions the women’s stories with common themes framed within unique narratives, thus avoiding homogenization.96 The documentary continues to create identification through balancing these individuals’ experiences against the larger sociocultural structures in which they occurred, but it does so through representing the survivors as both normal as individuals and as extraordinary for the abuses they suffered.97 This process of witnessing within documentary also hopefully instills within the witness—the audience member—a sense of obligation to do something about what she sees. While this process raises questions about representation and othering, it also points to the ideas of change and impact that inform committed documentary production. Committed documentary makers frequently attempt to engage audiences through their works in order to bring about impacts in the social or political world. The form taken by these impacts can depend on both the documentary and its audiences. For gender-based violence and documentary, impacts include raising awareness about issues, changing misperceptions and correcting myths, assisting survivors in their struggles, engaging aggressors and their behaviors,98 and even changing legislation. A significant change for engaging contemporary audiences lies in the development of interactive technologies and social media and their impacts on social movements. Committed documentaries frequently align themselves with existing social movements, such as the women’s movements, and sometimes they become movements unto themselves.99 Social media sites, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, facilitate the engagement with audiences toward impact goals. In the past, social movements relied on established communication systems, usually arranged and controlled hierarchically, to convey messages and reach audiences. With social media, however, two fundamental changes occur. According to Castells, “the more interactive and self-configurable communication is, the less hierarchical is the organization and the more participatory is the movement.”100 Audiences engage the messages on their own terms and contribute to the potential impacts in their own ways. For the release of Sex Crimes Unit, for example, Lisa F. Jackson and HBO both offered Tweets about rape myths leading

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up to the documentary’s premiere on HBO. Audiences found opportunities to learn more about the myths and to engage further actions as suggested on the documentary’s website.

Chapter previews We have arranged the chapters in this volume under four broad themes. The first four chapters provide ideological critiques of documentaries about gender-based violence. Next, we include two chapters that analyze the tensions between more mainstream texts on these issues and independent documentaries that appear to offer some correctives. Other chapters address documentary subjectivities within inperson and online communities. Finally, we include three chapters that investigate the production and distribution processes that inform these documentaries. A select filmography and distribution list follows. Using textual analysis, Lisa Cuklanz’s chapter on Sex Crimes Unit (2011) explores how both mainstream and feminist ideologies intersect within the text. She concludes that while Sex Crimes Unit shows how people inside the justice system work to counter rape myths, the film offers a limited vision of social change by locating the impetus for this change primarily within the government. Moving to mainstream film, in Chapter 3 Annie Fukushima and Julietta Hua analyze the anti–human trafficking documentary Call + Response (2008) and its promotional materials. They argue that the film provides awareness about the subject of human trafficking and its victims, but it does so within the contexts of Western capitalism and neoliberalism, thereby limiting its message about the negative effects of human trafficking. In Chapter 4, Swati Bandi critiques how Indian news represented two highly visible gang rapes in Mangalore and New Delhi. She analyzes how the reliance of English-language programs The Newshour and The Newshour Debate on the conventions of television news, including spectacle, access, and immediacy, effectively undermined the feminist voices and ultimately reinforced the expected social silences. Chapter 5 shifts the idea of documentary toward written autobiography. Shirlita Africa Espinosa examines two texts, Filipino Women Achievers in Queensland: A Compilation of Stories of Seven Achievement Award Recipients and Other Nominees (2001) and Crossing the Barriers: Filipino Women Stories: An Anthology of Migration (2002), which attempt to counter the dominant perceptions of Filipino women as mail-order brides. Through her analysis of these life narratives, Espinosa shows that, while these volumes were intended to counteract the stereotype of the Filipina mail-order bride, their classist modes of production and themes reinforce status differences as much as mitigate them. Chapters 6 and 7 provide comparative analyses of several texts, pointing out representational differences between mainstream documentaries and the correctives offered by independent documentary. In Chapter 6, Wendy S. Hesford investigates the uses of victim narratives in videos produced by non-governmental women’s rights organizations and by an independent feminist filmmaker. She analyzes Bought and

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Sold: An Investigative Documentary about the International Trade in Women (1997) and So Deep a Violence: Prostitution, Trafficking, and the Global Sex Industry (2000) alongside independent filmmaker Ursula Biemann’s Remote Sensing (2001) and Writing Desire (2001). She demonstrates the limited nature of the victim–agent binary and argues for a shift in considering the fluidity in identities, as approximated in Biemann’s films. In Chapter 7 Lauren Berliner takes a similar approach by comparing mainstream and independent online videos about LGBTQ bullying. She begins with the It Gets Better Campaign, which while intended to discourage LGBTQ youth suicide, inadvertently narrows the range of experiences addressed and even excludes some youth. In contrast, user-generated content on YouTube better represents the lived realities of LGBTQ youth and offers an expanding viewpoint on bullying and other issues. Though a common theme across many chapters in this volume, the next set of chapters emphasizes the importance of respecting the dignity and rights of genderviolence survivors, engaging these issues through discussions of documentary production. In Chapter 8, Natalia Deeb-Sossa brings the photovoices technique to immigrant and migrant children and their communities in California. The photovoice methodology enables survivors and others to record their realities and to engender dialogue and understanding toward potentially reaching policy makers through their photographs. Through her application of this technique in her study, Deeb-Sossa shows how it offers the opportunity for migrant and immigrant children to communicate about their anxieties and fears. The children’s photos often focus on the vulnerability of their mothers and fathers, who experience issues and traumas in different ways within a highly unstable situation. In Chapter 9, Phyllisa Deroze focuses on trauma survivors and representations of their experiences within documentary theater. Through an analysis of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined (2007), Deroze demonstrates how theatrical performance shows the trauma of the mass rapes in the Congo, getting as close to the reality as possible through interviews while respecting the survivors through preserving their anonymity within the story that unfolds. The final chapters engage questions of production and distribution toward the missions of advocacy and social change. In Chapter 10, Laura Vazquez analyzes Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War (2012), which represents the subject of rape in the United States military and the lack of justice for the survivors. She argues that the film’s production in part provided for collaborative filming by allowing Kori Cioca to record her own experience through a camera provided by the producers. Vazquez also discusses how the film enables a successful social movement through its careful avoidance of an anti-military stance. In Chapter 11, Heather McIntosh offers a case study of Sin by Silence, a domestic violence campaign committed to raising awareness about the issues and survivors through both traditional and online media. Through explication of aspects of personal stories, contemporary distribution, and social media engagement, she demonstrates how director Olivia Klaus navigates these different opportunities to engage audiences with her efforts to raise awareness about domestic violence and about the women in the CWAA, the Convicted Women Against Abuse, a prison-based organization that supports domestic violence survivors who murdered

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their abusers for fear of their lives. Through in-depth interviews with four directors of documentaries on gender violence, including Christine Welsh, Raymonde Provencher, Kirby Dick, and Lisa F. Jackson, in Chapter 12 Ruth Goldman engages the myriad issues facing productions about gender violence, including securing funding, respecting and empowering subjects during preproduction and filming, and handling the emotional intensity for the filmmakers. She also offers some final words of advice for those planning their own documentary productions about gender violence.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

United Nations, “Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.” http:// www.un.org/documents/ga/res/48/a48r104.htm (accessed June 4, 2014). Spence and Navarro, Crafting Truth, 2. Barnouw, Documentary, 3–5. Barnouw, Documentary, 5–22. Bruzzi, New Documentary, 5. Nichols, Representing Reality, xiii. Beattie, Documentary Screens, 26–43. Though directed by Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton, Housing Problems is considered part of the Griersonian Tradition that Winston refers to in “Tradition.” Winston, “Tradition,” 35. Winston, Claiming the Real, 57. Waugh, “Introduction,” xiv. While Waugh refers to the “committed documentary” as having a strategic alliance with the Left, other scholars use the term more generally to refer to advocacy-driven documentaries. Feldman, “Cinema Weekly,” 3–20, and Waugh, “Joris Ivens,” 105–132. Alexander, Film on the Left, 3–64. Alexander, Film on the Left, 56–60, and Campbell, “Radical Documentary,” 69–88. Heck-Rabi, Women Filmmakers, 281. Fregoso, “Transforming Terror,” forthcoming 2015. Hanisch, “The Personal.” In an introduction to the reprinting of the essay, Hanisch attributes the title to Shulie Firestone and Anne Koedt, editors of the anthology, Notes from the Second Year, that included it. Buechler, Women’s Movements, 1990. Ryan, Feminism, 53–64. Saunders, Direct Cinema, 2007. Though not interchangeable, other terms used to describe the prominent style of the era include “direct cinema” and “observational cinema.” Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance, 110, and Martin, “Madeline Anderson,” 75. Nichols, Representing Reality, 3. See Bill Nichols’ Representing Reality for an in-depth discussion about documentary modes. Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance, 112. Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance, 142. Walker and Waldman, “Introduction,” 7.

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28 Johnston, “Women’s Cinema,” 29. Walker and Waldman refer to this essay in their introduction. 29 Johnston, “Women’s Cinema,” 29. 30 Walker and Waldman, “Introduction,” 8. 31 Walker and Waldman, “Introduction,” 8. 32 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 34–47. 33 Juhasz, “They Said,” 191. 34 Walker and Waldman, “Introduction,” 10–11. 35 Martineau, “Talking About,” 258. 36 Warren, “Consciousness-Raising.” 37 Warren, “Real Politics,” 73. 38 Citron, Home Movies, 143. 39 Lesage, “Feminist Documentary,” 246–247. 40 Juhasz, “Introduction,” 15. 41 Ellis, Documentary. 42 Anderson and Benson, “Direct Cinema,” 59. 43 Lesage, “Feminist Documentary,” 237. 44 Winston, “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary,” 40. 45 Walker and Waldman, “Introduction,” 14. 46 White, “Cinema Solidarity,” 124. 47 Gaines, “White Privilege,” 176. 48 Cutler and Klotman, “Introduction,” xvi. 49 Kigvamasud’Vashti, Simmons, and Bierria, “Catalyzing Possibility,” 61. 50 Sinha, “Witness to Violence,” 373. 51 Juhasz, “No Woman,” 71–72. 52 A “rough cut” of a film is a work in progress. 53 Pryluck, “Ultimately We Are,” 259. 54 Ellis, Documentary. 55 Walker and Waldman, “Introduction,” 17. 56 Torchin, “Rates of Exchange.” 57 Michelle and Weaver, “Discursive Manoeuvres,” 296. 58 Leys, From Guilt, 8. 59 Some journals to consult include Journal of Family Violence, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Violence and Victims, Psychology of Women Quarterly, Journal of Traumatic Stress, and Violence against Women. 60 Ball, “Introduction: Trauma,” 2. 61 Leys, From Guilt, 8–9. 62 Leys, From Guilt, 9. 63 Leys, From Guilt, 9. 64 This is not to say that electronic recording devices make perfect records. 65 Suleiman, “History, Memory,” 511–512. 66 Walker, “The Traumatic Paradox,” 809. 67 Ball, “Introduction: Trauma,” 8. 68 LaCapra, Writing History, 141. 69 Sturken, “Reenactment,” 64–79. 70 Hesford, “Documenting Violations,” 105. 71 Torchin, Creating the Witness, 5. 72 Torchin, Creating the Witness, 5. She cites Yúdice, “Testimonio and Postmodernism,” 44.

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73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Torchin, Creating the Witness, 5. She cites Yúdice, “Testimonio and Postmodernism,” 44. Sarkar and Walker, “Introduction,” 9. Juhasz, “No Woman,” 70. Lane, Autobiographical, 5–6. Citron, “Fleeing from Documentary,” 272. Lesage, “Women’s Fragmented,” 312. Lesage, “Women’s Fragmented,” 312–313. Walker and Waldman, “Introduction,” 23. Hesford, “Reading Rape Stories,” 192 and Lesage, “Women’s Fragmented,” 313. Hesford, “Reading Rape Stories,” 192. Nisbet and Aufderheide, “Documentary Film,” 453. Pouliot and Cowen, “Does Perceived,” 241–259, and LaMarre and Landreville, “When is Fiction,” 537–555. 85 Austin, Watching the World, 2007, and Hill, Restyling Factual TV, 2007. 86 Walker and Waldman, “Introduction,” 24–26. 87 Smaill, Documentary, 17. 88 Cowie, Recording Reality, 86. 89 Cowie, Recording Reality, 103. 90 Cowie, Recording Reality, 88. 91 Torchin, Creating the Witness, 5. 92 Torchin, Creating the Witness, 12. 93 Hesford, “Documenting Violations,” 106. 94 Britt, “Listening Rhetorically,” 157. 95 Britt, “Listening Rhetorically,” 165. 96 Britt, “Listening Rhetorically,” 166. 97 Britt, “Listening Rhetorically,” 167–168. 98 Jackson Katz’s documentary Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity (2006) attempts to address gender violence through men and aggression. 99 Abrash and White, “The Uprising,” 87–99. 100 Castells, Networks, 15.

Bibliography Abrash, Barbara and David Whiteman. “The Uprising of ’34: Filmmaking as Community Engagement.” Wide Angle 21, no. 2 (1999): 87–99. Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931–1942. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Anderson, Carolyn and Thomas W. Benson “Direct Cinema and the Myth of Informed Consent: The Case of Titicut Follies.” In Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film and Television, edited by Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz and Jay, Ruby, 58–90. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988. Austin, Thomas. Watching the World: Screen Documentary and Audiences. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Ball, Karyn. “Introduction: Trauma and Its Institutional Destinies.” Cultural Critique 46 (2000): 1–44.

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Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993. Beattie, Keith. Documentary Screens: Nonfiction Film and Television. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Biemann, Ursula. “Videogeographies.” In Blackwell Companion to Film Studies: Documentary and Documentary Histories, edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alise Lebow. Malden, MA: Blackwell, forthcoming 2015. Britt, Elizabeth C. “Listening Rhetorically to Defending Our Lives: Identification and Advocacy in Intimate Partner Abuse.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 10, no. 1 (2012): 155–178. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. Buechler, Steven M. Women’s Movements in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Campbell, Russell. “Radical Documentary in the United States, 1930–1942.” In “Show Us Life:” Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, 69–88. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. Castells, Manuel. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Malden, MA: Polity, 2012. Citron, Michelle. “Fleeing from Documentary: Autobiographical Film/Video and the ‘Ethics of Responsibility.’ ” In Feminism and Documentary, edited by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, 271–286. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. ———. Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Cowie, Elizabeth. Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Cutler, Janet K. and Phyllis R. Klotman “Introduction.” In Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, edited by Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler, xiii–xxxii. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Ellis, John. Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation. New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. Kindle edition. Feldman, Seth. “ ‘Cinema Weekly’ and ‘Cinema Truth’: Dziga Vertov and the Leninist Proportion.” In “Show Us Life:” Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, 3–20. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. Fregoso, Rosa-Linda. “Transforming Terror: Documentary Poetics in Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada (2001).” In Blackwell Companion to Film Studies: Documentary and Documentary Histories, edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. Malden, MA: Blackwell, forthcoming 2015. Gaines, Jane. “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory.” In Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar and Janice R. Welsch, 336–355. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Hanisch, Carol. “The Personal Is Political.” 1969. http://carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP. html (accessed June 5, 2014). Heck-Rabi, Louise. Women Filmmakers: A Critical Reception. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. Hesford, Wendy S. “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation.” College English 62, no. 2 (1999): 192–221.

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———. “Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering.” Biography 27, no. 1 (2004): 104–144. Hill, Annette. Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres. New York, NY: Routledge, 2007. Jackson, Lisa F. “Director’s Statement.” 2011. http://sexcrimesunit.com/directorsstatement/ (accessed May 29, 2014). Johnston, Claire. “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” Feminism & Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 22–33. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. Juhasz, Alexandra. “They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality—All I Want to Show Is My Video: The Politics of the Realist Feminist Documentary.” In Collecting Visible Evidence, edited by Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, 190–215. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. ———. “Introduction.” In Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, edited by Alexandra Juhasz, 1–44. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. ———. “No Woman Is an Object: Realizing the Feminist Collaborative Video.” Cinema Obscura 54 18, no. 3 (2003): 70–97. Kigvamasud’Vashti, Theryn, Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Alisa Bierria. “Catalyzing Possibility: The NO! Film Documentary as Community Accountability Technology.” Social Justice 37, no. 4 (2011–2012): 60–75. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. LaMarre, Heather L. and Kristen D. Landreville “When Is Fiction as Good as Fact? Comparing the Influence of Documentary and Historical Reenactment Films on Engagement, Affect, Issue Interest, and Learning.” Mass Communication and Society 12, no. 4 (2009): 537–555. Lane, John. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Lesage, Julia. “Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics.” In “Show Us Life:” Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, 223–251. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. ———. “Women’s Fragmented Consciousness in Feminist Experimental Autobiographical Video.” In Feminism and Documentary, edited by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, 309–337. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Leys, Ruth. From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Martin, Michael T. “Madeline Anderson in Conversation: Pioneering an African American Documentary Tradition.” Black Camera 5, no. 1 (2013): 72–93. Martineau, Barbara Halpern. “Talking about Our Lives and Experiences: Thoughts about Feminism, Documentary, and ‘Talking Heads.’ ” In “Show Us Life:” Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, 252–273. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. Michelle, Carolyn and C. Kay Weaver. “Discursive Manoeuvres and Hegemonic Recuperations in New Zealand Documentary Representations of Domestic Violence.” Feminist Media Studies 3, no. 1 (2003): 283–299. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Feminism & Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 34–47. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. Nash, Kate. “Goa Hippy Tribe:’ Theorising Documentary Content on a Social Network Site.” Media International Australia, 142 (2012): 30–40.

Introduction

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Nash, Kate, Craig Hight and Catherine Summerhayes. New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices, and Discourses, Kindle edition. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Nisbet, Matthew C. and Patricia Aufderheide. “Documentary Film: Towards a Research Agenda on Forms, Functions, and Impacts.” Mass Communication and Society, 12 (2009): 450–456. Nottage, Lynn. Ruined. New York, NY: Theater Communications Group, 2009. Pouliot, Louise and Paul S. Cowen “Does Perceived Realism Really Matter in Media Effects?”, Media Psychology 9 (2007): 241–259. Pryluck, Calvin. “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking.” New Challenges for Documentary, edited by Alan Rosenthal, 255–268. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1988. Rabinovitz, Lauren. Points of Resistance: Women, Power, & Politics in the New York Avantgarde Cinema, 1943–1971. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Rampal, Jean Christophe and Marc Fernandez. “La Cité des Mortes.” http://www. lacitedesmortes.net/nav.php (accessed May 27, 2014). Reneilt, Janelle. “The Promise of Documentary.” In Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, edited by Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson, 6–23. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ryan, Barbara. Feminism and the Women’s Movement: Dynamics of Change in Social Movement Ideology and Activism. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. Sarkar, Bhaskar and Janet Walker. “Introduction: Moving Testimonies.” In Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, edited by Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker, 1–34. New York, NY: Routledge, 2010. Saunders, David. Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties. London: Wallflower, 2007. Sinha, Madhumeeta. “Witness to Violence: Documentary Cinema and the Women’s Movement in India.” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 17, no. 3 (2010): 365–373. Smaill, Brenda. The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Spence, Louise and Vinicius Navarro. Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Sturken, Marita. “Reenactment, Fantasy, and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone’s Docudramas.” History and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 64–79. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “History, Memory, and Moral Judgment in Documentary Film: On Marcel Ophuls’s “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie.”” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 509–541. ———. “Judith Herman and Contemporary Trauma Theory.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, nos. 1 and 2 (2008): 276–281. Torchin, Leshu. Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. ———. “Rates of Exchange: Human Trafficking and the Global Marketplace.” In Blackwell Companion to Film Studies: Documentary and Documentary Histories, edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. Malden, MA: Blackwell, forthcoming 2015. United Nations. “Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.” http://www. un.org/documents/ga/res/48/a48r104.htm (accessed June 4, 2014).

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Walker, Janet. “The Traumatic Paradox: Documentary Films, Historical Fictions, and Cataclysmic Past Events.” Signs 22, no. 4 (1997): 803–825. Walker, Janet and Diane Waldman. “Introduction.” In Feminism and Documentary, edited by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, 1–35. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Warren, Shilyh J. Real Politics and Feminist Documentaries: Re-Visioning Seventies Film Feminisms. PhD diss., Duke University, 2010. ———. “Consciousness-Raising and Difference in The Woman’s Film (1971) and SelfHealth (1974).” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 54 (2012) http://www. ejumpcut.org/archive/jc54.2012/Warren70sFemstDocs/index.html (accessed May 26, 2014). Waugh, Thomas. “Introduction: Why Documentary Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change the World, or Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries.” In “Show Us Life:” Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, xi–xxvii. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. ———. “Joris Ivens’ The Spanish Earth: Committed Documentary and the Popular Front.” In “Show Us Life:” Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, 105–132. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. White, Patricia. “Cinema Solidarity: The Documentary Practice of Kim Longinotto.” Cinema Journal 46, no. 1 (2006): 120–128. ———. “Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory: The Visibility of FGC.” In Blackwell Companion to Film Studies: Documentary and Documentary Histories, edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. Malden, MA: Blackwell, forthcoming 2015. Winston, Brian. “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary.” In Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film and Television, edited by Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz and Jay Ruby, 34–57. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” In The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg M. Gugelberger, 42–57. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

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Creating a Sense of Reality in Sex Crimes Unit Lisa Cuklanz

Introduction Lisa Jackson’s 2011 documentary Sex Crimes Unit follows the division of the New York City District Attorney’s office that is dedicated to the prosecution of sex crimes cases. The film first aired on HBO on June 20, 2011. Jackson received a MUSE Award in 2012 from New York Women in Film and Television for “outstanding vision and achievement,” one of only two MUSE awards ever given to a documentary filmmaker. In the film, Jackson, a survivor herself of a gang rape that was never prosecuted, focuses on the office’s daily routines and creates a positive and fairly heroic portrait intended to “honor those who do this hard work.”1 The film follows DA Lisa Friel and several Assistant District Attorneys in her office through the various phases of two specific cases, both of which end in conviction. Along the way of her documentary shooting, additional cases slip through the cracks, with insufficient evidence for prosecution or principal witnesses who are unable to follow through. Through its heroic portrayal of the DA and Assistant DAs, the film also offers corrective discourses that debunk traditional myths about rape and sexual assault. It utilizes many of the familiar techniques of cinema verité to produce an image of the office and selected cases. However, in failing to call attention to its own processes and conditions of production, the film reproduces some unfortunate, if unintended, implications regarding sexual assault, race, and gender, limiting its ability to fully debunk familiar rape myths. In addition, without inclusion of information on the beginnings of the rape reform movement, the final impression is that feminism is best (or only) represented by government agents. Emphasis is placed on the ways in which social change, or legal reform, has been slow or incomplete in dealing with sexual assault cases due to the outmoded beliefs of the general public, which lags behind the enlightenment of those in the DAs’ office.

Theoretical background Before undertaking a formal analysis of the film, it is important to consider the academic conversation that has taken place in feminist scholarship on film in

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general, and on feminist documentary film in particular. The relationships between documentary filmmaking and feminist themes and perspectives are central to an understanding and analysis of Jackson’s film. As Julia Lesage notes, “feminist documentary filmmaking … developed as a cinematic genre related to a political movement, the contemporary women’s movement.”2 In early feminist films from the 1970s, emphasis was often placed on simply providing a forum and voice to women whose experiences were not formerly considered important enough to be made the subject of film. These films created a pattern of representation characterized by “biography, simplicity, trust between woman filmmaker and woman subject, a linear narrative structure, little self-consciousness about the flexibility of the cinematic medium … .”3 Many utilized footage of collective conversation or collaborations in a way that tended to show how understanding can be “arrived at collectively” and to provide “a sense of mutual support.”4 In addition, in many of these early films, directors tended to “identify personally with their subjects,” to the extent that “their relation to that subject while filming often is collaborative, with both subject and filmmaker sharing the project’s political goals.”5 As Martineau notes “early women’s liberation cinema used images of women talking in closeup to validate the concept of self-expression, a crucial concept for women used to being objectified, interpreted, eroticized, and generally discounted by the mass media.”6 These close-ups of real women talking about their own experiences were considered feminist in some ways, as the female subjects they foregrounded were often effective in articulating their feelings and points of view, as well as readily willing to speak openly with filmmakers.7 Feminist film theorists have consistently pointed out the limitations and ideological tendencies of central cinema verité film techniques, and have insisted that feminist committed documentaries, aimed consciously at producing social change on issues of relevance to women, should work to call attention to, question, and even subvert and replace traditional techniques of documentary filmmaking. As Claire Johnston asserted as early as 1973, “the language of the cinema/the depiction of reality must … be interrogated, so that a break with ideology and text is effected.”8 The techniques that should be interrogated and/or questioned include the use of authoritative commentary given by experts on screen (“talking heads”), reliance on identification and techniques aimed to produce identification of audience members with the subjects and subject matter of documentary films, use of authoritative voiceovers and inter-titles to anchor meaning and direct audience interpretations of what is presented, use of conventional filmic techniques that work to hide rather than reveal the technical apparatus of filmmaking, and the acceptance and even support of structures and representatives of institutionalized authority.9 Alexandra Juhasz concisely summarizes the insights of E. Ann Kaplan10 by enumerating how “feminists need to make and view films that do four things: focus on the cinematic apparatus as a signifying practice, refuse to construct a fixed spectator, deny pleasure, and mix the codes of documentary and fiction.”11

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However, Juhasz and other more recent authors have highlighted the persistent gap between theories of what feminist films (including documentary films) should do and what filmmakers have actually chosen to present in their works. In particular, accepted techniques of realism are often incorporated into works focusing on gender construction, feminist politics, and women’s experiences within patriarchal society. As Juhasz notes, although academic theory cautions against reliance on realism and identification, filmmakers have been at pains to move beyond these technical elements in consistent and meaningful ways. Martineau similarly outlines the range of ways in which the single technique of “talking heads” can be used to support, question, or critique authority figures and authoritative discourses. Thus, feminist scholars have noted that this technique still finds a place in feminist documentary, with differential meanings depending on the particularities of its use in a given context. To date, it has been easier to provide critiques and explanations of how accepted techniques are limited or problematic, but more difficult to create and place into action new techniques that do not replicate the same patterns.12 Since the 1970s, feminist films, including documentary films treating the subject of rape, have been concerned with interrogating or reversing problematic tropes found in mainstream filmic treatments of sexual assault, women’s victimization, and patriarchal understandings of the causes of rape.13 As Lesage summarizes succinctly, Usually a “sympathetic” depiction of rape on film presents the victim in terms of pathos, horror, or individual tragedy. In such a case, the audience response may be one of both titillation and catharsis. Both males and females in the audience may respond—for different reasons—with a reaction such as this: “She’s dead and beautiful and out there. Lucky it’s not me.” Either as titillation or catharsis or both, such a response has an adverse social effect in that it serves to limit people’s capacity for self-awareness and their impulse to effect social change.14

Feminist theorists such as Lesage have found problematic those representations that encourage viewer titillation and/or promote feelings of comparative relief that the viewer is not in the place of the on-screen victim. More recent feminist scholarship on the representation of rape myths across genres and styles of media has also emphasized a need for portrayals that do not sexualize rape or depict assault and coercion as entertainment.15 In working with the subjects of rape and sexual assault, feminist filmmakers, then, have endeavored to eliminate the elements of voyeurism and titillation as well as pathos and a sense of avoidable tragedy at the individual level. They have struggled to find ways of representing sexual assault and rape that do not further traumatize, or re-traumatize, survivors. They have tried to move away from narratives or representations that suggest remedies based in individual avoidance or prevention behaviors, which in turn imply victimblaming. Rather, they have worked to explore structural causes and meanings while offering a voice to individual women including those who have experienced victimization.

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The case of Sex Crimes Unit and survivors of sexual assault Much of the footage in Sex Crimes Unit features conversational meetings among colleagues within the unit, as well as other activities such as phone calls, site visits, and other professional excursions to gather evidence or follow up on case-related information. Jackson’s access to the interior workings of the office and its staff yields a personal and relaxed treatment of their work that approximates reality in some of the ways originally established as central to cinema verité. In particular, the conversational nature of many of the unit’s meetings does contribute to a sense of collaborative decision-making and dialogic interaction as key to daily operations. The film provides the appearance of following Friel’s staff in daily discussions about myriad cases and general issues such as evidence collection, discussions with police, trial preparations, and case reviews. At the same time, though, footage of these conversations and activities is interspersed with footage following developments in two specific cases. The most central of the two is introduced at the very start of the film, where survivor Natasha Alexenko talks about her violent rape by Victor Rondon many years earlier. A second case, the rape of a prostitute for which Kevin Rios is eventually convicted, is followed through the phases of report, evidence collection, trial preparation, and trial. The victim in this case is not named or visually depicted in the film. The importance of privileging and legitimizing the rape victim’s point of view and personal understanding of her own experience underlies much of the material included in Jackson’s film. Sex Crimes Unit is structured in a way that reflects early feminist documentary practices in relation to survivor experience and voice, and voyeuristic elements are carefully avoided. The film includes some interview segments with rape survivor Natasha Alexenko. Although Alexenko is the only survivor depicted on screen, her experience is used to anchor the film’s treatment of the various stages of the process from the actual rape, through the survivor’s struggles to cope, through evidence collection and eventual arrest, through the use of DNA to identify Rondon as the perpetrator, to trial and conviction, and eventually to healing and life for Alexenko beyond the final stages of the legal process. The film effectively opens and closes with Alexenko’s story. The opening segment features her tearful discussion of how she would like to be able to go back in time and tell her younger victimized self that everything was going to turn out ok. The palpable emotion of the scene serves as powerful evidence of rape’s ongoing trauma to survivors: later we learn that this interview takes place seventeen years after the attack. Later, Alexenko discusses how she inevitably plays over the events and in part blames herself for not doing something differently. Here, she notes that even fighting back and being killed might have resulted in retaining her dignity. By opening and closing with Alexenko’s story, the film is able to include both evidence of trauma, as in the opening scene, and evidence of healing. The inclusion of her mother and her friend Trevor, both of whom provide background narratives from their own point of view, supports Alexenko and her story. In a segment near the fi lm’s end, Alexenko’s appointment to a new career post is included. Shown with her mother

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by her side, she appears successful, happy, and respected by her community. Her final segment features a return, with the film crew, to the site of the initial attack seventeen years earlier. Here, she is able to express her feelings and emphasize that the place itself now seems benign in comparison to her memories of it. Although not completely able to put the events aside, she has clearly been able to progress emotionally and to experience healing, both through the passage of time and through the trial process. To the film’s credit, Alexenko does not specifically praise individuals for their role in bringing her rapist to justice. Rather, the focus is on her, her thoughts and feelings, and her progression from the traumatic past to the present. Support for victims, survivors, and their voices and experiences is also achieved through the focus on the dedicated people who commit their energies to obtaining justice for survivors of sexual assault.16 Apart from the powerful footage of Alexenko, most of the screen time is devoted to the members of the DA’s office going about their daily routines and discussing their commitment to, and support of, victims and their right to see justice served. The film’s major scenes feature Lisa Friel and her staff of ADAs meeting together and discussing the cases on which they work. The treatment of this group of colleagues lends itself to an understanding of them as quiet heroes who do their best to obtain justice as well as lend emotional support to victims. The conversational style captures the voices of the various colleagues, who are mostly women but include some men as well. As colleagues, the staff appears to be an amicable group, offering support and empathy when needed, and bolstering each other’s claims and feelings in relation to the work that they do. At several points, for example, ADAs comment on the particular emotional and interpersonal nature of their work. They note that the work with victims can be intense, and that it requires constant checking in with the survivor, as well as encouragement in the pursuit of the perpetrators involved. They are shown talking with survivors on the phone, encouraging and praising them for their strength and commitment to the judicial process. They talk about the ways in which sex crimes cases (as well as cases involving child abuse) require a high level of interaction with social workers, hospital personnel, police, and therapists, as well as with survivors, who are also the principal witnesses to the crimes that have victimized them. Significantly, they also talk about their personal experience of doing this work: it is described as emotionally challenging, sometimes draining or depressing, and difficult for some people to manage for long periods of time. Without being melodramatic, colleagues are able to understand each other and commiserate. Their comments about their own feelings show the intensity of their challenging work in dealing daily with victims of severe trauma. Their role is in large part defined as providing support to these survivors. The discussion is seldom sensationalized or extreme, and for the most part focuses on specific cases as extended examples. If the film considers them to be heroes, it does so in a subtle and understated way, and certainly not through exaggerated portrayals of emotional drama or intense interpersonal interactions. This understated style allows for a longitudinal examination of both the cases at hand and the lives of those involved. Viewers get a

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sense of the long-term emotional trauma and healing process of victims as well as the ways in which the members of Friel’s staff balance their individual needs and lives with those of the victims they support.

Cinema verité An important source of footage in Sex Crimes Unit was Jackson’s access to the daily routines of the members of the Friel’s office. Following the ADAs as they perform caserelated tasks and discuss evidence and developments, Jackson’s film utilizes several key techniques to produce a sense of realism in its portrait of the DA’s office. Intertitles are used at several points in the film to provide “factual” information such as the incidence of rape in New York City as compared to successful prosecutions, the history of certain rape laws, and the ratio of women who are sexually victimized at some point during their lifetime. Along with these factual inter-titles, the film utilizes montage sequences of newspaper headlines, particularly in relation to historical facts regarding the treatment of sexual assault. As Julia Lesage has noted, The realist feminist documentaries represent a use of, yet a shift in, the aesthetics of cinema verité, due to the feminist filmmakers close identification with their subjects, participation in the women’s movement, and sense of the films’ intended effect.17

In Sex Crimes Unit, Lisa Friel and her staff are presented as feminist in their commitment to survivors and in their ability to articulate feminist ideas in relation to their work. From the outset, subtitles and inter-titles anchor the action. In the opening sequence, Lisa Friel talks on the phone over the title “Daily Initial Crime Report.” In this establishing scene, in which Friel is introduced, the audience views framed photographs of her three children as toddlers and as young adults, and learns that she has been working in the department for 23 years, that “she has been Chief of the unit since 2002,” and that “she oversees 40 senior Assistant District Attorneys.” A close-up of a sign on her desk reveals the slogan “I have flying monkeys and I am not afraid to use them,” in reference to the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. Friel’s discussion of her son’s college application to Tufts University receives emphasis just a few minutes later. Throughout the film, personal details about the women and men who work with Friel are also included. These details sometimes include work habits (one ADA likes to visit the crime scene on the night before the trial, another likes to handwrite her notes for closing arguments), while many bear no particular relation to the job (a candy jar that circulates in the office). ADAs are often shown ordering food, visiting local eating establishments, discussing food, sharing candy, and eating together. They discuss their children, stages of pregnancy, and feelings about the various cases and elements of the job at hand. Jackson’s unusual access to the members of Friel’s group

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and their work routines results in some fairly intimate camera work. The camera captures them in personalized locations such as driving a car and standing in line for doughnuts. One interview features the speaker riding in the back seat of a car while the camera angle is from the front seat. As Lisa Jackson articulates in her “director statement” on the film’s website, these details were a central part of what she wanted to show in the film: … what really blew my mind were the women prosecutors I filmed. They were tenacious and compassionate and laser-focused but they showed me their true humanity in surprising ways: obsessing about TV shows (Rock of Love!), fretting a child’s college financing, cajoling cops, having babies, talking baseball and worrying about their weight. It’s odd to say that a film about sexual violence can be full of laughter and joy and the infectious pride of doing good work, but that was the reality I found in those cluttered offices … 18

The film goes even further than the inclusion of personal details, and at several points includes footage of Friel and her ADAs making specific remarks about their dedication to their jobs. The most notable of these is in discussions by and about their colleague Melissa Penabad, who was pregnant during the time that the film was being shot, and whose baby was born during one of the culminating trials. After the baby is born, a conversation about jury selection digresses into the information that “Melissa is home with the baby … she kind of fell off the map, with a newborn … she is so busy!” Near the end of the film, she and her colleagues note that, although the case lasted throughout the pregnancy, she did not want to miss any aspect of the development of the case in spite of the birth of her child.

Debunking rape myths The film can easily be understood as feminist on the level of overt argumentation in that it is easily read as a corrective debunking of several clearly articulated rape myths. There are several commonly held myths about rape that the DAs actively work against, and in some scenes, they even lament how the attitudes of the general public tend to hamper them in their work advancing the cause of victims. Within the film, the members of Friel’s staff work to explain that victims do not ask for violent sexual assault, that the majority of sexual assaults are committed by acquaintances rather than strangers, that a victim’s engagement in illegal activity does not mitigate the crime committed against her, and that rape is not the same as sex. The film offers explanations that juries can make decisions about sexual assault cases just as well as they can make decisions about other cases, that special corroborative evidence in rape is not an appropriate or necessary legal requirement, and that a victim’s prior sexual activity is not relevant to whether or not she consented in a particular instance. The ADAs are quite articulate both in their support of reformed rape laws and victim rights

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and in their refutation of common rape myths. Several of the ADAs’ conversations and insights provide sections in which either monologues or dialogues focus on ways in which the crime of rape is generally misunderstood. Notably, one of the two central cases followed in the film involves a victim who works as a prostitute, and her rights are adamantly defended at numerous points in the film. The ADAs make several statements about the importance of believing and pursuing the claims of any victim, no matter her background or line of work, and they also note that cases of this type generally do not end in conviction. They insist that in this particular case, the victim’s persistence and strength in preserving evidence, as well as her willingness to make herself vulnerable to the negative views and judgments of others including the jury, resulted in an unusual successful conviction. In one scene, ADA Coleen Balbert explains how some potential jurors can be understood as misguided in their understanding of rape and rape victims. She explains how some potential jurors had to be eliminated from consideration because they were sort of … “how we could assess the credibility of this witness when she is engaging in illegal activity when she is alleging that the defendant was engaging in illegal activity” … maybe because he raped her at gunpoint? … there is a little bit of a difference … so I was like, you know what? You’re going down for cause.

An extended discussion follows, focusing on the fact that participating in an illegal activity such as drug use does not mean that a person cannot be a victim of a violent crime, or that their victimization is not understood as such by the law. Lisa Friel goes on to note that women are often harder on females than men are (as prospective jurors), and that one reason is their psychological need to believe that they could not be similarly victimized because they would never do whatever the victim in the case at hand has done, whether it be drug use, prostitution, or some other activity. She and the Assistant DAs articulate their understanding of their work and their commitment to justice for survivors of sex crimes no matter what their identities. They emphasize that a victim’s credibility does not depend on her profession, and they redirect focus toward relevant qualities of honesty, reliability, evidence, and bravery in the face of personal risk in coming forward. They admire and praise the prostitute victim in this case for her bravery and strength in preserving evidence and coming forward in spite of the risk of being disbelieved or discounted. Jackson captures the commitment in action of the ADAs to the rape victims with whom they work. There are several scenes in which the prosecutors emphasize their empathy for victim-witnesses. Balbert notes: “she was honest, and I think that is all you can really ask of a witness is for them to be themselves and to be honest and tell the truth, and I think she did that, you know, with a sense of composure and … I think it was obviously really difficult for her.” Walking out of the courtroom as the individual jurors are polled for their agreement with the verdict of “guilty,” she notes “as soon as I get back to my office I’m going to call her, and I’m going to let her know, and she’s going to be thrilled.” The prosecutors talk with survivors on the phone at various

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points including the resolution of the case, praising their intelligence, strength, and persistence, as well as specifically naming the way in which the guilty verdict confirms the jury’s support. In the case of the victim who was working as a prostitute at the time she was raped at gunpoint, Coleen Balbert emphasizes how the verdict is a validation of her experience as a victim and for her humanity. On the phone at her desk, with the subtitle “phone call with victim” anchoring the image, Balbert says: You did it! You did it. You know, they believed you. You really did a tremendous thing by reporting it, and by coming forward, and by being honest about everything, and by telling the truth … I’m so happy that you got … the justice in the end … . Tears of joy are ok. There’s nothing wrong with crying.

Although this survivor is never named or shown on screen, support and guidance for her and all survivors are depicted as central to the work of the DAs office, and these segments emphasize both human connections and genuine caring for the victims of every case. By showing and referring to the human side of emotions in obtaining and hearing about the conviction, and by emphasizing the notion of justice, the film directs our attention to the reality that a victim’s identity or line of work does not call her credibility into question or make her victimization less real. Through its focus on Lisa Friel and her staff of ADAs, Sex Crimes Unit maintains an attitude of admiration by emphasizing the passion and commitment to the cause that is demonstrated in many scenes. Notably, in one scene, Lisa Friel lectures to an audience of sexual assault forensic examiners, emphasizing repeatedly that a victim of rape who comes to the hospital for help is to be believed and treated with respect. Her directives, such as “never use the word ‘claim,’ ” focus on the humane treatment of sexual assault victims and on their inherent credibility, as victims of violent crime, in coming to the hospital for care. She urges hospital personnel to be very careful about the language they use in other ways as well. As one example, she notes that words like “hickey” should not be used in case reports because of their connotation of mutually consensual sexual behavior. Throughout her talk, it is clear that victim rights and feelings are central, and that elements of doubt and questioning that might have characterized institutional responses to victims in the past are not considered appropriate or professional in this context. The scene is outside the realm of the legal process but is relevant to that process in that it pertains to the collection and recording of evidence by medical personnel. It is clear here that there is much work left to do, as the average medical worker seemingly will not think of the issues Friel discusses without this special training session. The very need for such training illustrates the reality that medical workers do not understand these issues automatically. In addressing these topics directly, Friel is effectively recognizing that the general population believes in the myths that rape claimants are likely to be lying, and that people might have a tendency to use the terms of consensual sex to discuss rape. In addition to emphasizing commitment to all victims no matter their identity or occupation, many of these scenes focus on the collection of evidence and the

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frustratingly stringent requirement for evidence in rape cases. At one point, Friel notes that conviction is nearly impossible, especially in acquaintance rape cases, without actual videotape of the crime. In this context, Friel also explains the goals and frustrations of the work she and her staff perform each day in relation to a common myth about the nature of rapists. Speaking about a perpetrator who was caught on film kidnapping the unconscious victim from a night club, she talks about how, since most people tend to believe that rape is a crime committed by men with serious psychological problems who cannot convince women to have consensual sex, the videotape is essential to conviction in this case. Friel notes that the average person would not believe that a seemingly normal man could commit this sort of crime: So many times I hear from people, oh, you know he’s so good looking and there’s no way he would have done this, and had we not had this on tape to prove that exactly what we knew happened happened, which we don’t in most cases, nobody’d believe it. You know, it’s a good-looking guy, he’s got a girlfriend, he can have sex whenever he wants to, why would he do this to someone who is passed out? Damned if I know.

At different points throughout the film, misconceptions about rape not only are debunked but a feminist point of view is explained by Friel or a member of her staff. They are uniformly articulate and very certain of their cause, whether they are discussing the myths at hand related to victims and their lack of credibility and tendency to lie, those related to corroborating evidence for acquaintance rape, or those related to perpetrators and their inexplicable behavior.

Authorial voice While it has traditionally been at odds with the techniques of cinema verité, Jackson is also able to use the element of expert “talking heads” to discuss the history of rape law reform from an authoritative point of view, and thereby express support for the reformed, feminist understanding of the crime that the new laws incorporated. This history itself followed a trajectory of debunking traditionally widely accepted myths about rape including the idea that most rapes are committed by violent attackers who were complete strangers to their victims. Linda Fairstein and Robert Morgenthau, Lisa Friel’s predecessors in the DA’s office, are presented as experts who share their knowledge. They offer helpful facts about how cases were handled in the past, legal requirements at trial such as the need for corroborative evidence to support the victim’s claim, and the abysmal conviction rate that was the result of these unique requirements. Fairstein is shown within the first three minutes of the film, noting that Today, a person calling 911, making a complaint about a sexual assault or a domestic assault really has no idea of what the history of these crimes was, and

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that as recently as 20 years ago marital rape was not a crime, there was no such thing as stalking, there was no DNA, there was no science to say she’s right or she’s wrong about her attacker. Acquaintance rapes simply weren’t prosecuted almost anywhere in America.

Later, there is also discussion of legal understandings of consent and the advent of the “Rape Shield” law, which bars evidence about the victim’s sexual history as evidence of consent in a rape case. Such evidence was allowed until the 1970s under the assumption that a woman who had voluntary sex with multiple partners probably also consented in the instance at hand. Fairstein and Morganthau, both of whom were also featured in a more negative light in the 2012 documentary, The Central Park Five,19 are portrayed here simply as advocates for women’s rights and for rape law reform. Whereas in The Central Park Five their more problematic role in prosecuting the erroneous convictions of five African American youths in one of the most publicized cases in United States history is more central, here the treatment is laudatory. The controversial nature and history of the work performed by the ADAs in relation to sex crimes is not part of the representation of Sex Crimes Unit. Rather, the portrayal focuses not only on the dedication to women victims, but also on the trajectory of improvement in legal, police, and courtroom processes with respect to cases of rape and sexual assault. Viewers learn that real rape includes date and acquaintance rape, and that a victim’s personal sexual history should not be considered relevant in determining consent in a rape case. So-called “rape shield” laws now bar such evidence from most rape trials. The idea of heroic DAs fighting for positive progress in working against rape myths is central to the film. For instance, a lengthy sequence on the use of the “John Doe” indictment, in which the statute of limitations in rape cases is circumvented through the indictment of a rapist’s DNA profile (even though the perpetrator’s name is not known), further emphasizes the idea of progress and improvement in the handling of rape cases. In a “John Doe” indictment, prosecutors seek indictment of an individual DNA profile without knowledge of that individual’s name or “identity” in the usual sense. Once the indictment based on a DNA profile has been obtained, the clock on the statute of limitations stops, and the prosecutors have unlimited time to locate the person who matches the DNA profile from the rape kit (or other DNA) evidence. Several experts explain both the limitations of past evidence collection and the importance of the advent of DNA testing and evidence, as well as the principal behind the idea of the John Doe indictment, which is depicted as a partial solution for the problem that the statute of limitations presented. Furthermore, the film’s central inclusion of the Alexenko case, the first in which a John Doe indictment resulted in successful conviction of the perpetrator, underscores the idea that the state’s handling of rape cases is still improving and provides an overall hopeful tone in looking toward a future of more successful convictions than were possible at any time in the past.20 Presenting the history of the use of DNA testing in rape cases, Linda Fairstein remembers that it was in 1986 that a medical examiner first mentioned to her that there was a new technique that she would want to learn about

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because it would surely become very important to the prosecution of sexual assault cases. Assistant DAs narrate that, in Alexenko’s case, This rape kit went on the shelf, and that’s where it sat for the next nine and a half years. It was sealed, and nothing happened to it, and that happened with 17 thousand kits around the city, and the seals were never broken. But then in 2000 … our medical examiners office, which does all of the DNA testing for the five boroughs, joined CODIS, the databank system, so you now had profiles of known individuals that you could compare crime scene evidence to.

Morganthau remembers that he set up a cold case unit and “had to assign people to go through all those old rape kits, and see if you could match it up with the perpetrators,” while others remember the feeling of pressure placed on them by the statute of limitations, which was nearly expired on some of the cold cases. One notes of the Alexenko case that “we were desperate to go through cases and find those … that were nearing the statute of limitations, and do something with them.” Morgenthau concludes that You have the identification, the DNA of the perpetrator, but you didn’t know who it was, so you filed a John Doe indictment, so if that person was subsequently picked up, he could be prosecuted. And we were the first office in the United States to get a John Doe indictment against somebody who we only knew his DNA. We didn’t know anything else.

An inter-title against the background of a New York City landscape notes that “In 2006, New York State eliminated the statute of limitations on rape cases,” again emphasizing the idea of progress in handling these cases better and better over time.

Limitations Sex Crimes Unit utilizes cinema verité techniques to debunk several common rape myths and provide discussion of the history of rape law reform, particularly in relation to the use of DNA evidence. It also provides a complex and sympathetic portrayal of survivor Natasha Alexenko’s point of view and voice. It is also able to produce a portrait of the ADAs working on sex crimes cases as devoted to feminist principles and goals, dedicated to justice and victim support, and able to manage their own emotions while dealing with difficult cases and traumatized victims. The segments on these colleagues emphasize feminist struggle and successful social change, handled from the point of view of government agents that conflate their voices with a feminist point of view, focusing more on progress than on limitations or the long and difficult processes that can be involved in institutional shifts. Changes in the collection of evidence, in the elimination of the requirement for corroborative evidence to support victim testimony, in the advent of the “rape shield” law, and in the elimination of

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special jury instructions noting that rape claimant may be lying are all mentioned and explained by members (or former members) of the New York prosecutor’s office in the film. These expert talking-head segments not only contribute to the portrayal of these prosecutors as heroes who have accomplished important social change, but also locate the cause of this change squarely within the government itself, rather than including some discussion of the pressures brought to bear by external groups of feminists from the 1960s onward. Thus, the central focus is on heroic action by reallife individuals situated within the institutionalized setting of government, including primarily the DA and the assistant DAs, but also police officers who come to testify at trials, and even judges who are sympathetic to victims. Feminist voices that are critical of the slow pace of change, or current limitations to change, or the ways in which government officials define and measure change, are not included. Discussion of current limitations within the legal system is minimal. A number of techniques contribute to the impression that feminism is best (or only) represented by government agents. Jackson’s inclusion of recognizable reallife heroes from the past (Fairstein published a much-used book on rape and sexual assault)21 underscores the valiant efforts of the present-day heroes working on the cases that form the central narratives of the film. Their work is presented as part of a decades-long legacy of progress in victim support and feminist triumphs in handling these cases. At one point, for instance, Fairstein notes that “the elimination of the corroboration requirement was the first step in a long chain of legislative reforms in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.” At another point, she comments on how, the day before the vote of the New York legislature to eliminate the corroboration requirement for rape, The New York Times “ran an editorial stating that it was abhorrent to think that a man could be convicted solely on the testimony of a woman.” Here, the government’s reformed and feminist viewpoint is contrasted with the backward New York Times editorial. While this is a good point and not factually inaccurate, without the inclusion of the pre-1974 politics and activism surrounding the treatment of rape and rape victims by the legal system, the implication is that the government created the change on its own. Countervaling narratives focusing on feminist groups fighting against government forces in order to produce change are omitted. In New York, the work of the New York Radical Feminists in organizing speak-outs and consciousness-raising groups to examine patterns in rape cases and their police/government handling, could have provided relevant information for the film.22 The recognition of patterns and processes such as poor evidence collection, failure to take claimants seriously, and insensitive interviewing that was often described by victims as a “second rape” were all revealed to be contributing factors to the abysmal conviction rates common in decades prior to the 1970s. Trial practices mentioned by Fairstein such as special jury instructions, requirements for corroborative evidence, and allowance of personal history evidence were certainly contributing factors as well. While it is accurate to note that these elements of governmental practices and procedures did change over time, it is also important to note that the initial impetus toward change did not come from the government itself.

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The film’s use of captions and inter-titles also works subtly to retain viewer focus on the government and its agents as relevant heroes and to help elide other narratives of change. A lengthy segment on the advent of DNA testing and evidence focuses the trajectory of improvement in legal treatments of rape cases primarily on this new forensic tool. Missing is a discussion of the limitations of DNA evidence, or the difficulty of obtaining convictions without it. One newspaper headline functions as an inter-title notes that courts are making rape convictions easier. This is followed soon after with a subtitle noting that “without another conviction, Rios could be out in 2013.”23 A close-up of a second newspaper headline on DNA testing establishes the historical significance of this new technique. Captions indicating the magnitude of the crime, including “1 out of every 6 American women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime,” and “every two minutes someone in the United States is sexually assaulted” focus viewers’ attention on the big job that government workers are doing. DNA evidence is presented as a solution to the conviction problem without significant critical analysis or countervailing information. There is little mention of the preponderance of cases in which there is no DNA evidence, and the remaining difficulties in prosecuting them. Not only does the locus of social change within the film appear to be the government itself, but Jackson also highlights some points at which individuals within these institutional roles note that progress, or the pace of social change, has been limited and can be frustrating for prosecutors and victims. In these moments, blame is usually placed on an entity outside of the government, usually a generalized public opinion or traditionalism whose effects include tainting the jury pool. For instance, in her training session for sexual assault forensic examiners, Friel discusses how most people, particularly the “male half ” of the population, believe that women would be badly injured by any sexual penetration unless they were sexually excited (which in turn would, according to this benighted view, imply consent). Most notably, the prosecutors discuss the ways in which victim testimony can be questioned and brought into doubt, including misunderstandings about what constitutes consent (prior sexual relationships, work as a prostitute, or clothing style do not imply consent to sex at a particular time with a particular person). The prosecutors lament the ways in which many people, including potential jurors, still cling to outmoded beliefs in this regard, making prosecution and conviction difficult in cases that offer anything short of videotaped evidence of the attack in question. The result is an emphasis on the ways in which social change, or legal reform, has been slow or incomplete in dealing with sexual assault cases due to the outmoded beliefs of the general public, which lags behind the enlightenment of those in the DAs office. According to the film, it is in many ways these limited traditional attitudes among the general public that stand in the way of the heroic ADAs and their work on behalf of victims. In light of its overt feminist arguments and positions, the film’s failure to address myths related to race and rape is perhaps its most notable limitation. As previously noted, Friel, Fairstein, Morganthau and others are quoted in relation to several common rape myths and misconceptions. These include the perceived relevance of

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the victim’s engagement in illegal activity, the proper means of assessing a victim’s credibility, the belief that rapists are people who cannot get sex any other way, and the belief that rape victims make up their stories to protect their own reputations. However, in spite of its specific engagement with, and corrective of, this wide range of traditional rape myths, the film does not address rape myths that are related to race of perpetrator or race of victim. Along with this lack of acknowledgment of the myths that African/African American men are more likely to rape than men of other races, and that Caucasian women are under the highest threat of attack,24 the film includes case profiles that feed into these myths. Jackson’s subject matter was limited to the period during which she was filming in New York City and thus the film follows only two cases from start to successful finish. An unfortunate effect perhaps related to this limitation is that all of the perpetrators visually depicted appear to be men of color. These include both the perpetrators of the central cases, Kevin Rios and Victor Rondon, and an unnamed perpetrator caught on videotape kidnapping an unconscious woman from a nightclub in order to rape her. Even further, in one scene in the unit’s office, the camera provides a specific close-up of a newspaper clipping featuring a Black male with the headline “Sex Crazed Teen.” In light of the visual racial bias in the film, some discussion of the rights of the various victims and defendants in relation to their depiction in the film, or of their choice or lack of choice in participating through visual representation, could also have been meaningful here. Viewers are not informed of what choices these defendants have been able to make about their inclusion in the film, or of how decisions about which perpetrators to include were made. This information is only available outside the text itself. Defendant Victor Rondon is not depicted in person but is shown visually through several police photos. Kevin Rios, the defendant in the other case followed throughout the film, is depicted visually in still photo as well as in a grainy interrogation video and also in person during the trial. His personal and tearful appeal for leniency to the judge is included, along with the judge’s outraged response that his apology is not convincing and that his claim of innocence is absurd. Each form of representation depicts Rios as a criminal and/or liar. In addition to the numerous inclusions of black males as convicts, defendants, and suspects in rape cases, all of the victims who are visually depicted are Caucasian (the prostitute survivor in the Rios case is not named or shown in the film). There is no verbal information that would contradict this pattern, leaving the film with all Caucasian victims and all perpetrators of color. While the film in general is able to maintain an emphasis on a range of different fact patterns in sexual assault cases (i.e., violent stranger attack vs. kidnapping a drunk woman from a bar), this element, combined with the other signs of realism offered by the film, serves to suggest that there is a particular racial profile to sexual assault cases, whatever their other fact patterns may be. Even if the choice of cases was more a factor of chance timing than of any deliberate choice on Jackson’s part, the implications of racial composition of these combined cases could have been mitigated through the inclusion of some specific discussion of myths of rape and race.

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Conclusion Sex Crimes Unit presents a sympathetic and heroic, though not overdramatized, depiction both of rape survivors and of the people who make up this unit within the Sex Crimes Unit of the DAs office in New York City. The film utilizes several techniques of cinema verité including the use of inter-titles to anchor meaning and provide background, and the inclusion of personal details to establish the possibility of identification between the viewer and the dedicated prosecutors who work with these cases and the victim-witnesses they involve. The resulting portrayal provides a sense of reality that is based in these traditional techniques and presents the members of the unit as regular people who do emotionally difficult work and are dedicated to survivors. The film also articulates feminist arguments in relation to rape and commonly accepted rape myths. While its support and representation of the survivor’s voice is complex and strong, and its emphasis on debunking several commonly held rape myths is clear, there are also several limitations in the film’s treatment of rape, law reform history, victims, and perpetrators. Through the use of talking heads to convey information about social change efforts and successes, the film locates the impetus for this change within a government agency without reference to an external social movement. Feminist activists, as well as their history of protest against government handling of rape cases, are not included. Owing to both the cinema verité elements and the selection of cases that were available at the time of filming, misconceptions related to race and rape are not explored or debunked, and the film visually represents only white female victims and male perpetrators of color. Through an unusual level of access to the inner workings of the Sex Crimes Unit in the Manhattan DAs office, Jackson’s film is able to provide a somewhat heroic portrait of the dedication to the feminist principles behind rape law reform and the debunking of rape myths that underlies the unit’s daily work. The result is a committed documentary that is at once feminist and supportive of institutions of power in which and with which these DAs work. Although it was at one time targeted at critiquing, transforming, and replacing laws and procedures, feminism can accurately now be portrayed as institutionalized within the very realms it once critiqued. Sex Crimes Unit captures this significant shift, although it does not carry its feminist critique further to question current limitations of those same institutions. In focusing only on government agents dedicated to feminist principles, it excludes the wider social discussion that has contributed importantly to the recognition and support of the legitimate claims of rape victims.

Notes 1

2

http://sexcrimesunit.com/directors-statement/ (accessed February 2, 2014). Subsequent to the film’s release, in July of 2011, Friel decided to leave the unit in order to pursue other endeavors. Lesage, “Feminist documentary,” 223.

Creating a Sense of Reality in Sex Crimes Unit 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20

21 22 23

24

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Lesage, “Feminist documentary,” 225. Lesage, “Feminist documentary,” 232. Lesage, “Feminist documentary,” 231. Martineau, “Talking about,” 258. Martineau, “Talking about,” 262. Johnston, “Women’s Cinema,” 29. Johnston, “Women’s Cinema,”. Kaplan, “Theories and Strategies.” Juhasz, “They said,” 191. For further discussion of feminism and documentary, see also Hall, “Don’t You Ever”; Juhasz, “Introduction”; Kaplan, “Theory and Practice”; Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red; Spence and Navarro, Crafting Truth; Walker and Waldman, “Introduction.” See Projansky, Watching Rape. Lesage, “Feminist documentary,” 238. See Benedict, Virgin or Vamp; Bumiller, In an Abusive State; Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time; Cuklanz and Moorti, Local Violence, Global Media; Moorti, Color of Rape. Projansky, Watching Rape. Since some of the members of the Sex Crimes Unit use the term “victim” to refer to the women who have been victimized through sexual assault and rape, I used this term when closely following their work as presented in the film. In other instances, particularly in discussing Natasha Alexenko, the term “survivor” is more appropriate. Sex Crimes Unit as a text certainly privileges an understanding of Alexenko as a survivor who has been through a healing process and who has been able to find strength to rebuild her life. Lesage, “Feminist documentary,” 246. http://sexcrimesunit.com/directors-statement/ (accessed February 2, 2014). Central Park Five, Directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon. Natasha Alexenko has extended her work beyond the film in creating an initiative to support and press for the processing of backlogged rape kits. See http:// natashasjusticeproject.org/natasha/ Fairstein, Sexual Violence. Griffin, Rape and the Power of Consciousness. See also Brownmiller, Against Our Will; Russell, The Politics of Rape; Cuklanz, Rape on Trial, Chapter 2. At the time of the trial depicted in this film, Rios had already been convicted for another rape two years earlier. That conviction and the match to his DNA from this case were crucial to the second conviction. The sentence Rios received for the second rape is concurrent with his sentence in the first case. For discussion of race and rape, and related myths, see LaFree, Rape and Criminal Justice; Moorti, Color of Rape.

Bibliography Benedict, Helen. Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes. London: Oxford University Press, 1993. Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1975.

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Bumiller, Kristin. In An Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Cuklanz, Lisa. Rape on Trial: How the Mass Media Construct Legal Reform and Social Change. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. ———. Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Cuklanz, Lisa and Moorti, Sujata, eds. Local Violence, Global Media: Feminist Analysis of Gendered Representations. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. Fairstein, Linda. Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Books, 1995. Griffin, Susan. Rape and the Power of Consciousness. San Francisco, NY: Harper and Row, 1979. Hall, Jeanne. “Don’t You Ever Just Watch? American Cinema Verité and Don’t Look Back.” In Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Jeanette Sloniowski, 223–237. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Johnston, Claire. “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema.” In Notes on Women’s Cinema, edited by Claire Johnston, 24–31. London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1972. Juhasz, Alexandra. “They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality—All I Want to Show Is My Video: The Politics of Realist Feminist Documentary.” In Collecting Visible Evidence’, edited by Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, 190–215. Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 1999. ———. “Introduction.” In Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, edited by Alexandra Juhasz, 1–46. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Theory and Practice of the Realist Documentary Form in Harlan County USA.” In Show Us Life’: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, 212–222. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. ———. “Theories and Strategies of the Feminist Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary, edited by Alan Rosenthal, 78–102. Berkeley, MI: University of California Press, 1988. LaFree, Gary. Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Construction of Sexual Assault. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1992. Lesage, Julia. “Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics.” In “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, 223–251. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. Martineau, Barbara Halpern. “Talking about Our Lives and Experiences: Some Thoughts about Feminism, Documentary, and ‘Talking Heads.’ ” In “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, 252–273. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. Minh-ha, Trinh T. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics. New York, NY: Routledge, 1991. Moorti, Sujata. Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television’s Public Spheres. New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001. Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001. Russell, Diana E.H. The Politics of Rape. New York, NY: Stein and Day, 1975.

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Sex Crimes Unit. Directed by Lisa F. Jackson, New York, NY: HBO Documentary Films in association with Jackson Films Inc., 2011. Spence, Louise and Vinicius Navarro. Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Walker, Janet and Diane Waldman. “Introduction.” In Feminism and Documentary’, edited by Janet Walker and Diane Waldman, 1–35. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

3

Calling the Consumer Activist, Consuming the Trafficking Subject: Call + Response and the Terms of Legibility Annie Isabel Fukushima and Julietta Hua

The face of a woman of color is featured on posters and fliers advertising the antitrafficking documentary Call + Response (2008; Figure 3.1). She stares directly at the viewer and her mouth is covered with a photoshoped black-and-white banner of the film title. The tagline to the left of the image reads, “a film about the world’s 27 million most terrifying secrets.”1 Over her mouth are the images of artists and actors: Ashley Judd, Moby, Julia Ormond, Natasha Bedingfield. Below these celebrity images is one of Justin Dillon, the film’s director. The covering of the woman’s mouth—a woman who represents “the world’s 27 million”—reinforces the silence of the anonymous victim against the vocalized response of the featured celebrities, who provide the majority of the direct address in the documentary. This publicity poster captures the contradictory work of documentary film, particularly those that fall into the genre of human rights documentary. They serve as a remedy to the violence being depicted by calling attention to it. Yet at the same time they inflict their own violence in how they represent the subjects of such violence. Call + Response uses a monolithic image of “the world’s 27 million” to address and engage the primary audience of global North, English-speaking viewers into a particular form of consumer action, and in doing so, reproduces troubling racialized images of helpless victims. As the poster depicts, the victims of violence and abuse are unable to speak for themselves; they serve only as a backdrop. This chapter considers what is at stake in a human rights documentary like Call + Response, which does more than represent; it shapes reality by defining how, what, and who we see and accept as trafficking’s subjects. In 2010 Call + Response was featured in San Francisco as part of National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.2 The film incorporates Grammy-winning and critically acclaimed artists3 who collectively present a “rallying cry for the abolitionist movement currently brewing.”4 The film has generally been reviewed positively for its use of music,5 its interviews with experts and celebrities, and its commitment to ending human trafficking.6 Call + Response invokes the rockumentary—a film that documents musicians and musical events—but also adheres to the ethnographic

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Figure 3.1 Poster for Call + Response (Justin Dillon, 2008)

documentary where the “creative treatment of actuality” comes to “represent the historical world.”7 We provide an analysis of Call + Response in this chapter because the film represents some of the most mainstream and easily accepted views on trafficking and remains a popular film endorsed by the United Nations. We argue that documentary film is an important site through which social, political, and moral norms are produced and articulated. Documentary films like Call + Response exist alongside legal and political documents, news media, fiction, and other texts, shaping the broader discursive landscape of meanings that define “human rights” and trafficking. Our goal is to disrupt the ways films like Call + Response naturalize racial, national, gendered, and neoliberal assumptions shaping

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the subjectivities of trafficking victims, rescuers, and criminals; first world and third world; and women and children. Human rights films like Call + Response use cinematic conventions such as interviews and simulated “found footage” to activate and naturalize “certain cultural and national narratives”8 around race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship that not only reproduce stereotypes and caricatures, but also build a hierarchical understanding of human rights where certain issues become urgent while others are dismissed. As Wendy Hesford points out, the value of trafficking and the trafficking victim within a growing human rights economy is tied to how anti-trafficking documentaries, images, and narratives allow viewers to see, namely through the dichotomizing of subjects: the abject victim over and against the active rescuer.9 This is a process that, as Chandra Mohanty eloquently demonstrates, enacts a representational violence by constructing the “Third World Woman” as tradition-bound and uneducated while naturalizing the so-called modern and progressive West.10 Call + Response specifically elicits a politics of (first world) rescue and advocates for informed consumer activism as the primary strategy for change, which we argue reproduces violence by naturalizing racialized colonial paradigms of differentiation (like those critiqued by Mohanty) and capitalist principles of uneven accumulation. As Bill Nichols notes, documentary films are important because they can tell us about the historical context within which they are situated.11 The context for films like Call + Response is defined by an expanding landscape of human rights, where human rights serve as a catchall for the world’s moral conundrums. Yet, not all issues become legible or accepted as human rights concerns. Thus the human rights landscape works as an economy of its own, where documentaries like Call + Response “generate public outrage, gather supporters, raise funds, build organizations, and consequently … press the human rights system to include it [trafficking] as a violation.”12 One aspect of the work of documentaries like Call + Response is the marketing of human trafficking as a commodity. This is not unique to Call + Response; it is also found in the marketing strategies and narrative structures of films such as Cargo: Innocence Lost (2005), Not for Sale (2007), and Nefarious: Merchant of Souls (2013). Hence films like Call + Response need to be situated and read for how they help define and place sociopolitical value on violence. That is, in an ironic turn, some forms of violence become valuable in the human rights economy because this violence serves as evidence that an issue is worthy of attention, action, and funding, and documentary films play important roles in shaping this economic field. In what follows, we first situate Call + Response within a broader human rights mediascape. Understanding human rights as emerging within a mediascape necessitates considering how multiple forms of media interact and collectively shape and are shaped through narratives, images, and discourse that give meaning and value to concepts such as human rights. Attention to human rights mediascapes is important because it emphasizes the interaction of politics, media, and entertainment in defining which activities come to count as human trafficking (and which do not). We argue that the circulation of the film and its content reinforces a United States-state centered perspective and approach to anti-trafficking, economic freedoms, and justice even

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within ostensibly international arenas. Next we present the stakes involved, namely the ways particular understandings of racial, gendered, and national difference are naturalized throughout the film and its accompanying promotional materials. Finally, we argue that the remedy the film ultimately proposes of a consumer activism fueled by the Internet, which we link to the filmmaker’s other anti-trafficking projects, inscribes human rights as a moral and ultimately neoliberal project. We propose that addressing the violences of trafficking necessitates more than consumer activism; it requires attention to mainstream assumptions that affirm a too-simple dichotomizing of rescuers and victims, “western” and “other,” active and passive. We are critical of Call + Response not because we disagree with the production of such films. They play an important role in shaping social norms, whether we agree with their messaging or not. They also help publicize issues like trafficking, which while important, is a process that we argue needs to be explored. We argue in this chapter that human rights documentaries like Call + Response do more than move audiences to care about issues like human trafficking. They help shape how we understand and define trafficking, and relatedly, how we envision change. Understanding the human rights documentary this way is crucial in reframing, rather than re-asserting, troubling racial, gender, and national stereotypes and caricatures.

Human rights mediascapes For most human rights scholars, World War II marks a significant moment when the “human question” captivated our approach to world politics, enabling the rise of not only the United Nations and other international governing bodies, but an economy of humanitarian orientated nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). These NGOs appear in the political field as a space that exceeds the state, a space with the possibility to address what the state can or will not.13 To fulfill the identity of the NGO as a “third space,” NGOs must compete for private sources of funding, making marketing an increasingly central activity. As Marc Abeles, Andrea Smith and the INCITE Collective, the Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar, and others argue, competition for funding not only professionalizes the NGO, but places pressure on finding “good victims” to represent and market the NGO to potential donors. These good or ideal victims are constructed through direct promotional materials, and the “complex repertoire of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes” that find form in documentary film as well as state authored materials including laws, scholarly research, and so on, all of which tie “the world of commodities and the world of news and politics.”14 This broader interaction of multiple sites and forms Arjun Appaduri terms “mediascape.” A mediascape refers to the distribution and dissemination of the repertoires of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes15 via newspapers, magazines, television, film, or the Internet. The circulation of such images, narratives, and ethnoscapes constitutes the scripts and narratives used to understand, define, and differentiate “us” from “them” and our views of the world.

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Therefore, human rights mediascapes constitute the landscape through which the idea of human rights and its subjects are produced and given meaning. Human rights documentaries like Call + Response are a key component of these emerging human rights mediascapes, and trafficking has gained worldwide prominence in part because it is defined as a nebulous phenomenon in need of greater visibility. Defined as an activity that can happen to anyone at anytime, human trafficking opens itself up to varying perceptions and definitions, making quantification a difficult and even impossible feat, evident in the wide range of statistical data cited around human trafficking.16 In addition, the growth of antitrafficking strategies on national and international agendas is both a result of and cause for increasing levels of available monetary funding, creating intense competition to discover victims. Although many legal scholars consider the development of a standardized definition of human trafficking and migrant smuggling at the international level as a true breakthrough,17 ongoing research and new policy implementations to counter human trafficking point to the limitations of existing laws.18 Julia O’Connell Davidson, for instance, argues that the small numbers of authenticated trafficking victims is evidence that there is still no consensus about which situations are trafficking cases and which are simply matters of prostitution, smuggling, and undocumented migration.19 A survey of scholarly texts illustrates that human trafficking, by definition, is broad.20 Because trafficking can happen anywhere to anyone, and its exact form is uncertain, trafficking privileges visuality and the trope of revelation. Documentary film, even as it presents a constructed vision, has an element of witness that works alongside trafficking’s presumed need to be witnessed in order to be stopped. Thus films like Call + Response produce “humanitarian entertainment,” defined as the advancement of political claims by way of the culture industry,21 which works to market certain issues as worthy of money, attention, and advocacy. In fact, antitrafficking documentaries often deploy what Leshu Torchin describes as “media witnessing,” where the text or narrative (film, news story, non-fictional account) functions as a kind of testimony taken as truth and used to mobilize action.22 As Nichols points out, strategies key to defining the genre of documentary—cinema vérite, direct address, use of a “God voice,” and so on—centralize the notion of witness in order to construct a particular vision of reality.23 Attention to the idea of mediascapes enables us to consider how documentary films work alongside national and international laws to construct human trafficking. In 2000, the United States established its own legal definition of human trafficking with the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (reauthorized in 2003, 2005, 2008, and 2013) that parallels the international definition.24 The international legal regime and the implementation of the United Nations Protocol (2000) frame human trafficking as consisting of an action—“recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or a receipt of a persons”—through a means (“threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or position of vulnerability, giving or receiving payments or benefits to achieve consent of a person

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having control over another”) for exploitation.25 Feminist debates about trafficking are most publically visible when they present polarized locations; from the “sexual domination discourse” that views prostitution as a form of women’s oppression, to sex work as a space of potential agency and choice.26 Like Gretchen Soderlund we approach human trafficking as a social construction; it was not discovered, but “created as an object of humanitarian action, law enforcement intervention, and human rights policy.”27 As a social construction, how certain meanings and definitions get attached to trafficking can tell us about the kinds of racialized, gendered, and national values that become naturalized as social norms. These norms are important to identify because they can inflict representational violence in shaping how we imagine victimization and criminality, innocence and guilt. Human trafficking and its subjects are sustained by a paradigmatic dialectic of invisibility and visibility that is produced through sociopolitical, cultural, and legal discourses.28 The invisible potential victim or criminal shapes who officials recognize as the visible subject of trafficking, and how these subjects are recognized. Documentary films, along with legal and scholarly texts, help define the reality of human trafficking. Together these sites shape the mediascape of human trafficking that posits the violence of the trafficker against the innocence of the victim. The innocent victim and spectacular nature of the violence endured give value to trafficking within a broader economy of human rights. For Elizabeth Bernstein, Jennifer Musto, and others, the contradictory work of much human rights activism emerges from an uncritical acceptance of certain carceral politics—that criminals are never also victims, and that criminals should be punished—which justifies state violence and encourages the politics of rescue. Rather, in the section that follows, we argue the need to break away from too-easy understandings of trafficking as matters involving “innocent victims” against “guilty criminals” because this framing leaves unaddressed the benevolent rescuer (whether the state or individual) and reproduces troubling racial and gendered stereotypes. We argue instead that when the victim-criminalrescuer paradigm is troubled, and the contradictory nature of human rights is embraced, we might better address violence by recognizing its multiple forms. The act of representing violence, even if it is in order to address it, produces other forms of violence, which we explore in the sections that follow.

National and cultural narratives of race and citizenship What makes Call + Response unique, beyond its popularity, is its connection to a broader range of promotional and linked materials: a mobile app, a website that takes donations, a CD of music from the film, fliers that come with the purchase of a DVD, and stickers. Call + Response uses this multi-platform approach to market the film, allowing for low-budget advertising, which has nonetheless resulted in soldout screenings in major cities like New York and Los Angeles.29 Call + Response has also had international appeal and promotion, namely through the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT), a transnational body of

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anti-trafficking organizations aimed at fighting human trafficking. The Internet has thus served as an important community space for promoting the film; additionally, Internet circulation of the film helps establish it as a key artifact in a growing archive of anti-trafficking materials disseminated on a transnational scale. The UN.GIFT website includes a media hub, in which the collection of films “plays an indispensable role in educating people about human trafficking, presenting the problem in human terms and in all its painful detail.”30 The fact that not all anti-trafficking films are archived on the UN.GIFT website helps make films like Call + Response seem relatively unique and underground, a counterpoint to the underground activities of human trafficking. This uniqueness is a marketing tool for Call + Response, as a respected international body like the United Nations deems it one of a handful of must-see films for those interested in fighting human trafficking. Yet despite the film’s international promotion on UN.GIFT, the cultural and national narratives Call + Response present firmly center and privilege the United States as the leading site of anti-trafficking activism. Even as the film defines itself as an alternative to state-sponsored representations of trafficking, it reinforces agendas complicit with United States state discourses. For example, a mock I.D. card is one of the many supplemental materials accompanying the film. The card belongs to one H.T. Vic Tim (“H. T.” presumably standing for “human trafficking”; see Figure 3.2), an Asian woman with long black hair, dressed

Figure 3.2 Call + Response (Justin Dillon, 2008) in a pink tank top. In the I.D. her eyes are covered with a black anonymity strip. H.T. Vic Tim’s address, which is also the location of her exploitation, reads, “Grande Ole Massage, Myciti.” The card’s description notes H.T. Vic Tim is a “2nd Class Citizen” with a birthplace of “S.E. Asia.” The fine print along the bottom of the fake Tennessee driver license reads, “If this had been a lost driver’s license you would have done a good deed—so instead help us end slavery.” This identification card plays on a common question the United States government notes as important to ask in interviews assessing a potential trafficking situation: “Has someone taken your passport or

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identification?”31 The promotional material for the film assumes United States state recognition as an unproblematic solution for victims by referencing United States governmental resources as the response for what to do if one suspects trafficking, affirming state policing strategies and leaving unaddressed the state as a site of violence. That a film like Call + Response circulates as a transnational artifact reveals the political dominance of the United States nation-state in the mediascape of humanitarian entertainment. This United States-centrism is evident in the ways Call + Response and its promotional materials represent English-speakers as rescuers and racialized others as the problem (whether trafficked victim or criminal trafficker). These representations are evident in the promotional trailer, which, unlike most movie trailers, offers a narrative that does not appear in the film—a scene of a group of men enjoying a night out on the town. The film trailer features white, English-speaking men on a bachelor party (mis)adventure that begins with the group going out to buy sex. As the group checks the camera, one of them asks “are we on, camera?” making perceptible not only who they will see, but also their own role in witnessing alongside the viewer. Thus the viewer discovers along with the men a room with a girl-child sitting desolately on the edge of a bed, with her feet dangling, not touching the ground. The viewer discovers that the sought-for sex has quickly turned from a carefree bachelor party to a grainy and underground world the men quickly recognize as amoral and repugnant: They quietly ask, “dude what kind of place is this?” The undercover camera effect produces the revelatory scene of the girl as “wrong … obscene and foul … [something] that I’m not going to stand for,” as running text throughout the trailer reiterates. Here the viewer’s perspective is firmly aligned with the protagonists of the trailer, the men seeking a good time only to realize their own naiveté. The camera work never allows the viewer to see from the perspective of the girl in the bedroom; the trailer renders her passive. The trailer ends in much the same form as the film, with interviews of Ormond and Judd who remind the viewer that sex trades are lucrative and human trafficking is, “the fastest growing crime on the planet. … We live in a world in which we don’t even know what is going on next door.” Like the film, the trailer addresses a “you” who is like the protagonists of the trailer and like the filmmaker Dillon—a politically legible citizen-subject of an English-dominant nation-state. For example, the film depicts student activists in San Francisco as important participants in the global antitrafficking movement. Dillon narrates, “I got to meet these students in San Francisco who map slavery in San Francisco,” as the film depicts two white women standing in front of a massage parlor they mark on a map. There are no scenes representing nonwhite rescuers and the film, by only representing examples such as the students in San Francisco as activists or the bachelor partying men as potential rescuers, suggests that those who are capable of properly apprehending trafficking situations and speaking out about them are the protagonists. Such constructions make too simple the subjectpositions shaped through trafficking discourses, where the active and speaking rescuers are never considered part of the problem. The trailer never suggests that the uneven global distribution of wealth that enables a group of English-speaking men

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to travel easily is also responsible for the perpetuation of trafficking. The privileged positions of the trailer’s protagonists are taken for granted and never questioned. Like the trailer, the film imposes its own form of violence in representing victims through particular embodiments (as abject and helpless, as racially and culturally “othered” against the presumed viewer/rescuer). The victims featured in the spliced scenes tend to represent South and Southeast Asia (the film specifically names India and Cambodia), and are depicted as either homogenized en masse or as singularly passive, as the girl in the trailer. Eastern Europe is also marginally represented in the film as a space of sex trafficking, and the film touches on other stories of trafficking including child soldiering in Africa. Yet these stories are narrated through celebrity interviews, rather than interviews with purported victims. Few “victims” speak: an Asian woman speaks about being sold to a brothel and being raped when she attempted to leave, a Nigerian musician describes his commitment to making people aware of his and others’ experiences of child soldiering, a blurred European woman describes being coerced into sex work, another Asian woman speaks about her inability to leave the brothels. Even in these instances, victim-narratives are supplemented by celebrity commentary like Ormond’s insistence that “none of them [African child laborers] can smile.” Trafficked people’s experiences are recounted through a third party spokesperson further cementing the subjectivity of the victim as incapable of self-rescue. Given the long-existing colonial discourses that tie racial otherness to lack of self-determination, rationality, and civility, the uncritical ways in which Call + Response reaffirms such constructions needs to be problematized for how it perpetuates long-standing, racialized constructions. Racialized constructions also shape the criminality identified in the film as the primary problem. Like the trailer, the film begins with black-and-white, simulated undercover camera footage taken inside a brothel. The footage eventually reveals several Southeast women and children standing behind one Southeast Asian man who speaks in broken English to the disembodied, British-accented male voice behind the camera: “It’s okay, no problem. I do for you, I know what you like,” as he points to the women and children who surround him. They are asked by the voice behind the camera if they do “everything, like boom boom [intercourse]” and “yum yum [oral sex].” Here the criminal element is visualized as a Southeast Asian man who enables the transaction of women and children. The man is racialized as similar to the women and children he traffics over and against his presumed difference to the male voice behind the camera (a difference emphasized through the Southeast Asian man’s broken and accented English), making the crime seem like a cultural problem of immoral global “others.” The fact that the camera-holder is seeking a transaction (even if it is assumed to be for the camera only) is never questioned. Where “johns” or purchasers of trafficked labor/laborers fall into the film’s moral schema is unclear. While there is an increasing political and even feminist move to expand criminalization of johns and buyers, the film’s uncritical representation of these undercover scenes suggests that johns are redeemable.32 The bachelor-party-gone-wrong presented in the film’s trailer suggests that seeing the hidden truth can lead to recognition and redemption. There is

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never any suggestion that rescuers like the cameraman might also be criminals; instead the lines delineating the criminal, rescuer, and victim are black-and-white. By constructing a moral terrain where the subjectivities of the victims, criminal traffickers, and rescuers are mutually exclusive, the film can suggest that the john or first world consumer (of trafficked persons, or of commodities derived from their labor) is a potential rescuer if only offered the opportunity to see the “truth” of trafficking’s violence, in contrast to the criminal trafficker who is never represented as redeemable. Further playing on the mutually exclusive subject positions (criminal, rescuer, victim), the film perpetuates the construction of the “womanchild”—what Pardis Mahavi and Christine Sargent describe as the collapsing of “womenandchildren” into “women as children”—which forecloses the possibility that victims might rescue themselves. Mahavi and Sargent further argue that the womanchild erases any potential exploitation of men, and naturalizes the infantilization of women.33 The scene of the children who boom boom and yum yum is continually revisited throughout the film, perpetuating the centrality of women and children as the primary victims of trafficking, and of sexual exploitation as the central marker of trafficking. Human trafficking is segregated into sexual and non-sexual contexts that gender labor, problematically placing male subjects as victims only in specific contexts and industries (i.e., agricultural fields or as soldiers). The film thus produces its own representational violence in how it defines the spaces through which viewers can understand trafficking’s subjects—for example, sexual violence as impacting women and children and separable from labor trafficking or child soldiering—foreclosing the possibility of seeing a broader range of exploitations as trafficking. The suffering and violence attached to a victim (and sexual exploitation works here as an indicator of severe violence) gives value to the subject, implying that some victims (those represented in the film) are more worthy of attention and rescue than others. The film thus facilitates a hierarchy of victimization, where the victim stories that are depicted in the film are implicitly contrasted to those the film leaves out. Such hierarchies are unhelpful as they conceptualize difference as layers of victimization; as many feminists have argued, oppression is not layered, but rather it is entangled with understandings of (racial, national, sexual) difference and power. The cultural and national narratives that shape how viewers interpret Call + Response reinforce racialized understandings of citizenship (white and Englishspeaking rescuers against non-white and “third world” victims and criminals). Multiculturalism also functions as a cultural and national narrative that contextualizes the film’s message and its acquisition by viewers. In what follows, we examine the film’s use of call and response—a musical form where one stanza responds to another, usually performed through two distinct instruments or musicians—in order to argue that the analogizing of human trafficking with past forms of trans-Atlantic slavery allows the role of the United States nation-state in contributing to trafficking conditions to go unaddressed. We argue instead for an analysis attentive to structural conditions including the ways the United States nation-state is naturalized in Call + Response as the inevitable site of anti-trafficking activisms, democracy, and justice.

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Analogizing slavery: Recentering the nation Through its rockumentary structure Call + Response enables viewers to travel off—and on-stage: off-stage the viewer witnesses a story of human trafficking; on-stage viewers are shown ways to participate in a movement.34 As described by Keath Beattie, “in the rockumentary, performance—which functions in dialectical relationship with truth claims—is the productive realm of spectatorial pleasure.”35 In effect, viewers are caught between visceral responses to the music in tandem with a witnessing of human trafficking’s abuses. The film’s structure illustrates human trafficking through alternating cuts between artistic performances and interviews with experts and witnesses. This back-and-forth movement juxtaposes the musical performances as art against the non-musical elements as reality or “the truth.” Furthermore, the film narrates both the musical element of call and response, as well as human trafficking, as originating in the United States history of trans-Atlantic slavery, a strategy no doubt used to enhance the visceral response of the viewer. A key celebrity expert featured in the film, African American Studies scholar Cornell West explains that because all slaves had (nominal) control over their voices, the musical tradition of call and response emerged as a way to motivate and mobilize. He recounts the ways his own call to a white musician like Dillon follows in this legacy—one that Dillon is now continuing with his anti-trafficking film. For West, the form of musical address is a “truth teller”; it enables a way to speak what is otherwise unspeakable (for slaves, call and response music was a way to comment on their conditions without being punished for the content of their address). Although the film reflects upon this origin story of rhythm and blues music in the slave fields, it uses it uncritically, producing a link left un-problematized in the film: just as slaves spoke the truth of violence and were resilient in the face of that oppression, the film presents interviewees (including the filmmaker) and antitrafficking activists as “truth tellers,” the primary actors in the liberation of today’s slaves. The trope of call and response enables the viewer to identify with both celebrity activists and the African slave, fulfilling a multicultural mythos that thrives on the conceptualization of a political terrain where “we might all be victims”—that is, a political terrain where racism is assumed to be quickly disappearing for a postracial future. The film celebrates the fact that Dillon, a white musician, appropriates musical forms and traditions closely associated with enslaved communities. For example, Dillon states, “I found these old abolitionist lyrics that were written 150 years ago for the original abolitionist movement here in the states. They seemed as true now as they were then so I decided to write some music around them … and kind of steal them away and use them again for this new abolitionist movement.”36 Rather than interrogating Dillon’s whiteness and privilege, the film follows postracial logics that assume such questions no longer matter (or matter less than the good work resulting from this appropriation). The teleological work of the film is problematic in the way it elides key political questions that pertain to the structural conditions that dispossess, leaving the unevenly produced subject positions (victim, viewer/responder, filmmaker/caller) unaddressed. The film’s appropriation of the

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history of white abolitionist activisms is never problematized. The film never allows for the problematizing of the racial legacies and logics initiated through antebellum trans-Atlantic slavery. For example, present conditions enable a relatively privileged subject like Dillon to never have to question how his appropriation of call and response continues a long legacy of white musicians profiting from the musical talents and traditions of black artists. Rather, the film understands trans-Atlantic slavery as a past and discrete event (contained to “150 years ago”), and never attempts to link the structural conditions of uneven accumulation and dispossession initiated through trans-Atlantic slavery with the present conditions of globalized labor and capital. Further, the film’s centering of a black-white racial history of the United States ignores the ways slave work songs, and later blues and jazz, actually include an intertextual engagement with Native cultural forms and the history of Native displacement.37 As Jodi Byrd argues, inattention to the ways trans-Atlantic slavery interacted in complex ways with other forms of migration, including the forced displacement of indigenous peoples, erases the originary entitlement of the United States nation-state and naturalizes the ongoing displacement and colonialism of Native Nations. These are the complex and interconnected histories that the film too easily appropriates and glosses in its analogizing of trans-Atlantic slavery and human trafficking. We argue that the unproblematized equating of trans-Atlantic slavery with contemporary human trafficking is a dangerous analogy because it elides the ways racial power continues to shape the United States political and representational field, problematically suggesting that racism (as de jure practices of exclusion) no longer exists. That is, by placing trans-Atlantic slavery firmly in the past by suggesting its more modern expression is human trafficking, the film endorses a progress-narrative that erases the fact that Dillon, the film’s celebrity advocates, and the protagonists in the trailer inherit the privileges extracted from an uneven, racial, and gendered economic structure initiated in part through trans-Atlantic slavery. Furthermore, such an analogy naturalizes the primacy of the United States nation-state as a site of benevolent redress, ignoring for example, Byrd’s concerns about the ongoing United States colonial occupation of indigenous nations. As Chandan Reddy explains, “only through temporalizing racial experience into a past, present, and future can the state both invalidate itself and maintain its legitimacy.”38 Thus, in Call + Response, the United States nation-state is recuperated as a site of promise in addressing trafficking via contemporary legal strategies even as the nation-state is simultaneously invalidated as an actor that enables racism, racial inequality, racialized violences, and trafficking. While the re-centering of the United States nation is one assumption that Call + Response establishes through both cinematic convention and filmic content, another comes in the forwarding of “truth telling” through speaking out. The film’s centralizing of visibility and speech, evident in the use of call and response, celebrity proxies, and stories of abuse and victimization, suggests that justice is achieved through eliciting the testimony.39 While testimony and self-speech are invaluable tools deployed to address injustices, the privileging of testimony closes off consideration of the ways speaking out assumes a bounded subject of

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trauma and ignores the fact that testifiers might be re-victimized by having to speak out. As Kimberly Theidon’s work on truth commissions explains, testifying is not intrinsically healing and can often force a linearity onto narratives that makes too simple causal relationships. She argues instead for attentiveness to the fact that “there are questions that we do not have a right to ask.”40 In treating and representing victims as the background—the anonymous H.T. Vic Tim or one of “the world’s 27 million”—Call + Response never meaningfully asks how victims might conceptualize justice, nor does it consider that victims might prefer silence to certain forms of testimony. The analogizing of slaveries and the assumption that speaking out is the preferred means to justice are simply examples (not unique to Call + Response) that make clear what is at stake. Simply accepting the assumptions underlying dominant understandings of trafficking and human rights, like those represented in Call + Response, limits how and what we recognize as violence in need of remedy, and who we accept as victim, criminal or benevolent rescuer.

Thinking beyond consumer activism In the previous sections, we read Call + Response to demonstrate what is at stake when documentary human rights films are not analyzed for how and what they construct as truth, and what assumptions they make in establishing truth claims. In what follows we argue that the consumer-driven theme of Call + Response, in working to seek justice for those bought and sold, consequently repackages the trafficked person as commodity for mass consumption: a DVD, handout, sticker, website, and app. The consumer activism that the supplemental materials and film forward as the solution to human trafficking and the means to freedom for “slaves” envisions freedom as the expansion of consumer capitalist options and choices. The film even suggests that viewers might buy a slave’s freedom, by noting that the cost of setting a slave free equals on average the money spent by Americans on Valentine’s Day. We argue that this consumption-based framework is fundamentally conservative in its inability to question normative values, whether they are capitalist values that privilege consumption as the primary frame through which to understand subjects, or the ways contemporary (neoliberal) formations of dispossession “have been mapped onto previous racial and colonial (imperial) discourses and practices.”41 In our final reading of the film, we use the film’s proposed solution (not unique to Call + Response—many anti-trafficking organizations encourage consumer activism) in order to think about alternative strategies for change. Following J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy, we agree that “consumers have a limited economic role—they can decide to consume more, consume less, or consume differently,” but changing our given conditions, whether in order to end trafficking or for general human betterment, requires reframing existing paradigms for understanding difference and power: “Reframing can achieve what’s called a figure/ground shift and produce very different understandings that can lead to previously unthinkable actions.”42 For example, when the victims-rescuer-criminal

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paradigm is reframed, a “rescuer” who is consuming slave-free products might also be implicated as part of a “criminal” economic context (based on the theft and colonial occupation of lands) that unevenly distributes global wealth to the benefit of some at the cost of others. Seeing the mutual implication of differently situated subjects without losing sight of uneven life conditions (economic, social, political) can dramatically shift how we understand violence, human rights, and justice. That is, in reframing mainstream anti-trafficking discourses, human rights documentaries like Call + Response might examine how viewers participate in making a stratified global economy that distributes the risk of violence unevenly. The film’s website and app facilitate viewers to imagine themselves as part of a vast, online community of consumers and activists who “take photos of what [they] already own and demand slave free standards [and] post [their] photos and join the revolution” (Figure 3.3). Here ownership is key—even if the viewer does not own a trafficked person, he/she may own products derived from enslaved labor. For example, a supplemental brochure titled “Be the Response” (Figure 3.3) notes, purchasers of the DVD can and should not only “show the film” and “spread the word” by accessing “your social network,” but also participate in the online community of people who “fund the liberators,” share ideas, and “demand slavefree products.” The film and its promotional materials suggest that without the film to bring voices to the victims, which according to a supplemental brochure will enable “new audiences … [to] Be The Response,” and without the accompanying “demand for slavefree products” (information available to consumers via an app), trafficking not only goes unheeded, but unremarked and forgotten. The film’s call-to-action frames the viewer as also individual, activist, and consumer. Anti-trafficking activism here is envisioned as primarily practiced through awareness of individual’s consumer habits. That only certain global citizens have the capacity to photograph their belongings and post them online only reinforces the racialized and national assumptions naturalized throughout—that the primary rescuers/actors are the relatively privileged English-speaking global citizens, while the victims and criminals are racialized others. In the film, the consuming subject as the anti-trafficker is naturalized at the cost of making structures of dispossession invisible. What is rendered invisible is that which is unobservable and left unrepresented in the film—the structural conditions of consumer capital that normalize both violence and the dispossession of certain communities. There is no doubt that structures of dispossession include exploitative migrations and the displacement of peoples from places like “S.E. Asia”; there is no question that Asian migrants experience human trafficking. Yet in rendering a figure like H.T. Vic Tim visible as one of the 27 million slaves in the world,43 the film hails viewers (also the consumers of the DVD) as the response and solution to the rescue of the Asian diaspora eliding any interrogation of the history of United States exclusions, racisms, and heterosexisms that frame the relationship between the United States and “S.E. Asian” places in the global political economy. Further, the film universalizes a particular figure of the individual activist and rescuer, forgetting that access to the Internet is not universal, nor is the capability to pay more for, or spend time seeking out “slave-free” products.44

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Figure 3.3 Call + Response (Justin Dillon, 2008) The film approaches trafficking through a frame that centers commodity chains and global circuits of labor exploitation by stating, “we are connected” through product chains. Throughout, the film emphasizes that the commodification of people through slavery is morally wrong. By the end of the film Dillon asserts the interconnectedness of the victim, trafficker, and rescuer/viewer, noting that the demand for lower and lower prices for goods fuels slavery. Despite this attempt to situate trafficking within the broader global conditions of capitalism that unevenly

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distribute wealth, Call + Response never ultimately critiques the naturalization of capitalist principles; its critique of economic conditions remains invested in a global consumer capitalist subject who is simply an informed consumer who will buy the “better” product. In other words, there is no attempt to question the existence of global commodity chains, nor is there any exploration of the historical and colonial conditions that shape contemporary global economies. There is no critique of the idea of hierarchized labor chains (where third world workers enable first world consumers). Our critique of the film’s proposal for better consumer choices is not to suggest that such strategies are meaningless. They are very meaningful to the people that practice them, and have potential to, as Dillon notes, disrupt aspects of businessas-usual. We argue that without consideration of the ways consumer activism can take for granted a racialized and gendered transnational labor system, consumer activism will be a limited and limiting strategy for change. The limits of these neoliberal framings are evident in the film’s privileging of the anti-trafficking subject as the central agent of progress, attainable through proper and moral consumerism. For Dillon, anti-trafficking activism, and the eradication of trafficking as a whole, comes with properly harnessing “the power of one”—of orienting individual responses in a way the properly apprehends moral choices. Dillon’s investment in this kind of neoliberal politics is evident in his other projects as well, which include the Chain Store Reaction,45 Slavery Footprint,46 and Made in a Free World.47 He describes these projects this way in the film: “Like anything that moves society forward, we need commitment and innovation … . There’s never been a disease that has been eradicated, or a human rights issue that has been wiped out without both of those things.” The unquestioned contradiction of his statement is captured in the fact that, in a climate in which global economic inequalities exacerbate violence and exploitation, Slavery Footprint was one of the ten organizations to receive a portion of the $10.5 million grant offered by Google in 2011 to “end slavery and human trafficking.”48 The film’s focus on better consumer practices as the privileged path to eradicating trafficking disables an analysis of the linking of global labor exploitation with relational structures of violence—structures of violence that ignore the ways companies like Google depend on the segregated labor of “innovators” (like programmers) and “non-innovators” (like custodial staff at the Google campus) that reproduce colonial paradigms of dispossession. As David Pellow and Lisa Park painstakingly document in their study of Silicon Valley, the success of companies like Google as global technological “innovators” is only enabled through indigenous displacement, multiple transformations of the land that continue to necessitate exploitative labor conditions, and the uneven distribution of the economic and health costs such as the high rates of cancer and other diseases among the mostly immigrant workers of color who assemble hardware like microchips. That these labor conditions are not easily accepted or circulated as human rights violations, nor tied to phenomena like human trafficking, is exactly our concern.49 Although funding anti-trafficking efforts in the current global economic structure may alleviate the trafficking of some,50 it is not enough to aid the trafficked after they have been exploited as this does not change or challenge the multiple

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oppressions one lives through. Instead, we might rethink the easy relationship between documentary film and truth by looking at the digital storytelling project Creative Interventions’ Storytelling & Organizing Project (STOP). STOP creates platforms for sharing multiple kinds of stories offered by family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers where ideas for addressing violence are shared, enabling the creation of multiple communities (not always the same all the time, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not) working to address multiple forms of violence.51 Further, while films like Call + Response use victim testimony to craft a narrative, there are few instances where survivors of trafficking can offer a life-narrative. Cupcake Brown’s A Piece of Cake: a Memoir (2006), Theresa Flores’ The Sacred Bath (2008, Republished in 2010 as A Slave Across the Street), and Rachel Lloyd’s Girls Like Us (2011) are a few examples of memoirs authored by self-identified survivors of trafficking. That victim representations in films like Call + Response (as well as in many other venues like Congressional Hearings and in NGO promotional materials) limit survivors to narrating themselves only through their experience with trafficking’s violences erases a sense of the survivor as a whole person—as more than just a victim. In critiquing the consumer activism promoted in Call + Response, we argue for a rethinking and reframing of both how violence circulates (not just in physical abuse, but in representational and cultural sites) as well as what justice might look like (beyond being spoken for, or speaking out).

Conclusion In our analysis of Call + Response, we argue that documentary films participate in human rights mediascapes that set the terms of recognition for trafficking subjects. Even while documentaries like Call + Response advocate for, and enable, certain forms of action, they also naturalize the conditions for thinking of what constitutes (anti-trafficking) action and inaction. Thus we further argue that critical awareness of what kinds of ideas and assumptions become accepted as social norms is important because they can recirculate troubling racial and colonial legacies that enact representational violence in naturalizing notions of “othered” backwardness and first world progress. These representations manifest in Call + Response through the visual images of mostly non-white, non-English-speaking victims that are juxtaposed against United States and western European celebrity and expert interviews. Further, the film’s promotional materials shape the viewer into a potential rescuer (identified with the celebrity commentators), and the mutually exclusive construction of rescuer, victim, and criminal subjects never enables the viewer to imagine him-/herself as also criminal or victim. This construction also never allows the victim subject to act as her own rescuer and thus never asks whether the ways victims envision justice and redress depart from those the film represents. Human rights documentaries like Call + Response are important sites through which social norms and meanings take shape, and thus also sites where we can understand how such norms delimit our understand of the world. Even while they do

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the important work of drawing attention to violence, they also participate in a human rights economy that values violence as a means to justify attention and garner funding. Human rights documentaries also participate in representational violences that often manifest in familiar stereotypes of gendered and racialized subjects in need of rescue or discipline. Being attentive to this broader social and discursive context, we argue, is the first step in expanding how we address violence.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17

Some advertisements use the word “dirtiest” instead of “terrifying,” stating: “A film about the world’s 27 million dirtiest secrets.” http://www.impawards.com/2008/call_ and_response.html (accessed November 11, 2013). In honor of Human Trafficking Awareness Month United Nations Development Fund for Women/United States National Committee (UNIFEM/USNC) and San Francisco Collaborative Against Human Trafficking (SFCAHT) hosted a screening of Call + Response at the Artists Television Access (January 30, 2010). Artists featured in Call + Response include Moby, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids, Matisyahu, Imogen Heap, Talib Kweli, Five for Fighting, Switchfoot, members of Nickel Creek and Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, and Rocco Deluca. https://madeinafreeworld.com/projects (accessed November 1, 2013). Jeff Shannon refers to the music as “consistently good” in his review, “Call + Response’: A rough but impassioned call to end human trafficking,” The Seattle Times, October 9, 2008. http://seattletimes.com/html/movies/2008245187_mr10call.html (accessed November 1, 2013). Robert Abele, “Review for Call & Response,” Chicago Tribune, October 22, 2008. http://events.gazette.com/reviews/show/32631-review-for-call-response (accessed November 1, 2013). Bill Nichols references John Grierson’s definition to define the documentary form as not having a precise definition, however, as having particular characteristics that invoke documenting actual events in the historical world. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 6. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 9. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 9. “Under Western Eyes,” 333–358. Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 7. Levitt and Merry, “Making Women’s Rights in the Vernacular,” 84. Abeles, The Politics of Survival, ch 6. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33–35. See also Abeles, The Politics of Survival, 2010; Smith, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 2007; Sangtin Writers and Nagar, Playing With Fire, 2006. Appadurai defines ethnoscape as the people who constitute the shifting world we live in: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33. Guinn, “Defining the Problem of Trafficking,” 131. Laczko, “Data and Research on Human Trafficking,” 5–16.

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18 Jennifer M. Chacon conveys the failures of domestic human trafficking laws as not new, but rather due to historic failures of the United States to “successfully assess and grapple with the global and domestic forces that drive migration” (2979). See also Chuang, “Beyond a Snapshot,” 137–163. 19 Davidson, “Will the Real Sex Slave Please Stand Up?” 11. 20 Parreñas, Hwang, and Lee, “What Is Human Trafficking?,” 1016. 21 Galusca, “Slave Hungers, Brothel Busters, and Feminist Interventions,” 1–24. 22 Torchin, Creating the Witness. 23 Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 17. 24 Section 103(8): “SEVERE FORMS OF TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS.—The term ‘severe forms of trafficking in persons’ means—(A) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or (B) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.” From Section 109 (9): “SEX TRAFFICKING.—The term ‘sex trafficking’ means the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” United States Congress, Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Public Law 106–386. 106th Cong., October 28, 2000. 25 United Nations, Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, 2000. 26 Joyce Outshoorn’s research examines these dominant frames as they have informed the anti-trafficking debate, and argues that whichever way one views sexual economies—as oppressive or income generating—the feminist movement will have to come to terms with migration and new definitions of human rights and criminality. Jo Doezema proffers that the traffic in women is a myth engendered through ideological consolidations of sexuality around gendered meanings of consent. 27 Soderlund, “The Rhetoric of Revelation,” 193. 28 Fukushima, Asian and Latina Migrants in the United States and the Invisible/Visible Paradigm of Human Trafficking. 29 Alisa Harris, “A New Call, A New Response,” Web Extra, December 13, 2008. http://www. worldmag.com/2008/12/a_new_call_a_new_response (accessed November 1, 2013). 30 http://www.ungift.org/knowledgehub/en/media/index.html (accessed November 1, 2013). 31 http://www.state.gov/j/tip/id/index.htm (accessed September 27, 2014). 32 This works alongside criminal legal efforts in the United States to punish “johns” or consumers of sex, through compulsory re-education in “john schools” rather than incarceration. 33 Mahdavi and Sargent, “Questioning the Discursive Construction of Trafficking and Forced Labor in the United Arab Emirates,” 6–35. 34 Keath Beattie illustrates how the rockumentary form emphasizes showing over telling: “That is, rockumentary privileges the visual capacities of documentary over patterns of exposition” (25). 35 Keath Beattie illustrates how the rockumentary form emphasizes showing over telling: “That is, rockumentary privileges the visual capacities of documentary over patterns of exposition” (25). 36 The song is called “I am an Abolitionist” by William Lloyd Garrison. Jacobs, “William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and Boston’s Blacks, 1830–1865,” 259–277.

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37 Byrd, Transit of Empire, 118. 38 Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 192, 195. 39 As Torchin defines, “testimony relates to the rhetorical efforts of film projects that portray distant atrocities with the intention of ending them. The term is probably most often associated with the courtroom wherein the … witness testifies … in order to bring about justice” (5). 40 Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 141. 41 Chakravartty and Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt,” 368. 42 The film states this number, but governing bodies and research accounts do not agree on any estimate for the number of individuals trafficked worldwide. 43 Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy, Take Back the Economy, xix, 7. 44 A consumer capital based accumulation is further upheld when individuals who give toward Dillon’s projects are rewarded materially; donations toward Made in a Free World are linked to a “thank you” gift: the Call + Response soundtrack, the DVD of the film, a T-shirt or hoodie. 45 Chain Store Reaction encourages consumers to send a pre-drafted letter to a company. http://chainstorereaction.com/how_it_works/ (accessed November 1, 2013). 46 Slavery Footprint allows users enter pre-selected consumer products in their homes (like technology, clothing and so on) in order to calculate how many slaves work for them. http://slaveryfootprint.org/ (accessed November 1, 2013). 47 Money donated by visitors to Made in a Free World goes to rescuing, rehabilitating, and reintegrating trafficked Ghanaians. http://madeinafreeworld.com/ghana/ (accessed November 1, 2013). 48 http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/14/us/google-anti-slavery-grant (accessed November 1, 2013). 49 Pellow and Park, The Silicon Valley of Dreams, ch 1 and ch 4. 50 It is estimated that 12,000 people have been aided with the Google grant. http://www. cnn.com/2011/12/14/us/google-anti-slavery-grant/ (accessed May 15, 2014). 51 http://www.stopviolenceeveryday.org/stop-2/ (accessed May 15, 2014).

Bibliography Abeles, Marc. The Politics of Survival. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Beattie, Keith. “It’s Not Only Rock and Roll: ‘Rockumentary’, Direct Cinema, and Performative Display.” Australasian Journal of American Studies 24, no. 2 (December 2005): 21–41. Bernstein, Elizabeth. “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns.” Signs 36, no. 1 (2010): 45–71. Byrd, Jodi. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Chacon, Jennifer M. “Misery and Myopia: Understanding the Failures of U.S. Efforts to Stop Human Trafficking.” Fordham Law Review 74 (May 2006): 2977–3012.

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Chakravartty, Paula and Denise Ferriera da Silva. “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism.” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 361–385. Chuang, Janie. “Beyond a Snapshot: Preventing Human Trafficking in the Global Economy.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 13, no. 1 (2006): 137–163. Davidson, Julia O’Connell. “Will the Real Sex Slave Please Stand Up?” Feminist Review 83 (2006): 4–22. Doezema, Jo. Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking. London: Zed Books, 2010. Fukushima, Annie Isabel. Asian and Latina Migrants in the United States and the Invisible/ Visible Paradigm of Human Trafficking. PhD diss., Berkeley : University of California, 2012. Galusca, Roxana. “Slave Hungers, Brothel Busters, and Feminist Interventions: Investigative Journalism as Anti-Sex-Trafficking Humanitarians.” Feminist Formations 24, no. 2 (2012): 1–24. Gibson-Graham, J.K., Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy. Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Guinn, David E. “Defining the Problem of Trafficking: The Interplay of U.S. Law, Donor, and the NGO Engagement and the Local Context in Latin America.” Human Rights Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2008): 119–145. Hesford, Wendy. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Jacobs, Donald M. “William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and Boston’s Blacks, 1830–1865.” New England Quarterly 44 (1971): 259–277. Laczko, Frank. “Data and Research on Human Trafficking.” International Organization of Migration 43 (2005): 5–16. Levitt, Peggy and Sally Engle Merry. “Making Women’s Rights in the Vernacular: Navigating the Culture/Rights Divide.” In Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights, edited by Dorothy Hodgson, 81–100. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Mahdavi, Pardis and Christine Sargent. “Questioning the Discursive Construction of Trafficking and Forced Labor in the United Arab Emirates.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7, no. 3 (2011): 6–35. Mohanty, Chandra Tapalde. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30 (1988): 333–358. Musto, Jennifer Lynne. “Carceral Protectionism and Multi-Professional Anti-Trafficking Human Rights Work in the Netherlands.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 12, no. 3–4 (2010): 381–400. Nichols, Bill. “The Voice of Documentary.” Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1983): 17–30. ———. Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, 2010. Outshoorn, Joyce. “The Political Debates on Prostitution and Trafficking of Women.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 12, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 141–155. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar, Maria Cecilia Hwang and Heather Ruth Lee. “What Is Human Trafficking? A Review Essay.” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37, no. 4 (2012): 1015–1030.

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Pellow, David Naguib and Park Lisa Sun-Hee. The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Reddy, Chandan. Freedom with Violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Sangtin, Writers and Richa Nagar. Playing With Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism Through Seven Lives in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Smith, Andrea and INCITE, eds. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the NonProfit Industrial Complex. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007. Soderlund, Gretchen. “The Rhetoric of Revelation: Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 2, no. 2 (2011): 193–211. Theidon, Kimberly. Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Torchin, Leshu. Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. United Nations. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2000. http://www.osce.org/odihr/19223 (accessed November 18, 2013). United States Congress, Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Public Law 106–386. 106th Cong., October 28, 2000.

4

“The Nation Wants to Know!”: Documenting Sexual Violence on Indian Prime-Time Television News Swati Bandi

In a heated moment on the Indian prime-time English-language television news show The Newshour, its anchor Arnab Goswami confronts his guest Vinay Singh, the general secretary of the Hindu vigilante group Sri Ram Sene (Army of Lord Rama). Singh was there to defend the actions of his group members who on January 24, 2009, had physically and sexually assaulted a group of young women gathered at a bar in the Southwestern city of Mangalore, India. After repetitive telecasts of raw “documentary” footage of the assault shot by a television channel, Goswami says to Singh: “Are you trying to use any perverse argument to justify forty young men taking the clothes off, tearing the clothes of five young girls, smashing them, kicking them all over; making them fall around? The word in English for that, Mr. Vinay, is molest” (emphasis mine).1 Goswami’s certitude in naming the minute details of the molestation highlights the role that techno-mediated scenes of sexual violence, made available by ubiquitous video-recording technologies like cameras, cellphones, ipods, “nannycams,” etc., play in constructing expert-centric discourses of sexual violence. Spurred by his nightly invocation, “the nation wants to know!,” an imagined unified nation used these often graphic, unedited scenes, acting as objective “visible evidence,” to debate their anxieties over the bodies of female victims. Further, the temporality of such documentary scenes, that is, the attribute of “liveness,” accentuates the urgent and immediate nature of the violent event, turning each little detail of the violence into a singular unit of analysis. This ultimately helps produce a market-driven representational system that reconciles the use of sensational and spectacular codes of representation with conventional codes of objectivity and truth-telling. This “live” system of representation thus brings into question notions of cinematic realism and documentary indexicality in the representation of gendered violence in ways that deserve urgent problematization. This essay therefore uses “visible evidence” as an analytic to undertake an analysis of television news’ representations of sexual violence. To anchor my claims, I use a feminist lens to examine the coverage of two recent cases of sexual violence on the television network TimesNow, which claims to be “India’s most-watched English

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news channel,” and the in-studio The Newshour debate in particular. Specifically, I examine how market-driven television news employs “documentary” footage of the sexual violence to exaggerate its claim to the real, thereby mediating national consensus around sexual violence through its sensational and spectacular narrative grammar. I argue that English-language television news uses visible evidence of sexual violence against women to institute a neoliberal governmentality that ultimately works to discipline victims through its representational system.

“Mangalore Horror” In the days following the January 24, 2009 assault of the young women, television anchors, politicians, activists and pundits debated the moral, cultural and political intricacies of the event in mainstream media outlets, revealing deeply contentious views on the materiality of the female body and the multiplicity of ways in which codes of honor, tradition and citizenship are inscribed on it. Soon after the incident was televised, uploaded on the Internet and shared on social media, the Sene, a Hindu vigilante outfit with unestablished ties with the Hindu majoritarian political party Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) and the Bajrang Dal, the radical youth wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), claimed responsibility. The Sene claimed that they were provoked to such actions by their desire to correct the morally corrupt ways of the young women who had broken traditional Hindu/Indian norms of womanhood by drinking alcohol and socializing with men.2 Prasad Attavar, a member of the Bajrang Dal, claimed the attack was a “spontaneous reaction against women who flouted traditional norms of decency.”3 As it would soon become apparent, the vigilante group had appointed themselves the “custodians of Indian culture.” Pramod Muthalik, the Sene’s founder, is reported to have said, “whoever has done this has done a good job. Girls going to pubs is not acceptable. So, whatever the Sena members did was right.”4 The Union Health Minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, identified alcohol as the problem, promising to implement a national alcohol law to curb drinking, without which, he said, “India will not progress.”5 Over several weeks, the program played up the quality of televisual liveness, repeating on loop the shaky, unedited, prerecorded footage of the assault on the young women as “live” debates over “real India,” democracy, culture and morality raged on in brightly-lit studios, with flashy graphics and “live” reporting adding to the seemingly immediate temporality of the television proceedings. Further, the Newshour’s coverage of the Mangalore case also exemplified the crucial role of contemporary television news in constructing a Hindu nationalistic discourse premised on (Hindu) women’s bodies and threatening outsiders. Televisual logics of “liveness” and “real” in conjunction with expert commentary by the show’s guests, to some extent, worked to situate the perpetrators as “alien” to traditional Hindu/Indian values. For instance, on the 26 January Newshour debate “Will Ram Sena Pay For It?,” Renuka Chowdhry, the then Union Minister for Women and Child Development,

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called the attack on the young women “sponsored terrorism” against Indian women. As the shaky, unedited footage was slowed down and played on loop, she reiterated her position, claiming that the event evinced the “talibanization of India.” A curious entanglement presents itself in the debates surrounding the “Mangalore Horror:” the perpetrators’ Hindu-ness is effaced to foreground their unmodern, lower classness. By casting their actions in terms of their alien-ness; reinscribing their actions as foreign, not really modern Indian, nor traditionally Hindu/Indian (with a pure moral core), a discourse of the nation is seen to emerge. The Newshour’s approximation of the real, through its particular aestheticization of violence, is integral to creating this national discourse. As Mark Williams argues, television news carefully curates “live” debates, “live” sited reporting, and spectacular real-time graphics that emphasize shock value and proximity to death, to reaffirm “TV’s distinctive access to the real.”6 But, how does a popular medium such as television claim a generative role in the social life of the nation? To answer this question, I would like to briefly pause to provide historical context to how the medium of television news, ascribing to marketdriven logics, comes to anchor the access between televisual liveness and the real. And further, I examine how through aestheticizing sexual violence it helps institute a governmentality through a culture of self-surveillance to individuate the female victims of sexual violence from the material contexts within which she is embedded.

Aestheticizing television news Michel Foucault, in “Technologies of the Self ” refers to the self-surveillance practices through which individuals are socialized into an understanding of their own ethical selves.7 Laying out his attempts to chart a “history of the organization of knowledge with respect to both domination and the self ” he posits governmentality as the “contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self.”8 For Foucault, governmentality is established through a discourse of scientific, objective expertise or governmental rationality that reconstitutes the social by producing new citizen-subjects and new techniques for governing them.9 Expanding upon this conceptualization, scholars have theorized how a neoliberal governmentality recruits media technologies to initiate the production of new citizen-subjects who value “self-sufficiency and a kind of personal freedom that requires self-discipline.”10 It is my contention that in the Indian context “personal freedom” for women is a bargain best negotiated through governing oneself through self-surveillance and an interiority presumed to help them prevent rape and other forms of gender-based violence. As a technology of power then, television’s pioneering role, beginning in the late-capitalist period of the 1940s,11 in instituting this insidious governmentality must be theorized. Doing so will help trace television news’ generative role in producing a climate of fear and protectionism for women. In the Indian postcolonial context, despite small-scale telecasts in the late 1950s, it was only during the Satellite Television Instructional Experiment (SITE) of 1975–1976, an India–United States joint venture, that satellite television was

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used in aid of rural development. Although it began under the state’s modernity project, by the mid-80s, however, it had become a “standard, taken-for-granted part of the fabric of Indian everyday life.”12 This citation needs to be situated in the larger reconfigurations of the social in the Indian public sphere that was ushered in by the economic liberalization processes that took place at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Until the early 1990s, the state monopolized satellite television through Doordarshan, the state-run service. However, the large-scale economic liberalization processes set in motion a television revolution that has resulted in India’s television market climbing to the third spot (behind the United States and China) in the world.13 In the last ten years or so, television has grown exponentially, with more than 300 channels (including pan-Indian and local regional language channels) reaching an approximate 39 million homes and with estimated revenue of 500 billion rupees.14 Transnational television networks like TimesNow (owned by Bennett, Coleman and Company and Reuters, English), CNN-IBN (owned by Time Warner and India’s TV18 Group), and ABP (formerly Star News, owned by News Corporation) have a significant presence along with global satellite news channels like BBCWorld, CNN, and other financial news channels. Accompanied by the refrain, “The Nation Wants to Know,” Arnab Goswami, the Editor-in-Chief of TimesNow and anchor of the in-studio show The Newshour Debate exemplifies a new global aesthetic that is in stark contrast to the modest “public-service ethos” of Doordarshan, the state-sponsored “old” television news. This new global news aestheticizes the portrayal of violence by cannibalizing “visual forms and styles borrowed from contemporary TV commercials and an MTVstyle visual aesthetics, including fast-paced visual action, in a post-modern studio, computer-animated logos, eye-catching visuals and rhetorical headlines from an, often glamorous, anchor person.”15 The representational strategies employed by the program and other similar news shows of the “Mangalore Horror” and later, as I will show, the “Delhi Rape Case” put style over substance, following the logics of market-driven television news cultures. Thus, the representational shifts in television remade at various sociohistorical conjunctures imbricate the nation’s story of modernity with the story of its women citizen-subjects. It is to be noted that the entanglement goes much further back (the 1947 partition, for instance), but the particular convergence between narratives of gendered violence and the narratives of the nation made anew under the banner of neoliberalism-inflected global television bears scrutiny. Therefore, while it is beyond the scope of this essay to expand upon the woman-as-nation trope that sutures together a masculine nationalist discourse, I present in the next sections how market-driven aesthetics of “live” and “real” news implement a representational system that works to coach women in the benefits of self-surveillance as a way to preserve the idea of a morally pure Indian nation. The documentary footage of the assault against the young women was recorded by television news reporters, who some claim were purposely called to the bar to document the assault. In it one can hear the girls being called whores, instructions on whom to target being passed around between the men, and the anguished cries of the women trying desperately to escape the mob.16 The documenting camera follows

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the action steadily, never breaking its incessant gaze. In a momentary performance, a perpetrator stares into the camera before assaulting one of the victims. The excess that this raw footage signified—both in terms of the brutality of the attack and its veracity as documentary evidence—initiated a crisis in the representation and consumption of sexual violence on public and satellite television. In order to contain this excess, satellite news channels like TimesNow inaugurated a new system of representation characterized by a framing technique intended to apprehend victims and perpetrators, as well as the viewer within a continuous frame. In this representational system, television interrupts its own narrative logic of urgent, immediate relay of moving images/action by slowing down the action and stalling it at the moment of violence. The video footage is refashioned into a still image that closes in on the action. Here, we see the young women shield their faces and bodies both from both the attacks and from the documenting camera. The victims are indistinguishable except for the attempts of the television channel to apprehend the singularity (and veracity) of the violence inflicted on their bodies. Then, as the chaos of the moment unfolds, uninterrupted by either the television crew or the gathered crowd, a graphic of a bright red circle is superimposed on the fleeing body of each girl (and later on the molesters too). The red circle expands to both contain and isolate her within this “intolerable (violent) image,” which cannot be viewed without “experiencing pain or indignation.”17 Once apprehended within the double-frame, the spectacle is thus created and heightened even more by using the rostrum camera effect, a technique integral to documentary film’s representation of trauma. As Karen Lury notes, the rostrum camera animates the still image, thereby creating an effect of a roving camera eye that appears to seek out something and in so doing allows the “image to be ‘pored over,’ pulled closer to view.”18 The aesthetics of this scene—initially fast and chaotic then slowed down to apprehend the actors within a double-frame and finally the rostrum effect— mimics certain cinematic aesthetic cues, which are easily recognized by the Indian cine-going public. These cues help the viewer anticipate action, to know the exact moment in the scenes that evoke the sentiments of pity, disgust, revulsion or pleasure. The “repetition and proximity” of the documentary images allow viewers to “trace and follow the features of faces, places and objects”19 but stall any abstraction or distraction that might occur by firmly apprehending the victims and perpetrators using the double-framing technique. As an aesthetic practice, this proximity pushes the tactile, sensual aesthetic of the violent frames further and mobilizes affective responses to the apprehended image we see on the television screen. Television news thus transcends its communicatory role to become an (aesthetic) “object entering the life-world, taking its place among other things.”20 By entering the lifeworld of its viewer, television news brings the images of violence to the spectator’s present. Transcending its objective role, it narrativizes sexual violence, using visible evidence to cast already-always abject victims (women) and terrifying perpetrators (alien men) in overdetermined “gender scripts.”21 Further, its unrelenting gaze coerces the victims (and not the perpetrators) to “police their own behavioral and mental maps”22 in relation to the historical and social scripts

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that determine the materiality of rape and its representation by attenuating her agency, encouraging the viewer’s voyeuristic gaze to converge upon her as objects to be seen. In that, as Carine Mardorossian argues, the victim is placed between a “rock and a hard place when it comes to remedy” since “evidence of autonomy and agency in a victim of sexual violence seeking retribution is always already compromising, since its absence is held against the victim as potential consent while its presence (whether before or after the incident) is seen as taking away from—if not outright denying the scope and reality of the violation.”23 To wit, except for one Newshour interview with a victim, the voices of the victims were mostly absent. As an ultimate sign of the success of this conservative rhetoric, Nirmala Venkatesh, member of the group put together by the National Commission for Women to investigate the Mangalore assault, commented: “Everybody was dancing wearing so many nude clothes (sic) and all. That is why they did what they did, they (the attackers) said. We women should always try to safeguard ourselves.”24 While her comments were severely criticized by various sections of the public through the media, it is easy to see how “real” documentary footage of the assault, along with the aesthetic manipulation and immediacy supplied by televisual liveness generates a climate of fear and protectionism for women. I turn now to what came to be called the “Delhi Rape Case,” to illustrate the point I am making about television news’ aestheticization and narrativization of sexual violence using visible evidence. As I will show, in the four years between the Mangalore and Delhi cases, the spectacular narrative grammar of market-driven television news is naturalized to the point that despite a lack of documentary footage of the actual event in the latter case, a spectacular “real” narrative is constructed using the same aesthetic and narrative techniques. Further, this narrative is used to serve the market logics of the television network through mobile participatory technologies intended to garner the widest possible audience of consumer-spectators.

“The Delhi Rape Case” On the night of December 16, 2012, a twenty-three year-old paramedical student from New Delhi was brutally gang-raped by six men in a private chartered bus, which she had boarded along with her male friend after being unable to find public transportation. She subsequently died from her injuries in a Singapore hospital on December 29, 2012. Owing to Indian rape shield law, the young woman was initially not identified publicly or even in court documents. Later, her father came forward to reveal her name as Jyoti Singh. Singh’s image still evades the public. The lack of an image or name in the “Delhi rape-case,” as opposed to the excess of images in the Mangalore case, revealed an interesting insight into the public articulations of grief and trauma, as well as the nature of class, citizenship and democracy. The lack of “visible evidence” of the rape is remedied by television news through a three-stepprocess invoking a set of affective responses. First, Singh’s victimhood is established through repeated allusions to her helplessness in the situation while paradoxically

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invoking her unrealized bravery and courage through symbolic labels. In various media platforms—newspapers, television, magazines, etc.—she is referred to as Damini (lightning), Amanat (treasure), Nirbhaya (fearless one), Jagruti (awareness), and the Delhi Braveheart. Secondly, to make up for the lack of Singh’s image, the clearly marked lower-class perpetrators’ faces and bodies are incessantly relayed, accompanied by experts testifying to their “rural,” “migrant,” “rootless,” and “outsider” social class and status (rehearsing the nationalist debates seen that arose after the Mangalore case). Thirdly, to substitute for the lack of visible evidence of the rape itself, closed-circuit television (CCTV) images of the moving bus taken the night of the rape as well as images of the investigation from inside the bus are used to reconstruct a rape narrative. Following the three-step process, the representational strategies employed in Newshour debates narrate sexual violence in the most spectacular of forms by, again, calling on the erotic imagination of the spectator. The process is particularly evident in a December 17, 2012, Newshour debate in which Sudha Sundaram, the general secretary of the left-aligned All-India Democratic Women’s Association, attempts to contextualize Singh’s rape. She says that women entering new spheres of action are perceived as threats to conservative sections of the society and further, that these threats are exacerbated with the “market force commandeering all the action” leading to sexual violence. As the guests speak, the screen is split. On the right side of the frame CCTV images of the moving bus taken the night of the rape (as the rape and torture were probably happening) are repeated on loop. As the moving bus, the “site of action,” is caught in the surveillance cameras the apprehending red circle is imposed on a specific tinted window of the bus. In the absence of visible evidence of the event, television aesthetics co-opt a cinematic narrative, established by the logic of the slow motion, pan, and then the double-frame. The circle constructs the most spectacular of rape narratives, calling on the cinematic imagination of viewers used to titillating and violent rape scenes in popular Indian films and television and another class of viewers who consume images of actual rapes filmed and peddled as soft porn in an underground market. The close-up and slow pan of the darkened bus window encircled with the red graphic perform the same functions, despite the lack of footage of the rape, as the visuals of the Mangalore Horror. Just as the rostrum effect in those images helps the spectator to “pore over” and pull them “closer to view,”25 when used on the bus window, it heightens the spectacular nature of the crime, promising to reveal what is typically not visible to the public eye. Interspersed with the documentary footage of the moving bus are images of the inside of the bus taken during official police investigations, further establishing the mise-en-scene of the site of the crime. In one frame, a red arrow appears to pinpoint a detail of the rape. In the absence of actual evidence of the rape, the CCTV and images of the investigation reconstruct the rape by engaging one’s erotic cinematic imagination. As the viewer’s attention is apprehended by the spectacle playing out on the television screen, Sundaram’s critical and nuanced attempts to speak of the rape and death as symbolic of competing and interconnected nationalist and neoliberal frameworks are effectively muted. As Goswami’s voice comes on,

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the images of the scene of action are replaced by a split screen of the scenes of the interviews. The three women activists and Goswami appear, with the news anchor reinstating his stewardship of the narrative. Exasperated, he stalls Sundaram to say: “Ms. Sundaram, beyond going into the reasons, we now have to look for solutions.” Despite Sundaram repeatedly saying “you have to speak of the reasons to look for solutions,” Goswami faithfully reinforces the market-driven television logics operating here and says that he is going to “open up the phone lines.” These televisual logics not only accentuate the voyeuristic proximity and immediacy demanded by live and breaking television news ideologies, but also help these consumer-spectators to organize their sensations through a variety of tactile, sensual mobile media technologies by phoning or texting in their sentiments.26 Goswami’s interruption of Sundaram’s nuanced theorization of rape with an invitation to “open up the phone lines” reinforces an expert-centric, neoliberal discourse of sexual violence in which expert goals and solutions rather than reasons and critique are favored. Thus, even though English-language television news deploys an emotional-objectivity that claims to truthfully represent and combat rape cultures in the Indian context, its spectacular frame revictimizes the victims by privileging the visual pleasure and humanitarian impulses of the consumer-spectator. Importantly, market-driven television logics weaken the victims’ experience of rape, turning rape into an exceptional form of violence perpetrated by exceptional perpetrators upon exceptional subjects. As Mardorrosian points out, the discourse of exceptionality does more harm than good when it comes to justice for rape victims.27 For not only does it not take into account the fact that most sexual violence is committed by intimate and familiar people known to the victim, it also absolves the institutional and historical ways the nation-state enables rape cultures. Thus, as feminist scholars point out, the discourse of exceptionality allows the state to retain its authority through a hierarchical retributive politics that sustained by disciplining both the female victims and lower class perpetrators. A most startling display of such a call for retribution was in effect a few days after Singh’s rape on a December 18, 2013, Newshour debate titled, Justice through death penalty? As Goswami begins his introduction, the following question flashes on the screen: “Unless the death penalty is put in place, will there be enough fear?” In the background, images of the proceedings in the Parliament session called specially to discuss the case are juxtaposed with split screen images of the various guests’ reactions, images of the as-yet unidentified masked perpetrators, and footage of a public gathering in support of the victim in New Delhi. First, Goswami questions Renuka Chowdhry, the female Member of Parliament about her views on the issue. Chowdhry answers that “it is one process” but that death penalty does not offer solutions for the bureaucratic and judicial systems that put the onus on the victim to prove that the rape did occur. Unsatisfied with the answer, Goswami cuts to the male Member of Parliament Chandan Mitra (also, Chowdhry’s political adversary), who responds that “there is a need for really, really stringent punishment for the rapists.

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The law must be amended and death penalty should be put on the statute books for rape.” Goswami interjects, “absolutely, absolutely!” With increasingly agitated hand gestures, he proceeds to dominate the proceeding, invoking the people of the nation: “The problem is that five men raping a girl, hitting her with an iron rod, permanently damaging her abdomen, hurting her intestines out there, the girl is battling for survival, she’s in a very critical state. I don’t know! If this is not the rarest of rare cases—also if the person gets away with a five or seven year imprisonment, whether the faith of the people will be shaken.” Goswami’s detailed narration of Singh’s rape, just like his detailed narration of the assault against the victims in Mangalore, rehearses the masculine, nationalist anxieties around threatening alien, illegal others. In certain, unequivocal terms, he repeats Mitra’s call for the death of the rapists, invoking an imagined and unified “faith of the people” to measure the apparent impotency of the judiciary. As if in response, on September 13, 2013, four of the five adult rapists were sentenced to death by a District Court in Delhi, India. The other committed suicide in his jail cell and the eighteen-year old juvenile was given three years in a correctional home. Only partially implementing the more expansive and progressive changes recommended by the Verma Committee28 headed by Jagdish Sharan Verma, the former Chief Justice of the Indian Supreme Court, the judiciary effectively muted feminist calls to consider the potential backlash against making rape worthy of death. In equating rape with murder, the cultures of rape imbue the act with an exceptionality that rehearses earlier and more regressive notions of honor killings being the only path to redeeming the woman’s and her society’s honor. As Flavia Agnes, writing in opposition to the death penalty awarded to the rapists in a more recent gang-rape case, argues, the death penalty dilute(s) the “rarest of rare” premise.29 She argues that since the “feminist position has always been ‘rape is not murder’ and a woman who is raped is not a zinda laash (living corpse),” equating rape with murder will mean more women will be killed after they are raped or worse, even less will report it if the rape is committed by a known person. However, against feminist demands for more nuanced and sustained debates on rape, Newshour and other similar news’ shows consistently called for the severest retribution against the illegal, passive, or rootless perpetrators. A retributive public, thus, helps to normalize this form of gendered violence within what has been termed rape “culture.”

Rape cultures and making rape visible Upendra Baxi suggests that the systemic normalization of sexual violence as an unfortunate by-product of conducting social democracy “articulates what must be named as ‘rape culture.’ ”30 He writes: In an operative rape culture, then, women’s right to be and remain human depend not on the normative necessity of law or constitution but on the sheer

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Documenting Gendered Violence contingency of politics, law, and administration as well as of the ways of social protest and action. Rape culture complicates achievement of women’s dignity, integrity, and autonomy by naming violence against women as “unfortunate” not as “unjust.”31

In the matter of rape then, politics, law, and administrations not only fail to materialize in favor of the raped woman but nurture a climate of fear and protectionism that aids conservative efforts to keep women tethered to the private or domestic sphere. It is true that rape cultures are routinely normalized through conservative discourses of rape that call on women to possess a self-aware interiority that helps them “identify the various parts of their interaction with the to-be rapist as stages within a continuum,” within which women can “try to intervene, overpower and deflect the threatened action.”32 Or, in the event that they are unable to, then be able to access this interiority to reconstruct the details of the event. Since visual footage flows in a linear manner, with discrete units that can be slowed down, pored over, and debated (within media and legal spheres), the actual event itself comes to be publicly imaged in the same linear manner. The visible evidence of sexual violence, raw footage, CCTV videos, etc., coupled with television news’ narration of it (using plot, metaphor, and spectacular visuals), heightens the urgency of this call for interiority and self-surveillance. In a particularly insidious instance of such conservatism, a popular Hindu religious leader called Asaram Bapu blamed Singh for lacking the foresight to recognize and invoke divinity, despite the opportunities ostensibly structured into such violent encounters, in her rapists.33 He is reported to have said that she “should have taken God’s name and could have held the hand of one of the men and said ‘I consider you as my brother,’ and should have said to the other two ‘Brother I am helpless, you are my brother, my religious brother’ … . She should have taken God’s name and held their hands and feet … then the misconduct wouldn’t have happened.” Further, the interiority bestowed upon the girl by the divine is also supposed to give her the precognitive abilities to foresee the future rape. For, Bapu is also reported to have said: “The accused were drunk. If the girl had chanted hymns to Goddess Saraswati and to Guru Diksha, then she wouldn’t have entered the bus.”34 An invocation of divine protection, according to this logic of religious interiority, works in two ways. First, the rape wouldn’t have happened if she had recognized what was to come and deflected the rape by invoking an affective familial relationship with her rapists, and second, it would have kept her home so she would not have encountered the men in the first place. Thus, by not turning inward to her spiritual self, she is not only responsible for her own rape and murder but also for turning the merely “drunk men” into rapists and murderers. Ironically, a conservative discourse of rape also rehearses the call for interiority that characterizes much of postmodern feminist theories of rape. Critiquing United States feminist postmodern scholarship to “locate rape prevention inside women’s psyches,” Mardorossian writes that it inadvertently aligns with a conservative rhetoric of victim blaming.35 She argues that this approach places the onus on women to “identify the various parts of their interaction with the to-be rapist as stages

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within a continuum,” within which women can “try to intervene, overpower and deflect the threatened action.”36 Further, she sees this preponderance for interiority as taking away from the political charge of the term “rape culture” instituted by the second-wave feminists to emphasize collective responses to rape prevention and recovery. Thus, she sees the call for self-reflexivity as individuating the victim from the material contexts within which she is embedded; running the “risk of becoming a new form of panopticism, an interiorized and individualized system of surveillance by which every woman becomes her own overseer.”37 Certainly, the absence of the voices of victims of sexual violence in mainstream media more than shows that female victims would rather not subject themselves to intense media scrutiny on top of the various legal and bureaucratic struggles they already face. In a postcolonial setting such as India’s, television news has become crucial to producing collective emotions such as fear, pride, and shame that work to police women’s movement in India’s urban and rapidly urbanizing outlying spaces. Propelled by an unwieldy modernity project characterized by international debt, militaristic and global economic aspirations, as well as a growing middle class, the nation’s narrative is increasingly being crafted by market-defined television news logics that have, as I’ve argued here, successfully reconciled the use of sensational and spectacular codes of representation with conventional documentary and television news codes of objectivity and truth-telling. Thus, in transcending its original purpose of communication, television news approximates the preeminent role of documentary film in narrativizing “real” trauma. It displaces documentary’s vanguard role in exposing the ills of society through closely mimicking its aesthetics, which are simultaneously affective and evidentiary. At the same time, it borrows from stylistic conventions of cinema and popular media (e.g., reality television conventions of soundtrack music and confessionals) of depicting violence to appeal to a wider audience. Like documentary films that deal with trauma, television too has a “dual effect,” in that in its attempts to show an “unveiled pain, to suture the audience to the multilayered tonality” it also “opens up the issue of voyeurism.”38 While both mediums carry the risk of voyeurism, the deep influence of television news in the public sphere makes its neglect of nuance and complexity in representing sexual violence that much more dangerous.

Conclusion The rapid expansion of satellite television in India precipitated a crisis in the representation of “real” and “visible” gender-based violences. Particularly, the marketdefined logics of contemporary English-language television news, with the clear aim of profit, use documentary or visible evidence to reconcile televisual liveness with the real, to produce an altogether spectacular narrative grammar. In fact, this grammar ensures a fetishistic pleasure to the consumer-spectator by using cinematic conventions intended to aestheticize the raw excess of the original visible evidence. And, in the absence of actual evidence, television news transcends its objective communicatory

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role to construct compelling and highly spectacular narratives of sexual violence. Therefore, this essay argued that visible evidence is a shifting construct subject to the vagaries of the actors and institutions recording it. As the essay showed, however, it is presented by television news as self-evident in ways that are detrimental to feminist academic and activist work in this regard. By claiming a transparency between the “real” and the “live” and “breaking” telecasts, television news helps construct a discourse of exceptionality that unfortunately works only to cast the victims as exceptional subjects of the nation’s voyeuristic gaze. This essay argued that the neoliberal conventions of television news thus not only work to control women’s movement through a representational system that suggests selfsurveillance as the only viable solution to sexual violence, but also do the cultural and political work in local and global contexts to mediate a national consensus around sexual violence. As a “technology of power,” television news thus participates in reinforcing the complex structures of oppression that include patriarchal, nationalist, and neoliberal formations. Further, by claiming itself to be the seemingly democratic space of an inclusive-mediated public sphere (sociality and intimacy promised through participatory mobile technologies) through a politics of immediacy, an “ironic solidarity” is forged between victims and viewers through “neoliberal strategies of branding or show business.”39 Yet, in recognizing the corporate logics of television news’ representations of sexual violence, one cannot ignore the rich and complex formations that happen outside of these logics. Particularly, Internet-based social campaigns that articulate the complex negotiations between women citizen-subjects, technology, and consumer agency in the neoliberal moment. For example, after the Mangalore event, an extremely performative protest called the Pink Chaddi (Pink Underwear) campaign took shape. Initially started as a Facebook group called the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women, this campaign called on people from around the country to send pink underwear to the Sene headquarters to shame its members. While not without its problems, this campaign, as well as others like the SlutWalk campaign, evinces some important divergences from television logics of narrating sexual violence. As Ratna Kapur states, these campaigns provide an “important normative and discursive challenge” to the strand of feminism based on the male domination-female subordination binary in the area of sexuality.40 Television news in general, and the Newshour in particular, however, upend the import of these formations by representing them as transient reactions to a “women’s issue.” Against progressive feminist activism to critique rape cultures as symptomatic of the nationalist preoccupation with women’s sexuality, television news uses its qualities of liveness and access to the “real” to discipline the victim by turning narratives of sexual violence into a source of voyeurism and titillation. While there has been a renewed vigor in feminist and popular activism against sexual violence in India, I contend that the work remains incomplete unless we pay close attention to the institution of television news and its appropriation of power to gain a thorough understanding of its role as a generative force in rape cultures.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34

The Newshour Debate. “Will Politics Take Over the Mangalore Horror?” Published online on January 28, 2009. URL: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-congress-does-a-bjp-in-andhrapradesh-bans-women-from-pubs-after-10-pm-1830639 Chattopadhyay, “Who’s Afraid of the Pink Chaddi?,” 2012. “Pramod Muthalik: Stalwart Of Sangh Parivar Coming Home To Roost!” URL: http:// www.countercurrents.org/khan070209.htm. Published February 7, 2009. Sengupta, Somini. “Attack on Women at an Indian Bar Intensifies a Clash of Cultures.” New York Times website: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/world/asia/09india. html (2009). Williams, “History in a Flash,” 294. Hutton, Gutman, and Martin eds, Technologies of the Self, 1988. Hutton, Gutman, and Martin eds, Technologies of the Self, 1988. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 1999. Hay, “Unaided Virtues.” Hay, “Unaided Virtues.” Mazzarella, “Reality Must Improve,” 216. Mehta ed, Television in India. Jain, “Beaming It Live.” Thussu, News as Entertainment, 8. URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEbD2aXs-XU Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 83. Lury, “Closeup,” 103. Lury, “Closeup,” 103. Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 128. Cuklanz, Lisa and Sujata Moorti eds, Local Violence, Global Media, 3. Mardorossian, “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape,” 757. Mardorossian, “Rape and the Violence of Representation in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace,” 76. http://ibnlive.in.com/news/man-who-fended-off-attackers-threatened/84235-3-1.html http://ibnlive.in.com/news/man-who-fended-off-attackers-threatened/84235-3-1. html; Lury, “Closeup,” 103. Williams, “History in a Flash,” 294. Mardorossian, “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape,” 757. In March 2013, the government incorporated some of these recommendations into the Criminal Law Amendments Act, including making marital rape a crime, criminalizing stalking and voyeurism of women, and increasing punishment for those who engage in trafficking women. “Opinion: Why I Oppose Death for Rapists” Mumbai Mirror. April 5, 2014. Baxi, “The Second Gujarat catastrophe,” 3520. Baxi, “The Second Gujarat catastrophe,” 3520. Mardorossian, “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape,” 757. URL: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-01-07/news/36192700_1_ asaram-bapu-religious-guru-gangrape http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-01-07/news/36192700_1_asarambapu-religious-guru-gangrape

80 35 36 37 38 39 40

Documenting Gendered Violence Mardorossian, “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape,” 757. Mardorossian, “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape,” 757. Mardorossian, “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape,” 757. Marciniak, “Pedagogy of Anxiety,” 88. Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator, 22. Kapur, “Pink Chaddis and SlutWalk Couture.”

Bibliography Baxi, Upendra. “The Second Gujarat Catastrophe.” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 34 (2002): 3519–3531. Chattopadhyay, Saayan. “Who’s Afraid of the Pink Chaddi? New Media, Hindutva and Feminist Agency in India.” In Challenging Images of Women in the Media: Reinventing Women’s Lives, edited by T. Carilli and Jane Campbell, 7. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. Chouliaraki, Lillie. The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Cuklanz, Lisa and Moorti, Sujata, eds. Local Violence, Global Media. Feminist Analysis of Gendered Representations. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009. Hay, James. “Unaided Virtues: The (Neo-) Liberalization of the Domestic Sphere.” Television and New Media 1, no. 1 (2000): 53–73. Hutton, Patrick H., Gutman, Huck and Martin, Luther H., eds. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Jain, Anuja. “ ‘Beaming It Live:’ 24-hour Television News, the Spectator and the Spectacle of the 2002 Gujarat Carnage.” South Asian Popular Culture 8, no. 2 (2010): 136–179. Kapur, Ratna. “Pink Chaddis and SlutWalk Couture: The Postcolonial Politics of Feminism Lite.” Feminist Legal Studies 20, no. 1 (2012): 1–20. Lury, Karen. “Closeup: Documentary Aesthetics.” Screen 44, no. 1 (2003): 101–105. Marciniak, Katarzyna. “Pedagogy of Anxiety.” Signs 35, no. 4 (2010): 869–892. Mardorossian, Carine M. “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape.” Signs 27, no. 3 (2002): 743–775. ———. “Rape and the Violence of Representation in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Research in African Literatures 42, no. 4 (2011): 72–83. Mazzarella, William. “ ‘Reality Must Improve’: The Perversity of Expertise and the Belatedness of Indian Development Television.” Global Media and Communication 8, no. 3 (2012): 215–241. Mehta, Nalin, ed. Television in India: Satellites, Politics and Cultural Change. Vol. 10. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008. Rajagopal, Arvind. Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2011. Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Documenting Sexual Violence on Indian Television News Thussu, Daya Kishan. News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment. London: Sage, 2008. Williams, Mark. “History in a Flash: Notes on the Myth of TV Liveness.” In Collecting Visible Evidence, edited by Jane Gaines and Michael Renov, 292–312. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

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5

When Solidarity Melts into Air: Philippines-Born Women Migrants in Australia Shirlita Africa Espinosa

My friend’s husband told me that he had a friend back in Australia who was interested to have a long-term relationship with a Filipina and that he wanted one who could sew and cook. I thought, “bingo!” Adelia Netty1

We all deal with representations of ourselves. We all participate in the making and unmaking of our representations and of ourselves as representations. The idea of the Filipino woman in Australian media is commonly tied to that of the “mail-order bride”: the wife, the fiancée, the sex slave, the body as exchangeable commodity, and for United States talk show host Geraldo Rivera, the “household appliance with sex organs.”2 The Philippines-Australian migration stream is feminized largely due to “mail-order brides”3 who are ostracized as economic migrants in a country known for its racialist immigration history. The influx of women from the late 1970s to the early 1990s and the subsequent family reunion migration grew into a solid Filipino community, contributing to Australia’s multicultural expansion. However, many women suffered from physical violence, mental torture, and, at times, murder, which has drawn the community to internalize social embarrassment. Thus, there is a persistent disavowal that “not all Filipino women are ‘mail-order brides,’ ” which may even take the form of passing as non-Filipinos.4 The erasure of the “mailorder bride” subjectivity in Filipino-Australian cultural productions in the guise of celebrating individual strength is a symptom of such disavowal. As a collective response, the community thought of ways of countering racism and sexism without accounting for the larger social structures that facilitate its gendered migration. Two important strategies in this effort are the staging of cultural performances and the production of print materials advocating grand narratives of equality, human rights, and multiculturalism. This chapter looks at the (mis)recognition of the symbolic violence engendered by intra-ethnic women’s solidarity in the context of the international sexual division of labor. In particular, I will focus on the politics and processes of documentation of two volumes, Filipino Women Achievers in Queensland: A Compilation of Stories of

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Seven Achievement Award Recipients and the Other Nominees (2001) and Crossing the Barriers: Filipino Women Stories: An Anthology of Migration (2002). The collections are the official publications of the Filipino Women’s Achiever Awards (FAWAA) held in two states, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Queensland. In honoring outstanding women based on their “dedication, persistence, compassion, sense of identity and generosity,” FAWAA presumably disregards the type of work a woman does. FAWAA aims to emphasize the importance of advocacy, community volunteerism, public service, and sense of justice.5 The award was also staged once in 2006 in Sydney but did not produce an anthology of women’s writing. Without any mention of “brides,” violence, or the media, FAWAA in Sydney focused on the capacity of the group to “[contribute] to the ongoing discourse on Australian nation-building.”6 The geo-demographic combination of Filipino-Australians in Sydney does not suitably fit FAWAA’s advocacy: Sydney prides itself as an area of fewer interracial marriages, and secondly, the plethora of multicultural award-giving bodies diminishes the attraction of a local FAWAA. But for rural Queensland and to a lesser degree, the ACT, with high numbers of marriage migrants, the “mail-order bride” issue needs to be addressed. Both Filipino leaders and Australian race-relations administrators believed that FAWAA would negate the stereotypes. The two volumes analyzed in this chapter are, thus, imbued with supposedly transformative power. An unpacking of the gender, class, and ethnic politics with which the documentation of FAWAA intersects reveals solidarity, but a kind circumscribed by the violence of inequalities. My use of the term “violence” here refers both to that which individuals experience in everyday life and as concept referencing a social phenomenon.7 The first springs from the experiences of Filipino women migrants who suffered intimate violence, sometimes death; and the second, violence as inherently a gendered phenomenon perpetrated through racialist and sexist relations. Specifically, the chapter examines how personal and institutional violence against the “mail-order bride” in Australia results in attitudes and behavior eliciting a subtle form of intra-ethnic violence. FAWAA’s approach, a cold, “objective” presentation of Filipino women migrants, professionals and “mail-order brides” alike, is in itself a reproduction of violence because it disregards the inequalities that engender forced migrations, and perpetuates them in another setting. What would have been more constructive was to address the roots of gendered violence without scapegoating a vulnerable sector of women migrants. In other words, I present violence constructed in relational space due to the complex negotiation of power among Filipino women migrants, and between Filipinos and the Australian society. This essay interrogates the violence that results from the practice of othering the object of activism by an exclusive group of women directing FAWAA, and questions the very grounds on which such solidarity stands. I argue that issues of racial exclusion and class identification drive Filipino women’s formations to write about the “mailorder bride,” but only insofar as to erase the specter of the destitute economic migrant to Australia that haunts the community’s hyperfeminized migration. Much of the

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cultural production by the Filipino community itself critiques Australia’s tendency to perceive its migration only through the lens of “mail-order bride.”8 However, it does so at the expense of condemnation, or at least, a disavowal of women who came to Australia in this way. Problematizing the documentation of the FAWAA narratives gains more resonance in the context of domestic abuse of Philippinesborn women in Australia. The politics of representation, in particular, the “violence of representation,” is almost always pertinent especially when the project designed to end violence against Filipino women commits a tacit violence by creating an underclass. Representations in the name of solidarity are violent when subjects are constructed precisely because of their deficit as subjects. The lack of economic and social capitals of “mail-order brides” is an ostensible reason to imagine them as a captive subjectivity—an elected “subaltern” so to speak—to advance certain interpretations of women’s solidarity. This research, based on an ethnographic project on Philippines-born migrants in Australia from 2009 to 2012, examines the attempt of Filipino-Australian women migrants to gain acceptability in a national space that has traditionally denied them political recognition. The essay unpacks how a colonizing solidarity operates, where activism paradoxically results in the discursive subjugation of the “mail-order bride.” Following critiques of Western (white) feminism’s appropriation of the women’s struggle, owning the voices of those who are neither white nor privileged, intraethnic solidarity has gained ground.9 The critique, however, invites a privileging of native women-as-activist, the “authentic insider” position.10 Once privileged, a few Filipino women in Australia speaking for many others, especially in the case of women professionals recognized by the dominant society, create an aura of power and persuasion that their interpretation of solidarity is the correct one. I argue, however, that because relationships forged in solidarity are almost always asymmetrical,11 there is a need to interrogate how formations that claim to end violence may be perpetuating the old, or manufacturing new, types of violence.12

A “southern” migration Filipinos prefer a Northern Hemisphere migration. The historical, economic, political, social, and cultural ties that bind them to the United States have set this up. Lisa Lowe articulates well what we, “Filipinos,” do: “For Filipino immigrants, modes of capitalist incorporation and acculturation into American life begin not at the moment of immigration, but rather in the ‘homeland’ already deeply affected by United States influences and modes of social organization.”13 In 2010, there were 3.5 million United States citizens of Filipino ancestry, the second largest group after the Chinese.14 The “southern” migration to “northern” Australia in the 1970s was precipitated by three not unrelated events: the opening up of borders in the age of globalization to facilitate the movement of labor in the service sector; the effects of neoliberal economic adjustments in the Philippines, which drove international prostitution and trafficking of women15; and the emergence of Australia as a political

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and economic power in the newly recognizable region of the “Asia Pacific.”16 Until four decades ago, Filipinos never looked “down under”; what Filipinos knew about Australia were stereotypes shared with the rest of the world: kangaroos, koalas, sheep, beaches, and surfing. The specifically marriage migration of Philippines-born nationals holds a marked place in Australian immigration history. The 1975 Racial Discrimination Act under the Whitlam government that dismantled race-based migration criteria thereby allowed marriage migrants to Australia. A high rate of bride sponsorship that lasted for twenty-five years, from 1974 to 1998, rose “very sharply” in 1978 and peaked in 1986.17 Despite a decrease in the early 1990s, spousal migration remains high. Among first-generation Filipino migrants, 32 percent of “brides” from the Philippines married “long-time Australians” (Anglo-Celtic Australians by ancestry), 38 percent married “overseas-born Australians” (eastern European or Middle Eastern ancestries), making the Filipino community quite unlike all other migrant groups, who marry within their ethnicity.18 The neatness of these figures always cited by the media—70 percent of Filipinas married to Australians!—are more than enough solid substantiation to imagine a mass invasion of aliens who have found in Australia a market for white unmarried males. Australians think that Filipino women are jumping the immigration queue, an opportunism resented by white Australia.19 This feminization of international migration is not, however, Australia-specific. From 1989 to 2013, 416,489 women (92 percent) married non-Filipino nationals, while only 38,969 Filipino men (8 percent) did so. In Australia, there are a total of 36,339 migrants categorized as “Filipino spouses.”20 The diaspora of Filipinos is not unique among postcolonial nations whose citizens seek economic refuge in first-world destinations, either as permanent migrants or as temporary workers in oftentimes dirty, dangerous, and demeaning jobs.21 As Saskia Sassen suggested, “migrations do not just happen; they are produced.”22 What was meant to be a provisional solution to the ballooning national deficit and massive unemployment proved to be an effective palliative as a kickoff to the new internationalist system.23 Labor migration and the remittances which registered positive effects on the country’s balance of payments, dollar reserves, reduction of unemployment, and immediate alleviation from absolute poverty, continued under the conditions of militarized repression during the Marcos period. The exodus of women and their eventual settlement all over Australia is interconnected with the feminization of migration. The presence of women and immigrants in global cities today performing “wifely” work in high-income professional households is what Sassen calls the “feminization of survival.”24 Because of the shutdown of manufacturing jobs in cities, and the breakup of the traditional livelihood in the countryside, women must leave home for personal and national survival. While Sassen’s focus on global circuits draws her to nannies and careers, women as “brides” are plugged into the network of circuits that service global suburbia and the first-world outback through reproductive labor. The intensification of economic and military restructuring in the Philippines in the 1980s exemplifies Sassen’s feminized survival theory.25 The “mail-order bride” in Australia complements the formation of a regional bloc led by the militaristic

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geopolitical alliance of the United States, Japan, and Australia. Moreover, the opening up of Australia as a modern nation that has abandoned its racist past dovetails with the migration flow of marriage migrants.

Who is the Filipino in Australia? The Filipino in Australia is a Filipina. As early as 1982, the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs released A Bride for All Reasons: Report on a Pilot Survey of Filipino Brides.26 The study displayed the aforementioned panic and anxiety but also preventive strategies in its statistical exposure of the problem singularly associated with this ethnic group. The gendered specificity of their migration positions the community as an underclass doubly discriminable for the weight of being non-white, “Third World-looking people.”27 In my research of Australian archives, to say that Filipinos are cast as the “whore” immigrant class is not an overstatement. Not very long ago, in 1995, in the Sunday magazine Good Weekend, widely circulated in Australia as a supplement to the Saturday editions of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Filipino women were categorically described as “disposable wives.”28 The magazine’s cover illustrates a balding, heavy-set Caucasian man slouching, apparently watching television, reaching for a “drink.” Right next to the couch is a six-pack, not of beer, but of tiny brides in their white wedding gowns. The article features the fate of women who ended up as quadriplegic, dead, missing, abandoned, beaten up, among other forms of tragic end due to intimate partner violence. The hyperfeminized migration on which the Good Weekend article focused gained notoriety with the spate of domestic abuse and murders which the Centre for Philippines Concerns-Australia (CPCA) count at 44 Filipino women and children victimized since 1980.29 As a sexualized citizen, the Filipino woman is portrayed as the sexual other of Australians, both men and women. The uproar that sexualized migration caused was documented in a debate published in the Australian Journal of Social Issues from 1982 to1983. Even though this is a specialized journal, the exchanges resemble non-expert, everyday opinions in letters to editors or television programs. David Watkins initially suggested that “Filipino brides are likely to be well educated, timid, modest and family oriented” in his defense against Filipino women’s representation as desperate economic migrants.30 Kathryn Robinson critiqued Watkins’ near-sighted view of the migrant woman as “support[ive] [of] the stereotype” was not a critical analysis of the “mail-order bride” phenomenon.31 Her comment focused on the class positions that Philippines-born migrants occupy, but that which is not deep enough to involve geopolitical relations to explain structural gendered violence. In a further comment by Deborah Wall, speaking from the “authentic insider” voice as a FilipinoAustralian woman, she claimed that both Watkins and Robinson “seem to miss the point” on two arguments.32 First, Watkins failed to realize that not all Filipino women are “mail-order brides” such as herself, and second, that Robinson failed to question the brand of feminism she espoused due to her resentment that white women could

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have “something to learn” from subservient Filipino women.33 This argument of Wall is another take on the asymmetry of relations within the women struggle between white and non-white women. While one view defends “mail-order brides” as victims of structural injustices, another perceives that marriage migrants participate in their own victimization. For one, they are characterized as desperate women who marry equally desperate, often underprivileged Australian males, a rather elitist response from white women who see marriage mostly from an economic perspective.34 Finally, Watkins’s rejoinder defended his position with a tangential “wives have the real power” answer and stated that no woman must suffer at the hands of men.35 This repartee where three subjectivities are represented—the Australian male married to a Filipino woman, the Filipino woman married to an Australian, and the white Australian female—exemplifies how exchanges were conducted along the limited narratives of opportunism, gender roles, and cultural stereotypes while evading debate on structural inequalities. Depictions of the Filipino woman in popular culture are also circumscribed by the stereotype. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,36 an iconic Australian film, reinforced perceptions of the Filipino woman as “promiscuous, irresponsible and predatory.”37 The image of the trash-talking, ping-pong ball– popping Filipino woman infamously portrayed in the film is etched in public memory. She is an embodiment of coloniality, orientalism, international division of labor, hyperfeminized migration, and Australian media’s racism.38 Priscilla, one of Australia’s celebrated films, underwrites a national narrative of triumph against a hostile environment, of taming its black Other (Aboriginal Australians), and successfully emerging from colonial, penal settlement past into a modern, multicultural country. The inclusion of the gold-digging, hypersexualized Filipina wife exploits the immigrant subject to bolster a national fantasy of masculinity superimposed in the figure of the (white) Australian battler.39 Set against the background of the dry heartland, the Australian national body accommodates the unwanted (natives and foreign people alike) against all odds. For two decades, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, two known broadsheets, were littered with the name of Rose Hancock Porteus, described as the “most famous” and the “most infamous Filipina maid made good” in all of Australia.40 Porteus, who married the iron-ore magnate Lang Hancock, has been variously described as maid, prostitute, gold-digger, tacky, addicted, sex-bomb, hustler, ambitious, and evil, among other evocative terms.41 She was dubbed “the Cinderella of cleaners. The Eliza Doolittle of maids.”42 The saga of her courtroom battles started when Hancock died and his only daughter, Gina Rhinehart—the richest Australian in 2013 and the first woman to be so—sued her stepmother for causing his untimely death. The standing of Hancock alone plus the hackneyed narrative of money, family betrayal, murder suspicion, and quick marriage to the dead man’s friend were enough to stir the imagination of white Perth, journalists, and society page columnists. Porteus embodies the sexed caricature of the “mail-order bride” in Australia. Vivian Alvarez Solon is the other Filipina who is written in Australian immigration’s history of notable cases. She was the “Australian” who was deported to

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her country: the Philippines, in 2001, where she languished in a home for the disabled for many years before a missionary followed up on her case. Looking like a disheveled (non-white) immigrant, inarticulate upon police questioning, Alvarez Solon was found by the police one night “dirty, drunk and screaming in pain,” then taken into immigration custody and then deported expediently.43 Australian authorities, for some bureaucratic excuse, did not know that she is an Australian citizen, a marriage migrant after all. Her case caused furor from advocacy groups in Australia (more than from the Philippine government) at the immigration department, which thenPrime Minister John Howard defended as not racist.44 Alvarez Solon whose behavior exemplified the wrong kind of migrant further shows how aliens are a drain in the welfare state.45 Her “deportation” was written long before she attracted the attention of white authorities; it might even have predated her arrival. Australian officials, although they regarded the deportation as “deeply regrettable,” never apologized to Alvarez Solon. In lieu of this, it was alleged that the Filipino woman received a “payout” of $4.5 million for the injuries caused by her sexualized citizenship.46 The cases of Porteus and Alvarez Solon reinforce not so much that they are “brides”— there are marriage migrants from all over the world after all—but that their lives are spectacles of either failure or opportunism. Indeed, the “Filipina wife’ is more than a designation; it is a term that interpellates all those who rightfully (or wrongfully) belong to the category. A woman becomes a nameless, faceless immovable caricature that evokes the “mail-order bride” in Priscilla. She has even become a joke: when an Australian marries a Chinese woman, his mates would crack jokes about “taking Filipina brides.”47

I, the “mail order bride”: Documenting feminized migration The FAWAA anthologies are a rectification project aimed to salvage the representation of Filipino women. Delia Domingo-Albert, ambassador to Australia from 1994 to 2001, thought that intervention was much needed. Still reeling from the bad press of murder cases and domestic battery, Filipino leaders felt the burden to justify the community’s presence. According to the ambassador, “Australia needed to be made aware that our Filipino women migrants have high level of skills, work and educational capabilities and that their adaptability and innovative efforts enabled them to maintain happy and successful cross-cultural partnerships as responsible citizens of Australia.”48 Behind this is the reductive logic that if Australia could imagine Filipinas as qualified and worthy of respect, the marriages they contract themselves into would be “happy” and “successful.” Furthermore, what FAWAA wished to rectify is the characterization as social outcasts “who would do basically anything to leave poor conditions in their country in order to come to Australia and prosper by marrying an Australian.”49 Implicit in these notions is that gendered violence against Filipino women was wrought by their complicit participation in marriage migration. Saroca’s study found a correlation between intimate partner violence against Filipino women

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and the perceived notion of their opportunism, contracting marriages to men met through catalogues, or as entertainers to Australian tourists in the Philippines.50 The narrative of opportunism is reflected not only in the justifications of abusive men who hurt transgressive women, but also by the way media tweaks the stories of abuse as events that are traceable to a woman’s desire for a better life. What FAWAA attempted to do was to revert the formula of exploitation. The anthologies produced were a challenge to the identification of Filipino women as objects without agency of their own, as bodies in a transnational market of sexual and domestic slavery that Collette Guillaumin calls “sexage”: a term she coined from esclavage (slavery) and servage (serfdom).51 If they were presented as agentic, it was in such a way as to paint them as vampiristic predators using “love as the weapon of the weak.”52 To accomplish such goals, FAWAA presented the skilled, the educated, and the adaptable—the best of the “us”—to the Australian public. The FAWAA anthologies, given the weight and permanence of print culture as documentation, are imbued with the task of undoing the irreparable image of marriage immigrants as willing victims of Australia’s misogyny. The FAWAA hopes to do this through three strategies or processes: (1) empowerment of women through community and nation building; (2) using testimonio as discursive space; and (3) initiating healing of trauma. First, the FAWAA initiative was a collaboration between state actors (Philippine embassy staff and Australian multicultural administrators) and community members (organizations, newspapers, migrant businesses). The publications, contest proper, and awarding ceremonies in three Australian states required considerable effort to put together. Marlene Agmata-Tucker, editor of the ACT edition, remembered how FAWAA tested many friendships, drew criticisms and intrigues, and required many hours of voluntary work. It was an attempt for the Filipino community to make more visible their “positive” presence in Australia. The FAWAA, more importantly, was a project of nation building for Australia.53 Because Filipino “migrant women are so crucial to the rich fabric of Australian society,”54 the role that these documentations play is strategic to angle the woman question as an issue primarily of multicultural import: how can the sexualized subject be integrated into the folds of the multicultural nation? The incipient feminist discourse of FAWAA becomes a venue to improve race relations: to fight against stereotyping that “creat[ed] divisions within the Filipino community and in many cases, isolat[ed] the Filipino women from the wider [Australian] community.”55 Second, what the FAWAA anthologies have achieved, if framed within the perspective of migrant women’s writing in Australia, is considerable. FAWAA has transposed Filipino women’s lives into print, creating spaces for discursive and political encounters. They have given a voice where there is silence, denial, and disavowal. At a time when life-writing, autobiographies, and emancipatory and testimonial narratives have attained acceptance in literature, it is not easy to find “mail-order bride” literature. For instance, a study of Asian-American literature focused its analyses based on the memoir of a Thai “bride” despite the study’s overemphasis on the fact that Filipinas are the “embodiment of exchange.”56 Also, Rolando Tolentino, a Filipino scholar, planned

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to conduct an ethnographic study of “mail-order brides” in Los Angeles but could not execute his plan for lack of interviewees. He attributed this failure to women’s fear and the “blacklash against ‘coming out.’ ”57 Life writing of “ethnic” women is commonly published in Australia but the “Filipina” remains outside an imagined fence as well. Weaving a Double Cloth: Stories of Asia-Pacific Women in Australia is a collection of trauma stories, yet it excludes the trauma of the Filipina “mail-order bride.”58 The ease by which narratives of refugees, “boat people,” and other economic migrants win sympathy—no matter how “fictitious,” the kind of sympathy Virginia Woolf had for working class women59—is not extended to the sexualized migrant. This “personal” aspect of “mail-order bride” migration, compared to the highly political context of asylum-seeking, renders doubly difficult to explain the phenomenon as traceable to sexist, racialist, and elitist international relations. Moreover, because the marriage migrant is embodied as wife and mother whose labors are “private,” and therefore voluntary and free, to remain in the private sphere is an erasure of the systemic appropriation of her labor power.60 Especially because the marriage of a “mail-order bride” is an economic transaction, she must pay through her labors. The FAWAA anthologies introduced the genre of testimonio—to bear witness—to Filipino women in Australia. Defined by Gayatri Spivak as “the genre of the subaltern giving witness to oppression,”61 the testimonio of the unlettered is constructed out of the contingencies of resistance movements and solidarity formations. It is also a criticism of the structures that precipitate histories of trauma and their consumption by a public who participates in their telling.62 Escaping the violence from which many testimonial writings are written, the political subject breaks the silence to bear witness against atrocities. FAWAA’s aim is to create solidarity premised on the unity of Filipino women to bridge social divides between them and the Australian mainstream. Because it is a literature of bearing witness, an audience, a reader, or someone who will listen, is as important as the one rendering the testimony: FAWAA demands that the white Australian public listen and read: to force a close encounter with the sexualized ethnic other, and from this, forge the possibility of understanding. The production of these narratives in itself is a positive outcome where there is only a dearth of literature by marriage migrants. Out of testimonio comes FAWAA’s third achievement that empowers the subject to exorcise the trauma of migration, racial difference, and gendered violence. It is a textual rendition of one’s life, “a memory yet to be understood, a potential yet to come into being.”63 The FAWAA project is a return to the past, to a temporal and spatial beginning where one’s past is welded into one’s present through pain. This disjointed life is articulated through a nostalgic reconstruction of life before migration but also a romanticization of that with which Australia has gifted them. By inducing a “coming out of the closet,” FAWAA began healing the trauma “through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound.”64 There exists a deep intertextuality of Filipino women’s lives in Australia. One “mail-order bride’s” trauma is tied to another’s embarrassment. An example is editor Agmata-Tucker

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traumatizing encounter with former Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Philip Ruddock, who joked during a dinner party, “Are you sure you’re not a mail order bride?”65 The “mail-order bride,” the community, the lawyer-diplomat, the FAWAA project, and even I, are all caught in the deep structure of this sexualized trauma. Although my position as a researcher frames me as “outsider” to FilipinoAustralian community because I am not one of them, for Australians at large I am a Filipino and a woman who—whether I like it or not—shares the fate of a sexualized community.

Race for distinction: Because not all “brides” are created equal FAWAA’s documentation of life histories from a wide spectrum of Filipino women reveals different types of narrations. My analysis divides the narratives into four categories based on their treatment of the “mail-order bride” thematic: (1) a clear delineation that one is not; (2) an ambiguous admission; (3) an admission without justification; and (4) silence. These tendencies are dependent on the editorial intervention, stylistic differences in authorship of the narratives, and disparity between Filipino women migrants pitted against each other in FAWAA. Specifically, the highlighting of one’s qualifications and background indicative of class status is a tendency found among FAWAA awardees. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of distinction and social capital are useful concepts in reading Filipino-Australian women’s narratives.66 The “race for distinction” manifested in social class, I argue, is the mechanism that drives FAWAA, which then draws criticisms to evaluate methods in the pursuit of its objectives. The narratives that discuss, for instance, how one’s father is an aircraft engineer or how one’s mother is racially hybrid or that one was born in Spain are clear suggestions of that immigrant’s class belonging. Educational institutions outline social and cultural capital at once, and predict one’s capacity to accumulate more capital, in particular, economic capital.67 The frequency of descriptors such as “Catholic school,” “all-girls,” “exclusive” and “private” is not hard to miss. Some accentuate educational investment with old tales of nuns and prayers, an imprimatur of wealth and standing rooted in the country’s religio-comprador history: “I pride myself as an alumnus of the prestigious 400-year old University of Santo Tomas with a Diploma of Bachelor of Science in Medical Technology,” writes one nominee.68 The stories of AgmataTucker, editor and Marie-Louise Singson, awardee, are the types of narrations exemplifying the first category. Agmata-Tucker’s narrative highlights the centrality of education toward social mobility. She narrates how her family’s poverty—which she interprets as “unfortunate circumstance”—was compensated by “more-thanaverage sense of intelligence” of the brood.69 The result of such is professionalization of a Filipino family: a captain, lawyer-diplomat, medical doctor, three nurses in the United States and the United Kingdom, an example of Filipino diaspora transformed socioeconomically by labor migration. Implicit in her life story is the conflation of

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success with migration and the ability to plug into the global labor market. AgmataTucker’s scholastic achievements in the Philippines and professional successes in Australia serve as ammunition against the sexist and racialist attacks such as that episode involving an Australian minister. A racialized approach to distinction is, on the other hand, demonstrated by Singson. The Philippines is not multicultural per se, but ethnolinguistically diverse; there also exists a racialized hierarchy based on skin color. With considerable similarities to the construction of the criollo in Spanish America— racially white but born in the new world—the mestizo in the Philippines holds what I call “racial capital.”70 There are mestizos and mestizas whose social standing is inscribed within the racial superiority and economic history of that class. Beauty is whiteness (and whiteness is beauty): it almost always means privilege. Take, for instance, FAWAA winner Singson’s careful attention to her racial pedigree, thus, her social class: Marguerita Marie Veronica Ruiz y Jardine and Jose Buenaventura Antonio Flor y Justo whose influential families hail from the north of the Philippines. My mother, whose multi-racial background is more European than Asian has a beauty that radiates from outside as well as inside … . My father’s illustrious naval career explodes with success, travel and heights of military honours, yet he is silent and humble of these achievement (sic).71

Another telling example is former “house manager” Teresita Stravopodis: “As my name [Librando] indicates, we have both Spanish and Filipino blood. We live in a nice home in Manila.”72 The pride attached to anything Spanish is likewise apparent in Leonor Xyrakis’ early days in Australia: “My circle of friends were mostly Filipinos of Spanish origin who migrated when they were only teenagers … .”73 I do not refute the veracity of these claims to madre España; however, claims of links to the colonial Spanish regime are never without signification. These claims are never irrelevant despite misplaced arrogance. Many migrants I met in Sydney claim—not mindlessly— that their “ancestors” are Spaniards. Raising the specter of racial hierarchy in the feudal Philippines in these subtle ways is an unnecessary wounding that harks back to when “natives” were the object of collective violence by Spanish colonialists and their local cohorts. To transpose the history of privileging whiteness onto Philippines-Australian migration context is insensitive as it further cleaves the elect few from the rest of migrant women. The second category of narratives, ambiguous admission to being a “mail-order bride” is exemplified by awardee Luwalhati Kendrick who writes poems and paints. Her work exemplifies semantic control in deferring admission, and the unwillingness to yield and interpellate oneself as a “bride.” There is, furthermore, considerable effort in the writing style to portray oneself as an exceptional kind of marriage migrant, and that her marriage to the Australian was very much serendipitous. This is important because only through careful differentiation that Kendrick can be imagined as an ideal

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migrant whom FAWAA endorses. The passage below illustrates the textual strategies in Kendrick’s seventeen-page autobiographical narrative: It was not until December 1974 that I decided to send a Christmas card to Gary. It was purely by chance, I found his name and address in my bedroom drawer although I could not remember where and how I met him. As I had many extra Christmas cards, I decided to send him one. At that stage, he was already posted in Sydney but the Brisbane Post Office forwarded the mail to him. He later told me that he immediately wrote to me and proposed to marry me as he never forgot our first encounter in Manila. I did not, however, receive Gary’s letter. However, Filipinos have adopted the American tradition of exchanging cards with their loved ones on Valentine’s day. On that occasion, I again had a spare card and not wanting to waste it, I sent it to the Australian whose face I only half remembered and whose address had somehow managed to survive in the chaos of my drawer. Gary realised that his earlier proposal had gone astray and we then commenced corresponding.74

To cut the story short, Gary arrived in Manila in December 1975, and then left with a Filipina wife for Australia. According to Kendrick, she did this for love, despite the fact that her “teaching career, new-found fame as a poet, friends and family” would be “a world away.”75 While far from being a “traumatically shattered subject” like women of slavery, Kendrick manifests how women’s writing is a therapeutic exercise, a “scriptotherapy” to “[reinvent] the self and [reconstruct] the subject.”76 Reconstruction does not suggest untruth, but what is interesting is the narratological technique Kendrick uses to preclude a semantic conflation of her efforts to communicate with the man and her migration as “bride.” Kendrick, in finding—serendipitously—the name and address of a man she hardly remembered, draws more attention to her re-imagining of it, framed by her careful language. The supposed spontaneity of the moment constructs Kendrick as a “letter-writing bride”—a category different from the “mail-order bride” (whose details are advertised in a catalogue)—that at the same time defines the “mail-order bride” that Kendrick is not. The writer addresses Australia and members of the “mail-order bride” community, only insofar as she convinces herself of the veracity of her story. Francisca Batistic and Maria Diwanni Simonds, both non-awardees, exemplify the third category of narratives: direct admission that one is a “mail-order bride.” Their narratives are in third-person authored by Agmata-Tucker, much shorter, and accompanied by a headshot on a casual background. Their life stories, foregrounded by poverty, lack of distinction, and little social capital, are a marked contrast to those of women like Kendrick and Singson. Batistic’s narrative evidences no concealment of her status as a “mail-order bride,” nor of her poor origins. Hers is a refreshing take, for she does not justify anything. The problem is that she never had to say I am a “mailorder bride”; the editor did it for her. The third-person perspective indicates editorial intervention, drawn from raw material, written, and “doctored” for her approval.

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Agmata-Tucker had to interview FAWAA nominees to substantiate her rendition of their lives.77 It is not exactly Batistic’s voice that we hear or her decision to not defer the confession or to defend her agency in making her migration happen: it was the editor’s. The narrative of recovery is not hers. Batistic’s trauma is authored by someone who does not share her migrant experience. If “editorial control can simulate spontaneity,” in the way Spivak did to her subaltern subjects,78 then the FAWAA project, through Batistic, speaks for the “imagined community” of marriage migrants: She met her husband Vladimir through an advertisement in a local newspaper in Iloilo. This fact is something that Francisca does not hide—romances, after all, start in various ways and hers happens to have started with a pen and a piece of paper. Francisca found her destiny through correspondence and it saddens her to hear of other people talking negatively about a relationship that started through the mail, correspondence, or pen friendship. She believes that they fail to see the uniqueness in every relationship regardless of how they started. She has many friends and acquaintances who like her, met their spouses through correspondence. A majority of their marriages, like hers, are genuinely grounded on love and deep commitment.79

Another example similar to Batistic’s reclaiming of the label “mail-order bride” is Maria Diwanni Simonds’ story. The narrative speaks of the confrontation not simply against the Australian and the Filipino-Australian community but also with and for oneself. Albeit also mediated by the “learned” use of language by Agmata-Tucker, Simonds’ telling of the travesties of poverty she underwent is brave and witty when juxtaposed against the watchful seriousness of the FAWAA winners. The healing of Simonds stretches further back before her migration to Australia, when she: married Allan in Townsville, Australia in 1991 and envisioned a life of a Queen [sic] living in a mansion and turning white-skinned but only to find out the reality that she knew little of the English language, unknowledgeable on the use of electricity, and finding herself living in a tin shed for five years! Nonetheless, even under such poor conditions, Diwanni says she was very happy … .[She] prides herself of her beautiful son and daughter, now a nice and comfortable house (beside the old tin shed) and another house that they rent out; a house for her family back home and jeepney business in Pitalo managed by her sister who wrote the first replies to her beloved husband!80

With less severity than misery porn, Batistic’s and Simonds’ narratives function as such in the context of FAWAA. Often attributed to visual texts drawing catharsis from the suffering (only) of others, misery porn dramatizes the poverty, hunger, isolation, desperation, and enslavement of other women to justify the opportunism of being “mail-order bride.”81 This is particularly a way to violate those whose stories stand

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next to the likes of Kendrick whose sophistication in narrating their “brideness” is foregrounded with middle-class values. The fourth category of narratives features those who keep silent about their migration. For an anthology that celebrates cross-cultural understanding and achieving success in a foreign land, total absence of the circumstances of one’s migration is unexpected, if not bewildering. To begin, in the FAWAA Queensland anthology, twenty out of thirty non-winning narratives fail to reveal how the women met their Australian husbands.82 Although a few of these introduced the presence of the men through basic descriptive phrases such as “the former German teacher” or “the Englishman,” none of them detailed how they met the German or the Englishman. There were hints such as “on fiancée visa,” or the less revealing, “before coming to Australia in year ____” to mark a most significant moment in their lives. The majority of women in the narratives have non-Filipino surnames, a hint of their union with an Australian male. Lastly, there are women whose stellar careers are detailed, specifying their professional achievements both in the Philippines and Australia, yet omitting how they first made the journey to Australia. To have to admit, “I married an Australian to come to this country” demands humility from nominees of a contest that is about pomp and achievement. Writing is revealing, but at the same time, an act of editing. These women chose reticence over the opportunity to use the testimonials to speak about the circumstances of their migration, and subsequently claim freedom from the silence that has imprisoned Filipino women in Australia. While it is understandable that the trauma of racialization prevents marriage migrants from easily “confessing” about their source of embarrassment, the reticence of some only reinforced the inability of FAWAA as a rectificatory project to rise above this embarrassment.

The politics of “achievement”: Surfacing the hidden trauma The FAWAA anthologies as “women’s writing” have materialized that which had not been attempted before: a return to writing about each woman’s journey, a cathartic excision of guilt for being a border-crossing woman. The transposition of migrant women’s lives into textual lives has the potential toward a radicalizing of the “mailorder bride” subjectivity. These testimonios exert a force determined to exorcise the community’s ambivalent feelings toward the specter of the Filipina. However, the case is complicated, if not problematic. First, FAWAA’s potential to heal the trauma is snatched by the disavowal of the “mail-order bride” by FAWAA’s achievers who have projected onto others, sisters in the lower rung, the very objectification they are fighting. This is illustrated by the inclusion of some “mail-order bride” women’s stories mired in poverty, often narrated in third-person, in much shorter articles. The fact that most of these women are non-awardees is highlighted by the uninspired presentation of their narratives. There is trauma and pain in inscribing I, “the mailorder bride” onto oneself, but relief and pride in claiming that one is not. I see the FAWAA volumes as a kind of “second wounding” that retrace the violence of racism

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and sexism in these narratives because “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event.”83 I would even argue that the trauma does not originate from the moment of departure to Australia but in the sociopolitical realities of being a Filipino. The FAWAA anthologies were unable to provide this structural analysis. Second, FAWAA does not interrogate the politics of “coming out of the closet.” It is neither a corrective approach toward the politics of the uses of “coming out,” nor a questioning, “why come out and for whom?” Australian government sponsorship inevitably opened up FAWAA to co-optation by dismissing the racism and sexism from which Filipinas suffer as a question of “cultural” differences. Because Australia prides itself as a multicultural nation, the master narrative of integration interprets specific issues concerning each migrant group almost always as a question of “culturally” managing migrants. This logic echoes popular media claims that abusers misunderstood Filipino culture, and that women migrated without knowing what they are getting themselves into. The effect is a sublimation of patriarchal sexism where complicity of male-centered social structures in consenting to violence is glossed over. This not specifically female quality of Australian multiculturalism implies a “mark of its masculinity.”84 Australia’s public institutions and their active promotion of multiculturalism serve, paradoxically, as venues of continued racialism. The institutional support that FAWAA received shows that conservative solidarity driven by elitist “race for distinction” is compatible with a narrow understanding of transformative politics. Third, in showcasing the economic and social capital of a handful of Filipinas, FAWAA made Australia realize that not all are “mail-order brides.” But what it ended by doing is a “valorisation of the middle class,” of women whose migration experiences are not universal, and a corresponding devaluation of the marriage migrants’ experiences.85 To show that there are professional Filipino women does not erase the “mail-order bride” or her stereotype. The case of FAWAA is an instructive negation of racial and class prejudices by valorizing another class, reproducing the violence of prejudice and abuse experienced by many Filipino women migrants in Australia after migration. The FAWAA project, despite its claim of solidarity, hierarchized women by class, social capital, and racial capital, a “race for distinction.” For the poor, unlettered, and inarticulate, it was a “race to the bottom.” FAWAA implicitly endorses a femininity and exercise of citizenship that conflate employment participation, mainstream respectability, motherhood and domestic roles into a neat formula. But this ideal is engendered through the writing off of women who work as nannies, women who scavenged food as children, women who served as maids, women who are victims, and women like Adelia Netty whose opportunism is depicted as complicit to her enslavement. In sum, FAWAA’s claim of solidarity among migrant women is no less than a documentation of its own violence in reinforcing racialist and classist stereotypes it sought to combat. Much of the failure of FAWAA is its use of contests, awards, and literary documentation without awareness of the objectification that such platforms engender. Despite the possibility that some token women like Adelia Netty are healed from the trauma of violence, the project’s documentation undermines the claim of Filipino

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women’s solidarity. The FAWAA functioned to not only speak for and speak about the “mail-order bride,” but it also reinforced the idea that Filipino women are either “mailorder brides” or “brides with professions.” This paradox was, rather expectedly, missed by the community with few exceptions. Dee Hunt, founder of CPCA Brisbane and editor of activist newsletter Kasama, questions FAWAA’s logic of accepting “stigma” and “shame” as the responsibility of Filipinos but not the racist, elitist, and sexist culture prevalent in Australia.86 To what extent did FAWAA influence the Australian public in blotting out the “mail-order bride” tag? This is difficult to measure. For one, the images of the opportunistic, sexualized female interloper remain pervasive. The representations of Rose Porteus, the maid who married a mining magnate, as a gold-digging prostitute, and the deportation of Vivian Alvarez Solon, an Australian citizen to the Philippines, hint at the inefficacy of glittery measures to rectify public perception. On the one hand, the FAWAA was a small, unsteady step undertaken by the Filipino-Australian community to combat the stereotyping. The effort was neither systemic nor strategic in its approach to solidarity. On the other, it stands to be the guide by which the community can proceed in its solidarity actions in the future. The entire experience offers signposts by which actions where intersections of race, gender, and class in a multicultural setting matter can be successfully launched. One lesson would be to refuse to subsume gender only as an issue under the project of multicultural integration. The “mail-order bride” as “somebody but not me,” or “I was once but not anymore,” or “I might have been but there is nothing wrong with it,” is an indication of the cracks within a multiculturalist, gender-based solidarity campaign. These fragmentations are indicative of reformist political actions: first, in the continuation of the racialization of the Filipina migrant; and, second, in the transposition of class divisions in the Philippines to Australia. In the final instance, while it may be argued that the entire praxis of awards and publications was an act of recuperation from racism, sexism, and elitism, FAWAA reinforced practices of the ideologies it tried to combat. It is a re-opening of wounds, a fingering of the sensitive history of Filipino-Australian migration that engenders a soft violence hidden in the folds of documentation. It is a return to violence, a healing that failed, a trauma that demands to be remembered.

Notes 1 2 3

4

Netty, “Fighting Domestic Violence,” 44. So, Economic Citizens, 98. My use of the term “mail-order bride” under quotation marks is in part my hesitation to appropriate a derogatory term coined with the idea to objectify these women. I put the term “mail-order bride” in quotation marks because it is a term ordinarily used that I do not endorse. Passing as non-Filipino, in jest or seriousness, is documented in Filipino-Australian literature. It was also commonly found during fieldwork. The general attitude of

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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the community is one of evasion; some even noted that they thought that the era of post-“mail-order bride” had arrived. FAWAA ACT Task Force, “Guidelines,” document, 3. “Former Colegialas Chosen in FAWAA Awards.” Bayanihan News (Sydney, Australia), November 2006. Brownstein, Zahn and Jackson, Introduction, 3. Espinosa, “Sexualised Citizenship.” Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, 5–9. Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, 1–5. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound, 5–9. The act of committing representational violence is, on the other hand, not a monopoly of those whose politics is considered conservative. Academics, critics, and activists, such as I am, need to be vigilant in not committing the “violence of critique” with little or no accountability to those whose work I label as problematic. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 8. United States Census Bureau, “The Asian Population: 2010.” Available online, December 1, 2013. http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-11.pdf Tadiar, Fantasy-production, 46–50; Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 23–30. Dirlik, “Introduction,” 3–13. Australia Bureau of Statistics, “Family Formation: Cultural Diversity in Marriages,” Last modified May 2, 2006. http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSTATS Australia Bureau of Statistics, “Family Formation.” Cunneen and Stubbs, Gender, Race and International Relations, 106. Commission on Filipinos Overseas, “Number of Filipino Spouses and other Partners of Foreign Nationals by Gender: 1989–2013,” http://www.cfo.gov.ph/images/stories/ pdf/gender8913.pdf Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong; Chang, Disposable Domestics; Faier, Intimate Encounters; Parreñas, The Force of Domesticity. Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents, 56. Tolentino, “Bodies, Letters, Catalogs,” 54. Sassen, Cities, 286. Sassen, Cities, 286. Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, A Bride for all Reasons. Hage, White Nation, 18–19. Barrowclough, “Disposable Wives,” 48. Centre for Philippine Concerns-Australia Brisbane, “Violent Deaths and Disappearances.” Watkins, “Filipino Brides,” 73. Robinson, “Filipino Brides: A Comment,” 166. Wall, “Filipino Brides: A Further Comment,” 219. Wall, “Filipino Brides: A Further Comment,” 219. In 2010, after presenting a paper at a conference in Australia on this topic, a “feminist”—judging by the arguments of her presentation—approached me to enthusiastically discuss “mail-order brides.” She pointed out how men who sponsor women are at the bottom rung of Australian society that no (white) Australian women wanted to marry them. Thus, those who did must be in very dire situations to do so.

100 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Documenting Gendered Violence Watkins, “Filipino Brides,” 222. The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Dessert, directed by Stephan Elliot, DVD. Cunneen and Stubbs, Gender, Race and International Relations, 106. Marshall, “The Representation of Filipino,” 14–17. Tolentino, National/Transnational, 22–23. Andrew Hornery, “PS Private Sydney.” The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney Australia), September 7, 2007. Belinda Hickman, “Rose revels in Bittersweet End to an Ugly Soap Opera,” The Australian, April 27, 2002; “Ugly Soap Opera Ends in Sweetest Victory for Rose.” The Australian, April 27, 2002. Natalie O’Brien, “Hancock Women Score a Win Each.” The Australian, March 26, 2002, 1999; “Rose in Bloom after 14 Hours in the Dock.” The Australian, March 24, 1999; “Gina Tagged Lang’s Rose a Prostitute.” The Australian, March 13, 1999. Layla Tucak, “Lang was in Love with Me Right to the End, Says Rose.” The Australian, September 7, 2001; “Porteous— My Buddy Lang.” The Australian, September 6, 2001; “Rose Is Most Evil Person, Dad Said—Rinehart Gets Her Chance to ‘Clear the Air of Lies’.” The Australian, September 5, 2001. Ruth Richie, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The Sydney Morning Herald, October 22, 2002. David Marr, “Guilty Secrets.” The Sydney Morning Herald, Accessed August 20, 2005. “The Lies that Kept Vivian Alvarez Hidden for Years.” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 20, 2005. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-lies-that-kept-vivianalvarez-hidden-for-years/2005/08/19/1124435144969.html (accessed March 20, 2010). The night Vivian Alvarez Solon was found, according to police reports as reported in the media, she was “dirty, drunk and screaming in pain.” Marr, “Guilty Secrets.” Laura Anderson. “$4.5m Payout to Alvarez.” Adelaide Now, Last modified November 30, 2006 http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/m-payout-to-alvarez/storye6frea6u-1111112613867 Graeme Leech, “Our ‘Little Mongrels’ Hold Hope for Future.” The Australian, December 22, 1997. Domingo-Albert, “Foreword,” ix. Themal, “Introduction,” vii. Saroca, “Hearing the Voices.” Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, 181. Cheng, “Romancing the Club,” 245. “Former Colegialas Chosen in FAWAA Awards.” Bayanihan News (Sydney, Australia), November 2006. Agmata-Tucker, “Introduction,” Age of Wisdom, v. Agmata-Tucker, “Introduction,” Crossing the Barrier, 20. So, Economic Citizens, 127. Tolentino, National/Transnational, 2. Bourke, Holzknecht and Bartlett, Weaving a Double Cloth. Woolf, “Introductory Letter,” xxvi. Delphy and Leonard, Familiar Exploitation, 2–8. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” 7.

Philippines-Born Women Migrants in Australia 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86

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Maier, “Case History of Women’s Testimonial Literature,” 4–7. Anderson, Women and Autobiography, 8. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 8. Agmata-Tucker, “Marriage across Cultural Boundaries,” 18. According to AgmataTucker, Ruddock was not satisfied with the “jesting remark” but still persisted in pursuing the insult by asking her husband if she were a “mail-order bride” (interview with Agmata-Tucker, ACT, April 18, 2002). Although Ruddock’s involvement here proved that he was not fond of foreign women, he was friendly with the likes of Dante Tan, a fugitive from the Philippines. In 2003, Ruddock’s name was dragged into “cash-for-visa” controversy when Tan was given Australian citizenship despite being involved in a high-profile market-fraud case. Tan was prosecuted for contributing to Ruddock’s campaign funds. Bourdieu, Distinction. Bourdieu, Distinction, 5–10. Themal, “Introduction,” 76. Agmata-Tucker, “Introduction,” Crossing the Barrier, 194. My use of the term “racial capital” means race, particularly whiteness in the context of colonial Philippines, as a capital from which one can gain entitlement. A similar definition of racial capital is the “economic and social value derived from an individual’s racial identity.” Leong, “Racial Capitalism.” Harvard Law Review, June 2013, Accessible online, http://racism.org/index.php?option=com_co ntent&view=article&id=1702:racialcapitalism&catid=17&Itemid=120&showall=& limitstart=8 Singson, Crossing the Barrier, 115–116. Stravopodis, Crossing the Barrier, 128. Xyrakis, Crossing the Barrier, 148. Kendrick, Crossing the Barrier, 48; Kendrick, Crossing the Barrier, 48. Henke, Shattered Subjects, xxii–xv. Agmata-Tucker (FAWAA ACT Task Force chairperson) in discussion with author, April 18, 2010. She noted: “I was very happy with the honesty of a lot of women who participated. But there were talks that some were not completely honest in their stories, for example, not mentioning some facts here and there.” Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts”, 9. Batistic, Crossing the Barrier, 159–160. Simonds, Crossing the Barrier, 88. Sometimes called “pathography” or “misery literature,” misery porn is the label attached to texts whether filmic or written that exploit the narrative excesses of tragedy and trauma. Often mistaken as profundity and realistic portrayal of life, misery porn’s effect draws from the affective investment of the audience based on extreme pain suffered by others. Themal, “Introduction,”, 2001. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. Ahmed, Strangers Encounters, 109. Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, 113. Hunt, “Filipino Community Organising on Women’s Issues in Australia.”

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6

Global Sex Work, Victim Identities, and Cybersexualities Wendy S. Hesford

Spectacular representations of women as passive and naive victims lured or tricked into sex work are prominent in international human rights campaigns, including feminist anti-trafficking campaigns, and in international news media representations of the global sex trade.1 Western audiences are familiar with this narrative of sex trafficking as one of the most prominent human rights violations; it is a pervasive narrative that situates human rights violations elsewhere.2 In 2004, Nicholas D. Kristof wrote a series of op-ed pieces for the New York Times about his visits to brothels in Poipet, Cambodia, where he posed as a customer to interview two young prostitutes—whose freedom he later purchased by paying off their debt to the brothel owners. Kristof ’s stated intentions were to “address the brutality that is the lot of so many women in the developing world,” an issue that he claims “gets little attention and that most American women’s groups have done shamefully little to address.”3 Kristof overlooked feminist organizations that work to counter sex trafficking, and his interaction with these two young women set in motion a paternalistic rescue narrative defined through the very parameters of the global sex trade—the purchase of human beings. Kristof ’s actions therefore risk constructing advocacy on the same grounds as exploitation. What cultural, political, and economic forces contribute to making particular audiences readily accept such identifications and narratives? For whom, and in what contexts, are such narratives persuasive? To what degree do feminist anti-trafficking campaigns promote justice as a politics-of-recognition paradigm through their construction of women and girls as sympathetic victims in need of rescue? An exploration of these questions reveals the intersection of a Western-inflected human rights internationalism with feminist, securitization, and antimigration agendas. Feminist anti-trafficking campaigns have been framed largely by moral distinctions between those who are considered to be the victims of trafficking and those who choose sex work as a form of survival. This tension in feminist activism Reprint of “Global Sex Work, Victim Identities, and Cybersexualities” in Spectacular Rhetorics, Wendy Hesford, pp. 125–150. Copyright, 2011, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. http://www.dukeupress.edu.

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between the rights of trafficked victims and of voluntary sex workers highlights the need for a differentiated politics of recognition and an understanding of identification practices as material and rhetorical acts. Feminist anti-trafficking campaigns fall on a continuum running from neo-abolitionist campaigns—which use women’s testimonies to influence anti-trafficking legislation and to resist the movement to legalize prostitution—to campaigns that stress sex workers’ agency and implicate discriminatory law enforcement as the major cause of their exploitation.4 Despite ideological differences, all the anti-trafficking campaigns, including those that address trafficking as a complex problem involving contextspecific issues of migration and labor, rely on women’s victimization narratives to structure their rhetorical appeal. To the extent that these campaigns uncritically turn to women’s narratives of victimization in making the invisible visible, they ignore the complications of transnational movements and privilege certain rights over others. The right to be protected from violence and exploitation (admittedly a crucial right) is privileged over the right not to live in poverty and the right to control one’s sexuality, for instance. The focus on sexual victimization reveals the hegemony in women’s human rights discourse of liberal individualism based on one kind of notion of morality and sexuality. The spectacle of female sexual victimization is a central component of the international women’s human rights movement and its focus on violence against women, especially the trafficking of women and girls for sex work. Violence against women became an important topic for transnational social movements in the early 1980s and gained prominence in human rights concerns in 1985, when it became an object of UN activity. In 1983, Charlotte Bunch and Kathleen Barry organized a global feminist workshop in Rotterdam against traffic in women, which situated sexual slavery in a broader debate about women’s human rights. Violence against women was also a central part of the platform at the UN Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. But the danger of restricting such varied practices as battering, incest, rape, and female genital mutilation to a single category—violence against women—or collapsing trafficking and prostitution is that such representations fail to account for the different ways in which women and activists interpret and resist these practices in different regions of the world.5 Despite the achievements of transnational feminist activists in engaging a wide range of concerns that affect the lives of women and children, including poverty and the lack of education and health care, spectacular representations of sexual violations of women and girls continue to attract international media attention in part because such stories subscribe to Western myths of deserving victims and to the shaming tactics of human rights organizations. Similarly, transnational feminist activism tends to be publicly recognized when the issue is sexual victimization.6 Ratna Kapur uses methodological terms to frame the challenge of understanding the contrary functions of victimization rhetoric in human rights campaigns: “What is missing from the VAW [violence against women] position, and the writings of scholars … who endorse it, is an analysis of how the mechanisms of discursive engagement produce the victim subject and the accounts of violence to which she maybe subjected”.7

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In analyzing the deployment of victimization rhetoric in anti-trafficking campaigns, I am not calling for the silencing or repression of narratives of violation; the stories of trafficked and enslaved persons need to be told and heard in a range of contexts. The Freedom Network, a national coalition of anti-trafficking organizations and advocates in the United States, notes that to empower trafficked and enslaved persons to gain full access to justice and victim-centered services, organizations must ensure that these persons are perceived, in part, as victims. United States legislation on human trafficking requires individuals to prove they were victims of a severe form of human trafficking in order to receive legal benefits and social services.8 But, human rights activists and feminist scholars need to become more attuned to the ways in which strategic and at times uncritical mobilizations of victimization narratives, both verbal and visual, may revictimize the subjects represented and support repressive cultural and political agendas. My goal therefore is to draw attention to women’s accounts of violation within the context of feminist anti-trafficking video campaigns, paying particular attention to contrasting mobilizations of identity claims and to representations of sex work and the global sex trade that challenge the pathology of recognition—namely, the idea that the oppressed desire recognition by the oppressor—by highlighting multiple, shifting identities. Additionally, we must account for the geopolitical structures and technological developments that affect the mobility and marketability of certain identifications and recognition practices associated with female bodies and sexuality. Rhetorical analysis will not resolve the seemingly incommensurate theoretical and ideological positions taken by advocates and scholars, but it can help us to better understand the politics of recognition that structure the discourse about the global sex trade and anti-trafficking campaigns and policies. ...

Feminist anti-trafficking campaigns Recent feminist anti-trafficking campaigns’ emphasis on victimization narratives can be understood, in part, as a consequence of the primacy of violence against women as an organizing device in the international women’s human rights movement. When that violence became a prominent focus of the movement in the early 1980s, it helped to counteract historical divisions between Western feminists, who emphasized discrimination against women, and feminists in the developing world, who focused on development and social justice and their effects on both men and women. The rhetorical appeal of the transnational identity of women as victims of oppression is persuasive. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink suggest that the issue of “bodily harm with the ideological traditions of Western liberal countries like the United States and Western Europe [and] with basic ideas of human dignity common to most cultures … . Issues of bodily harm also lend themselves to dramatic portrayal and personal testimony that are such an important part of network tactics”.9

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In the course of creating sympathetic visibility10 for women and girls coerced and trafficked into the sex trade, anti-trafficking campaigns often isolate women and children as objects to be seen and then rescued. Women and girls in the sex industry not only become instruments of pathos but also evidence-proof-of the need for antitrafficking agencies and policies. Neo-abolitionist anti-trafficking campaigns, such as that of the Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW), mobilize women’s testimonies of victimization as a means of influencing anti-trafficking legislation to resist the movement to legalize prostitution as a form of work, and of making the harm of prostitution visible. In CATW’s campaign materials, experiential narratives appeal to a moral understanding of human rights premised on the coherence of “women” as a universal category. Despite recognition of women’s consent to sex work, CATW claims that prostitution “reduces all women to sex” and therefore that all prostitution is exploitative (http://www.catwinternational.org). CATW employs a broad definition of prostitution, which includes casual sex, work in a brothel or escort agency, military prostitution, sex tourism, the selling of mail-order brides, and trafficking in women.11 In its representation of sex workers as victims, CATW’s campaign video So Deep a Violence: Prostitution, Trafficking, and the Global Sex Industry (2000) highlights the global and local contexts and forces (such as poverty and sexism) that drive women into sex work and the material forces that constrain women’s choices. But, the video does not expand upon the contextual forces in its portrayal and identification of women as victims. In other words, an ethos of individual victimization takes precedence over a contextual understanding. Close-ups of sad and angry faces, along with the testimonies of women and children who were beaten and confined, frame the video’s portrayal of “prostitution as a form of violence against women and … a human rights violation.” According to the testimonies, these women have “little or no sexual autonomy.” Women are seen as radically naive. The video claims, for instance, that they “don’t understand that the mail-order bride marketers are promoting women of their country as subordinate domestic and sexual servants.” The testimonies of women provide evidence that they were duped and trapped into prostitution. As one woman, a former sex worker, puts it: “I felt trapped, like I had no other choice.” She continues: “We have no resources or money to create our own business … [prostitution] is a survival strategy … . I just wanted to live a normal life.” This woman’s narrative alludes to contextual constraints, including the lack of economic opportunity, but the larger abolitionist argument places little or no responsibility on those contextual constraints. So Deep a Violence also highlights the role of men in the proliferation of prostitution and as victims of its ideology. An unnamed “expert” and CATW activist notes that prostitution “teaches men and boys that women are simply things, commodities to be used for sex.” Another unnamed CATW activist says: “Economic analysis is not enough because it does not address the men, the socalled customers, or the male-dominated values that assume that prostitution is inevitable, a male’s rights or a male’s needs.” Patriarchy is the contextual frame applied here. The commonplace that sex workers or consumers of commercial sex

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are passive victims of patriarchy assumes a static notion of gender identity attached to victimization—an injury or wound—and ignores the myriad forces and range of identity markers (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on) that shape human agency and subjectivity.12 This configuration also produces a static notion of context that does not account for how the economy structures sexual desire and the demand for commercial sex work.13 According to Jo Doezema, an activist and researcher with the Network of Sex Work Projects and a former sex worker, images of “trafficking victims” as naive, innocent young women lured by traffickers bear little resemblance to the realities of the majority of women who migrate for work in the sex industry. Yet, as she notes, “it is easier to gain support for victims of evil traffickers than for challenging structures that violate sex workers’ human rights … . The picture of the ‘duped innocent’ is a pervasive and tenacious cultural myth”.14 Moreover, a segment of the anti-trafficking lobby depicts “victims of trafficking” as unemancipated, poor, third world women “kidnapped or lured from [their] village[s] with promises of a lucrative, respectable job overseas”.15 Choice is an option, Doezema claims, that in some anti-trafficking campaigns is given only to Western prostitutes.16 At work here is an international, hierarchal politics of status recognition. Many migrant sex workers, she notes, are aware that they will work as prostitutes; what they are lied to about are the slavery-like conditions under which they must work.17 Stereotypes of prostitutes as social deviants or as helpless victims maintain their rhetorical appeal because they keep the audience’s focus on the other and thereby deflect attention from the national and international policies, economic and sociopolitical forces, and cultural traditions that contribute to the material conditions that drive many women to work in the sex industry. The identification of women solely as victims also serves a crime-control agenda. The persuasiveness of neoabolitionist campaigns in the current climate, for instance, is achieved through their kairotic—that is, timely and opportunistic—association with United States national narratives of crisis, vulnerability, and security. The anxiety and panic over the violation of moral and geographic boundaries that characterize neo-abolitionist antitrafficking campaigns might be considered, as Doezema suggests, a modern version of old cultural myths about “white slavery.” Campaigns against white slavery in Europe and the United States in the latenineteenth century attempted to regulate female sexuality under the pretext of protecting women. Then, as now, such claims reflect uncertainties over national identity and fears of women’s increased desire for autonomy.18 Dominated by repressive moralists, these campaigns forged alliances with religious and socialpurity organizations and feminist organizations that sought to abolish prostitution.19 Opportunistic alliances continue to exist today between neo-abolitionist feminists and right-wing groups. Although a range of forces paved the way for the passage of the United States Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), including the efforts of Senator Paul Wellstone, right-wing and feminist groups coalesced around the passage to advance their own political agendas. As AnnaLouise Crago notes: “A successful joint campaign was mounted to ensure that the

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TVPA would not only condemn forced labor and forced prostitution but condemn sex work as a whole-forced or not.”20 For instance, on January 15, 2003, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) notified organizations around the world that no funds would go to anti-trafficking projects that advocate “prostitution as an employment choice or advocate or support the legalization of prostitution.”21 The United States government is not alone in its antiprostitution abolitionist agenda but is joined by feminist groups and right-wing Christian groups. As Laura Lederer, the former senior advisor on Trafficking in Persons for the Office for Democracy and Global Affairs of the United States Department of State, puts it, faith-based groups have brought “a fresh perspective and a biblical mandate to the women’s movement. Women’s groups don’t understand that the partnership on this issue has strengthened them, because they would not be getting attention internationally otherwise.”22 Likewise, Donna Hughes, the education and research coordinator at CATW (1994– 1996), in her response to the new USAID policy, states: “The challenge now is to implement these landmark [antiprostitution] policies in order to free women and children from enslavement.”23 Such couplings, however, can have serious consequences. For example, Josephine Ho from ZiTeng, a sex workers’ rights group in Hong Kong, notes how domestic policies designed for their national appeal can be imposed on other nations: First-world feminists and women’s NGOS … have now joined with UN workers and other international organizations in characterizing Asian sex work as nothing but the trafficking in women and thus is to be outlawed and banned completely … the immense power of Western aid, coupled with the third-world states’ desire for modernization … [has led to interpretations of] all forms of women’s migration toward economic betterment and sex work as mere trafficking.24

One possible outcome of the new USAID policy—beyond the reproduction of paternalistic rescue and rehabilitation narratives, as Crago rightly notes—is the prospect that USAID will give financial support only to organizations with antimigration agendas.25 To collapse the terms “trafficking” and “prostitution” is also to downplay the role of migration in understanding the increase in human trafficking, as well as to eclipse the men, women, and children trafficked for other labor than sex work. In addition to the trafficking of women and young girls for sex work, men, women, and children are trafficked for sweatshop labor, domestic labor, marriage, and, in the case of children, for illegal adoptions. Many anti-trafficking campaigns that advocate the decriminalization of prostitution find the voluntary-forced distinction problematic because it assumes that voluntary prostitutes don’t have rights: only forced prostitutes (trafficked women) have rights that have been violated. In their 1997 report Trafficking in Women, Forced Labour and Slavery-Like Practices in Marriage, Domestic Labour, and Prostitution, Marjan Wijers and Lin Lap-chew argue that the forced-free distinction and its mobilization negates sex workers’ rights to self-determination and oversimplifies the complexity of women’s agency as both victims and agents.26

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Similarly, the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women (GAATW) campaign importantly argues for the application of human rights principles in order to address trafficking as a complex problem that involves context-specific issues of migration and labor. GAATW aims to combat the restrictive trends of crimecontrol campaigns and neo-abolitionist agendas, which the organization argues infringe on the rights and protection of trafficked persons. GAATW’s position is that trafficking as a concept is insufficient because it does not account for the link between trafficking and migration.27 Bought and Sold: An Investigative Documentary about the International Trade in Women is directed by Gillian Caldwell (a lawyer and filmmaker born and based in the United States, and a former executive director of Witness)28 and Steven Galster (a United States-born animal-rights activist and director of WildAid’s operations in Thailand). The video represents a more mediated view and integrated approach to the politics of recognition than So Deep a Violence in its focus on the experiences of migrant women, its attention to economic and social circumstances that enable and support the global sex trade, and its embrace of GAATW’s definition of trafficking.29 Caldwell and Galster made Bought and Sold while they worked with the Global Survival Network (a group whose investigative work focuses on exposing environmental and human rights abuses). The video is based on a two-year secret investigation of the trafficking of women from the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. The video argues that the transition from communism to capitalism throughout Russia and Eastern Europe and decline of the economic status of women have both contributed to the increase in human trafficking. Sex workers go into sex work not because they are just naive but also because the transition to capitalism in the Eastern bloc has led to women’s economic decline: “Poverty like this leads women throughout the world to migrate for work. But they face limited opportunities and substantial risks.” Bought and Sold focuses specifically on the representational strategies of recruiters who position women in competition with each other: “White women from the former Eastern bloc are regarded as the hottest new commodity in the sex trade and are being marketed as alternatives to Asian and Latin American women”—they are “from a modern, yet meager society.” Bought and Sold also has a strong thread of victimization narratives, which amplifies its call for both the recognition and the protection of trafficked women: these women are all “lured” with promises of a better life and recruited by friends, and some women are portrayed as seduced by the profession of sex work. However, the video negotiates the agent-victim and economic-cultural binaries carefully, deploying victim narratives in ways that portray the complexities of trafficking and the issue of transnationality. In other words, the video presents the kairos of identification in relation to the geopolitical conditions and contexts that shape women’s actions. These conditions include growing unemployment and declining economies in their home countries, which drive many women to seek work abroad; the recruitment of women through front companies that present a legal façade as travel, modeling, and marriage agencies; and debt-bondage, or contracts between trafficking networks and women. Travel debts can range from $1,000 to over $10,000, and women also incur debts for food and housing, as well

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as financial penalties for misbehavior. Finally, Bought and Sold illustrates the roles of international networks of organized crime and government complicity—often related to traffickers’ bribes of national security units and local law enforcement. Bought and Sold exposes how the systems meant to protect individuals facilitate their exploitation. The Global Survival Network emphasizes training law enforcement officials not to treat trafficked persons as criminals, but as victims of human rights abuses. Bought and Sold does not fall into the trap of representing women as only duped victims, even though some of the women’s stories fit that mold. For instance, the video’s opening scene depicts the agency of a woman (Lowena) in dealing with a man who is trying to lure her into sex work and who is consciously choosing a life in sex work abroad. The voice-over says: “Lowena is ready to go. She is twenty-two. She is willing to work as an escort abroad. She hopes it is her ticket to a life of adventure and glamour. This film is made for people like her.” Moreover, in its call to action at the end (a section titled “What Can Be Done?”), the video calls for a variety of strategies by activists, governments, and media groups. Besides insisting that trafficking be recognized as a human rights violation, Bought and Sold demands: “Governments must stop treating sex workers as illegal migrants.” Instead, governments should provide stays of deportation as well as services for sex workers, including health care, education and training, and witness protection. In other words, the video represents advocacy as a necessary transnational collaboration among many sectors. Bought and Sold has been distributed to more than 500 NGOs in countries around the world and to United States embassies. The Global Survival Network identifies multiple audiences for the video, including at-risk women—namely, those from countries undergoing socioeconomic transition, NGOs, governmental and intergovernmental organizations, university students, the general public, and the media.30 One of the major pedagogical goals of the film is to foster an understanding of trafficking as a human rights abuse, in order to promote the development of policies that offer protections and compensation to victims and governmental and nongovernmental programs that address the socioeconomic causes of the problem and to counter media coverage that sensationalizes or dehumanizes women whose human rights are being abused. As my analysis of the videos of feminist antitrafficking campaigns suggests, the timeliness of certain identifications and the recognitions and misrecognitions they activate might be understood as adaptive, strategic, or motivated by and meaningful only in certain circumstances.31 ...

Cybersexualities and cosmopolitan attachments Ursula Biemann’s experimental videos Remote Sensing and Writing Desire trace the routes and displacements of female bodies in the global sex and mail-order industries and provide an opportunity to explore further how transnational movements and migrations trouble the cultural politics of recognition that inform liberal feminist anti-trafficking campaigns and Western-centric cosmopolitanisms. Biemann is a

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white Western experimental videographer, activist, and scholar, born and based in Zurich. Her videos are distributed by Women Make Movies, in NewYork City—which targets an educational market, selling chiefly to universities. But her videos have also been shown at documentary festivals and in art exhibitions, and NGOs have used them in lobbying and to promote debates. Writing Desire was made for an art exhibition in NewYork City on the body image in bio- and cybertechnology, but it has been frequently shown in art exhibitions on globalization processes. Biemann says that she is interested in revealing the constructedness of different positions articulated by NGOs rather than in reducing issues to messages that can be used to bring about change on a legislative level.32 Throughout Remote Sensing, the screen is divided into parts that show multiple images and offer different viewing positions, including a close-up video shot of a space shuttle taking off, a distant view of a weather satellite, and what seems to be an aerial view from a fighter jet. The latter situates the viewer in the pilot’s seat, gazing through a targeting device. The divided screen, like the title Remote Sensing, refers to the abstraction of geography and gender by satellite technology as well as the contradictions produced by and within transnational publics generated through the production, circulation, and reception of representations of global sex work (see Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Commuting between a Manila slum and the Hong Kong Bunny Club. Still from Remote Sensing, by permission of Ursula Biemann

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Remote Sensing points out how global capital and technologies sexualize and facilitate women’s movement into the sex industry and at the same time police geographical boundaries (see Figure 6.2).33 The film insists that stricter migration

Figure 6.2 Travel schedule from Moscow to Tel Aviv, through the Bosphorus. Still from Remote Sensing, by permission of Ursula Biemann policies and control of borders will not necessarily reduce the trafficking of women. Rather, the result might be an increase in prostitution and trafficking worldwide, because states’ policies forbid women to migrate for work in other professions. Remote Sensing reports: “Five hundred thousand women migrate into the European sex industry every year. Two-thirds come from postsocialist countries.” As the narrator notes, migration laws reveal “the place of sex in … national space. These laws protect the flourishing sexual life of male citizens as privileged, and a source of power.”34 Focusing on the border between the former East Germany and the Czech Republic, “where two nations come together, one united, one dissolved,” the camera moves down a long road—the famous highway between the two countries— sparsely populated by cars. It is winter and snow covers everything (see Figure 6.3). The voice-over says: “Women standing on the roadside come from as far away as Bulgaria, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Glass house brothels, where girls dance naked under disco lights, or simply stand out in the cold, dark forest” to await their German tourist consumers. The video also challenges the victim-agent binary through its portrayal of the identity of sex workers at the border between the two countries:

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Figure 6.3 In a brothel on the highway from the Czech Republic to Germany. Still from Remote Sensing, by permission of Ursula Biemann

“Here, everything is transitory, no sentimentality, no clinging to the past. The prostitutes are from distant places, many smuggled in, captured, and illegal. They all know that where they are, and what they are, is only temporary. The consumers, the German tourists just passing through—they too are aware that their time here is only temporary. Everything resonates with impending change.” Hence, this segment suggests that both feminine and masculine identity is constructed, and that male desire is also a result of social conditioning. Neither of Biemann’s videos resolves the victim-agent binary, but both do expose the oppositional logics, cultural values, and public policies that create and sustain such categories. Bandana Pattanaik, one of the sex workers in Remote Sensing, says: Seeing them as victims creates a lot of sympathy and therefore people find it easier to accept. If I’ll say that I have been forced into prostitution, people say, oh poor thing, like let’s help her, she is in a really bad situation. But if somebody says I chose to become a prostitute that’s very difficult to accept or to understand. Why would you choose to be a prostitute? So many times it’s framed in this either-or debate. Either you are a victim or you are an agent. Either you have chosen to be a sex worker or you have been forced into prostitution. And I think there are such large gray areas in between.

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Both Remote Sensing and Writing Desire struggle against the logic of oppositions and reveal just how large the obstacles are to systematic change and processes of resignification, even within transnational feminist advocacy. Despite Biemann’s claim that she is not primarily interested in the evidentiary function of representation, or in reinforcing the victim-agent binary, both films include narratives of women lured and tricked into sex work. For instance, Remote Sensing focuses on a case involving eight Filipinas who were recruited by a German man and his Filipina wife in Manila. One of the women says: “One morning the recruiter approached me personally and promised me $350 a month if I agreed to work in a restaurant in Germany. We didn’t have to pay any placement fees … all the fees would be gradually deducted from our salary. At the moment of departure, we noticed that on the ticket it said Nigeria instead of Germany as we believed.” Yet, this “lured and tricked” narrative is complicated by several factors, including the narrative of Naomi, whose story ends in Cyprus, where prostitution is legal, and who used the money she earned through prostitution to return home. Like several of the other women presented in the video, Naomi was recruited in Manila and sold into Nigeria. She was then sold into Lome, Toga, before she fled to Cyprus. When Biemann asks Naomi if she has ever had a boyfriend, Naomi responds that she has never had sex without getting paid for it. “No someone you loved?” Biemann asks again. Naomi clarifies: “I never say to a customer … I love you.” But, she is perplexed by the question: “No boyfriend. But customer, yes. But free, no. Why?” Naomi inhabits a radically different framework than that inherent in Biemann’s question. The politics of this exchange resides in the videographer’s insertion of the cultural and rhetorical commonplace of the romance narrative. The audio representation in Remote Sensing provides yet another framing device for the women’s experiences. In the case of Filipinas in Nigeria, Biemann includes a strong mediating device, an English voice-over—which she seldom uses in her work. She has said that she typically aims to let her subjects, who include former sex workers and women employed by NGOs, speak and analyze the international situation, rather than theorizing about their experiences in a voice-over.35 This voice-over might be read as an ethical breech by the Western white videographer in representing sex workers in the global south (a breech that reproduces the social dominance of the global north). But, we might also view this editorial decision as evidence of the representational challenges of transnational feminist advocacy and of the lure of a feminist cosmopolitan analytic. As its deployment in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and cultural anthropology suggests, the term “cosmopolitan” reveals contradictory uses and meanings.36 On the one hand, the term has been used negatively to signify liberal self-invention, tourism, and global travel, and to refer to carnivalesque cosmopolitanism.37 Cosmopolitans are associated with the movement of capital, with “knowing no boundaries.”38 On the other hand, the term has been used positively to categorize a new class of transnational cosmopolitans,39 and to refer to migration, diasporic movements, and refugees, as in James Clifford’s notion of the “discrepant cosmopolitan.”40 The philosophical concept of cosmopolitanism can

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be traced to ancient Greek and Roman thought. The Cynic philosopher Diogenes (404–323 BC) coined the term “citizen of the world.” Martha Nussbaum observes: “Diogenes refused to be defined by local origins and group memberships”.41 The Stoic philosophers over the next few centuries followed his lead in arguing that we each dwell in both local communities and the community of human aspiration.42 Broadly speaking, cosmopolitanism upholds “the view that we are citizens of the world, members of a common humanity, and that we should pay no more regard to the claims of our co-nationals than to those of any other human beings regardless of where they happen to reside.”43 Invocations of cosmopolitanism in human rights education and politics tend to invoke modernist philosophical conceptions of the cosmopolitan, especially Kant’s project for perpetual peace, in which he called for international commerce as a form of sociability and a way to activate, as Pheng Cheah puts it, the “humanizing processes of self-cultivation.”44 Such invocations emphasize a universal humanism that transcends particularism.45 For instance, Nussbaum calls for a cosmopolitan approach to civic education based on the view that we are all citizens of the world and members of a common humanity. For her, literature and the arts play a “vital role [in] cultivating powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship”.46 But cosmopolitanism, as I have argued elsewhere, can function as an alibi for neoliberalism and national interests in a global guise.47 To address the risks of cosmopolitanism for human rights politics, feminist scholars and advocates need to engage its all-consuming vision and acknowledge the differential conditions of mobility and the shifting dominance relations among men, women, and children in diverse locations. Moreover, we need to acknowledge that human rights law and culture work together to sustain normative frameworks of inclusion and exclusion, and that cultural predilections and entrenched conceptions of identity and difference shape an individual’s imaginative capacity to identify with others.48 Biemann generates a critical ambivalence through her critique of the victim-agent binary and her simultaneous inclusion of the testimonies of women victimized by the sex industry, which is indicative of her navigation of cosmopolitan and transnational feminist analytics. This ambivalence illuminates the representational challenges posed by the rhetorical conventions of a human rights internationalism based on UN discourses and treaties for transnational feminist scholars and advocates, especially the challenge of how to document victimization. For instance, Remote Sensing exposes the risks of documentary techniques in revealing multiple layers of surveillance: “Locked up in tiny rooms, confined in semi-darkness, guarded closely, she lives in the ghettos and the bars of the underworld, the semi-world, living a halflife. Guarded step by step, number by number, trick by trick.” The camera travels down long, dark corridors of brothels at night, dimly lit by streetlights and the lights from clubs. The corridors echo the “semi-darkness” and the “underworld” quality of the narrator’s description of sex workers’ lives. The halls are dirty and crowded, choked with prostitutes and potential customers. Because of the danger of filming in this milieu and the fact that the women didn’t want to be filmed,49 the camera does not focus on any individuals. Instead, it lingers on women’s eroticized body parts—

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breasts, lips—fragmenting the bodies it seeks to represent. Here, the video plays on the cultural expectations that women will be objectified. But we might ask: Are such identifications necessary as forms of persuasion in transnational feminist advocacy? This choice, according to Biemann, is a result of difficult recording circumstances, but it also indicates the embrace and limitations of certain representational strategies and journalistic conventions. These images of captivity progressively dissolve, as later parts of the film speak to more self-motivated decisions to enter the sex trade. Writing Desire suggests that critical agency resides in the strategic mobilization and juxtaposition of dominant discourses and counterdiscourses, and in this way, the video draws attention to the fundamental intercontextuality of rhetorical agency. The first scene shows a beach with palm trees, and we hear upbeat music. Over this touristic image, the following lines appear in succession: “Geography is imbued with the notion of passivity.” “Feminized national spaces awaiting rescue.” “With the penetration of foreign capital.” The opening sequence foregrounds the increasing disembodiment of sexuality, the links between sexual desire and electronic communication technologies, and the production of subjectivities through the compressed space of virtual exchanges. This sequence constructs the viewers as consumers: we hear Internet dial-up sounds, then categories and links appear on the screen, representing a search by the categories of country, age, height, weight, and education. The cursor scrolls down a list of third-world countries. The link for the Philippines is then opened, and digital representations (photographs and online videos) of young women appear. Women are ranked and described according to their country of origin; in this way, the video highlights locational identifications and cultural stereotypes and myths: Women from the Philippines are described as the “most friendly.” Women from Brazil are listed as the “best lovers.” Women from Thailand are listed as the “most beautiful,” and those from Costa Rica as the “most eager to please.” Writing Desire focuses on commercialized gender relations on the Internet— namely, the market for mail-order brides and virgins in the former Soviet Union and the Philippines (one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia). The video argues that women’s bodies, as symbols of global products, are racialized as objects of desire waiting to be either conquered or rescued (see Figure 6.4). At one point in the film, the screen represents an Internet page with the following links: Distant Communication, World Sex, International Women, Travel, and Browse. Distant Communication is opened, and the following text appears. “Every year thousands of happy relationships between Western men and Eastern women begin by electronic communication.” The video implies that new media and technology create mobile subjectivities, make context irrelevant, and in so doing, enable alliances that otherwise might never occur. Yet, it also portrays the fantasy that individuals can bridge distance through technology without confronting the consequences of those fantasies: “a stream of desire troubled by nothing.” A woman lying across a bed says: “What’s interesting about it [e-mail desire] is that you create these love stories in which you are the protagonist … . What is important is the act of writing. While the real

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Figure 6.4 Still from Writing Desire, by permission of Ursula Biemann

bodies are absent, it’s all in the writing. That’s why the sexual discourse becomes important. It would be wrong to infer that it replaces the body.” Instead, the body is “present in the writing.” This sequence highlights the challenge of technology in configuring a locational feminism, in which identity is embodied as technology. Here, the body and identity become first and foremost rhetorical, highlighting Biemann’s feminist agenda of representation—which, as she puts it, is “to bring the representation of women in poverty in connection with high technology and other concepts [such as mobility] that have a progressive high status in our eyes.”50 Although both films attribute some level of agency to the women represented, we might ask whether the act of bringing “women in poverty” before “our” eyes reiterates a cosmopolitanism that once again positions poor women as objects of sight for the privileged gaze. In the case of Remote Sensing, “women become agents of transport and transformation for countries who struggle to make themselves a place on the global chart.”51 The video proposes a link between the proliferation of global sex work and sex tourism and the technology of the Internet, which “capitalizes on this vulnerable set of motivations.”52 Writing Desire fractures presumptions about the stability of identity and geographical contexts, yet it also reminds us that these new technologies foster inequitable material relations and oppressive conditions for much of the world’s population.

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At one point in the film, the rhetorical strategies that women in the global sex industry employ become strikingly clear. On the screen overlaying videos advertising brides from the former Soviet Union, the following text appears: “she is beautiful and feminine/she is loving and traditional/she is humble and devoted/she likes to listen to mellow music/the smile is her rhetorical gesture/she believes in a lasting marriage/ and a happy home/she is a copy of the First World’s past.” The phrase her “smile is her rhetorical gesture” acknowledges the rhetorical dimensions of identification and agency in the context of transnationality. Biemann notes in her commentary on the film: “To present herself as humble and unambitious, [the woman] denies the desirability of the financial and social rewards of marrying a Western man. Morality remains an economic issue but if women want to be seen as moral at all, they better mask their awareness of their relationship to property, mobility, and privilege.”53 In this sense, Writing Desire exposes the foundational Western idea, as Caren Kaplan notes in another context, that “travel produces the self, makes the subject through spectatorship and comparison with otherness.”54 A critical ambivalence characterizes Writing Desire, just as it does Remote Sensing. However, the critical ambivalence in Writing Desire does not emerge so much from the deployment and critique of victimization narratives as from the portrayal of cosmopolitan conceptions of identity. These conceptions are acquired through travel, virtual or otherwise, as represented in the figure of Maris Bustamante. Bustamante is an artist based in Mexico City who finds an American husband through an Internet dating service. She is a middle-aged, self-identified feminist, widow, mother, university professor, and, as she puts it, “radical of my own will.” After an “examination of [the] Mexican the ‘Cradle of Machismo,’ ” and after working through “intellectual guilt,” she posts her profile on an Internet dating service. She corresponds for six months with a man named John, a lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps, whom she later marries and with whom she establishes a new family. Bustamante indicates that the Internet enabled her to suspend judgment and reformulate her expectations: she would not ordinarily have been attracted to a military man. Her narrative is emblematic of the historical trajectory of future promise (construed in familial, heterosexual terms), a narrative that recasts the white, middle-class feminist subject at the center and as normative. She and the lieutenant are pictured in a classic family portrait. The centerpiece of the black-and-white photograph is the father, seated front and center, surrounded by his wife and three teenage children. His wife’s hands rest on his shoulder. The whole family is smiling. Bustamante is depicted as a virtual feminist cosmopolitan, whose worldliness is acquired largely via technology. The position of her story, defined by a conventional narrative arc, affords her character a certain status in Writing Desire. We might read this narrative as an example of the idiomatic particularity of contemporary geopolitical feminisms, or of the temporal rhetoric of awakening and rebirth common to secondwave feminism. Either way, Bustamante’s narrative highlights the venerable power of rhetorical stasis to usurp the transnational feminist project by reclaiming rhetorical commonplaces and hegemonic notions of freedom, movement, and liberation, and securing normative identifications through structures of opportunity, technology, and

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privilege. The rhetorical weight of Bustamante’s narrative in Writing Desire offers a cautionary tale to feminist scholars and human rights advocates about the risks of transference (rhetorical, methodological, and cultural) and the prominence of a cultural cosmopolitanism that construes the global citizen subject as a consumer of difference. Claudia Colimoro, an advocate for prostitutes’ rights, attests to such risks in an interview with Amalia Lucia Cabezas, when she notes the lack of financial support for sex worker advocates in the third world and points out that sex workers do not seem to benefit from academic interest: “There are sociologists, anthropologists and others interested in the different research and education projects. But the sex workers do not benefit. The academics are the ones on the board of directors, not the sexual workers. We need to have a group of academics around. But this does not permit us to advance. They are the ones who go to the congresses, the ones who take the organizations forward. It is a good business for the academics but not for the prostitutes.”55 I return to the issue of academic appropriation in the following chapter, in my discussion of children as subaltern subjects. Here, I want to simply reassert the importance of understanding identity as a field of action because such a view allows us to question the victim-agent binary and to consider the strategic deployment of such contrasts in particular contexts. But, if this conceptualization loses all traces of the materiality of identification practices, it risks becoming the methodological equivalent of cultural tourism. Just as we need to look beyond the academic transmission of new conceptions to consider how “social movements appropriate and transform global meanings, and materialize them in local practices,”56 we need to understand how identity claims, recognition practices, and localities are produced through the visual and affective economies of the global morality market to which human rights is tethered. The performative contradictions that characterize women’s experiences within the global sex trade, as several of the works discussed in this chapter suggest, compel us to read the geopolitics of recognition rhetorically, in terms of the timeliness of certain identifications and their deployment, and to account for the colonial and imperial histories of global sex work and the technologies that continue to position sexual subalterns as objects of sight and surveillance.

Notes 1

Nicholas Kristof admits that “buying sex slaves and freeing them is not a longterm solution. It helps individuals but risks creating incentives for other girls to be kidnapped into servitude” (“Stopping the Traffickers,” The New York Times, January 31, 2004). To his credit, in an e-mail correspondence to his readers on January 20, 2004, he recognizes that a broad solution to the problem is needed, one that involves “a mix of economic development, literacy programs for girls, improved police and judicial systems, and constant crackdowns on the brothels that confine girls against their will. It’s critical that governments do more to raise the status of girls and women so that they are not second-class citizens, for so many of these problems arise from power disparities between males and females in poor countries.”

124 2

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Documenting Gendered Violence Human rights groups estimate that between 600,000 and 800,000 people each year are sold into the sex trade worldwide, with a sizable portion of those coming from South Asia, Central and South America, and Eastern Europe. Between 14,500 and 17,500 are trafficked each year into the United States (2004 Department of Health and Human Services, “Human Trafficking Fact Sheet,” http://www.acf.hhs.gov/trafficking/ about/factsheets.html). Reliable statistics are not available, however, due to covert channels of human trafficking. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Girls for Sale,” The New York Times, January 17, 2004. The other articles in this series include “Bargaining for Freedom” (January 21, 2004), “Going Home, with Hope” (January 24, 2004), “Loss of Innocence” (January 28, 2004), and “Stopping the Traffickers” (January 31, 2004). Melanie Simmons generalizes the position of Feminists against Systems of Prostitution (FASP, a movement inspired by Catharine MacKinnon and others, which construes sex workers as “economically compelled, lured by false claims, or duped into prostitution” (1999, 129) and therefore in need of rescue and rehabilitation. Simmons states that “FASP activists see prostitution as little more than rape and celebrate prostitutes for simply surviving the situation” (129), as well as seeing “women’s sexual desires and expression as constructed by a patriarchal society and thus not of their own making” (131). She notes that FASP, which seems to be reconsidering depenalization of prostitutes, does not have a clear position on depenalization versus decriminalization. Simmons cites the example of PROMISE in San Francisco, a program that women arrested for prostitution can attend as an alternative to incarceration http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/services.html) (133). CATW is also included as an organization that has begun to support depenalization (http://www.catwinternational.org). Simmons argues that the prostitutes’ rights movement is congruent with a rights discourse. Similarly, Shannon Bell argues: “A discourse premised on the extension of basic human and civil rights … as far as it may go in changing the identity and status of the claimant group and even in undoing the traditional concept of rights, can only act as an intervention. It is an act of micropolitics concerned with its specific struggle, … and not with a change in any totality” (Bell quoted in Simmons 1999, 132). Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema are critical of Bell on the ground that her work contributes, indirectly, to hegemonic Western scripts about prostitution. Building on Shannon Bell’s Rewriting the Prostitute Body (1994), they argue that her act of locating the prostitute “at the heart of Western thought” (Bell quoted in Kempadoo and Doezema 1998, 12) homogenizes the origins of prostitution and erases contextual differences, resulting in an essentialist definition of the prostitute (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998, 13). Simmons, Theorizing Prostitution, 132. For example, the danger of campaigns against sexual victimization when focused exclusively on non-Western women is that they can—as happened in the campaign against gender apartheid in Afghanistan led by Western feminist groups like the Feminist Majority—reproduce anti-Arab sentiment and reinforce the view that Muslim women are “victims of Islamic faith” (Basu, “Globalization of the Local/ Localization of the Global,” 78, 82). Basu, “Globalization of the Local/Localization of the Global,” 82. Kapur, Erotic Justice, 108. In the early part of the twentieth century, the League of Nations (the forerunner of the United Nations) recognized trafficking of women and children. The emphasis

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at this time was on white women forced into prostitution, which was known as the “white slave trade.” In 1951, the UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (which replaced earlier international conventions of 1904, 1919, 1921, and 1933), which focused on trafficking for prostitution, entered into force (Skrobanek, Boonpakdee, and Jantateero 1997, 7). As Siriporn Skrobanek, Nataya Boonpakdee, and Chutima Jantateero importantly note, national antiprostitution laws have been based on the 1951 UN convention, which calls for the abolition of prostitution and the prosecution of those involved, regardless of whether or not their participation was forced. The 1981 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women calls on governments to suppress all forms of traffic in women and the exploitation of the prostitution of others (article 6). The 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child also demands that governments prevent the traffic in children (article 35) (Skrobanek, Boonpakdee, and Jantateero 1997, 27). In terms of the relation between trafficking and migration, it is important to note that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country including his [sic] own” (article 13). Article 12 of the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights sets limits on the UDHR by subjecting migration to legal restrictions, when issues of national security and public health and morals, as well as the rights of others, are involved (Skrobanek, Boonpakdee, and Jantateero 1997, 7). In 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted a new instrument on trafficking, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. And, the United States Victims of Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act of 2000 aims to assist and to protect trafficked persons and to increase penalties for traffickers. It defines severe forms of trafficking as sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion; or in which the person induced to perform such an act is not eighteen, or the recruitment, harboring, or transportation of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion, for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt, bondage, or slavery. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 205. In my use of the term sympathetic visibility, I follow Ann Van Sant’s (1993) incisive study of sensibility and representations of suffering in the novel and philanthropic practices of the eighteenth century. CATW defines sexual exploitation as practices “by which persons achieve sexual gratification or financial gain or advancement through the abuse of a person’s sexuality by abrogating that person’s human right to dignity, equality, autonomy, and physical and mental well-being” (Crago 2003). See Wendy Brown (1995) for an important critique of the relationship between identity, injury, and rights discourse. Wilson. “Remapping Trafficking.” Given Doezema’s recognition of the power of rhetorical appeals and pervasive cultural myths, I find her claim that the “image of the ‘trafficking’ victim … [is] a figment of neo-Victorian imaginations” (1998, 44) a bit puzzling. At the macrolevel, her claim at first appears more or less reasonable, but it ignores micro-level politics of particular rhetorical situations. For example, though she does allude to this dynamic elsewhere (2000), in “Forced to Choose,” she does not address the limitation of geopolitical realities and the context that enables the proliferation of

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Documenting Gendered Violence such myths (1998). We need to make distinctions in terms of who or which groups invoke certain cultural myths, and with what intent. In other words, claims of the agency of sex workers can become overly romanticized just as easily as cultural myths of victimization. Doezema, “Forced to Choose,” 42–43. Doezema, 1999, 165. Doezema refers to “The Human Rights Watch Global Report on Women’s Human Rights” from 1995 as an example of a recent publication that reproduces trafficking stereotypes. Doezema, 1999, 166. Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women?” 24. As Doezema notes, the anti-white-slavery campaigns in the early twentieth century need to be seen within the context of nineteenth-century discourses on prostitution. She notes two competing views held at the time: the regulationist view, which refers to state systems of licensed brothels and forced medical examination of prostitutions and restriction of their mobility; and abolitionist discourse, which arose as a response to the Contagious Diseases Acts in England in the 1860s (2000, 26–27). Among the recurring narrative motifs in the United States and Europe were the image of an “innocent country girl” lured to the corrupt city and the emphasis on disease (in particular, syphilis) and degradation. In addition, drawing on racist conceptions of whiteness as purity, white migrant prostitutes were construed as white slaves rather than as common prostitutes. Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women?” 23–24. Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women?” 28. CATW’s website refers to article 3 of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, which supplements the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, in defense of the organization’s position that even consensual prostitution is exploitation. The protocol states: “The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set for in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set for in subparagraph (a) have been used” (the report is available at http://www. umn.edu/humanrts/instree/trafficking.html). CATW calls for the decriminalization of women in prostitution and the criminalization of men who buy women and children and anyone who promotes sexual exploitation; however, the organization does not position itself as an advocate for the decriminalization of prostitution as labor. Crago, “Unholy Alliance.” As Crago notes, this policy may effect the funding of groups such as Empower, a sex workers’ group in Thailand that has expressed support for the legalization and political organizing of sex workers (2003). (Quoted in Crago, “Unholy Alliance”). Quoted in Crago, “Unholy Alliance.” Quoted in Crago, “Unholy Alliance.” Quoted in Crago, “Unholy Alliance.” Crago, “Unholy Alliance.” Unlike many definitions of trafficking, as Doezema notes, Wijers and Lap-Chew’s report “expands the scope of trafficking to include trafficking for domestic work and marriage” (Doezema 1999, 165). Wijers and Lap-Chew’s position in their 1998 report resonates with that of the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women. Also see Wijers 1997. Wijers and Lap-Chew, Trafficking in Women, Forced Labour and Slavery-Like Practices. In 1999, GAATW developed a document called “The Human Rights Standards for the Treatment of Trafficked Persons” with the International Human Rights Law Group

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and the Foundation against Trafficking in Women and in conjunction with other NGOs. These standards are included in the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women (2001). GAATW also worked with human rights groups like the two mentioned above to lobby successfully for a broader definition of trafficking. The UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children provides the first internationally agreed upon definition of trafficking. The protocol does not equate trafficking with prostitution and distinguishes between voluntary and forced prostitution. GAATW considered the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women an ineffective human rights instrument because of its conflation of trafficking and prostitution reproduced the victim stereotype, disregarded the agency of women, and left out those trafficked for purposes other than prostitution (http://www.gaatw.org). The protocol has a crimecontrol approach (a product of its negotiations at the UN Crime Commission in Vienna), but it now includes a human rights component, though its implementation remains at the discretion of individual states. For more recent articulations of these linkages, see GAATW’s 2010 multiyear program, also available on their website. WITNESS is a not-for-profit human rights organization based in New York that uses video and technology to fight for human rights. Caldwell and Galster, Bought and Sold. See WITNESS’S “International Trafficking of Women” (2000) on http://www.witness. org. Documentary videos not discussed in this essay that focus on child prostitution and the global sex trade include Andrew Levine’s The Price of Youth (2000) distributed by WITNESS; Brian Edwards and Kate Blewett’s Slavery: A Global Investigation (2000); Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic (1999), distributed by Miramax; Ellen Bruno’s Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes from Burma (1998) available through The Film Library; and David Feingold’s Trading Women (2003), available through Documentary Educational Resources. Another movie, Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-ever (2002) (distributed by Sonet film) is a drama about how trafficking works in the former Soviet Union. Ursula Biemann, e-mail message to author. Biemann, Remote Sensing; Biemann, Writing Desire. For a further discussion of Biemann’s construction of gender in transnational spaces, see Berelowitz 2001 and Biemann 2000. For information on Writing Desire’s screenings, see the Women Make Movies website: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/ pages/c537.shtml. Biemann indicated that she is the narrator (e-mail message to author). But she also notes: “It’s not one authorial voice, it’s many theoretical voices that speak through me, not that I’m merely quoting, but it’s all shared knowledge somehow.” Ursula Biemann, e-mail message to author. Wilson, “A New Cosmopolitanism Is in the Air,” 352. Buell, National Culture and the New Global System, 1994. Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” 249; also see Kaplan, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Orient, 2001. Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” 1990. Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 108. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 6. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 7.

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Miller, On Nationality, 3. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 81. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 19. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 85. For insightful critiques and a qualified embrace of cosmopolitanism, see Appiah 2006, Robbins 1999, and Cheah 2006. Hesford, “Cosmopolitanism and Feminist Geopolitical Rhetorics,” 2010. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, Chapter 1. Ursula Biemann, e-mail message to author. Ursula Biemann, e-mail message to author. Ursula Biemann, e-mail message to author. Biemann, Remote Sensing, 3. Biemann, Remote Sensing, 3. Kaplan, Questions of Travel, 36. Colimoro, “A World of People,” 1999. Thayer, “Traveling Feminism,” 207–208.

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

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“This Is about Way More than Bullies”: User-Generated Video, Narrative Multiplicity, and LGBTQ Youth Identity Lauren S. Berliner

In recent years, online video has been widely embraced as a method for connecting and giving voice to marginalized subjects. YouTube, in particular, has been celebrated as a platform that seemingly enables everyday users the opportunity to circumnavigate the formal barriers of institutional spaces and the constraints of mass communications with self-generated and self-directed videos, or what Manuel Castells has referred to as “mass self-communication.”1 With relatively low barriers to participation, opportunities for informal mentorship, and strong support for collaboration with others, YouTube is seen by many educators and activists as a model platform for facilitating interaction among those with shared affinities.2 Through the act of producing and circulating videos, YouTube invites everyday users to engage in what Peters and Seier have described as a “self-staging” of identities, in which producers can reflect on how they perform in the world.3 For LGBTQ youth, who have historically utilized media to forge social connections, peer recognition, and identity formation, YouTube has had a particular gravitational pull.4 Mary L. Gray’s ethnographic work with rural LGBTQ youth suggests that media are often the primary site of production for social knowledge about LGBTQ identities—it is the first point of contact for some youth who will come to identify as LGBTQ. For Gray, it is through media that youth “circulate the social grammar, appearance, and sites of LGBTQ-ness.”5 As LGBTQ youth produce themselves in the social media world, it becomes apparent that an assortment of narratives is needed to construct different kinds of LGBTQ identities and experiences. Surveying the diversity of LGBTQ-produced YouTube videos provides a lens for recognizing the ways in which LGBTQ youth are not limited to being one kind of (documentary/social media) subject. When we examine the range of YouTube videos produced by and for LGBTQ youth, we begin to see a variety of narrative templates emerge that share formal and expressive similarities. This chapter aims to draw attention to the ways in which some of the most visible and prominent video templates function to locate LGBTQ youth identity in a discourse of oppression and violence, while other common, but

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less circulated, templates facilitate more expansive possibilities for LGBTQ identity. These templates resemble traditional documentary genres—from home movies, to public service announcements, to testimonial films, yet because of their social media context, we must account for the specific modes of spectatorship and distribution they engage. I refer to the first category of video templates as pedagogical. Here I am using a capacious definition of pedagogy that emphasizes the structures and methods by which knowledge about subjects is produced (as opposed to how subjects are taught or instructed).6 The theme and content of these kinds of videos are generally ascribed from outside, rather than emerging from existing local publics, and explicitly aim to change thinking or behavior related to LGBTQ identity. Most prominent (if not defining) of the category of pedagogical videos is the It Gets Better Project (IGBP). Launched in fall 2010 by columnist Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller in response to a string of highly publicized teen suicides, the online video campaign has utilized YouTube as a space for posting and circulating short, testimonialstyle videos intended to deliver messages of hope to struggling youth.7 Through its immediate and remarkable popularity, the campaign fueled an entire discourse around the phenomenon of anti–gay bullying and popularized the idea that creating and circulating video online is an effective technique for mitigating the pain that leads so many LGBTQ youth to suicidal ideation. While adults (many of them public figures and celebrities) were the primary contributors of early campaign videos, soon many LGBTQ teens were posting, too. The growing involvement of teens in the campaign, paired with the predominance of adult testimonials, has prompted many educators and youth advocates to encourage more youth to contribute their own voices to the anti-bullying discourse through the production of their own online videos.8 In these testimonial-style pedagogical videos, the well-being of youth producers is imagined to be achieved and sustained through both their production and consumption of media messages of emergence. As Professor Stephen Sprinkle, an early contributor to IGBP, put it in an interview for the New York Times, the It Gets Better Project is “a new way of using the technology at hand to save lives.”9 The discourse surrounding IGBP suggests YouTube is as a mechanism for cohering an LGBTQ youth public and forging intergenerational connections that can buttress those who are struggling. Participation in the anti-bullying discourse through video production appears to enable LGBTQ youth to leverage themselves as visible—both in their identities and as successful media makers. The testimonial-style video campaign was formed as a tool for aiding LGBTQ youth in their identity formation, connection to each other and to a broader LGBTQ community, and visibility through an aggregate of their individual voices. Yet, as several critics have asserted, in the attempt to normalize LGBTQ narratives, the It Gets Better Project simultaneously homogenizes and sensationalizes them.10 IGBP, and the many spin-off online video projects it has inspired, in aggregate, fix a narrative that suggests that at its core LGBTQ life is inherently rooted in the

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experience of suffering and emergence. So despite the It Gets Better campaign’s intent to discourage LGBTQ youth from suicidal ideation, the structure of the campaign nonetheless reinforces the logics of LGBTQ youth suicide. The It Gets Better campaign does not challenge heteronormative social structures in which an LGBTQ youth may feel excluded; rather it takes suicidal ideation as the problem rather than the symptom. Dustin Bradley Goltz has identified the differential logics of queer and straight teen suicide in which queer youth suicide is naturalized in mediated representations and presented as “sensible” within the context of normative forms of belonging. Goltz compares this to representations of straight teen suicide, paradoxically represented as “selfish” within normative familial bonds.11 The discursive logic of queer youth suicide, he argues, mitigates against the possibility of queer relational systems that elide this logic. This discourse, predicated on LGBTQ identity as rooted in struggle due to non-normativity, belies other ways of understanding queerness as a project of worldmaking, and a destabilizing of collective identity.12 Therefore, while the campaign may encourage connection between LGBTQ-identified people, it ultimately does not challenge heteronormativity or structural injustice. Furthermore, the campaign has been proven to disproportionately feature white, normatively gendered males, who in general are most likely to be represented in the mainstream media as the face of sexuality-based bullying.13 The campaign represents ‘LGBTQ’ as an identity that is quintessentially about survival, which not only comes to stand in for what it means to be an LGBTQidentified youth, but also attempts to define how LGBTQ youth use media technologies towards identity formation. Indeed, the sizeable viewership of IGBP videos suggests tremendous relevance to LGBTQ youth experience. Moreover, due to the consistency of talking points across IGBP videos (“life is hard for LGBTQ youth, but hold on and it will get better”), the wide circulation of IGBP videos on the Internet, and celebrity, corporate, non-profit, and broadcast media tie-ins and promotions, the “it gets better” message is affectively and algorithmically set up to circulate successfully.14 This is in part because videos like those of IGBP traffic in broadcast strategies of publicity, circulating to an imagined, universal LGBTQ public that is assumed to share common experiences with bullying, self-loathing, and forms of structural violence. Pedagogical videos, like those of the It Gets Better Project, present common logics of a broadcast genre in a social media environment that imagines and addresses a universal LGBTQ public with a consistent narrative about LGBTQ experience. The emphasis on message cohesion and legibility in pedagogical videos seems to take precedence in ways that suggest that these videos and the campaigns they are a part of in fact have more in common with top-down traditional broadcast advertising that is interested in singular, comprehensive narratives. This is perhaps because the commonly utilized public service announcement (PSA) form, similar to commercial advertisements, takes a unidirectional approach to a target audience about an issue and offers one discreet, often hard-hitting, uncomplicated message. One’s participation in a pedagogical anti–gay bullying or suicide awareness video, therefore, inevitably

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becomes a performance of a particular position with regards to (LGBTQ) youth pain and suicidal ideation. When one films, views, or circulates pedagogical anti-bullying PSA videos, for instance, one identifies as the “not-bully,” “the ally,” or “the survivor.” Yet when we disentangle the spread and mainstream visibility that the It Gets Better Project video campaign enjoys from the sheer number of videos that exist for and about LGBTQ youth, we begin to see a profuse and diverse representation of LGBTQ youth life that effectually counters the homogenizing, oppression-based narrative that the campaign and its derivatives further. A second category of videos can therefore be characterized as more informal, improvisational, and typically posted for an already-invested local public of viewers (rather than an imagined, homogenous LGBTQ youth public). These videos, which I call performative, are characteristically disjointed, non-linear, and work against any particular script. In so doing, they work to direct the viewer away from notions of any essentialized interiority associated with being LGBTQ.15 So rather than describing a universal narrative of what it means to be LGBTQ, as pedagogical videos are apt to do, performative videos actively enact queer publics.16 Through a multiplicity of narratives, styles, tone, and genres, the sphere of queer legitimacy and identity is cast much wider.17 Indeed the filming styles, content, metadata, and circulation of performative videos consummate queer youth publics online, and in turn complicate the proscribed, teleological narrative that the It Gets Better Project and similar pedagogical videos further. It thus moves us away from monolithic narratives routed in violence and oppression and toward multiple narratives of possibility. Taken together, performative LGBTQ youth videos confound the narrative of a singular queer public that IGBP seeks to cohere. In so doing, they point to different forms of queer sociality and futurity, evidencing multiple queer publics that are responsive to change and invested in transformation. To wit, these videos encourage alternative ways of thinking about the potential role of participatory video in the lives of LGBTQ youth. As the variety of performative LGBTQ youth videos illustrate, YouTube is a site where marginal positions, narratives, and experiences are performed and circulated. These appear to emerge from local publics that have preexisting audiences and knowledges that are embedded in the production process. For these reasons, such videos rarely circulate beyond an already-invested viewership. But as local LGBTQ youth publics continue to utilize YouTube, the multiplicity of narratives, coalitions, symbolic representation, and mimetic reimaginings they create can help form the basis for transformative social change. These videos realize a world in which many other possibilities and ways of being LGBTQ emerge, de-emphasizing bullying, violence, and suicidal ideation as the most legible, shared narrative. Performative LGBTQ youth videos take many forms, reflecting the overall diversity of existing online production genres. They range from home video-like documentation of local LGBTQ community events, to group webcasts, to participations in mainstream Internet video memes, to personal video blogs, intergenerational community-produced videos, and beyond. Like so much user-generated content on YouTube, the circulation of each particular video is often quite weak. This is in part due to the sheer ubiquity

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of videos online, but also because most of these videos do not follow the templates that ensure spreadability, which Jenkins, Ford, and Green define as “the potential— both technical and cultural—for audiences to share content for their own purposes.”18 Pedagogical videos require spreadability because their social value is imagined to be located in the content (a message). Peformative videos, on the other hand, are typically more directed toward representing community and LGBTQ diversity, while activating local publics. In what follows, I identify and outline the features of several genres of queer youth performative videos to ask, what are the possibilities for social connection, identity formation, and social recognition when the goals of production shift away from consolidating a shared public narrative of emergence from suffering, toward a deeper engagement among more localized, preexisting communities of affinity? What are the possibilities when queer youth video production is thought of as constitutive of local, already-invested mediated queer publics rather than a mass audience that selfbroadcast efforts like It Gets Better Project encourage? I argue that through practices of production and distribution of performative videos, many LGBTQ youth actively imagine alternatives to the dominant narrative of shared identity-based violence.

From pedagogical to performative videos Informal peer-education videos If pedagogical videos work to reinforce cohesive narratives about LGBTQ lives, LGBTQ youth video blogs (vlogs) and webcasts confound them. Typically featuring individuals or pairs of youth who answer questions their viewers have posted or emailed to them across a series of episodes, these videos present a spectrum of ways to be LGBTQ. A digital age rendering of the call-in peer helpline or advice column, combined with the television talk show genre, peer education videos offer an opportunity for informal peer-to-peer advising, knowledge sharing, and the opportunity for youth producers to perform LGBTQ identity for others who are learning what it means to be LGBTQ. These videos speak to a self-identified audience of viewers and fans, rather than a generalized imagined community. Altogether these works present an expansive and varied picture of LGBTQ youth. One popular silo for peer education vlogs is LGBTeens, a YouTube channel that consists of more than 600 videos, has 36,000 subscribers, and 10,493,655 viewers.19 The webcast’s tagline, “we offer a younger perspective of the LGBT community,” gestures to the often-criticized approach of video campaigns like the It Gets Better Project that are initiated and shaped by adults. In LGBTeens, viewers typically email questions to the vloggers, which are subsequently answered on camera. No information about who is asking the questions is provided in the blog, but the sense of individual viewers standing by to hear their questions answered is evoked. Topics vary from specific practical and logistical concerns, such as “where to hang out,” and “where to buy a chest binder,” to broader issues of identity, such as “how to identify within the queer

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community.” Videos are generally unscripted and do not appear to have been edited, and often incorporate unplanned appearances from pets and friends who enter the frame and interrupt the conversation. Videos range in length, and typically only devote a portion of onscreen time to the designated topic. Most of the videos involve the vloggers simply interacting with each other onscreen—they are so informal that in some cases it feels as if they may have forgotten to turn off the camera. Their onscreen performance with ease suggests both the lack of immediate danger and threat in their environment while representing the world of the LGBTeens as safe and comforting. The improvisational nature of the videos signals the makers’ inclination to depart from a script, signifying their willingness to represent their lives as more disjointed and complex than might be offered by a scripted (pedagogical) video that tries to encapsulate an overarching narrative of the lives of LGBTQ youth. Violence and loss are issues that also emerge, although from within non-linear, intimate conversations. In the wake of the 2010 suicides, many YouTube channels took up issues of bullying and suicidal ideation, but on LGBTeens, mention of these topics is typically buried within other discussions. In the channel’s popular 2010 video, Dumbledore Is a Raging Homosexual with a Unicycle, vloggers Anna and Amanda briefly address the recent youth suicides after a playful opening in which they tell a joke while the video cuts back and forth between settings.20 A minute in, Amanda addresses the topic: Before we start with the questions, we have to touch on kind of a serious note. Lately there have been five suicides in the past I think, week … somebody said six, but I am going to go with five because it is less sad … by gay youth and gay teens and, uh, I just want … if that’s a problem that any of you are having, just know that there is always something better for you to do and that suicide is never, ever, the answer.

To this point in the video, the message and approach bear similarities to those of pedagogical videos. But as she continues, it becomes clear that her intent is to inspire action more so than it is to circulate a message. First, she presents herself as a resource: “If any of you are having issues, you can come to me and talk to me, all you millions of people.” Second, she mentions ways to participate in a suicide awareness campaign that is happening offline, in different cities. There do not appear to be any organizations or foundations behind Amanda’s message; rather, it seems she has independently gathered resources at her disposal to share with other youth. The video actively builds on already established connections, making links between the talking heads on YouTube and action and connections that can happen off line. Another way in which the video departs from the pedagogical template is that discussion of LGBTQ youth bullying and suicide is mentioned alongside several other discussion threads. Anna and Amanda address the topic briefly (but solemnly) at the head of the video, but then continue for six more minutes laughing and chatting about a range of things, like whose pack of cigarettes they are smoking. They frequently interrupt each other—sometimes with a kiss—and take a break to show Anna riding—

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and subsequently falling off—a unicycle. They shout back and forth to Anna’s younger brother who is outside of the frame, and whisper about whose car they will use to make out in after they turn off the camera. Amidst the playfulness they also do address three of the questions that had been sent in by viewers: “Do you think society’s view of the gay community is slowly changing?” “After coming out did you become really gay? For example, buying lots of rainbow stuff ?” and “What did you think about Dumbledore being gay in Harry Potter?” These questions indicate a range of ways that viewers are connecting with Amanda and Anna, and serve to spark discussion between the vloggers rather than to elicit certain answers. In addressing the questions onscreen, the pair demonstrates the ways in which both they and their viewers are making sense of what it means to identify as LGBTQ. If the viewers learn anything from the vlog, it is that there are no simple answers to the question of what it means to be LGBTQ.

Intergenerational collaborations/local social justice media work Whereas the It Gets Better Project and similar spin-off pedagogical videos reify generational divides in the LGBTQ community, others have utilized online video production as a tool for enhancing intergenerational alliances and social justice activities in their communities. On November 23, 2010, only a month into the It Gets Better Project, Seattle-based community educator/media makers Sid Jordan and Megan Kennedy launched a YouTube PSA that they had written in conjunction with youth in their community called ReTeaching Gender and Sexuality.21 In the three-minute video, a diverse set of young people each utters a sentence of a statement that implicitly stages a critique of the It Gets Better Project while offering an alternative framing of LGBTQ youth in relation to bullying and suicidal ideation. They begin, -This is about way more than bullies in our schools. -This is about our school boards, our homes, and our country. -This is about every small town, every suburb, and every city. -This is about how people talk about us and treat us. -This is how we talk about ourselves, and treat ourselves. -This is not just about how “it gets better” when you get older. -Do you want me to wait till later? -Hell no! -This is not just about being picked on for being different. -It’s about being … queer.

At first glance the video might appear to be aligned with the more didactic, pedagogical videos like those of the It Gets Better campaign, but upon watching the video all the way through, it soon becomes apparent that the filmmakers have strategically utilized the generic conventions of the public service announcement to draw attention to their project’s radical departure from the dominant style narrative

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the It Gets Better Project proffers. And while this PSA quite literally presents a number of disparate voices coming together to produce a unified message, it ultimately differs from the more explicitly pedagogical videos in that its message is precisely that making life better for LGBTQ youth requires a complex set of approaches and actions that extend beyond the realm of YouTube. To boot, ReTeaching Gender and Sexuality does not purport to represent LGBTQ youth; instead, it encourages young people to participate in a movement aimed at changing the ways in which young LGBTQ young people speak for themselves and are spoken about. It seeks to “to contribute additional queer/trans youth voices to the national conversations about queer/trans youth lives” and “intends to steer the conversation beyond the symptom of bullying, to consider systemic issues and deeper beliefs about gender and sexuality that impact queer youth.”22 Promotional stickers that support the ReTeaching Gender and Sexuality campaign speak back directly to the notion of the promise that “it gets better” by advocating that “this is not about waiting.” It is clear from the video’s message that the ReTeaching Gender and Sexuality team’s explicit aim is to identify strategies within communities that can address the “root causes of violence and isolation in our communities” rather than passively accept them as realities of LGBTQ life.23 The ReTeaching Gender and Sexuality YouTube video page includes a link to the group’s website, which provides facilitator discussion guides, definitions of preferred language, and information about the composition of the volunteer advisory team, which they describe as “intentionally multi-generational, multi-racial, and multi-faith” who are “a majority people of color, under 23 years old, and trans/gender-variant.” They claim “we collectively speak 7+ languages; are from diasporic histories; are people with disabilities; and are people who have experienced homelessness.” This description illustrates the group’s breadth of experience and their valuation of different variations and circumstances of LGBTQ life experience, and by contrast calls out the It Gets Better Project’s overwhelmingly white, normatively gendered, middle-class, older representation. Indeed, videos that have been produced as part of intergenerational collaborative media projects are increasingly common on YouTube, particularly as more community organizations have involved media productions as part of LGBTQ community-building efforts. One notable example is Global Action Project, a media action organization that has been facilitating social justice media work with New York City youth since 1991. Their mission is “to work with young people most affected by injustice to build the knowledge, tools, and relationships needed to create media for community power, cultural expression, and political change.”24 The organization hosts a variety of media education programs including one for LGBTQ youth called SupaFriends, through which participants have produced dozens of videos that now circulate on YouTube.25 Utilizing a range of genres, from drama, to science fiction, to animation, SupaFriends producers explore justice issues by imagining queer worlds that draw heavily on documentary footage from their communities. One film, Supafriends: The Fight for Acceptance, is a nine-minute live-action comic book story that centers the drama on the trials facing LGBTQ teens.26 Juxtaposing

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mainstream news footage and clips of youth speaking at the “LGBTQ communities against ‘stop and frisk’ press conference” with dramatic sequences, the teens reimagine their universe as subject to evil forces that are enacted through gentrification, violence, and the criminalization of queer youth of color. The video relies on science fiction tropes to distance the audience from an otherwise archetypal narrative about LGBTQ youth experience that pedagogical videos often insist upon, while it incorporates documentary footage from the filmmakers’ communities as a way of explicitly making links back to their lived realities. Quick cuts, special effects, and bombastic costumes and set decoration also establish a tone that is more playful than pedantic. The synopsis for the movie reads: “When one member of the Superheros loses hope for justice on earth and decides to escape to the moon, other members of the team have their beliefs tested. In the process an unlikely hero discovers their own powers to heal, connect, and stop cycles of violence.” The prevalent themes of selfdoubt, isolation, and violence resemble those of LGBTQ youth pedagogical videos, but by blending the supernatural and the spectacular, these producers distance the content from an otherwise didactic message about overcoming self-hate with selflove: “Sometimes the best way to live,” the main character explains in voiceover narration, “is to leave the world entirely—to find a way to escape, rather than to sustain yourself.” Here we see that the youth filmmakers have chosen to represent suicidal ideation and feelings of oppression through an abstraction of social forces, imagining “leaving the world” as flying to the moon. Choosing to live, represented here as “sustaining,” is characterized as an active process that requires community collaboration and the utilization of preexisting powers. Through the narrative, we might imagine that the video is hailing the communities around LGBTQ youth, encouraging them to fight for justice. Like most youth-produced videos on YouTube, SupaFriends videos have each garnered relatively few viewers—averaging just a few hundred hits per video. This suggests that, unlike campaign-based videos like the It Gets Better Project, which in many cases has facilitated generous hits for videos related to the campaign, the SupaFriends audience is likely local and already invested in the topic (including the people who produce and appear in the videos). This extended viewing community is explicitly rewarded for their insider knowledge through content that references inside jokes, nicknames, and slang that would not necessarily register as meaningful to outside viewers. Videos often close with long credit sequences that celebrate the filmmakers. While these sequences appear to exist more for the benefit of the makers and their friends and families than for an imagined public, they have the potential added effect of demonstrating queer relationality to other youth who are looking for examples of real teens who appear to live fulfilling and fun lives. Global Action Project specifically emphasizes the production process as knowledge creation and the exercising of community power. The expressed priority of the process of the pedagogical and social value of production (over the aesthetic quality and distributive potential of the movie that is produced) aligns their work with a history of youth cultural expression and media activism that extends back before the existence

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of YouTube (and digital media, for that matter). As leading youth media activist and educator DeeDee Halleck notes in her reflections on the history of youth-produced film, prior to digital media, media teachers needed to actively seek out audiences and contend with the reality that there were few venues showcasing youth media work.27 With few people beyond the filmmakers ever seeing the final films, teachers had little choice but to de-emphasize the value of the final media product. Halleck describes the value of the process: The film that came back from the lab never quite captured the brilliance and group energy of those moments. Or even in the editing: it was watching those kids with film draped around their necks, hanging from their knees to grab that close-up shot off the clothespinned improvised trim barrel, and shouting with glee when it fit perfectly. Those we the moments we worked for-the actual film was only a by-product.

Halleck’s account underscores the potential pedagogical and social value of the production experience. The process helps to open up a mode of sociality and intersubjectivity among the participants that encourages criticality and forms of interaction that can help develop individuals who can be habituated into forming critical communities.

Slam-book videos Countering the tendency for pedagogical videos to be rooted in discourses of violence and oppression, other video projects have sought to take a more playful and uplifting approach that celebrates LGBTQ identity. One commonly utilized YouTube genre by LGBTQ youth is what I call the “slam-book” mode. Similar to the trendy, self-created books of questions that circulated among teen friendship circles in the late 1980s, these videos involve youth responding, at length, to sets of questions that have been determined by the group. The form encourages contributors to give personal and creative responses.28 Altogether, the videos that are included in each grouping work to present a diversity of narratives around any given subject. LGBTQ youth have utilized this mode in novel ways, and in some cases, as a way to both challenge the oppression-based narratives that are circulated through pedagogical videos, and account for glaring omissions in the narratives. The WeHappyTrans project has circulated a slam-book video called 7 Questions which the site contributors describe as “a set of questions for trans* people framed to prompt positive responses.” According to the site, over 50 participants have submitted responses, “spreading the word that trans people are just people, with many talents, who all deserve to be happy.”29 Open-ended questions prompt participants to provide extensive responses. Questions encourage participates to situate their experience in ways that emphasize identity-based self-awareness and joy, over stories of violence and dejection. The prompts include, “Who has been most supportive of your transition or gender expression?” and “What do you most enjoy about your life since beginning

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transition? If you’re not there yet, what about the possibility of transition excites you the most? What do you look forward to? Alternatively, what about your current gender expression is most satisfying?” Participants are asked to name their trans role models and identify the change they would most like to see in the world. They are asked to speak about how they are “the change they [you] want to see.” Unlike the It Gets Better Project, the 7 Questions videos encourage participants to imagine and perform the world they wish to live in and resist simple narratives. They are asked to speak the change they wish to see. This is made apparent in the way that the organizers imagine the site, both as a way of convening trans community as well as a way to contradict normative narratives about trans people that tend to circulate. They explain that WeHappyTrans is an organized community effort of trans people “talking to one another, reaching out to one another to create something together … it’s a communal consciousness raising project, an effort to destroy the idea that trans lives are exclusively comprised of suffering.” One highly circulated 7 Questions video features Vassar College student Stephen Ira, who opens his video by introducing himself as “a transman, a faggy queen, a homosexual, a queer, nerdfighter, a writer, an artist, and a guy who needs a haircut.” This video garnered widespread attention and circulation through mainstream media outlets due to public interest in Ira’s celebrity parentage (he is a child of actors Annette Benning and Warren Beatty). In this coverage, the media framed the WeHappyTrans project as simply a site for trans people to talk about their feelings. In his blog, Supermattachine Review, titled in homage to the radical pre-Stonewall queer activist group Mattachine Society, Ira reflects upon his reasons for participating, insisting that he was motivated by a desire for discursive and structural change.30 He writes, Of course trans people need space to talk about our feelings, both our suffering and our joy. That’s part of why WeHappyTrans exists, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that this makes WeHappyTrans an apolitical project. The media talks about trans people only in very specific contexts. They talk about trans people when we are murdered, when we’re connected to famous cis people, or when cis writers feel the need to discuss our aberrant bodies for purposes of sensationalism and exploitation. When trans people talk about our feelings to one another–really talk about them, not through a cis lens–we’re doing profoundly political work. That’s why WeHappyTrans is political, subversive, and valuable. What could be more subversive than a happy transsexual?

Here Ira directly expresses the need for trans people to imagine themselves outside of media narratives that perform a sort of discursive violence against trans people by depicting them as victims. 7 Questions calls on trans-identified people to utilize online video to articulate a transgender public that is committed to exploring the possibilities and joys of transgender experience while creating a form of self-representation that provides dimension and texture not available in dominant depictions of trans people.

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A very different, but also popular, set of slam-book videos, referred to as “The Girlfriend Tag” and “The Boyfriend Tag,” appears prominently on LGBTeens’ YouTube channel and elsewhere on YouTube. In this series, young LGBTQ couples casually answer self-directed questions about their relationships, covering everything from what they watch on TV, to what kinds of drinks they order when they go out to eat, to what characteristics attracted them to each other.31 In these videos, the couples discuss the intimacies and ordinary details of their relationships for their imagined peer viewers while answering a script of questions that are addressed across all videos in this meme. As each different couple answers the questions, they exhibit for other young viewers a range of representations of what it is like to be in a relationship with another LGBTQ-identified person. The intimacy they create punctuates the content they discuss, demonstrating what it means to find love and support in the LGBTQ community and modeling relationships for LGBTQ youth who may be finding their independence. These images stand in contradistinction to the persistent archetype of the bullied and suicidal LGBTQ youth, and diminish the power of the master narrative of the anti–gay-bullying pedagogical video.

Home mode videos A final and powerful contrast to videos that deliberately situate LGBTQ youth in narratives of violence are videos we might typically think of as home movies. Many of these videos emerge from LGBTQ community centers and Gay/Straight Alliance clubs at school, where youth record events and everyday conversations that they circulate to each other through the site, or may choose not to upload and circulate at all. In home mode videos, life appears to be captured unaware, with little to no context provided for the viewer. A video from a youth dance or another organized entertainment event, in which a roving camera records people interacting, is one such example. There is no explicit agenda or message, only a clear aim toward social cohesion. Home mode videos are extremely important in the formation of offline LGBTQ youth community, as they can serve as a form of symbolic communication that both reflects and coheres invested spectators as integral to the depicted community. This is what visual anthropologist Richard Chalfen calls the home mode of communication.32 For Chalfen, home mode artifacts hold an important cultural function in the retention of details of people, places, and events; the depiction of kinship and generational continuity; and the connections to geographies, goods, and other material signifiers. Home mode media have autobiographical functions—to represent the events of one’s own life, and to observe one’s image in action, as well as rites of passage functions for seeing one’s place in relation to others in the family. These functions are used as performances of membership, identity, and lifestyle, and they enable individuals to produce and circulate their own images, measure them against other images, and to negotiate their place in a mediated culture.33 Chalfen argues that home movies tend to resemble each other in that they are most often produced without any voiceover, establishing shots,

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or intentional character development. As a result, viewers who are not already connected to the diegetic world of the home movie are therefore less able to draw on its contextual, intertextual, and indexical references. The symbolic world is therefore a relatively bound one. For this reason, LGBTQ youth videos shot in the home mode are unlikely to be of wide interest, unless they include keyword tags that connect them to popular videos. And often concerns about privacy and identifying information prevent teens from overtly identifying their videos as related to LGBTQ issues. Home mode videos, made by and featuring LGBTQ youth, provide representations that, like other types of performative videos discussed in this chapter, expand the terrain of LGBTQ youth representation on YouTube in ways that indirectly challenge the representation of LGBTQ youth as fundamentally affected and overwhelmed by violence and suffering. Rather than didactically speaking about their experiences with bullying, self-harm, and suicidal ideation to an imagined audience, the home mode video seeks to serve and appeal to the individuals and community who are featured.

Conclusion The dominant narrative circulating on YouTube about LGBTQ youth describes this demographic as especially vulnerable to violence (particularly bullying) and suicidal ideation, in part due to the ubiquity and reach of LGBTQ youth pedagogical videos like the It Gets Better Project. These videos eclipse other types of videos by and for LGBTQ youth that achieve less visibility online. Yet thousands of YouTube videos created by and for LGBTQ youth actively refute this discourse. This is not to say that LGBTQ youth contributors to YouTube always produce videos with the explicit intention of providing counternarratives, but rather, that the sheer range of content produced, in aggregate, provides a multiplicity of narratives and representations that in effect contradict any attempts to homogenize LBGTQ youth experience. Whereas pedagogical videos ultimately work to fix particular kinds of understandings of what it means to be LGBTQ youth, performative videos—from video blogs, to intergenerational collaborations, to slam-book videos and those shot in the home mode of production—reflect varied and sometimes even contradictory ways of identifying as LGBTQ. The range of video representations produce a diverse set of meanings about what it means to be LGBTQ and in effect, realizes the potential for joy, connection, and social action, often precluded by pedagogical videos that center around violence and oppression. While violence and suicidal ideation are indeed very real concerns for the LGBTQ youth population, they are not necessarily central to, or definitive of, the experience of being a young LGBTQ person. In this way, performative videos challenge the pedagogical video genre’s ability to speak to and about LGBTQ youth. Performative videos position themselves less as panacea for LGBTQ youth pain, but rather as just one of many possible outlets for expression,

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social cohesion, and perhaps even reflexivity. These videos perform the narrative multiplicity that exists among and between LGBTQ youth and in so doing encourage us to divest in the master narrative of oppression-based experience that is proffered by pedagogical videos such as the It Gets Better Project.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17

Castells, Communication Power, 2013. Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, 2009. Peters and Seier, Home Dance, 2009. Media studies scholar Larry Gross argues that electronic media have always played a central role in helping to forge connections between LGBT people. Gray, “Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires”, 1165. Here I am drawing on Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge and Paolo Freire’s concept of critical pedagogy. “It Gets Better: Dan and Terry.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IcVyvg2Qlo See the Make It Better Project, initiated a week after the It Gets Better Project. On its website the organization describes its purpose as “filling in the gaps—and the action” of the “it gets better” narrative with personal stories from youth about their personal stories of what they do to “make it better,” in the context of helping to change circumstances for LGBT youth in their schools. http://www.makeitbetterproject. org. Another project that emerged at this time was the singer Cyndi Lauper’s “Give a Damn” project sponsored by her organization the True Colors Fund. http://www. wegiveadamn.org. Stelter, Brian. “Campaign Offers to Help Gay Youths.” The New York Times (2010). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/us/19video.html. See Muller and Goltz, for excellent discussions of the It Gets Better Project. Goltz, “ ‘Sensible’ Suicide, Brutal Selfishness, and John Hughes’s Queer Bonds.” Cohen, “Pinkos, Bulliiabeers, and Welfare Queens,” 1997. Phillips, “Offering Hope and Making Attributions through YouTube,” 2013. Across the numerous anti-bullying pedagogical videos that exist online, there are striking consistencies in the message (“stop bullying!” or “hold on if you’re being bullied, life will get better!”), the positive tone, the call to action, and the digestible, sanitized, approach to the topic of violence and oppression. We can see normalization explicitly encouraged by the It Gets Better Project in the guidelines it provides contributors. These guidelines outline the visual and narrative parameters of successful (posts that won’t be blocked) video contribution. These sanitizing guides and requisite “positive tone” are likely motivated by practical concerns, such as a perceived danger of posting videos that suggest justifications and techniques for LGBT youth suicide. But beyond this, there is a clear desire on the part of the foundation to maintain consistency across the campaign’s style, tone, and message. While it is possible to consider all videos on YouTube as in some sense performative, I aim to highlight the ways in which particular narrative templates bring into being the LGBTQ experiences they seek to represent. Butler, “Bodies that Matter,” 1999. Cohen, “Pinkos, Bulliiabeers, and Welfare Queens,” 1997.

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18 Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media, 3. 19 “LGBTeens.” https://www.youtube.com/user/LGBTeens 20 “Dumbledore is a Raging Homosexual with a Unicycle.” http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yTm76oOj84I 21 “Put This on the Map.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51kQQuVpKxQ 22 http://www.reteachinggenderandsexuality.org 23 RGS website: http://www.reteachinggenderandsexuality.org/about-us/ 24 GAP website: mission statement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8meG60pqis 25 At the time of this writing, Global Action Project had 44 posted YouTube videos. 26 “Supafriends: The Fight for Acceptance.” http://www.youtube.com/user/ GlobalActionProject/videos 27 Halleck, Hand-Held Visions, 55. 28 A related mode that is harder to track is LGBTQ youth contributions to mimetic videos on YouTube. According to Limor Shifman, “mimetic videos invite participants to creatively respond to existing videos through innovation to existing features of the original video” a structure of participation that “lures extensive creative user engagement in the form of parody, pastiche, mash-ups or other derivative work.” Shifman has described mimetic videos as “the building blocks of complex cultures, intertwining and interacting with each other.” For example, a meme that became popular in early 2012 emerged from a video Shit White Girls say to Black Girls, in which a black woman performs a variety of white women making racist remarks to her. This meme was picked up across many LGBTQ youth communities, who subsequently made videos that creatively innovated and personalized the clip. Some of the videos that are part of this meme include the youth-produced Stuff People Say to LGBT Youth, Shit Straight People Say to the LGBT, and Shit Cis People Say to Trans People. Participation in video memes is a way in which LGBTQ youth creatively reimagine existing videos, integrating LGBTQ perspectives. Such creative videos mitigate stand in direct opposition to didacticism of pedagogical videos. 29 WeHappyTrans. http://wehappytrans.com 30 Supermattichine blog. http://supermattachine.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/278/ 31 Examples of the dozens of videos in this genre include: “Boyfriend Tag!” https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=oe_eZkmELjo and “Girlfriend Tag LGBT Edition” https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQb13LbDajo 32 Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life, 1987. 33 Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life, 8.

Bibliography Anonymous. Put this on the {Map} East King County. Seattle, WA: Revelry Media & Methods, 2010. Butler, Judith. “Bodies that Matter.” In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, 235–245. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999. Castells, Manuel. Communication Power. London: Oxford University Press, 2013. Chalfen, R. Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. Cohen, Cathy J. “Pinkos, Bulliiabeers, and Welfare Queens.” Glq 3 (1997): 437–465.

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Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish. New York, NY: Random House, 1977. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum, 2000. Goltz, Dustin Bradley. “It Gets Better: Queer Futures, Critical Frustrations, and Radical Potentials.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30, no. 2 (2013): 135–151. Goltz, Dustin Bradley. “ ‘Sensible’ Suicide, Brutal Selfishness, and John Hughes’s Queer Bonds.” Cultural Studies in Critical Methodologies 13, no. 2 (2013): 99–109. Gray, Mary L. “Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the Coming-Out Story.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14, no. 4 (2009): 1162–1189. Gray, Mary L. Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Halleck, DeeDee. Hand-Held Visions: The Impossible Possibilities of Community Media. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2002. Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Muller, Amber. “Virtual Communities and Translation into Physical Reality in the “It Gets Better” Project.” Journal of Media Practice 12, no. 3 (2011): 269–277. Peters, Kathrin and Andrea Seier. “Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube.” In The YouTube Reader, edited by Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, 187–203. Stockholm: The National Library of Sweden, 2009. Phillips, Laurie M. “Offering Hope and Making Attributions through YouTube: An Exploratory Ethnographic Content Analysis of the Social Change-Oriented ‘It Gets Better Project’.” The Journal of Social Media in Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 30–65. Pullen, Christopher, Margaret Cooper, eds. LGBT Identity and Online New Media. New York, NY: Routledge, 2010. Savage, Dan, Terry Miller, eds. It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living. New York, NY: Dutton, 2011. Shifman, Limor. “An Anatomy of a YouTube Meme.” New Media & Society 14, no. 2 (2012): 187–203.

8

A tráves de mis ojos: Fototestimonios with Children Growing Up in Immigrant and Migrant Communities in Northern California Natalia Deeb-Sossa

Introduction

Figure 8.1 Children at photography class In a period of intensified anti-Mexican sentiment in the United States and increased deportations that disproportionately targeted Mexican working-class men1 during the summers of 2009 and 2010, a group of Mexican-origin children living in immigrant and migrant communities in the Sacramento Valley participated in a fototestimonio project. The project reflected a grassroots approach to photography and social action, providing cameras to children so they could record and reflect on their strengths and problems.

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Figure 8.2 Boy with a camera This project, organized by community advocates and me, a university faculty member, promoted dialogue about issues that were important to the community, particularly immigration experiences. I initiated this project specifically to create a space of belonging and dialogue among children and youth about the ways their family and immigration status impacted their experiences in United States society.

Method review Fototestimonio is what I call an array of autobiographical narratives in Spanish, photographs, and narratives-in-photographs. To create these fototestimonios, I drew upon photovoice methodology. The three main goals of photovoice are to enable people (1) to record their community’s strengths and concerns, (2) to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about personal and community issues through group discussion of their photographs, and (3) to reach policymakers.2 Photovoice is a grassroots approach to social action. Using this approach required providing cameras to community members, so they could record and reflect on their strengths and problems as farmworker migrant children and immigrant children. Through group discussions of the photographs, photovoice promotes dialogue about issues important to community members.3 Wang defines photovoice as: a process by which people can identify, represent, and enhance their community through a specific photographic technique. It entrusts cameras to the hands of

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people to enable them to act as recorders, and potential catalysts for social action and change, in their own communities. It uses the immediacy of the visual image and accompanying stories to furnish evidence and to promote an effective, participatory means of sharing expertise to create healthful public policy.4

Photovoice, developed by Wang and Burris,5 is connected to the work of Freire6 insofar as Freire used photos and drawings to promote critical thought regarding an individual’s community. Wang and Burris further developed this concept and enabled the community members themselves to take photos of their own environment. This led to a more substantial impact on both the photo-takers and policymakers, as it presented better opportunities for dialogue and more insightful photographs. The use of photovoice has proved beneficial with marginalized participants, as it promotes their feelings of satisfaction stemming from the “method’s success at balancing power, creating a sense of ownership in the research, fostering trust, building capacity, and implementing a culturally appropriate research project in the community.”7 One participant in another study, a member of an underrepresented community, explained when asked if photovoice was an effective and appropriate method to explore his surroundings and health concerns: “Mmm, for sure … . Because [the photograph] is right there. You can’t lie.”8 The children produced hundreds of photographs. Selection of those images to print was difficult. Some of the photographs will be discussed in depth below, as well as their accompanying narratives.

Testimonios and fototestimonios Testimonios enabled me, as a researcher, to address issues of inequality through a fototestimonio project intended to interrupt the “othering” of farmworker communities in the United States. In Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, some Chicana and Latina feminist scholars have defined testimonios as “a form of expression that comes out of intense repression or struggle … an effort by the disenfranchised to assert themselves as political subjects through others, often outsiders, and in the process to emphasize particular aspects of their collective identity.”9 These scholars also hold that testimonios reveal dynamics of power, agency, and forms of resistance not often recorded in official histories or narratives. They have considered women’s testimonios as a sitio, or a space,10 from which to theorize gender, as well as cultural, economic, and political borders.11 Saldívar-Hull points out that testimonios can be found in nontraditional spaces: “ … look in nontraditional places for our theories: in the prefaces to anthologies, in the interstices of autobiographies, in our cultural artifacts, our cuentos [stories], and if we are fortunate to have access to a good library, in the essays published in marginalized journals not widely distributed by the dominant institutions.”12 In this sense, the children’s fototestimonios can be defined as “a crucial means of bearing witness and inscribing into history those lived realities that would otherwise succumb to the alchemy of erasure.”13 Like other testimonios, the

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migrant and immigrant children’s fototestimonios captured their everyday lives, struggles, and resistance, and I found in them both histories of inequalities and of liberation.14 Their challenge to official histories is among the reasons this chapter highlights the fototestimonios of these children.

Context: Migrant and immigrant communities in the Sacramento Valley A total of thirty-three Mexican-origin children and youth from two communities surrounding the Sacramento Valley were receptive and eager to participate in the fototestimonio project by being part of a free photography class. One community was immigrant and the other migrant. The ages of the children ranged from 5 to 17 years old. Although many of the children had older brothers and sisters, their siblings were either in other states working or in Mexico. Most of the children were the youngest in their families and 80 percent of them had been born in the United States. In the migrant community, as the agricultural season came to an end, the number of children dwindled. Many families left in search of jobs in other states. However, approximately half of the families (fifteen children) decided to stop following the crops and remain in the larger community because the constant moving was becoming too disruptive to the education of the children. The children’s parents worked in construction, landscape, maintenance, or in the fields. I procured consent and assent for this project from parents and children, respectively. Under the supervision of “El Maestro Baba” (a pseudonym), a specialeducation and photography teacher from Sacramento, the children enrolled in the photography program. The children who resided at the migrant center took the sixweek photography class at their migrant center, located in the Sacramento Valley, California, one of approximately eight Northern California labor camps funded by the state and federal governments to provide appropriate housing for families who work on local farms and ranches. A complex of one-story residential buildings and well-tended lawns, the migrant center is home to as many as sixty-four agricultural workers and their families during the harvest season, from April to October. It has a child-care center, laundry facility, children’s playground, and soccer field, and it employs a staff of as many as nineteen. Laborers who live in the center work in nearby fields, picking crops such as almonds, strawberries, and grapes, typically earning minimum wage for their work. They pay between seven and nine dollars a day to rent a unit with two, three, or four bedrooms to house themselves and their families. In order to qualify to rent a unit at the center, workers must be migrants who live at least 50 miles away from the migrant center during the off-season. A photographers’ group in the San Francisco Bay Area donated all of the equipment, film, and processing. The art and photography classes were conducted twice a week for six weeks during the summer break. The children and youth used 35-mm cameras to photo-document their lives as farmworker children and as migrants. We then

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Figure 8.3 Migrant camp discussed the photographs, which promoted dialogues about issues important to the migrant children who came to the photography class. The goals of the program were twofold: First, the children learned how to take photos using manual control of a 35-mm camera, how to develop film, and how to use an enlarger to make a print. Second, with these newly acquired skills, they documented their experiences as immigrants and as children of agricultural workers, expressing how they faced changes and what they wanted to do about them. The children were able to express what living in their community meant to them, and they documented, in a moment-to-moment manner, what it meant to be a farmworker kid. I took detailed notes of the discussions the children had about their photographs and collected the short narratives (or captions) each child wrote for the photographs they took of their community, family, and daily lives. A similar photography class was offered in Squire Town (pseudonym) for ten immigrant farmworker mothers and their children. The community of approximately 1,500 is located in Northern California’s agricultural heartland. It relies economically on several industrial canneries and casinos located nearby. Squire Town residents, in large part, live in this unincorporated area because of its proximity to work and city limits, its affordability, and the possibility of home ownership. However, living on the municipality’s fringe comes with costs: no flood control, health dangers from local soil, and dependence on rural-character services (e.g., a student run community/ rural clinic). In addition, many residents rely on failing septic tanks and well water that is becoming increasingly polluted. Finally, Squire Town has no police station,

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and county sheriffs have struggled to cope with the increasing levels of rural crime and gang activity resulting, in large part, from the closure of the teen center, the public park, and organizations that provided free after-school programs to youth in the mid-2000s. I collected the fototestimonios and produced alongside them my fieldnotes and writing exercises conducted in Squire Town with the Mexican-origin immigrant children. In the summer of 2009, I conducted social-action research and fieldwork when visiting Squire Town community three days a week for three to five hours a day. After each day at Squire Town, I wrote detailed fieldnotes, notes-on-notes,15 and also created longer analytic memos.16 Finally, I had informal conversations and conducted semistructured interviews with a community advocate and community organizer. Once the immigrant children had learned how to use a 35-mm camera, how to develop film, and how to use an enlarger to make a print, they documented their experiences as residents of Squire Town, as immigrants in the United States, and as children of agricultural workers. I also collected the short narratives (or captions) each child wrote for the photographs they took of their community, family, and daily lives.

Figure 8.4 Squire Town In the case of Squire Town, as in the migrant camp, I systematically collected and recorded the photos (first obtaining permission). The fototestimonios captured what Hurtado has called “conversations with power,”17 which shed light on how “authority” and institutional violence had been imposed on the subjects on a daily basis and how they have resisted those barriers. By writing, discussing, and photo-documenting their experiences, the children saw themselves as participants and they “work[ed] to recognize and validate their existence and experiences … as subjects.”18

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Results We are the others: Enactment of borderlands To prepare for the fototestimonio project, the migrant and immigrant children participated in various focus groups that used visual art activities to build trust and to voice their community concerns. In this project, they collectively created two collages with representations of their communities. In one collage, they expressed various “negative” images or stereotypes about their community, and in the other, they offered “positive” images and information that they desired for the public to know about their community. Before discussing the various perceptions about their community that they believed or others believed, the children engaged in various trust-building exercises. Once the children knew about each other and came to trust one another, they sat around a table in a bright room and discussed the negative stereotypes associated with their community. The children and youth were open to discussing how their feelings about how the predominantly Anglo children and their parents viewed them and their community members. One stated, they “don’t like our brown color.” Another 5-year-old boy said: “They don’t like our color … .They prefer white.” A 7-year-old girl responded in agreement by saying, “a white girl was rude to another girl, because she was black … they think the same of us.” They used old magazines, calendars, and photos to spell out words or images that would capture the sentiments they expressed in their discussion. In the first collage, pictured below, the children wrote down, on a 16-by-16-inch white canvas, their feelings about their interactions in the community with non-Hispanic and nonimmigrant people.

Figure 8.5 Collage of negative images

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Other children added to the dialogue by offering a list of terms describing their experiences. They listed: “RACIST” “Ugly color” “NOT FRIENDS OF OURS” “Goodbye” “The others” The youth expressed how immigrants, and “brown” people in particular, were categorized as “others,” and how they were not welcomed into society. On the contrary, the children discussed how they felt that society did not want to be “their friends,” and wanted them gone, or in other words “goodbye.” The youth discussed how immigrants, and “Hispanics” in particular, were victims of hate crimes and violence as they are targeted as a source of the ills in United States social problems. They mentioned how “lost work,” “crime,” “devastation” was “BLAMED” on “Los Chicanos, Los Hispanos, Indigenous, Latinas/os, and immigrants.” The children also expressed how their parents and how they themselves had been ridiculed by nonimmigrants because of their accent. Twice “ACCENT” was spelled out in their activity. To wrap up the focus group, the children came to a consensus on cutting and pasting on their collage the quote “America the beautiful, who are you beautiful for?” by Jonathan Kozol, found in a “Peace Calendar” constructed by the Syracuse Cultural Workers. Despite their young age, the children recognize that in the United States, migrants and immigrants are acknowledged as laborers and purchasers, yet are racialized as “others.” Such nonexistence is revealed legally by their undocumented status, which renders them partial or informal citizens19 and restricts their participation in community life; leaves them vulnerable to random acts of violence, hate crimes, and deportation; limits them to low-wage jobs; and hinders their access to suitable housing, education, food, and health care.20 The children’s first collage reveals the contested spaces in which they and their families live every day that are characterized by in-betweenness and instability— sites of boundary-making and fragmentation.21 Thus, the localities in which they live—migrant camps and rural towns in the Sacramento Valley—are borderlands, as they are communities in which construction and policing of boundaries between “us” and “them” happen.22 The border construction is evolving, because it is a social process constructed through human interaction at multiple, contested borders that crosscut the intersecting domains of home, the community, and the workplace.23 The collage reveals that “borders of community belonging” in the Sacramento Valley are regulated within a broader, national context in which public discourses propagate racial images of Mexican immigrants as “the Brown Peril”—a massive “flood” or “invasion” that threatens communities by overrunning schools and social services, increasing crime rates, and even promoting terrorism.24 Such imagery and

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associated discourses define Mexican-origin immigrants as dangerous outsiders, fueling local anti-immigrant sentiment and providing a framework for United States natives to understand Latino/a immigration. Discourses about Mexican immigrants also justify their exclusion from social entitlements and full participation by emphasizing differences between racial and ethnic groups and criminalizing immigrants as “illegals.” This opposition to immigration takes place in communities where most United States citizens, and in particular the working poor, are trying to make sense of their own experience with decreased availability of social services, educational resources, affordable housing, and jobs that have occurred under global economic restructuring and the neoliberal defunding of public services.25 Language differences and residential and occupational segregation by race/class facilitate the perpetuation of these discourses and perceptions of immigrants as threats. Discourses also take on gender-specific qualities. Mexican-origin men are characterized as dangerous criminals who steal jobs from United States citizens.26 Mexican-origin immigrant women are defined as sexually irresponsible and a drain on public resources.27

Immigration reform: ¡Si Se Puede! In the second collage, the children used a 16-by-20-inch white canvas to illustrate positive images of their community. They included various mural images, Aztec words, and images generated by the group.

Figure 8.6 Collage of positive images

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They collectively chose and pasted the terms: Resist, success, unite, freedom, gente, history, mundo, visión, forward, religión, cultura, sueños, professional, quality, and ¡si se puede! And from the Peace Calendar they took and pasted: ¡Amnistía y Legalización Ahora! The children all agreed that the most prominent element on the collage should read “Amnesty and Legalization Now.” The migrant and immigrant children discussed the harassment their parents, in particular their fathers, faced due to their undocumented status. The children and youth expressed fear over the possible deportation and harassment of their male undocumented family members. The fear was so intense that some of the children and youth described how their young male family members tried to hide themselves and lead an underground existence whenever possible. Their parents’ “removal,” the legal term for deportation, is a real fear: In fiscal year 2011, the United States deported a record-breaking 397,000 people and detained nearly that many. According to federal data released to Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation28 through a Freedom of Information Act request, a growing number and proportion of deportees are parents. In the first six months of 2011, the federal government removed more than 46,000 mothers and fathers of United States-citizen children. These were persons who overstayed their tourist, student, or other temporary visas or entered the country illegally; the majority were not criminals or fugitives. Most removals occurred through aggressive enforcement strategies, such as raids on worksites employing undocumented workers, not through legal proceedings against an individual. Many of those removed are adults who have to decide whether to take with them or leave behind their United Statescitizen children. According to the publication Colorlines, between July 1, 2010 and September 31, 2012, approximately 23 percent of all deportations (204,810) involved the parents of United States-citizen children.29 When given the opportunity to discuss the positive aspects of their community, the children emphasized the community’s resilience, resistance, and unity as they challenge the anti-immigrant United States immigration policies that continue to break their families apart.

A war against Us: Danger, separation, and deportation The children discussed what it meant to be an immigrant child. All the children were nervous about the potential absence of their parents, either from having to move somewhere else for work, from not being able to take their children with them, or because of sudden death. They said: “Me da mucha tristeza la guerra que hay contra nosotros, contra mi papa, contra los Mexicanos.” Silvia, 8 años “The war waged against us, against my daddy, against Mexicans makes me very sad.” Silvia, 8 years old

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“Me pone nervioso que se lleven a papa.” Alejandra, 9 años “The deportation of my father makes me nervous.” Alejandra, 9 years old “Me pone nervioso que se vaya papa.” Ricardo, 6 años “It makes me nervous when my father goes away.” Ricardo, 6 years old “Me baja la moral que no vaya a irme con mi mama.” Dora, 10 años “What lowers my interest in things is that I don’t go with my mom.” Dora, 10 years old

Figures 8.7 and 8.8 Mothers after work In their discussions of what it meant to be a Mexican-origin immigrant or a migrant in the United States, the children foregrounded deportations, removals, and the potential absence of their parents and family members, in particular their male undocumented family members. The Urban Institute estimates that there are approximately 4 million United States-born children who have at least one undocumented parent.30 Because United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deporting record numbers of undocumented parents, their deportation has left, according to Race Forward, some 5,100 children trapped in the United States foster care system.31 Forty-five percent of the adults deported were not apprehended for any criminal offense. Those who were arrested committed relatively minor offenses, not violent crimes. Hirokazu Yoshikawa’s Immigrants Raising Citizens32 and Carola Suárez-Orozco et al.’s Learning a New Land33 show that undocumented parents typically work 12 hours a day, six days a week, at the lowest of wages, as they seek the “American Dream for their children.” Their deportation only worsens the childrens’ lives, as “the children of deportation face increased odds of lasting economic turmoil, psychic scarring, reduced school attainment, greater difficulty in maintaining relationships, social exclusion, and lower earnings.”34

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In fiscal year 2012, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials deported 419,384 people.35 As previously mentioned, according to federal data released to Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation through a Freedom of Information Act request, a growing number and proportion of deportees are parents of United States-born children (23 percent). In the first six months of 2011, the federal government removed more than 46,000 mothers and fathers of United States-citizen children. Many of those removed are adults who have to decide whether to take with them or leave behind their United States-citizen children. Mexican minors under the age of 18 were also deported from the United States in record-breaking numbers in the past couple of years, in large part because the rate of border-crossing minors tripled since 2008 to the point that in 2012, unaccompanied minors comprised 79 percent of all juvenile border crossers.36 According to Animal Politico,37 the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) released a report confirming that 13,454 unaccompanied Mexican minors under the age of 18 were deported from the United States in 2012. Once apprehended, minors are placed with the United States Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency in United States Health and Human Services that takes custody of minors while their cases are being resolved. While the majority of minors from Mexico are returned without being detained, some children are kept in adult detention centers. In 2012, these children spent anywhere from three days to more than a year in these adult detention centers. More than 1,300 children spent a combined 100 years in adult detention centers during 2012.38 Therefore, it is not surprising that Mexican-origin migrants and immigrants of all ages believe that immigration, or better yet, deportations, are the most important issues concerning their families and communities. Approximately 9 million people live in mixed-status families39 and thus are affected by the high rates of deportation and discrimination faced by immigrants and migrants in the United States. The children also discussed how their parents, due to their work, had to migrate across the country, following the growing seasons, and often they were forced to leave behind their young children. The children were afraid of being left behind.

“They die in the fields:” Farmwork is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States The second most frequent topic the children discussed was how dangerous it was to be a farmworker. They believed that their fathers or mothers, at any time, might suffer an injury, heat stroke, dehydration, or pesticide poisoning. The children were afraid that their farm-working parents could even die at any time. Some said: “Me baja la moral las muertes.” Joaquin, 10 años “What lowers my interest in things are deaths.” Joaquin, 10 years old. “La maquina que corta, corta rápido, y es difícil de manejar, y [papi] llega cansado. Se va muy temprano, llega, se baña, come y duerme.” Lorena, 6 años

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“The machine that cuts, cuts really fast, and it is difficult to manage, and [daddy] arrives very tired. He leaves very early, comes back home, takes a shower, eats and sleeps.” Lorena, 6 years old Lo mas difícil es que “todos tienen que trabajar mucho para atender la fruta.” Ramiro, 9 años What is most difficult is that “all have to work very hard to take care of the fruit.” Ramiro, 9 years old Lo mas difícil es que mis papis “trabajan en el sol y esta muy caliente y se queman … además siempre andan agachados.” Ramiro, 9 años What is most difficult is that my parents “work under the sun and it is really hot and they get burnt … also, they always work bent.” Ramiro, 9 years old “Nunca descansan. No pasamos mucho tiempo con ellos.” Dora, 10 años They never rest. We don’t spend much time with them. Dora, 10 years old

Figures 8.9 and 8.10 Fathers after work

The children were acutely aware that farmwork is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States.40 Agricultural workers are at high risk of fatal and nonfatal injuries, lung diseases, hearing loss, skin diseases, and cancers associated with chemical use and prolonged sun exposure.41 Additionally, Mexican-origin migrant farmworkers work in subpar and oppressive field conditions due to lack of drinking water, inadequate waste facilities, and/or enslavement.42 One of the most striking elements of the testimonios was the emphasis the children placed on how important family and friends were in their lives for the love, guidance, and friendship that they provided. However, as noted above, their

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families were also a source of great anxiety and sorrow. The children worried about their parents and family members’ health and safety. They expressed how hard their parents worked in the fields, under dangerous conditions, and for long hours. They also shared their sadness of not having enough time to play and be with them as they worked, and when they returned home they just wanted to rest or had to run errands.

Daily life as (im)migrants: Leaving home, family, friends, and el campito Other themes emerged after I conducted a qualitative analysis of the fototestimonios by analyzing (1) the kinds of pictures taken by the children and youth who participated in the study, and (2) the themes discussed. I identified two types of photographs taken by the children and youth: (1) pictures of their family and friends; (2) pictures of places where they live and play. In regard to the themes discussed, these included, as discussed above, absence of parents due to death, migration, or deportation, importance of family, constant worry for parents’ health and safety, how their world shrunk after migrating from Mexico, sadness of saying goodbye when the camps they lived in closed for the season, and rules to follow as migrants (pets, travel, and packing). In this section, I focus on those important issues and how they affected the children and youth. Some of the children talked in nostalgic ways about their abuelitas (grandmothers), abuelitos (grandfathers), tias (aunts), tios (uncles), primas y primos (cousins), and hermanas y hermanos (sisters and brothers). Five children took photos of things that reminded them of their brothers or grandmothers whom they had to leave behind when they came to California. A 9-year-old boy took photographs of the Chivas, the soccer players his elder brother “loved” and used to play with all the time in Mexico. He and his 10-year-old brother had no idea when they would be able to see them again. Children and youth who had recently arrived from Mexico shared how their world had become smaller when they arrived in California. Several children and youth felt that in the United States they were constantly being reprimanded (“me regañan”) and told not to touch things (“no puedo tocar cosas”). They could only go to school and play at the migrant camp. They missed being able to walk freely around their hometown, run through “the plaza,” play games with their cousins at the corner store, and have adventures around the municipality. As a 9-year-old boy we pseudonymously call Alejandro said: En México yo iba a la escuela normal, iba a la plaza a jugar maquinitas y tenia a mis hermanos que jugaban conmigo y montábamos la bicicleta juntos. Aquí, no puedo jugar en la cancha cuando otros están jugando. No tengo bicicleta entonces mientras otros montan yo tengo que caminar. Siempre tenemos que estar aquí en el campito. No podemos salir a explorar.

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Figure 8.11 Newspaper clipping

In Mexico I went to a normal school, went to the plaza to play games and I had my brothers who played with me and with whom I rode bicycle. Here, I cannot play in the field when others are playing. I do not have a bicycle so while others ride I have to walk. We always have to stay in the camp. We cannot explore.

Several children and youth took pictures of places where they lived and played and talked about the sadness of having to leave the camp when it closed, of having to say goodbye to their friends, and perhaps not seeing them ever again. Although all the children and youth liked living at the camp very much, as they had lived close to family, cousins, and friends, many complained how living at the camp also meant not being able to have their pets with them, as there is a “no pets” rule.

Discussion This fototestimonio project illustrated the ways children’s and youths’ lives were shaped by immigration experiences. Indeed, these experiences shaped their view of United States society. The children shared a collective consciousness about the oppression and racial views that they and their community members faced on a

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Figures 8.12 and 8.13 Children in migrant camp

Figure 8.14 Girls in migrant camp

daily basis. In spite of facing discrimination, their experiences were expressed in the various visual art forms that they offered with dignity.

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Figure 8.15 Students at school

The children and youth expressed the anxiety and stress they felt as a result of their parents’ long work hours under harsh conditions. The children and youth realized the dangers of being a farmworker. They all knew someone who had had a serious injury, had had lung or skin diseases, or had suffered from heatstroke. Additionally, the children and youth heard their parents or their parents’ friends complain about the subpar field conditions due to lack of drinking water, shade, and inadequate toilet facilities. Coping with harsh living conditions is particularly difficult for the children and youth, who are isolated from supportive family and friends. For many, the separation from family caused a deep sense of loneliness and isolation. Not only did they suffer from the separation from family, they also experienced anxiety over the well-being of family members in their home countries. In addition, the lack of sufficient recreational activities led to a sense of desperation in the children and youth. When I presented the results of the fototestimonio project and facilitated a discussion with the mothers, it helped raise their awareness of the issues and struggles faced by their children and youth. We had a potluck where the children and youth showcased their photographs and the accompanying narrative to their family members. We always had a notebook for attendees to let us know what they thought about the photographs and accompanying narrative. One mother wrote: “Muchas gracias por apoyar a los niños y enseñares fotografía. Muchas gracias por inyectar otras emociones, por lo menos a mi y a mis hijos. Les gusto mucho. Muchas gracias!”

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[“Many thanks for supporting the children and teaching them photography. Many thanks for giving them other emotions, at least to me and my children. They liked it a lot. Many thanks!”]

This comment, which was echoed by other mothers and fathers, describes how the photography class and the project itself were an intervention. For this mother, the photography and art classes provided the children and youth with a safe space to talk about the issues and problems they faced. She also noted less disruptive behaviors by her children, both in the classroom and at home. Other mothers mentioned healthy and positive changes in their children’s selfesteem and emotions: “Gracias por la motivación.” [“Thank you for the motivation.”] “Gracias por ayudar a nuestros hijos a tener sus mentes mas abiertas.” [“Thank you for helping our children be more open-minded.”] “Mis hijos aprendieron la importancia de emprender en sus vidas.” [“My children learned the importance of persevering in their lives.”]

One mother, in an interview, recalled her surprise when she realized the fears and concerns her children and the other children expressed having. She thought that only she and other adult farmworkers were the ones missing family members, living in fear of the police and “migra” (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement), or the ones concerned by how farm labor deteriorated their loved ones’ health. She said: “Me sorprendió el saber que mi hija estaba tan triste. No sabia que ella también, como yo, extrañaba tanto Mexico y a sus hermanos. Tampoco sabia que estaba tan preocupada por la salud de su papi o de ser immigrante aquí en el Norte. Yo sufro igual. Pero nunca pensé que ella, a su edad, tenia estos pesares.” “I was surprised to learn that my daughter was so sad. I did not know that she, as I, missed so much Mexico and her brothers. I did not know that she was so worried about her dad’s health or of being an immigrant here in the North. I suffer in the same way. I never thought that she, at her age, had these worries.”

When I asked the mother to elaborate on her worries about being an immigrant in the United States, she expressed how difficult it was to “not have papers.” For her, as for immigrants of every age, everywhere, undocumented immigration status brings with it a state of vulnerability, fear, and insecurity. The fear and vulnerability stemming from illegality begins well before arriving to the United States. Immigrant women and men who cross the geographic border illegally face a myriad of risks, including possible drowning, becoming lost in the desert or abandoned on the way

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by a coyote (smuggler), suffering from dehydration, being captured by the migra, or turned over to authorities by unscrupulous coyotes. Immigrant women, in addition, face sexual assault. As she noted, “hay muchas que soy violadas” [“There are many that are raped”]. After facing these dangers, recently arrived female immigrants are highly vulnerable to exploitation and even violence at the hands of coyotes, “guides,” or sponsoring family members or acquaintances who pay the cost of their transit and with whom they reside until they find their own jobs and housing. The mother continued explaining that for new arrivals, “isolation in ex-motel rooms where they rent rooms as they seek work in the fields often makes women and young men prey to males who make sexual overtures” [“aislamiento en ex-moteles donde alquilan habitaciones mientras buscan trabajo en el campo muchas veces hace que las mujeres y los hombres jóvenes sean victimas de hombres que hacen insinuaciones sexuales”]. Of course, for the mother, the fear and insecurity that she and her family experienced is embodied in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Although ICE raids of job-sites do sometimes occur, detentions are more common for immigrants as they travel through the area, often on the way to or from work. Routine traffic violations can result in deportations, as local courts and law enforcement have increasingly been granted or taken on the authority to enforce immigration law.43 For example, she recalled how a local farmworker, father of four, went to traffic court to pay a ticket only to be detained by the local judge and deported the next day to Mexico. Since men are more likely to drive, they run a greater risk of being detained by police and possibly deported. Women, in contrast, are more hidden from public view and run less risk of being detained or deported, in part because of their caretaking responsibilities, their dependency on men for transportation, and their paid work in the back rooms of casinos and canneries. After a rash of police detentions of farmworker men suspected of being “illegals,” a Squire Town church member told me, “I walk to work. But most of the men, the farm-worker men, have to drive to work. What will happen to the town if the men don’t come back?” Because of the fear of deportation, in particular for male immigrants, one mother expressed a reluctance to report crimes to the police, apply for certain services, and sometimes even to seek medical assistance. Almost no research has been done on the effects that immigration policies and migration have on the mental health of the children, youth, and immigrant parents. More research on the psychosocial behavior of children and parents after immigrationenforcement actions is a must. In addition, we need more ways of assessing the mental health of these immigrants. Fototestimonio proved to be a helpful mechanism to elicit and examine their fears and thoughts, as well as a good way to promote discussion about their fears and feelings. Fototestimonio, photovoice, and similar methodologies should continue to be incorporated in mental-health and public-health research.

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Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26

27

28

Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Latino Immigrant Men and the Deportation Crisis,” 2013. Wang, “Photovoice,” 1997. Wang, “Photovoice,” 1997; Wang and Burris, “Empowerment Through Photo Novella,” 1994; Wang and Burris, “Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use,” 1997; Wang and Redwood-Jones, “Photovoice Ethics,” 2001. Wang, “Photovoice,” 186. Wang and Burris, “Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use,” 369–387. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970. Castleden and Garvin, “Modifying Photovoice for Community-Based Participatory Indigenous Research,” 2008. Castleden and Garvin, “Modifying Photovoice for Community-Based Participatory Indigenous Research,” 1400. The Latina Feminist Group, “Telling to Live,” 13. Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse,”1991. Bañuelos, “Here They Go Again with the Race Stuff,” 2006; Burciaga and Tavares, “Our Pedagogy of Sisterhood,” 2006; Delgado Bernal, “Mujeres in College,” 2006; Holling, “The Critical Consciousness of Chicana and Latina Students,” 2006. Saldívar-Hull, “Feminism on the Border,” 206. The Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live, 2. Zavella, “Papelitos Guardados: Theorizing Latinidades Through Testimonio,” “Silence Begins at Home,” and “Tenemos Que Seguir Luchando,” 2001. Kleinman and Copp, Emotions and Fieldwork, 1993. Lofland and Lofland, Analyzing Social Settings, 1995. Hurtado, Voicing Chicana Feminisms, 33. Holling, “The Critical Consciousness of Chicana and Latina Students,” 81. Sassen, “Territory Authority Rights,” 294–296. Coutin, Legalizing Moves, 2000. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 1993; Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 1987; cf. Lugo, “Reflections on Border Theory, Culture, and the Nation,” 1997. Deeb-Sossa and Bickham-Mendez, “Enforcing Borders in the Nuevo South,” 2008. De Genova, Working the Boundaries, 2–3; Alvarez, “The Mexican-U.S. Border,” 449, 451. Chavez, The Latino Threat, 2008; Chavez, “Mexicans of Mass Destruction,” 2009; Chavez, “Narratives of the Nation and Anti-Nation,” 2011; Chavez, Shadowed Lives, 2013; Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters, 2008; Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising, 2002. Chavez, The Latino Threat; Chavez, “Mexicans of Mass Destruction”; Chavez “Narratives of Nation and Anti-Nation”; Chavez, Shadowed Lives; Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters; Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Unpacking 187,” 1996. Chavez, The Latino Threat; Chavez, “Mexicans of Mass Destruction”; Chavez “Narratives of Nation and Anti-Nation”; Chavez, Shadowed Lives; Hemming, Rouverol, and Hornsby, Neighborhood Voices, 2001. Chavez, The Latino Threat; Chavez, “Mexicans of Mass Destruction”; Chavez “Narratives of Nation and Anti-Nation”; Chavez, Shadowed Lives; Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters; Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Unpacking 187.” Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation, “Shattered Families,” 2011.

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29 Wessler, “Nearly 205K Deportations of Parents of U.S. Citizens in Just Over Two Years,” 2012. 30 Chaudry et al., “Facing Our Future,” 2014. http://www.urban.org/ UploadedPDF/412020_FacingOurFuture_final.pdf 31 Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation, “Shattered Families,” 2011. http://www.raceforward.org/research/reports/shattered-families?arc=1 (accessed January 30, 2014). 32 Yoshikawa, Immigrants Raising Citizens, 2012. 33 Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, and Todorova, Learning a New Land, 2010. 34 Costantini, “Deported Moms with American Children Separated on Mother’s Day,” 2014. 35 United States Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2012, Enforcement Actions. http://www.dhs.gov/yearbook-immigration-statistics2012-enforcement-actions 36 United States Department of Homeland Security, “United States Border Patrol: Juvenile and Adult Apprehensions—Fiscal Year 2012.” http://www.cbp.gov/sites/ default/files/documents/U.S.%20Border%20Patrol%20Fiscal%20Year%202012%20 Sector%20Profile.pdf 37 Animal Politico, “EU deportó a más de 13 mil menores mexicanos en 2012.” July 13, 2013. 38 Lee, “Over 1,300 Immigrant Children Spent a Combined 36,598 Days in Adult Detention Facilities,” 2013. 39 Taylor et al., “Unauthorized Immigrants,” 2011. 40 National Institute for Occupation Safety and Health (NIOSH), “Workplace Safety and Health Topics: Agriculture,” 2013. 41 Kirkhorn and Schenker, “Current Health Effects of Agricultural Work.” 2002. 42 Carroll et al., Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey, 2005. 43 Passel and Cohn, A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States, 2009.

Bibliography Alvarez, Robert R. “The Mexican-U.S. Border: The Making of an Anthropology of Borderlands.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 447–470. Animal Politico editors. “EU Deportó a Más de 13 Mil Menores Mexicanos en 2012.” AnimalPolitico.com. July 23, 2013. http://www.animalpolitico.com/2013/07/ eu-deporto-a-mas-de-13-mil-menores-mexicanos-en-2012/#axzz2ZtCFrjUS (accessed March 26, 2014). Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bañuelos, L. Esthela. “ ‘Here They Go Again with the Race Stuff ’: Chicana Negotiations of the Graduate Experience.” In Chicana/Latina Education in Everyday Life: Feminista Perspectives on Pedagogy and Epistemology, edited by Dolores Delgado Bernal, C. Alejandra Elenes, Francisca E. Godinez and Sofia Villenas, 95–112. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. Burciaga, R. and A. Tavares. “Our Pedagogy of Sisterhood: A Testimonio.” In “Chicana/ Latina Education in Everyday Life: Feminista Perspectives on Pedagogy and Epistemology, edited by Dolores Delgado Bernal, C. Alejandra Elenes, Francisca E. Godinez and Sofia Villenas, 133–142. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006.

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Carroll, Daniel, Ruth M. Samardick, Scott Bernard, Susan Gabbard and Trish Hernandez. Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2001–2002: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Farmworkers (Research Report No. 9). Washington, DC: United States Department of Labor, 2005. Castleden, Heather and Theresa Garvin. “Modifying Photovoice for Community-Based Participatory Indigenous Research.” Social Science & Medicine 66 (2008): 1393–1405. Chaudry, Ajay, Randolph Capps, Juan Pedroza, Rosa Maria Castaneda, Robert Santos and Molly M. Scott. “Facing Our Future: Children in the Aftermath of Immigration Enforcement.” Urban Institute. 2010. http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/412020_ FacingOurFuture_final.pdf (accessed March 26, 2014). Chavez, Leo R. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nations. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. ———. “Mexicans of Mass Destruction.” In International Migration and Human Rights: The Global Repercussions of U.S. Policy, edited by Samuel Martinez, 82–97. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2009. ———. “Narratives of the Nation and Anti-Nation: The Media and Construction of Latinos as a Threat to the United States.” In Narrating Peoplehood Amidst Diversity: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, edited by Michael Boos, 183–206. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2011. ———. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. Independence, KY: Cengage Learning, 2012. Costantini, Cristina. “Deported Moms with American Children Get Separated on Mother’s Day.” HuffingtonPost.com, May 13, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2012/05/11/deported-moms-mothers-day_n_1509963.html (accessed March 26, 2014). Coutin, Susan Bibler. Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Deeb-Sossa, Natalia. “Doing Good”: Racial Tensions and Workplace Inequalities at a Community Clinic in El Nuevo South. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2013. Deeb-Sossa, Natalia and Jennifer Bickham-Mendez. “Enforcing Borders in the Nuevo South: Gender and Migration in Williamsburg, VA and the Research Triangle, NC.” Gender and Society 22, no. 5 (2008): 613–638. De Genova, Nicholas. Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and Illegality in Mexican Chicago. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Delgado Bernal, Dolores. “Mujeres in College: Negotiating Identities and Challenging Educational Norms.” In Chicana/Latina Education in Everyday Life: Feminista Perspectives on Pedagogy and Epistemology, edited by Dolores Delgado Bernal, C. Alejandra Elenes, Francisca E. Godinez and Sofia Villenas, 77–79. Albany : State University of New York Press, 2006. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum, 1970. Golash-Boza, Tanya and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. “Latino Immigrant Men and the Deportation Crisis: A Gendered Racial Removal Program.” Latino Studies 11, no. 3 (2013): 271–292. Gutiérrez, Elena R. Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Hemming, Jill, A. J. Rouverol and A. Hornsby. Neighborhood Voices: New Immigrants in Northeast Central Durham. Durham, NC: Laser Image Corporate Publishing, 2001.

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Holling, Michelle A. “The Critical Consciousness of Chicana and Latina Students: Negotiating Identity amid Sociocultural Beliefs and Ideology.” In Chicana/Latina Education in Everyday Life: Feminista Perspectives on Pedagogy and Epistemology, edited by Dolores Delgado Bernal, C. Alejandra Elenes, Francisca E. Godinez and Sofia Villenas, 81–94. Albany : State University of New York Press, 2006. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. “Unpacking 187: Targeting Mejicanas.” In Immigration and Ethnic Communities: A Focus on Latinos, edited by Refugio I. Rochín, 93–103. East Lansing, MI: Julian Samora Research Institute, 1996. Hurtado, Aída. Voicing Chicana Feminisms: Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Kirkhorn, S.R. and M.B. Schenker. “Current Health Effects of Agricultural Work: Respiratory Disease, Cancer, Reproductive Effects, Musculoskeletal Injuries, and Pesticide-Related Illness.” Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health 8 (2002): 199–214. Kleinman, Sherryl and Martha A. Copp. Emotions and Fieldwork. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993. Lee, Esther Yu-Hsi. “Over 1,300 Immigrant Children Spent a Combined 36,598 Days in Adult Detention Facilities.” ThinkProgress.org, June 5, 2013. http://thinkprogress.org/ immigration/2013/06/05/2103651/over-1300-immigrant-children-spent-a-combined36598-days-in-adult-detention-facilities/ (accessed March 26, 2014). Lofland, John and Lyn H. Lofland. Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation Analysis, 3rd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1995. Lugo, Alejandro. “Reflections on Border Theory, Culture, and the Nation.” In “Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, edited by S. Michaelsen and D. E. Johnson, 43–67. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. National Institute for Occupation Safety and Health (NIOSH). “Workplace Safety and Health Topics: Agriculture.” December 9, 2013. http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/ agriculture/ (accessed May 10, 2011). Passel, Jeffrey S. and D’Vera Cohn. A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States. Washington, DC: Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project, April 14, 2009. Retrieved May 18, 2011. Pérez, Emma. “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor.” In Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, edited by Carla Trujillo, 159–184. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1991. Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation. “Shattered Families: The Perilous Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System.” 2011. http:// www.raceforward.org/research/reports/shattered-families?arc=1 (accessed January 30, 2014). Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993. Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. “Feminism on the Border: From Gender Politics to Geopolitics.” In Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, edited by Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar, 203–220. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Santa Ana, Otto. “Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Sassen, Saskia. Territory Authority Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

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Suárez-Orozco, Carola, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Irina Todorova. Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2010. Syracuse Cultural Workers. Peace Calendar, 2001. Taylor, Paul, Mark Hugo Lopez, Jeffrey S. Passel and Seth Motel. “Unauthorized Immigrants: Length of Residency, Patterns of Parenthood.” Pew Research, 2011. http:// www.pewhispanic.org/2011/12/01/unauthorized-immigrants-length-of-residencypatterns-of-parenthood/ (accessed March 26, 2014). The Latina Feminist Group. “Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. United States Department of Homeland Security. “Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2012, Enforcement Actions.” http://www.dhs.gov/yearbook-immigrationstatistics-2012-enforcement-actions (accessed March 25, 2012). ———. “United States Border Patrol: Juvenile and Adult Apprehensions—Fiscal Year 2012.” http://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/U.S.%20Border%20Patrol%20 Fiscal%20Year%202012%20Sector%20Profile.pdf (accessed June 5, 2013). Wang, Caroline C. “Photovoice: A Participatory Action Research Strategy Applied to Women’s Health.” Journal of Women’s Health 8, no. 2 (1999): 185–192. Wang, Caroline C. and Mary Ann Burris. “Empowerment Through Photo Novella: Portraits of Participation.” Health Education & Behavior 21, no. 2 (1994): 171–186. ———. “Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use of Participatory Needs Assessment.” Health Education & Behavior 24, no. 3 (1997): 369–387. Wang, Caroline C. and Yanique A. Redwood-Jones. “Photovoice Ethics: Perspectives from Flint Photovoice.” Health Education & Behavior 28, no. 5 (2001): 560–572 Wessler, Seth Freed. “Nearly 205K Deportations of Parents of U.S. Citizens in Just Over Two Years.” Colorlines.com, December 17, 2012. http://colorlines.com/ archives/2012/12/us_deports_more_than_200k_parents.html (accessed April 11, 2013). Yoshikawa, Hirokazu. Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Young Children. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012. Zavella, Patricia. “Papelitos Guardados: Theorizing Latinidades Through Testimonio,” “Silence Begins at Home,” and “Tenemos Que Seguir Luchando.” In Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. The Latina Feminist Group. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 1–24, 43–54, 348–356.

9

Staging Gender Violence in the Congo: Reading Lynn Nottage’s Ruined as a Documentary Drama Phyllisa Smith Deroze

This woman is Black So her blood is shed into silence This woman is Black So her blood falls to earth Like the droppings of birds To be washed away with silence and rain Audre Lorde

Lynn Nottage’s 2009 play Ruined positions her as one of America’s newest playwrights to use the theatrical stage as an instrument of awareness about gender violence against women. Ruined not only discloses gender violence against women but, more specifically, it also highlights the violence Congolese women experience as casualties of war. Nottage remarks that “after years of reading newspaper reports [about the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo] and feeling an absence of narrative I got very frustrated that I didn’t see what was happening to African women.”1 In 2004, Nottage and her artistic director Kate Whoriskey traveled to a refugee camp in Arua, Uganda—a city located on an Eastern border of the Congo. At the camp, Nottage and Whoriskey interviewed Congolese women refugees and documented the countless never-before-told or silenced stories of their abuse and survival before crossing the border into safety. Initially, Nottage planned to write a contemporary Congolese adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children (1930). Her proposed play would differ slightly from Mother Courage because it would tackle the “emotional reality” women faced during times of war.2 However, after visiting Uganda and talking with sexual violence survivors, Nottage decided against the contemporary adaptation idea for two major reasons. First, she says, “the words ‘mother courage’ transformed in [the Congolese women’s] mouths and when we left we had a different relationship with the play.”3 Second, “Brecht didn’t address what happens to women in war. And, as we’ve discovered,

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women find themselves uniquely vulnerable.”4 By “not sitting down listening with a journalist’s ear [but] listening with a storyteller’s ear,” Nottage discovered that the Congolese women she encountered at the refugee camp had such unique, powerful, haunting, and inspiring stories of their own that Brecht’s European-based themes could not adequately relay the fullness of their experiences.5 In short, Nottage found Brecht’s form, structure, and plot (albeit epic) too limiting to convey the reservoir of resilience of these women. Whoriskey, the artistic director, noted that her overall goal was to maintain a commitment to the complexity of “counter[ing] the drama with humor, spirit and wit, and to treat the stories collected in Central Africa with the understanding that at every moment the Congolese are determined to survive.”6 Indeed, Nottage and Whoriskey share a desire to remain true to the experiences of Congolese women in general, the individual interviewees in particular, and the emotional reality they encountered during their visit to Africa. This approach to playwriting aligns with Gary Dawson’s observation of documentary theater—“more and more, the history found in a documentary play is the oral history of a memory play offered up by key players in the making of it. The oral history of a documentary play is its chief authentifying sign system that confers actuality: proof something actually took place.”7 Nottage incorporates many of the oral testimonies about the impact of the war on Congolese women that she heard firsthand and included them in the play. Prior to Ruined’s off-Broadway opening night, Nottage stated, “it was important that the play not become a documentary, or agitprop. And that Mama Nadi is morally ambiguous, that you’re constantly shifting in your response to her.”8 After the play opened, however, she was more comfortable with the audience engaging with the play on its own merits. She later said in an interview, “our relationship to art shifts, and something that was not political can suddenly become political and something that seems political can suddenly become apolitical. So I am hesitant to label the play, and just [want to] allow the audience to have whatever relationship they want with the play.”9 My relationship with Ruined leads me to categorize the play as a documentary drama. Although it is widely known that Nottage conducted significant research before writing this play, no full-length essay until now has explored Ruined as a documentary drama. I aim to analyze the play by highlighting the major contributing examples Nottage uses to elucidate the real-life situation in the Congo and how those examples have led to the conclusion that Ruined is not just a Pulitzer Prize play but also an award-winning documentary drama. Ruined first premiered at the Goodman Theater (Chicago) in November 2008 and then opened off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theater Club in February 2009.10 On April 20, 2009, Lynn Nottage was awarded one of America’s highest literary honors— the Pulitzer Prize. This was a monumental moment because Nottage became the second African American woman to win the Pulitzer for drama.11 In addition, it marks the first time a play about gender violence against black women has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize.12 Nottage’s play risked ineligibility because it emphasizes violence in Africa rather than on American soil. The Pulitzer Prize Board grants the drama award “for a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original

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in its source and dealing with American life.”13 During an interview with PRI’s The World, Nottage was asked if she was surprised about winning the Pulitzer Prize, since Ruined centers on Congolese women and their lives on the African Continent. She responded, “I was a little surprised, but if I just say something about it not being about the United States: I do feel to a certain extent, the play is set in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but it very much touches upon themes that are relevant to the United States.”14 She continued to explain that unfortunately, roughly ninety percent of the precious mineral, coltan, extracted from the Congo directly impacts cell phones, computer chips, video games, and laptops used in America. In short, we Americans benefit from the chaotic, blood-shedding war in the Congo and as long as no one technically “owns” the land cultivating the precious minerals, people will continue to fight over the territory where huge quantities of coltan are found, stolen, and sold on the black market. Congolese women are also casualties of the war. Like the precious gems ripped violently from the soil, these women suffer from extreme forms of gender violence. The international acclaim Nottage received for exposing the rampant sexual violence against Congolese women implies that the hard work and dedication of feminists to end violence against women is progressing. There are still, however, ample opportunities for improvement and expansion of feminist and humanitarian efforts toward peace. Additionally, the popularity of the play (since its off-Broadway run it has been performed at a number of theaters in America and abroad) highlights the universality of gender violence around the world.

Documentary drama Although Lynn Nottage was initially hesitant about labeling her play, I believe that her creative process in writing Ruined provides an inescapable connection to the documentary drama genre. In its most basic format, documentary drama is “an alternative to received journalism.”15 Furthermore, documentary theater attempts to “reconcile the theatrical variables of space, audience, actors and textual actuality into a transformative aesthetic machine that can manipulate the real world.”16 Nottage began with locating an issue (the war in the Congo), gathered firsthand research (visited a refugee camp in Uganda), had a desire to tell the story from a non-journalistic approach, and used specific real-life information within the play (that I will highlight in this essay)—all of which are central components of documentary dramas. Documentary drama specialist Carol Martin lists six functions of documentary theater: “1. To re-open trials in order to critique justice, 2. To create additional historical accounts, 3. To recount an event, 4. To intermingle autobiography with history, 5. To critique the operations of both documentary and fiction, 6. To elaborate the oral culture of theater.”17 According to Martin, a documentary drama must have a connection to a historical event, and although the war in the Congo was still happening when Nottage wrote and staged Ruined, she hoped that she would be writing about the past. In an interview with Leonard

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Lopate, Nottage remarks, “it actually breaks my heart. I was hoping when I started writing this play that I would be talking about the past. It sort of shocks me that this play has as much relevance.”18 Nottage purposely avoids using some components of verbatim documentary drama that are frequently used by Anna Deavere Smith, one of the most well-known verbatim documentary drama playwrights and the most famous black American playwright in documentary drama. For example, Nottage does not disclose which, if any, of the words spoken in the play are verbatim from her interviews with Congolese refugees, nor does she expose which narratives belong to the specific women she interviewed. Lastly, she avoids making a claim that Ruined is a documentary drama. Although Ruined is not aligned with Western verbatim genres, it embodies elements that closely resemble South African documentary dramas: In the African context, the story is itself important as a mode through which we can know ourselves and explore our history, identity and collective value systems. It is no less true for being fictional or constructed. At some level it may even suggest greater truth, abstracted beyond the specific. Thus whether or not what is presented is someone’s “actual” words—that is, verbatim in a Western sense—is less important than whether they represent a recognizable, lived truth.19

Thus, Nottage’s attempt to move away from one aspect of the documentary drama genre—verbatim drama—is actually a move away from the Western style of documentary drama toward an African style. This developmental structure strengthens the play’s connection to Africa and the transcontinental bridge she tries to build between American theatergoers and an African subject and context. The genre of documentary drama has a variety of names: “documentary theater,” “docudrama,” “verbatim theater,” “theater of witness,” “tribunal theater,” “nonfiction theater,” “theater of fact,” or “theater of the real.”20 I use the term “documentary drama” to describe Ruined and I will subscribe to Hutchison’s definition of the play’s feasibility in portraying the reality of Congolese women rather than a verbatim testimony. In South African documentary drama, “ ‘feasibility’ parallels ‘authenticity’ in a Western context. It is based on what is recognizable as a commonly lived experience by sufficient numbers of people.”21 Also, “in representing these experiences, they represent the lived reality of all those who were silenced and unrepresented, but who would recognize themselves in the narrative.”22 I argue, therefore, that Ruined is the theatrical application of a feasible-reality based on the real-life Congolese women Nottage interviewed, their situations, and the war’s context.

The reality of gender violence in the Congo The United Nations has rightly described the Congo as “the rape capital of the world.”23 After visiting Eastern Africa, Nottage discovered that Congolese women “wanted the world to hear their stories, and they were extremely frustrated that there

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wasn’t a forum for them.”24 The visit ignited Nottage’s obsession with the war and the women’s stories. It is estimated that over 200,000 women and girls have been raped over the past twelve years in the Congo.25 According to the UN, there were 15,996 rape cases in 2008 and two out of every three were children.26 In August 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton “unveiled a $17 million plan to fight DRC’s stunning levels of sexual violence.”27 Congolese women are in an extremely vulnerable situation. Following the Rwanda genocide of 1994, in which almost 800,000 people were killed within 90 days, many rebels fled Rwanda and crossed into foreign territory— the Congo.28 The people of Eastern Congo have been suffering tremendously since this spillover into their country. In 1997, Laurent Kabila overthrew Mobutu’s United States-supported regime from a 32-year reign, which began Africa’s “First World War”.29 The instability in this region, combined with the discovery of the Congo’s abundant resources, has resulted in a number of countries, including Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Burundi, the USA, and other Western countries, fighting over the Congo’s rich natural resources (coltan, diamonds, gold, and timber). In 2007, it was estimated that about one million US dollars worth of coltan was stolen daily.30 On the one hand, rebel militia desire to destroy their enemies and prove that the rebels have absolute power by terrorizing residents. On the other hand, the Congolese army, notoriously known for being the most poorly paid army in all of Africa, sustain themselves by preying upon the local residents.31 Citizens of the wartorn country have a popular saying, “the soldiers are not so much hunting rebels as hunting women.”32 If citizens of Eastern Congo are fortunate to escape being slaughtered in the frequent massacres, they can expect to live in terror of being violently raped or witnessing a family member, friend, and/or neighbor raped at gunpoint; sometimes, relatives are ordered to participate in gang rape.33 There are, however, thousands of citizens who flee for a better life by relocating. It is estimated that 500,000 Congolese have been forced from their homes and many villages have been set ablaze.34 This sad and unfortunate reality also means that their history and culture is being desecrated. Unquestionably, the situation in the Congo is overtly disturbing. Violent rapes occur on a massive scale because rebel and military men assault women and the UN Peacekeepers are not protecting the citizens as securely as needed. In the late summer of 2010, approximately 500 women and children were raped over a couple of days within 10 miles of a UN Peacekeepers’ camp.35 These avoidable tragedies eliminate the possibility for Congolese citizens to have a safe haven of protection that residents of other countries might normally receive. Additionally, the level of physical damage caused to the bodies of women, girls, and recently some men,36during and after sexual assault, is unparalleled. Stephen Lewis, the co-director of AIDS-Free World, said, “there is no precedent for the insensate brutality of the war on women in the Congo. The world has never dealt with such a twisted and blistering phenomenon.”37 Karin Wachter, an advisor in the region working for the International Rescue Committee, noted that the brutality exerted upon survivors of rape causes

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women and girls [to] suffer from debilitating damage to their reproductive systems, resulting in multiple fistulae,38 as well as broken bones, severed limbs, and burns. From a public-health perspective, the psychological and social consequences of sexual violence are equally as devastating. There are serious consequences for women’s and girls’ mental health, including depression and suicide, as well as for the family and community members who witness or are forced to participate in the violence.39

Rape is not an uncommon tactic used during times of war but it is unquestionable that the Congo’s situation takes rape and war to a horrific new level.40 The atrocities described above are what disturbed Nottage so deeply that she traveled to Africa from America, interviewed survivors, and wrote the documentary drama Ruined.

Documenting the Congo’s complexity on stage Ruined is a two-act play set at Mama Nadi’s bar, which doubles as a whorehouse patronized by both soldiers and rebels. Mama Nadi, the Madam of the house, is in her mid-40s, attractive, and has a blunt personality that could be perceived as callous. Throughout the play she is presented as unemotional, controlling, and embodying traits of the Strong Black Woman caricature. She is able to demand that all guncarrying patrons leave their bullets at the counter with her. She is a fortress who will wave a machete fearlessly at rebels and soldiers alike if they threaten her safety or the safety of her girls. In essence, Mama Nadi alone is able to keep the war on the outside of her place—that is until the end of the play. Her establishment is located in an unnamed small mining town in the tropical Ituri rain forest. The modestly furnished bar and brothel is often without the necessary supplies such as condoms, liquor, soap, and cigarettes because looters frequently rob the deliveryman. Christian, the supplier, is also a not-so-secret admirer of Mama Nadi. He is drawn to her ability to create and maintain a nugget of calm in the midst of a chaotic time. Her bar is welcoming to all paying customers—white foreigners who visit seeking coltan and other precious minerals, rebel militia, neutral parties, peacekeepers, and Congolese military. Everyone, however, must obey her rules, which include respecting the women, the building and the meager furnishings, drinking the watered down and often recycled liquor41 without complaining, and putting bullets into her possession at the counter. The play begins just as Christian arrives with one of his routine, but late, deliveries. When Mama Nadi verbally reprimands Christian for arriving behind schedule and without all the items on her list, he interprets her attention as encouragement for his romantic gestures. He asks for a kiss, and when Mama Nadi does not oblige, he recites a love poem. She is not interested. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates intensely with Mama Nadi to purchase the other items in his cargo: CHRISTIAN: Go on. Take a peek in the truck. And don’t say I don’t think about you. (Mama smiles.) MAMA: Three? But, I can’t use three right now.

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CHRISTIAN: Of course you can. And I’ll give you a good price if you take all of them. ……………………………………………………………………… MAMA: Okay, one. That one in front. CHRISTIAN: Three. C’mon don’t make me travel back with them. MAMA: All right, all right. I don’t need the whole damn saga. Just tell me, how much for the one? CHRISTIAN: The same as usual plus twenty-five, because … because … You understand it wasn’t easy to get here with the— MAMA: Twenty. My best offer. (Christian mulls it over. He’s reluctant.) CHRISTIAN: Aye. Okay. Damn it. Yes. Yes. But I expect another cold Fanta. (… A moment later two women in ragged clothing step tentatively into the bar.: Sophie, a luminous beauty with an air of defiance, and Salima, a sturdy peasant woman whose face betrays a world weariness …).42

The mystery of how Mama gets supplies and women into a brothel located in a rural space is solved very quickly. Christian not only supplies her with goods but with sex workers, too. Furthermore, when Christian requests the amount of payment be “the same as usual,” it is clear that this is not their first human trafficking exchange. The young ladies’ disheveled and ragged clothing, body posture, and vaginal odor described as “the rot of meat” also inform the audience that these women’s virtue has been a casualty of the war. They are rape survivors.43 It appears that both Christian and Mama profit from their misfortune. As I will highlight, the exploitation facing Congolese women is multilayered and complex. Human trafficking, according to Siddharth Kara’s article “Labor in a Globalized World,” has its earliest beginning in Africa with the American Slave Trade when almost 13 million West Africans were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.44 Today, Kara claims that human trafficking is “essentially modern-day slave trading, which ensnares millions of people in debt bondage or forced labor conditions in a plethora of industries.”45 Louise Shelly, author of Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective, says this of immigrants who willingly resort to illegal means in order to get into Europe: “Many of these illicit immigrants have paid human smugglers and cannot be considered victims of trafficking. But all too often those who pay smugglers become victims of trafficking along the way or on the arrival.”46 Thus, human trafficking and the victimization caused by human trafficking may not be the same even though the divide between the two is thin. One expert on the health of trafficking victims explains, “professionals working this field have come to realize that there is an enormous grey area that leaves open the question of how exploited does one have to be in order to be considered ‘trafficked.’ ”47 Although at this point, Sophie and Salima appear to be helpless victims, it is later revealed that they do have some level of agency in their own trafficking. The exchange between Mama Nadi and Christian for Sophie and Salima appears to be a classic case of human trafficking—Christian is the greedy smuggler and Mama the selfish purchaser and they both benefit and profit from the lives of these young innocent

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women. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. The exchange is complicated as Sophie’s and Salima’s personal stories unfold. They both have been raped at gunpoint—Sophie raped by militiamen with a “bayonet and then left for dead” and Salima kidnapped by soldiers and made into a sex slave for five months.48 The men killed her daughter because the baby girl cried while Salima was gang-raped after being attacked while fetching water for the family. Although Mama Nadi’s place is a brothel, the women are able to find safety there from the vicious attacks they are subjected to in the villages. Nottage craftily avoids presenting prostitution as a binary—constraining or liberating—but rather it is an option that some women take in exchange for safety in a chaotic situation. Sophie and Salima are not liberated women free to explore their sexuality without boundaries as some sex workers profess—they still must have sex or tolerate being groped by men they disdain. Nor are they helpless women forced to stay in Mama Nadi’s brothel and whore themselves at no cost or until a debt is paid. The women stay because they want to remain safe. Mama confirms by asking Sophie directly, “do you know what kind of place this is?” And, Sophie replies, “yes, Mama. I think so.”49 Similarly to the way scholar Cynthia Blair describes African American women sex workers in Chicago during the late twentieth century who resorted to sex work as “a strategy of economic survival,” Sophie and Salima willingly choose a life of prostitution as a strategy of survival.50 Mama Nadi’s place offers safety from the outside. Beyond the brothel, the real world awaits them and in that world, women have no protection. The brothel’s four walls provide a visible defense and a place to call home in the wilderness. Indeed, a whorehouse is transformed into a supportive community where the women find physical protection, emotional support, and escape from starvation. Mama Nadi’s brothel is the safest place in the area. This is ironic because a brothel exists so that men can pay for sex with women, and then leave. Brothels are not traditionally places where women or men go to find love, a relationship, or long-term commitment. Therefore, women involved in this type of prostitution are usually characterized as being “trapped” or “enslaved.” Many feminists consider prostitution the antithesis of feminism, while a few argue the opposite in the name of women’s rights and personal liberation.51 Rebecca Whisnant’s and Christine Stark’s edited collection Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography contains twenty-eight essays by various feminist scholars both rejecting and celebrating prostitution and sex work. Together, however, these essays come to prove that “the prostitution industry is an enormously powerful and pervasive cultural presence.”52 Through the presentation of sex workers’ lives as complex and circumstantial, the women in the brothel emerge as women and are free from negative criticism. In sum, the women are humanized and the audience can empathize with the characters. Christian attempts to ask Mama to take his niece Sophie because the bar is a safer place for a pretty girl than living in the villages, and he ends up begging her. He is desperate because he knows that the brothel is safer than what awaits his niece. She was raped and left for dead once and he knows that the next time she might not be lucky enough to cheat death again. Once he discloses the outcome of her rape—that Sophie

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is “ruined”—Mama objects to their agreement and Christian resorts to begging and pleading, lowering the price to “free” and even paying her with goods to take Sophie: CHRISTIAN: … Look, militia did ungodly things to the child, took her with … a bayonet and then left her for dead. And she was— MAMA (snaps): I don’t need to hear it. Are you done? = …………………………………………………………. CHRISTIAN: Mama, please. Look, okay, I’m asking you to do me this favor…And I don’t ask you for a lot in return. Please. The child has no place else to go. MAMA: I’m sorry, but I’m running a business not a mission. Take her to the sisters in Bunia, let her weave baskets for them… ………………………………………………..… CHRISTIAN: She’s my sister’s only daughter. Okay? I told my family I’d find a place for her…And here at least I know she’ll be safe. Fed.53

The earlier negative characterization of Christian changes in the latter part of their exchange. He transforms from a careless, insensitive benefactor of human trafficking to a desperate man begging Mama to take his niece into her place of refuge as a favor. In short, he is willing to be indebted to Mama Nadi on his niece’s behalf or in addition to his niece, if that is what Mama Nadi requires. No longer is Christian perceived as a one-dimensional, heartless exploiter who sells women like cartons of cigarettes, but his humanity becomes apparent. He is an uncle trying to save his niece’s life by whatever means necessary. Mama Nadi recognizes the irony in Sophie being more secure working for her than living with her own family. Describing young women’s sense of security as safer within a brothel than in society elucidates the level of chaos Congolese women face daily. At the conclusion of their conversation, Mama agrees to take both Sophie and Salima. The fate of the third woman is unknown. Josephine, a young woman who has been working for Mama Nadi for a while, escorts the two into the rear of the building in order to teach them how business operates. Salima becomes a sex worker immediately, but Sophie’s physical damage from the rape with a bayonet is so devastating that she is unable to engage in vaginal sex and takes the role of singer/entertainer and personal accountant with limited sexual duties. Mama Nadi enables the women to have some, albeit very little, control over who can and cannot enter their bodies. In her novella Woman at Point Zero, Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi describes the paradox of having sexual control as a prostitute. The book is based on the life of Firdaus, a woman inmate at Qanatir Prison in Cairo, Egypt, who becomes a highpriced, self-employed, sex worker after suffering many years of abuse and running away from home. As her own boss, Firdaus could choose when she worked and how often, and she could also demand a certain clientele. One day a customer accuses her of not being a “respectable woman,” and the comment offends Firdaus. So, she trades a life of prostitution for a more “respectable” life as an office assistant in order to become

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a respectable woman. However, after Firdaus realizes that she has been used for free sex by the boss’s relative who pretends to want a romantic relationship with her, and she discovers that it is a common misfortune for “respectable women” to be used, she concludes “the least deluded of all women [is] the prostitute.”54 Likewise, the women in Mama Nadi’s brothel acknowledge that men will have sex with them regardless, but within the brothel they have some control over when and how. For example, when one of the rebel soldiers is not respectful to Sophie, Mama demands that he behave. Inside Mama’s bar Sophie can deny men who want to disrespect her or she can ignore the catcalls of soldiers. Mama Nadi can demand the men respect her women and insist that sex become a service in exchange for money or precious minerals rather than given for free or taken by brute force. This analysis is not meant to underestimate the horrible pain these women endure or the harsh realities of being trafficked into prostitution; it is offered as a means to better understand Nottage’s point that the situation for women in the Congo is so dismal that prostitution is a preference for some women. When Sophie first arrives at the bar, the physical damage from her rape is overtly apparent. As quickly as Mama Nadi accepts her into the brothel, she hands Sophie a drink and says, “here. It’ll help the pain down below. I know it hurts, because it smells like the rot of meat.”55 Furthermore, throughout the play, the audience is reminded of how extensive her physical injuries are and how much they have affected her. Ann Fox’s essay “Battles on the Body: Disability, Interpreting Dramatic Literature, and the Case of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined,” defines Sophie as a “disabled rape survivor” and believes that “the play’s representation of disability functions significantly as part of its political project.”56 The function is to constantly remind the audience that the rape of Congolese women is severe, traumatizing, and in many cases can be permanently damaging. Much later in the play when Sophie, Salima, and Josephine are in a back room alone, Sophie reminds the other ladies about her condition when they forget—first in an argument with Salima and then with Josephine. SALIMA: You, you don’t have to be with them … . This night, I look over at you singing, and you seem almost happy like a sunbird that can fly away … SOPHIE: Is that what you think? While I’m singing, I’m praying the pain will be gone, but what those men did to me lives inside of my body. Every step I take I feel them in me. … …………………………………………………………………………..… JOSEPHINE: … let me say what we all know, you are something worse than a whore. So many men have had you that you’re worthless. (A moment. Sophie, wounded, turns and limps away silently.)57

The audience witnesses Sophie’s constant struggle to forget the pain of being raped, but the physical scars entrap her. Her inability to heal physically prevents her emotionally healing. This is one of the most explicit truths documented in the play. Sophie suffers from a debilitating fistula, like many of the real-life rape survivors

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in the Congo. A fistula is a connection between two points in the body that do not normally connect, such as if the bladder, vagina, and rectum were to connect as one vessel with weakened or no muscle ability to prevent a woman’s bodily fluids from leaking uncontrollably. Fistulas can be caused naturally during childbirth but are more commonly caused by violent rapes using objects (bayonets, wood, or even guns) as in the case with the Congo. According to the Economist, “up to 80% of reported fistula cases in women” in the Eastern Congo are the result of violent rapes. The consequences of unrepaired fistulas are life altering.58 Some women are unable to control or stop the flow of blood, urine, and feces because their tissues have been ripped. A significant number of these Congolese women are shunned from their families and treated like outcasts because of the smell. This creates a situation where even if a woman could triumph over the emotional trauma of rape, it is nearly impossible to move beyond the physical and psychological trauma. This inability to heal or recover in all areas of one’s health can ignite an endless cycle of trauma. Because of her fistula, Sophie sings and entertains the bar’s customers more than she services men with sexual gratification. The one notable time Sophie has sex with government leader Osembenga, she describes how she feels carrying a physical reminder of the rape: SOPHIE (Shouting as if possessed): … I am dead! Fuck a corpse! What would that make you? (Osembenga is thrown.)

Although he is unexpectedly surprised by Sophie’s outburst, he still wants her. And Mama, angry at Sophie’s behavior, remarks: MAMA: Next time I will put you out for the vultures. I don’t care if that was the man who slit your mother’s throat … . You could have gotten all of us killed. …………………………………………………………………………..… MAMA: You’re lucky the commander is generous … . Now you go in there, and you make sure that his cock is clean.59

Undoubtedly, Sophie is left physically, emotionally, and psychologically scarred by the rape and her inability to heal from the physical trauma has affected the essence of her being. She feels like a corpse, useless and helpless. Mama Nadi, however, has little tolerance for helplessness, especially when it puts her and her establishment in jeopardy. There is a reason one of the characters copes with a fistula. The Panzi Hospital located in the Congo offers hope for many women in the situation that Sophie exemplifies. In some cases fistulas can be repaired and in other cases colostomy bags are used to manage the fluids privately without emitting noticeable odors, which gives the women back a sense of hope and pride. Although the magnitude of sexual violence in the Congo requires that Mama Nadi appear tough, it gradually becomes clear that she is protective of her establishment and workers. They are a

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community of women who are surviving in a war-torn country by the best available means. The most symbolic act of community comes when Mama Nadi risks her most precious possession in order to help Sophie get her fistula fixed. After Mama Nadi allows Sophie to assist her with the bookkeeping, Mama Nadi catches Sophie stealing from her. When she asks what Sophie is planning to do with her money and what can be so important that she would risk being thrown back into the bush, Sophie informs her that she has heard about a doctor in the city that helps repair women’s vaginas. SOPHIE: A man that come in here said he can help me. He said there is an operation for girls. MAMA: Don’t you lie to me. SOPHIE: Listen, listen, please listen, they can repair the damage. (A moment. Mama releases Sophie.)60

Sophie was hoping to steal enough money from Mama Nadi to get the medical treatment she needs and be repaired by the man who restores “ruined” women and young girls. Sophie’s desire to travel to the city and have her vagina repaired reflects the real phenomenon of many Congolese women who travel to Dr. Denis Mukwege’s Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, Congo. Dr. Mukwege’s medical expertise is extraordinary. He “specializes in treating women and girls who have been victims of sexual violence in the Congo’s twelve-year war. Many of these patients have been gang raped, and some subjected to assault from the inside out with bayonets, chucks of wood and even rifles.”61 In the documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Mukwege said that he operates on five women per day.62 In 2008, he was awarded the United Nations Human Rights Prize for “his work protecting the rights and dignity of tens of thousand[s] of Congolese women.”63 Mama Nadi has sympathy for Sophie and her willingness to risk it all for a chance to have the surgery and regain a sense of personal dignity, and therefore Mama Nadi does not kick her out. Eventually, Mama Nadi demonstrates a climactic act of kindness just as the war closes in on her haven in the rain forest. When Mama realizes that she is no longer able to keep the war outside of her establishment, she gives Mr Harari (a Lebanese merchant profiting from the extraction of the Congo’s minerals) her most precious diamond to sell in the city so that Sophie can get the operation to repair her body and have a better life. MAMA: Yes. Take it. (Hands him Sophie’s piece of paper) It has the name of a man in Bunia, a doctor. (With urgency) He won’t trouble you with questions. Use my name.64

Mama Nadi offers up the large diamond she has been saving to purchase land, just so that Sophie can have a chance at being healed. When Mr Harari agrees to do as Mama Nadi asks, she exits to a back room to get Sophie. While she is in the rear, an aid worker demands that Mr Harari leave immediately. The worker warns Mr Harari that there are three vehicles rapidly approaching and they should not be there when

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the vehicles arrive. Mr Harari calls for Mama Nadi, but after hearing the sounds of gunshots and the engine revving, he leaves. When she returns with Sophie, Mama Nadi quickly explains what she has done and pushes her out the door to run behind them. As Mama Nadi celebrates trading her most precious possession for a good cause, Sophie enters. SOPHIE: He’s gone. The stage is flooded with intense light. The sound of chaos, shouting, gunfire, grows with intensity. Government Soldiers pour in. A siege. A white hot flash. The generator blows! … Fortune, Commander Osembenga, Simon and Soldiers stand over Sophie and Mama.65

The shocking sound effects and lighting compound the sadness of knowing that Sophie might remain disabled for life without the fistula operation and that Mama Nadi’s prized diamond is gone. The intensity of emotion elucidates the importance of community, the feeling of isolation, and the sense of hopelessness real Congolese women experience daily as casualties of war. While one of Sophie’s primary purposes is to bring attention to the damaging fistula epidemic affecting real women in the Congo, Salima showcases another devastating impact facing survivors. When she fled the military camp where she was held captive for months and returned home, her husband abandoned her. Sadly, Congolese women are customarily shunned by family members (including their husbands) after being raped. Lisa Jackson told NPR that while visiting the Congo to film The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, her award-winning documentary, she met many mothers who, after being raped, were forced off their land and were abandoned by their husbands. Often the husbands would move to a different village and take a new wife. Jackson exclaimed, “you can see firsthand how rape affects one woman then affects the family, then affects the culture. It’s a femicide that is breaking down traditional villages and a way of life.”66 Because family members believe the myth that rape is a consequence of promiscuity, abandonment is unfortunately the usual response that awaits women who need community the most. As a result, there are a number of homeless women—like Sophie and Salima—who are vulnerable to repeat rapes or to human trafficking if they are without shelter for too long. Even within a play about women, Nottage highlights that the war also has devastating impacts on men who are encouraged to put their humanity aside and engage in savage behavior. From a womanist perspective, communal healing includes men and children. At Mama Nadi’s place where the women seek community, the soldiers come for a break from the war, too. Salima tells Sophie that the soldiers desire her emotionally as well as sexually. SALIMA: You know what he [a soldier] say? … He say, one man stuff the coltan into his mouth to keep soldiers from stealing his hard work, and they split his belly open with a machete … . And then he fucked me, and when he was finished he sat on the floor and wept. He wanted me to hold him. Comfort him.67

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Not only are the women in need of a community, but the men are, too. Nottage tries to capture the plight of a people searching for a community through the lens of women and their experiences. When Mama Nadi is no longer able to keep the war outside and the conflict barges into her bar, her strong black woman exterior dissolves to the human reality that she is. When the rebels arrive at Mama Nadi’s place, Salima’s husband Fortune is with them. He had abandoned Salima immediately following her rape and captivity as a sex slave for five months in rebel camps. Now her husband is embarked on a relentless search to have her again. He remains outside, but begs frequently to know if she is inside. Although no one confirms Fortune’s suspicions that Salima is inside hiding, he refuses to leave. He waits outside Mama Nadi’s place for days, even in the rain. Indeed, he has finally come to realize that it is senseless to be ashamed of his wife who had no control over her victimization, and after joining the rebel militia he understands the isolation and the damage that war causes families, both men and women. Maybe he has witnessed the rape of innocent women while out with the rebels and now knows that there was nothing Salima could have done to prevent her rape and their daughter’s murder. By the time Fortune arrives to Mama Nadi’s bar, Salima is pregnant and does not want Fortune to see her because she does not want to experience his rejection again. However, in the midst of Osembenga’s raid inside the brothel, Salima enters the main area from a rear room where she has been hiding for days in order to avoid Fortune. When she sees him, she unleashes all her anger about being abandoned. Salima, unable to bear the pain of her situation any longer, enters dazed and soaked with blood from the waist down. The blood dripping from her legs exposes the self-induced abortion she has just completed. After not wanting Fortune to see her pregnant with another man’s baby, Salima has made a radical and doubly fatal decision to terminate her pregnancy, and unashamed takes center stage: (Salima slowly enters as if in a trance. A pool of blood forms in the middle of her dress…) … SALIMA (Screams): For the love of God, stop this! Haven’t you done enough to us. Enough! Enough! (The Soldiers stop abruptly, shocked by Salima’s defiant voice.) MAMA: What did you do?! (Fortune violently pushes the Soldiers out of the way and races to Salima…Fortune scoops Salima into his arms.) …………………………………………………………….. (Salima smiles triumphantly. She takes Fortune’s hand.) SALIMA (To Osembenga, the soldiers, and Fortune): You will not fight your battles on my body anymore. (Salima collapses to the floor. Fortune cradles her in his arms. She dies. Blackout.)68

With a triumphant smile upon her face, Salima dies in Fortune’s arms and the immediate blackout accompanied by long silence makes this paralyzing event the play’s most climactic moment.

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Ending with a call to action Nottage’s understanding of feminist theories is apparent in the way she provides a voice for Congolese women who have been ignored. She also tackles the myth of the strong black woman. She could have ended the play with Salima’s death, but that ending risks being too traumatizing for audiences and could impede their transformation from spectator to activist. Activism is important to most documentary genres, including documentary drama. Nottage told the New York Times, One of the greatest challenges I faced in trying to tell the story of these women is figuring out a way to end with optimism…to marry the horror with the humanity, and tell a balanced tale that reflected the complexities of the Africa that I experienced, which was not just the horror. There was also a great deal of joy and humor that I encountered, and I wanted to capture those textures.69

Nottage’s desire to capture the beauty of the women in the play is also a refusal to allow the women to be described as “victims” or treated as such. Before the play ends, Nottage challenges the strong black woman caricature. The play returns to the romantic saga between Mama Nadi and Christian that opened the play. Mama Nadi’s callous exterior dissolves slightly in Act Two, but it is in the final scene that the myth is most explicitly dismantled. Nottage uses Mama Nadi to counter the matriarch stereotype and illustrates how this can cause emotional problems for black women. When Christian brings up the idea of marriage in the beginning of the play by saying, “I know you want a husband,” Mama replies that she would like that as much as she would “like a hole in [her] head.”70 She is perceived as epitomizing the ideal, independent, strong black woman who is liberated from the dependence of men and marriage. After the soldiers raid Mama Nadi’s bar and Salima dies from a botched abortion, everyone’s mood changes. Christian turns sober and back to his usual self with the exception of having more confidence to demand that Mama Nadi take him seriously. After his expressions of sadness over missing Mama Nadi are of no avail, he retaliates, “you are a mean-spirited woman … .”71 Caught off guard by his snappy comeback, Mama Nadi stands her defiant ground. Christian then boldly confesses his love for her: CHRISTIAN: We joke. It’s fun. But honestly I’m worn bare. …[P]lease, I’d like to have the truth… why not us? MAMA (With surprising vulnerability): I’m ruined. (Louder) I’m ruined. (He absorbs her words.) CHRISTIAN: God, I don’t know what those men did to you, but I’m sorry for it. I may be an idiot for saying so, but I think we, and I speak as a man, can do better. (He goes to comfort her. She pulls away until he’s forced to hold her in a tight embrace.) MAMA: No! Don’t touch me! No!

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(She struggles to free herself, but eventually succumbs to his heartfelt embrace. She breaks down in tears. He kisses her.)72

When Christian proves himself capable of being her support, Mama Nadi is vulnerable. The play ends with the two dancing as the lights fade. The ending has received unfavorable critique from some white feminist critics. They view the ending as being “a heterosexual dance,” functioning merely as “a heterosexual romance,” and implying that “heterosexual marriage solves everything.”73 Ann Fox writes, Where friends who saw it were moved, I was angry: at the horrible violence against women, but also at the play’s romanticized conclusion. Why would a work that had labored to expose the violence of a war fought for the economic gain of a mercenary few (and, thanks to the conflict minerals, our own ability to purchase cheap cell phones) become transformed in the end to an individuated, happily resolved love story?74

These critics, however, miss a couple of vital points that are important for a full understanding of the play’s conclusion. First, black feminism and womanism are not gender-separatist movements like traditional white feminism. The shared experience of racism unites black women and men, and prevents their total abandonment of each other even if some black men are perpetrators of violence. Secondly, the majority of Congolese women (who are culturally raised to prioritize family, motherhood, and heterosexual marriage over material possessions, autonomy, and homosexuality) want their husbands to embrace them. One anonymous respondent to The Feminist Spectator’s criticism of the ending said it well: “I went into the show with a certain fear, and came out feeling the story of life in Africa is finally being told from a point of view of humanity: that is the essence of the last scene!”75 In “The Icon of the Strong Black Woman: The Paradox of Strength,” Regina E. Romero writes, “society expects the African American woman to handles losses, traumas, failed relationships, and the dual oppressions of racism and sexism. Many African American women view falling short of this expectation as a personal failure. This may bring about an intense feeling of shame … .”76 Although Romero is talking about African American women, the same can be applied to African women in this context. Mama Nadi desires Christian, but pressures of society and to be a tough woman in the midst of war weigh her down. Mama Nadi has been dealing with her pain and burdens alone. She fosters a community within her brothel for the young women working there although she has not benefited from a community of her own. The play’s ending is paramount as it highlights Mama Nadi’s need for Christian’s support in her healing process. Christian symbolizes the community of men, religious (Christian) people, and to some degree the audience. The play ends with a call to action for Congolese men to stop abandoning their wives and nudges at

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the world to assist rather than turn its back on these women left to survive some of the most violent forms of sexual assault. This documentary drama captures the impact of systematic rape against women in the Congo and simultaneously places the plight of all black women on the world agenda so that it can be a safer place for all women and girls. Lynn Nottage may not have intentionally written a documentary drama, but I argue that this is what exists. The critical reception Nottage received highlights its ability to inspire the audience. Dawson noted, “when a documentary play works, it does so because it moves the conversation about its subject matter from a state of entropy to a higher level of activation energy and discourse. … In fact, … when documentary theater succeeds it often does so on a national scale with esteemed recognition often given to its award-winning makers.”77 In addition, the inclusion of real-world facts, although fictionalized, is enough to make Ruined a documentary drama. The fictionalized unnamed setting Nottage creates in the middle of the Ituri rain forest mirrors the lives of Congolese women, men, and foreigners seeking precious minerals. The Ituri rain forest is real even if we never know if Mama Nadi’s place existed. Congolese women do die from rape or physically survive it with traumatic hardships. Wives are abandoned by their husbands and are forced out of their villages after being abused. Dr. Denis Mukwege, who is unnamed in the play, works at the Panzi hospital repairing fistulas and other genital damage. And, unfortunately, both rebels and military men rape women, kidnap them, and make them sex slaves, inflicting extreme and horrific forms of gender and sexual violence. The plausibility that the fictional women in Ruined represent the lives of real women is heightened by the inclusion of images of the women Nottage interviewed at the refugee camp she visited. Even though Nottage does not provide verbatim testimony (out of respect for the women’s privacy) by including photographs and the names of the women in both the printed version of the play and during the performances, she provides sound evidence for my reading of Ruined as a documentary drama. Mama Nadi, Josephine, Salima, and Sophie are the names of real women she met in the Ugandan refugee camp. Their faces tell stories of survival and triumph, their resilience exudes from their eyes. I conclude with this compelling read of Ruined as a documentary drama by reflecting on Carol Martin’s words: “Even as documentary theater typically tries to divide fabrication from truth by presenting enactments of actual people and events from verifiable sources it is also where the real and the simulated collide and where they depend on each other.”78 Ruined is an extraordinary example of the melding of research and theatrical performance. Ruined is a beautifully designed, internationally acclaimed documentary drama and by analyzing it through this lens, the play surfaces as one of the most well-known theatrical documentations of violence against women and more specifically black women. When the play is analyzed from this perspective, Ruined could be one of the most revolutionary dramas written in the first decade of the twenty-first century because it has successfully documented gender violence against marginalized women from the villages of east Africa on the main stage of America.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Nottage, interview by Leonard Lopate. Nottage, interview by Leonard Lopate. Nottage, interview by Leonard Lopate. Nottage, “Lynn Nottage Gives Ruined Women a Voice.” Nottage, interview by Jeffery Brown, PBS News Hour. June 15, 2009. Nottage, Ruined, xiii. Nottage, Ruined, xiii. McGee, “Approaching Brecht, by Way of Africa.” Nottage, “The Root Interview.” Nottage, Ruined. 1. African American women have been publishing plays since Pauline Hopkins’s 1879 musical play Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad. Suzan-Lori Parks was the first African American woman playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama—she won it in 2002 for Topdog/Underdog. She was a finalist for the prize in 2000 for In the Blood, a play about the sexual exploitation of black women. Pulitzer.org, http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-Drama PRI’s The World: Global Perspectives for an American Audience. Dawson, Documentary Theater in the United States, xi. Alan Filewod, “The Documentary Body,” 62. Martin, “Bodies of Evidence,” 12–13. Nottage, interview by Leonard Lopate. Yvette Hutchison, “Verbatim Theater in South Africa,” 211. Martin, Dramaturgy on the Real World Stage, 1. Hutchison, “Verbatim Theater in South Africa,” 213. Hutchison, “Verbatim Theater in South Africa,” 212. Lloyd-Davies, “Why Eastern DR Congo is ‘Rape Capital of the World,’ ” CNN. Weaver, “ ‘Ruined,’ a Drama of Sexual Violence in Congo War,” Interview with Lynn Nottage. United Nations Population Fund, “Secretary-General Calls Attention of Scourge of Sexual Violence in DRC,” 1. Drash, “Girl, 9, Details Rape in Congo to Photographer,” CNN. Gettleman, “Symbol of Unhealed Congo,” A1. BBC News, “UN Peacekeepers ‘failed’ DR Congo Rape Victims,” BBCNWS.com Baaz and Stern, “Why Do Soldiers Rape?,” 500. Jackson, “The Greatest Silence.” Baaz and Stern, “Why Do Soldiers Rape?,” 500. McCrummen, “Congo’s Rape Epidemic Worsens During U.S.-Backed Military Operation.” In a 2007 video documentary “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo” by Lisa F. Jackson, a Congolese woman told the story of her brother’s death. Soldiers raided their home and gang-raped her. After making her brother watch the act, they demanded that he rape her too or be killed. When he refused to rape his sister, the soldiers murdered him right before the woman’s eyes. She was impregnated during the ordeal.

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34 Gettleman, “Symbol of Unhealed Congo,” A1. 35 BBC News, “UN Peacekeepers ‘failed’ DR Congo Rape Victims,” BBCNWS.com 36 Jeffery Gettleman’s article “Symbol of Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims,” featured a story of Congolese male rape survivors. Men raping men is a growing problem and by mid-summer it was estimated that 10 percent of all rape survivors in DRC are men and boys. These men are outcasts, just like the women, but are often laughed at and mocked by their neighbors who say, “Those men in the bush made you their wife.” Also, hospitals are reporting an increase in castrations. 37 Wairagaka Wakabi, “Sexual Violence Increasing in Democratic Republic of Congo,” 15. 38 According to the Fistula Foundation, there are two causes of Fistulas: childbirth and sexual violence. http://www.fistulafoundation.org/ 39 Wairagaka Wakabi, “Sexual Violence Increasing in Democratic Republic of Congo,” 15. 40 Elisabeth Jean Wood’s essay “Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When is Wartime Rape Rare?” corrected a misconception that rape is an inevitable part of every war by examining wars that did not involve rape. She does this to eliminate excuses that may prevent holding groups accountable for engaging in sexual violence. 41 Recycled liquor is the wine left over from customers’ glasses that Mama Nadi pours back into bottle. 42 Nottage, Ruined, 16. 43 Nottage, Ruined, 17. 44 Kara, “Supply and Demand,” 66. 45 Kara, “Supply and Demand,” 67. 46 Shelley, Human Trafficking, 4. 47 Siva, “Stopping Traffic,” 2058. 48 Nottage, Ruined, 13. 49 Nottage, Ruined, 17. 50 Blair, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’, 3. 51 Prostitution is a multi-billion-dollar industry that includes adult and child pornography, bartering sex for food and shelter, massage parlors, prostitution rings, stripping, saunas, live sex shows, street prostitution, escort services or outcall, ritual abuse, peep shows, phone sex, international and domestic trafficking, mail-order bride services, and prostitution tourism. Whisnant and Stark, eds., Not for Sale, xi. 52 Whisnant and Stark, eds., Not for Sale, xi. 53 Nottage, Ruined, 11–13. 54 El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, 86. 55 Nottage, Ruined, 17. 56 Nottage, Ruined, 2. 57 Nottage, Ruined, 37. 58 Economist, http://www.economist.com/node/11294767 59 Nottage, Ruined, 13. 60 Nottage, Ruined, 55. 61 http://www.fistulafoundation.org 62 Jackson, “The Greatest Silence.” 63 http://www.fistulafoundation.org 64 Nottage, Ruined, 90.

190 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Documenting Gendered Violence Nottage, Ruined, 92. Jackson, “The Greatest Silence.” Jackson Films, Inc., 2007. DVD. Nottage, Ruined, 31. Nottage, Ruined, 94. Weaver, “ ‘Ruined,’ a Drama of Sexual Violence in Congo War,” VOANews.com Nottage, Ruined, 7. Nottage, Ruined, 98. Nottage, Ruined, 67. Dolan, “The Feminist Spectator.” http://www.feministspectator.blogspot.com March 16, 2009. Fox, “Battles on the Body,” 1. Dolan, “The Feminist Spectator.” http://www.feministspectator.blogspot.com March 16, 2009 (accessed October 10, 2012). Romero, “The Icon of the Strong Black Woman,” 227. Nottage, Ruined, xii. Martin, Dramaturgy on the Real World Stage, 2.

Bibliography Baaz, Maria Eriksson and Maria Stern. “Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC).” International Studies Quarterly 53 (2009): 495–518. BBC News. “UN Peacekeepers ‘Failed’ DR Congo Rape Victims.” BBCNWS.com, September 8, 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11224656 Blair, Cynthia. I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Dawson, Gary Fisher. Documentary Theater in the United States: An Historical Survey and Analysis of Its Content, Form, and Stagecraft. London: Greenwood Press, 1999. Dolan, Jill. “The Feminist Spectator.” http://www.feministspectator.blogspot.com March 16, 2009. Drash, Wayne. “Girl, 9, Details Rape in Congo to Photographer.” CNN, August 11, 2009. Economist. “Congo: Atrocities beyond Words.” May 1, 2008. http://www.economist.com/ node/11294767 (accessed November 15, 2009). El Saadawi, Nawal. Woman at Point Zero. London: Zed Books, 1983. Filewod, Alan. “The Documentary Body: Theater Workshop to Banner Theater.” In Get Real: Documentary Theater Past and Present, edited by Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson, 55–73. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Fistula Foundation. Homepage. November 10, 2009. https://www.fistulafoundation.org/ Fox, Ann M. “Battles on the Body: Disability, Interpreting Dramatic Literature, and the Case of Lynn Nottage’s ‘Ruined.’ ” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 5, no. 1 (2011): 1–15. Gettleman, Jeffery. “Symbol of Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims.” New York Times, August 14, 2009, New York ed.: A1. ———. “Clinton Presents Plan to Fight Sexual Violence in Congo.” New York Times, August 12, 2009, New York ed.: A8.

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Hutchison, Yvette. “Verbatim Theater in South Africa: ‘Living History in a Person’s Performance.’ ” In Get Real: Documentary Theater Past and Present, edited by Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson, 209–223. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Jackson, Lisa F. “The Greatest Silence: Rape in Congo.” Directed by Lisa Jackson. Jackson Films, Inc. 2007. DVD. Kara, Siddharth. “Supply and Demand: Human Trafficking in the Global Economy.” Harvard International Review 33, no. 2 (2011): 66–71. Lloyd-Davies, Fiona. “Why Eastern DR Congo Is ‘Rape Capital of the World.’ ” CNN, November 25, 2011. Lorde, Audre. “Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices.” Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New. Revised edition. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984. Martin, Carol. “Bodies of Evidence.” The Drama Review 50, no. 3 T191 (2006): 8–15. ———. Dramaturgy on the Real World Stage. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. McCrummen, Stephanie. “Congo’s Rape Epidemic Worsens During U.S.-Backed Military Operation.” Washington Post Foreign Service. Washington Post, August 10, 2009. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/10/ AR2009081000492.html McGee, Celia. “Approaching Brecht, by Way of Africa.” The New York Times, January 21, 2009. Nottage, Lynn. “Extended Interview: Lynn Nottage.” Interview with Jeffery Brown. PBS News Hour, June 15, 2009. ———. Ruined. New York, NY: Theater Communications Group, 2009. ———. “The Root Interview: Lynn Nottage on ‘Ruined’ Beauty.” The Root, March 1, 2010. ———. “Ruined.” By Leonard Lopate. WNYC.org, March 6, 2010. Radio. ———. “Lynn Nottage Gives Ruined Women a Voice.” Metro.co.uk, April 21, 2010. Parks, Suzan-Lori. Red Letter Plays. New York, NY: Theater Communications Group, 2001. ———. Topdog/Underdog. New York, NY: Theater Communications Group, 2001. PRI’s The World: Global Perspectives for an American Audience. “Play on Rape in the Congo Wins Pulitzer.” Interview with Marco Werman. April 21, 2009. Pulitzer.org http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-Drama (accessed March 20, 2010). Romero, Regina E. “The Icon of the Strong Black Woman: The Paradox of Strength.” In Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, edited by Leslie C. Jackson and Beverly Greene, 225–238. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2000. Shelley, Louise. Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Siva, Nayanah. “Stopping Traffic.” The Lancet 376, no. 9758 (2010): 2057–2058. United Nations Population Fund. “Secretary-General Calls Attention of Scourge of Sexual Violence in DRC.” http://www.unfpa.org/public/News/pid/2181 (accessed March 1, 2009) Wakabi. Wairagaka. “Sexual Violence Increasing in Democratic Republic of Congo.” The Lancet 371, no. 9606 (2008): 15–16. Weaver, Carolyn. “ ‘Ruined,’ a Drama of Sexual Violence in Congo War.” Interview with Lynn Nottage. VOANews.com, 2009. Whisnant, Rebecca and Christine Stark, eds. Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2004. Wood, Elizabeth J. “Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When Is Wartime Rape Rare?” Politics Society 37, no. 1 (2009): 131. DOI: 10.1177/0032329208329755.

10

Making The Invisible War Visible Laura Vazquez

The radical feminist analysis remains: patriarchal masculinity and the oppression of women are the common root of terrorism and of war. Using the masculinist posturing and aggression of war without true legal justice will never get us to the world we envision. Jennie Ruby1

Introduction Post 9/11 Americans face a world with new real, perceived, and rhetorical challenges not present before that event. The rhetoric of the supposed “New World Order” caused us to redefine who we are as a global military force while redefining the enemies we now sought to confront. According to Bonnie Mann: The saturation of media space with films of the attack (the two erect towers penetrated then destroyed by the two planes over and over again), became the narrative vehicle that told the story of an extraordinary threat; the threat of the homosexual rape and simultaneous castration of the United States by a dark, brutal, and overwhelmingly masculine enemy.2

While Americans still believed in the same mythologies of heroism and masculinity as before the attack, this new military force now also brought women into the mix as the military increasingly relied on their active presence and support—despite their inability to serve in combat positions. This discrepancy in roles maintains a two-tier hierarchical system that prevents them from achieving high-level leadership positions and maintains an atmosphere that fosters sexual harassment and discrimination against women.3 Amid America’s adjustment to these significant cultural changes, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering released a documentary entitled The Invisible War (2012). The film takes careful aim at one of the strongest and most virile of our institutions, the United States military. Dick states that he wanted the film to call attention to these shocking

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issues of sexual harassment, discrimination, and military sexual assault—soldiers raping their female (and male) comrades in staggering numbers. He also wanted to emphasize how the very institution to which these assaulted soldiers committed their lives turned its back on them or punished them when they reported the assaults. Upon its release, The Invisible War garnered critical acclaim and drew considerable attention from the Pentagon, politicians, veterans, and the general public. It won several prestigious awards like the Sundance Audience Award, Best Feature Nominee from the International Documentary Association, and Best Documentary Winner of the Independent Spirit Award, and it was nominated for a 2012 Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category. Despite its rather soft showing at the box office, the film has taken the issue of military sexual assault from the margins of public awareness to center stage. In addition to a host of social media posts, articles have appeared in various blogs, major newspapers, and numerous news magazines on the film’s subject matter. It is a rather impressive achievement for a film about such a depressing subject—one that the military has sought to suppress and one that most of us would rather not acknowledge exists. Along with testimonies, the film successfully utilizes evidence that fosters political consciousness regarding military sexual assault, creating empathy, indignation, and a will to act in the audience. As such, it resists leaving the audience awash in a sea of emotions because its goal is a complicated kind of transformative activism. It seeks to motivate those outside the military to press for change in military procedures and policies that now turn a blind eye to sexual assault. This is no small task, and even the most financially successful documentaries struggle to produce change of this magnitude. This essay examines how the director, Kirby Dick, and producer, Amy Ziering, represent the survivors of military sexual assault as participants in their own healing process. This strategy facilitates their filmic transition from their being perceived as victims to being hailed as survivors. The essay further examines how the film strategically engages both military and nonmilitary audiences in an attempt to reach policymakers as well as advocates. It begins by exploring the documentary campaign (the film and its social action efforts) designed to energize and focus an activist movement with broad social and political implications. This analysis of the engagement of each of these critical facets (victim empowerment, well-researched evidence, powerful narratives, and the subsequent social action involvement) reaffirms the power of a well-orchestrated social action documentary campaign to convey the urgency of social justice issues that might otherwise go unaddressed in our highly saturated mediascape.

Documentary campaign Social-issue documentaries emerge from behind the shiny surface of our daily media experience and treat us not just as passive viewers but as social actors who can affect our world.4

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Documentary films have long history of reflecting the filmmaker’s desire to generate social and political change. The Internet and burgeoning social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have broadened a film’s reach by adding a way for viewers to become involved, to respond, and to reach back and out to powerful constituencies. A social action documentary campaign centers the efforts of activist and nonprofit groups around an evidentiary narrative whose goal is to communicate an argument regarding a social, political, environmental, or humanitarian issue. It is similar to what Participant Media, attempts under the leadership of founder and Chairman Jeff Skoll. The group partners with: “social sector organizations, non-profits and corporations who are committed to creating an open forum for discussion, education and who can, with Participant, offer specific ways for audience members to get involved.”5 Certainly, there are other models of support for this kind of “engaged entertainment.” ITVS, which partially funded The Invisible War, insists on a social action component to motivate audience members to challenge the status quo, and to hopefully reconsider their perspectives on social justice issues like sexual harassment, social and/or educational inequality, poverty, gangs, etc.6 In a documentary campaign, the documentary film is a focal point where the problem is asserted so that the audience, now aware of the issue, can involve themselves in generating a solution. Assisted by the Internet and social media platforms, The Invisible War has the potential to successfully mobilize individuals and organizations to keep the advocates and the film’s audiences aware, connected, and motivated. It is my belief that there is perhaps no other way to motivate for social justice change on a broad and inclusive level. The Invisible War offers a powerful model for analysis of the strategic use of the most salient features of an effective campaign for social and political action. Of course, institutional change moves at glacial pace, but change is an important facet of social issue documentary endeavors regardless of its subject or style. Awareness generated by the film is only the beginning.

A vehicle for engagement Rape should not be an “Occupational Hazard.” Watch The @Invisible_War & take action: www.notinvisible.org #NotInvisible.7

To successfully engage activism for any cause, supporters must produce a method for taking action: petitions, phone calls to Congress; blogs; newspaper articles; news reports, social media, tweets and more. Notinvisible.org calls itself “The Movement” and was launched with the release of the film. According to its website: The Invisible No More coalition seeks to ensure that the theatrical release of the film The Invisible War serves as a catalyst in creating a movement to cause lasting

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change in how the military handles sexual assault. We engage with advocacy organizations, key policymakers, military leaders, and other stakeholders to raise public awareness, coordinate policy, and energize the grassroots to change military policy and behavior. (Emphases in original)8

Invisible No More refers to itself as a social action campaign complete with headquarters in Los Angeles. Its website identifies nineteen organizational supporters from Protect Our Defenders to The American Association of University Women, with eleven advocacy organizations like the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. The film and Notinvisible.org have become focal points for activism on the subject of military sexual assault. In other words, the website is devoted to keeping the issue before our eyes as long as possible in order to create the policy change needed. Recent hearings in congress are a testament to the effectiveness of this strategy, though the outcome is still uncertain as of mid-2014.9 The documentary’s impact that formerly ended with the film viewing now extends into the real world in ways previously impossible to imagine. While preparing this essay, I received e-mails from couragecampaign.org and moveon.org asking that I contact my senators to ask for their support on the Military Justice Improvement Act, the Senate’s version of the STOP Act (Sexual Assault Training and Oversight Protection Act introduced April 17, 2013). This legislation is designed to remove sexual assault investigations and prosecutions from the chain of command. During the same week (June 4, 2013), Kirby Dick wrote an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times stating that our continued pressure on congress is the only way to stop military sexual assault.10 The online version of the article included over 300 comments with some supportive comments gaining approval from hundreds of readers. This media penetration allows for the discussion to continue long after viewing a film. Admittedly, the public has a short attention span for the kind of media attention this film has generated and ultimately only a sustained effort has the possibility of creating meaningful social change.

Winning hearts and minds: The argument of the invisible war Although we might not want to make a case for the radical documentary as a body genre, we still need to think the body in relation to films that make audience members want to kick and yell, films that make them want to do something ‘because of the conditions in the world of the audience’.11

Like other contemporary social issue documentaries, The Invisible War became the vehicle through which the filmmaker draws attention to a seemingly intractable social issue. Films like Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005), produced and distributed by his company Brave New Films, follow a strategy similar

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to Participant Media’s, using arranged screenings, petitions and online sales to create audience involvement in social change. John Haynes writes that these films largely address leftist activists and thus they “preach to the choir.”12 The Invisible War targeted a broader audience—one whose ideological frame included patriotism and militarism as well as those with an awareness of gender politics. In order to be successful, this film needed to reach across both sides of the congressional aisle traversing liberal and conservative ideological divides. It is the strategic positioning of the film’s argument and its carefully arranged interviews, testimonies, and statistics that give the film its power. Bill Nichols refers to epistophilia or the pleasure in seeking knowledge as one of the reasons audiences watch documentaries: “at their best, they convey an informing logic, a persuasive rhetoric, and a moving poetics that promises information and knowledge, insight and awareness.”13 Along with the acquisition of knowledge where social issues are concerned comes the power and responsibility to engage with the historical, material world—even if that world resides within the Pentagon. In 2012, after The Invisible War won the coveted Sundance Audience Award, it was strategically and discretely circulated among Pentagon officials. Dick and Ziering knew they faced an uphill battle against the military establishment, expecting a smear campaign before the film was released.14 In various interviews, they both admit that an antimilitary position in the film would not have resulted in any desired change to military policy. Beyond this, the women who agreed to participate in the film insisted that it not be used to bash the military, the very institution in which they still believed. They acknowledged, however, that military regulations regarding reporting assaults within the chain of command had denied them their rights and in nearly all cases cost them their careers. Perhaps central to that ability to change minds and ultimately alter steeled military policy is the way in which the film carefully maneuvers audience feelings from what Brian Winston calls “romanticizing victimhood” to indignation and action that supports both the cause and the survivors.15 Putting a face on the issue encourages us to take action like signing a petition or calling a senator, imagining that we are helping one of the women in the film. Dick also invokes the audience’s own patriotism particularly when we are reminded that protecting our soldiers (women and men) is everyone’s responsibility. Jane Gaines explores the subject of documentary activism as the next step after the gaining of insight and knowledge. She explains that the creation of a film does more than any written document could because the depiction of the struggle moves beyond the abstract or theoretical to the visceral. It bypasses the intellect and becomes sensual: The reason for using the documentary to advance political goals is that its aesthetic of similarity establishes a continuity between the world of the screen and the world of the audience, where the ideal viewer is poised to intervene in the world that so closely resembles the one represented on the screen.16

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This imagery and the experience the film creates are useless without coordinated political direction. The Invisible War creates a spectator implicated in the film’s mission, directing viewers from the film’s website and final credits to NotInvisible.org to register and to become activists. The use of testimonies from victim/participants is clearly the lynchpin of evidence in The Invisible War and its primary strength. Its dual address implicates both a military and nonmilitary audience in the film’s persuasive message. The rhetoric of the film is structured to convince us that we are all implicated in the travesty that occurs when impressionable young adults are encouraged to enlist into service for our country and then assaulted and abandoned when they try to report the assault. This appeal works on several levels in regard to gender. While identification with the women who have been assaulted may be difficult for men, the film’s appeal to men is partly based on their embarrassment that the United States military has become a haven for rapists. The inclusion of the testimonies of the women’s husbands and fathers also offers a point of identification for male viewers who may feel protective of women. Additionally, Dick includes information about the assault of males in the military, offering an opportunity for men who are not homophobic to empathize with male recruits. This strategy allows several points of identification with social actors who are empathic and engages our disgust with what is happening in the military. Gaines suggests that the use of evidence she calls the “ ‘pathos of fact’: this happened; people died for this cause; others are suffering; many took to the streets; this victim can be saved if only something is done”17 is a powerful tool. The Invisible War continually invokes the reality of this epidemic with an overwhelming number of facts about assaults that are never prosecuted, about the military’s ineffective attempts to use posters as training tools, and about the ineptitude of the military commanders to face the challenges of sexual assault in the ranks. The opening screen of The Invisible War reads: “All statistics in this film are from U.S. Government Studies.”18 This statement establishes the credibility of the statistical evidence we see throughout the film. It is also rather shocking because we know that we will learn what the Department of Defense knew all along and chose to ignore. The audience may be skeptical of the accuracy of the testimonials or even find them too particular or even anecdotal, but how can we disregard the military’s own statistics that indicate that perhaps a half a million men and women have experienced sexual assault while serving in the military in the past fifty years? The accompanying graphic animation provides stunning factual and irrefutable evidence.

The context: The military’s troubled history As part of the military’s systemic failure to “protect” women from rape, women West Point cadets are, according to Helen Rogan, frequently “visited” at night in their mandatorily unlocked rooms by male cadets. In addition to having discovered

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shaving cream-filled condoms in their beds, found obscenities scrawled on their walls, received vibrators in the mail, or been called “whore” by senior cadets, many women were assaulted in their own rooms … .19

Sexual assault in the military is certainly not a new subject. There were major scandals that are referred to in the film. Two of the more notorious examples are Tailhook in 1991 where eighty-three women were assaulted during three days of drunken lewd behavior at the 35th Annual Tailhook Symposium in Las Vegas,20 and Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1996 where nineteen women filed sexual assault charges against twenty noncommissioned officers.21 Over ten years ago, the Denver Post spent nine months interviewing sixty women about their assaults while serving in the United States military.22 Some of the women, now in their 70s, were raped fifty years ago by those who they believed were their comrades. The stories are painful, compelling, and difficult to read, though not nearly as difficult as watching women relive their trauma on screen in The Invisible War. Here, the women openly describe the horror of their own assaults and their subsequent betrayal and often punishment and/or dismissal by the institution to which they had dedicated themselves. The prevalence of rape within the ranks is underscored by its address in fictional film. Susan Jeffords writes about Opposing Force (Eric Karson, 1986) where the only female member of a military training camp is raped by the commanding officer. He tells her that he is just preparing her for what will happen when the enemy captures her. The ambivalent position of the military regarding women and rape was clear: protection from hostile rape was a goal but rape by a comrade was a consequence of service.23 Opposing Force “succeeded in rewriting the definition of enemy from ‘the enemy is he who rapes,’ to ‘he who rapes is the enemy.’ ”24 Jeffords clarifies that this switch from a categorical to a performative definition suggests that by this performative definition, between rapes, a man is not the “enemy.” As the sexual assault litigation depicted in The Invisible War indicates, determining who is the “enemy” and what is a “hazard of the job” remains an issue for women in the military. According to Judith Wagner DeCew, women are not considered full members of the military due to their exclusion from combat positions. DeCew suggests that this exclusion was not based on military rationale when the women’s corps was initially legislated in 1947: But in all the congressional discussions on the issue, no military purpose for the exclusion seems to have been articulated. It appears that the only reasons for the exclusion were paternalistic protectionism and stereotypical views about what work women were suited for.25

DeCew further concludes that there is a strong connection between the combat exclusion and sexual harassment because this unequal treatment of women leads to a culture of sexism and domination.26 While the atmosphere of sexual abuse is clearly well established in the military, the traumatic impact of assault on female soldiers is

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debilitating individually and institutionally, and its visual depiction in film or in news reports only further ensconces the image of the victimized, weeping woman on our collective cultural memory. Robert Jay Lifton asserts that our fighting men are driven to asocial behavior by the vicissitudes of war without a front line and without a clearly defined enemy. In referring to the “war on terrorism” waged in Iraq, in his research on conditions of atrocity, Lifton asserts: This kind of atrocity-producing situation can exist, with most of the characteristics I have described, in ordinary civilian prisons. And it surely occurs in some degree in all wars, including World War II, our last “good war.” But a counterinsurgency war in a hostile setting, especially when driven by profound ideological distortions, is particularly prone to sustained atrocity–all the more so when it becomes an occupation.27

Narrative films like Jarhead28 undertook the subject of this new kind of war depicting the endless boring hours of soldiers slowly baking in the desert sun, holding weapons they could not aim let alone determine at whom to shoot. Even in Jarhead, soldiers watched helicopter fights typical of the Viet Nam war in Apocalypse Now29 idealizing what seemed to be its clearly defined military focus. At the crux of Jarhead’s narrative, the experience of long-awaited combat causes the main character to disassociate and urinate himself, stricken by fear and unable to take action in the firefight raging around him. This scene underscores the traumatizing impact of the war. Afterward, one of the soldiers finds an Iraqi’s body which he desecrates, calling him “Ahab the Arab,” reminding us of the dehumanization of the faceless enemy so essential to war. Is it this war, as Lifton suggests, or any war for that matter, that has created a climate where deviant moral behavior thrives? As Nancy Doyle Palmer reflects on her much earlier reading of Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, and recent watching of The Invisible War: “Naïve me, I thought the world listened and changed, too. It really didn’t … . It’s a disheartening déjà vu. A sense that this violent constant in the history of men and women was only quelled never stopped.”30 The Invisible War prompts the question: How much more will we as a nation tolerate? But, while the contemporary war on terror and its transition to a faceless and unidentifiable enemy may have changed military tactics, it apparently did not change the behavior of many of its soldiers who still wanted to seek and destroy in the name of patriotism. Amid this change in how the military deployed soldiers came the need for more soldiers—including women. Women were encouraged to enlist, enroll in military academies, and work in all levels of the armed services. According to the Service Women’s Action Network, in 2009, one in ten United States soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan is female. Despite this, many women report a feeling of isolation on their base, leading them to feel vulnerable. Women still do not constitute a critical mass in their service units, and the camaraderie of the military experience

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embedded in the notion of “No man [sic] left behind” implies trust that women do not always experience. Helen Benedict, author of “The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq,” describes the problem of isolation and gender-based hostility many women in the military experience: This isolation, along with the military’s traditional and deep-seated hostility toward women, can cause problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself: degradation and sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness instead of the camaraderie that every soldier depends on for comfort and survival.31

Testimonials included in the evidence of The Invisible War frequently refer to this isolation. Researchers studying gender and war have documented the unsurprising strongly gendered nature of roles in war. Rebecca Hannagan and Holly Arrow note that “in the absence of cultural interventions, military women operate in an environment in which sexual assault may be deployed to defend traditional military structures.”32 Both the strong hierarchical nature of the institution, which limits challenges to authority, and the stressful rituals of basic training foster homosocial cohesion and promote bonding that excludes women. But, along with women’s presence came the problem of increased military sexual assault that is now so prevalent that it is frequently referred to as an epidemic. The Pentagon’s own studies affirm the rampant nature of military sexual assault: According to the Department of Defense (DOD), an estimated 19,300 sexual assaults occurred in the military in 2010, and yet only 13.5% of total survivors reported assault. Military sexual violence impacts service men and women in the Active Duty, Reserves and Guard forces, as well as cadets and midshipmen at the United States military academies. Victim-blaming, lack of accountability, and misogynistic climates are pervasive throughout the United States Armed Forces, preventing survivors from reporting incidents and perpetrators from being properly disciplined.33

In “How America Justifies Its War: A Modern/Postmodern Aesthetics of Masculinity and Sovereignty,” Bonnie Mann explores the integration of women into the war. Mann suggests that the example of Lynddie England is instructive. As photographs of Abu Ghraib emerged, Mann contends that [T]he American woman had been given the phallus in true (postmodern) democratic form as the military takes up the practice of racialized gender bending. She is invited to participate in the militarized masculine aesthetic along with the men, to become the one who penetrates the racialized other. Yet her position as the lesser partner is concentrated and confirmed by the whole scene, it is completely understandable in the United States context that being dominated by a woman is more humiliating, because this is United States American logic too.34

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England thus was used to complete the humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners whose photographs were evidence of their subordination by and to the lowest level of soldier available—a woman. Women as military interlopers challenge male dominance and superiority as warriors and are not typically welcomed within the institutional framework as soldiers, let alone allowed to be heroes. Most recently, action was taken that will allow women to have roles in combat, although there is ongoing discussion over the details of this shift.35 Prior to this, there was fear that women could be used as captives in a way that would endanger male soldiers who would have to “rescue” women from enemy captors. Unbeknownst to many male or female soldiers, the real enemy was right there within the ranks of their comrades. The rape culture that fosters this kind of assault has a long history in American society. It is readily apparent in the stories of the survivors. What is perhaps not as apparent is the fact that sexual assault is more about power than sex. The Invisible War relies heavily on Department of Defense statistics that prove the DOD’s awareness of this problem. This criminal behavior, like that within the Catholic Church, the subject of Dick’s previous documentary Twist of Faith (2005), is both hidden and dismissed. It is difficult for a viewer to be convinced that the United States Military has the decency and wherewithal to rectify this problem and yet chooses not to by keeping the judicial process within the chain of command. It is also difficult to believe, as the film asserts, that this violence is perpetrated by serial rapists who have enlisted in the military, though the laxity of prosecution makes it an appealing haven for rapists to act with impunity.

Testimonies and bodies of evidence One of my chief aims in teaching this film (Top Gun, Tony Scott, 1986) is to demonstrate the link between male homoerotic desire and misogyny. In the war film, misogyny traditionally takes the form of men’s jealously guarding their all-male preserve, the combat arena; equating women with the enemy to be conquered, and silencing female voices that have attempted to speak authoritatively about war.36

In addition to Department of Defense statistics, The Invisible War uses women’s oncamera presence, along with their testimonies, as evidence of how they were mistreated by dysfunctional United States military processes that force their complaints to remain within the chain of command, even when the command is implicated in their assault. These emotional testimonials are central to conveying the argument of the film. According to Bill Nichols: Testimonials are first person, oral more than literary, personal more than theoretical. It is a form of representation that explores the personal as political at

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the level of textual organization as well as at the level of lived experience. … The “I” of testimonials embodies social affinities but is also acutely aware of social difference, marginality, and its own place among the so-called Others of hegemonic discourse.37

There are six main characters in The Invisible War (Kori Cioca, Jessica Hinves, Trina McDonald, Elle Helmer, Hannah Sewell, and Ariana Klay) who tell their stories in some depth. Another twelve women simply state that they were threatened, harassed, raped, or assaulted while serving in the military. We are moved by the emotional valence of their screen presence and the apparent truthfulness of their performances. The body count of this heretofore-unseen war is growing, and accompanying statistics assert that over 20 percent of female veterans have been sexually assaulted while serving in the military. This knowledge quickly moves the testimony from the particular to a much larger collective. Despite the particularity of their testimonies, each of the six main female characters can be read also as representing a particular “type of target”: the petite, attractive unsophisticated woman, the lesbian woman, the full-bodied woman, and so on. Their physicality and the settings of their interviews represent various class and social positions. This breadth of their personae implies that there is no specific type of woman targeted but that all women are targets and are vulnerable to the humiliation of harassment and the possibility of sexual assault. Julia Lesage argues that a woman’s early introduction to the fear of public spaces makes her an heir to rape culture: For every woman, rape is always a real threat, and thus rape threat stays with her as a permanent mental structure. In a dissociated way it remains in the background of her consciousness but springs forward as lively fear as soon as a shadow crosses hers or a footstep comes up behind her in public space. We identify with stories of battery and rape because of rape consciousness, which is an integral part of our lives.38

Lesage’s frame suggests that women’s response to this film likely reverberates across the consciousness of having lived in a rape culture, allowing women to easily identify with the survivors who visibly struggle on screen to reclaim their self-esteem. There are no reenactments in The Invisible War, no special effects, or narrative details from interviewed assailants, so we are left to our judgments as to the veracity of the survivor’s descriptions of events. Our understanding of the evidence is shaped by the filmmaker’s perspective of horror at what has happened to these soldiers and the film’s urging that something must be done. This is represented most forcefully by the interview of attorney Susan Burke, who represented the women in their civil suit against the Department of Defense. Viewers are engaged by the apparent veracity the filmic world presents as survivor after survivor retells her not so dissimilar version of what happened, and how she was dismissively treated when she complained. The Invisible War film, and its subsequent social media campaign, remains positioned on the uneasy border between condemning the violent, hypermasculinist, hierarchical

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culture that fosters sexual assault with impunity, while suggesting that the military itself is an admirable organization capable of rectifying “procedural” flaws that allows them to blame a victim for her own assault. Dick claims that the interviewees did not want to be a part of a project that bashed the military—despite how they had been treated.39 In “Documentary in an Age of Terror,” Lynn Higgins asserts that Americans are drawn to contemporary documentaries after 9/11 out of a desire to know what is “really” happening. With the proliferation of images and speech, it has become increasingly impossible to discern any single agreed upon ideological meaning. Higgins borrows from Linda Williams, who writes about what she defines as the body genres of narrative film: horror, pornography, and melodrama that rely on creating a bodily reaction in the audience similar to what is shown on the screen. Higgins asserts that the only hope for reclaiming what is real is to turn to the body itself as evidence. She suggests that Morgan Spurlock’s use of his own body as evidence in Supersize Me is one such example and that this strategy “reconnects representation to the real by making documentary into a body genre.”40 In the recounting of military sexual assault, The Invisible War leaves the audience red-eyed with the feelings one might experience while watching a melodrama. Linda Williams refers to the loss represented in the melodramatic genre as one that endlessly repeats our melancholic “loss of origins” and desire to return to an earlier state.41 In the case of The Invisible War, the origins lost are the hopes reflected in the tear-stained faces of the enlistees who believed that they were a part of the band of brothers and sisters. The Invisible War allows us to identify with the past and present survivors, allowing us to experience their sense of loss and even their hope for the future. It is this visceral reaction that makes the film an appropriate tool for accessing the real experience of military sexual assault and ultimately for generating social action. The bodily reaction to the experience of watching the film, and the subsequent emotional stirring, is structured to motivate the kind of participation successful activism demands. The film’s introduction to the main speaking subjects frames them as idealistic, committed patriots dedicated to defending their country. Conceptualizations of gender and American ideology historically have placed women within the domestic sphere. The drastic changes brought about by 1970s feminism challenged this placement. The 1980s however saw a rapid increase in women working outside the home in a time of relative freedom from American involvement in war. When there were major shifts in the American economy in the early 2000s, young women sought other opportunities such as military service. The number of women enlisting has grown significantly according to Benedict: “Over 191,500 women have served in the Middle East since March of 2003, most of them in Iraq which is nearly five times more than in the 1991 Gulf War and twenty-six times more than in Vietnam.”42 Thus, enlisting in the military provided women with an alternative to employment or college. The photographs of assault survivors taken when they were hopeful and idealistic recruits, and their accompanying statements of enthusiasm and commitment, remind the audience of the women’s active desire to serve in the United States Military. These women may be civilians now, but they were soldiers then. The photographs serve as

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markers of that status; the women joined the “brotherhood”—or so they thought. The same photographs mark some of them as muscular yet smaller than the men surrounding them, and their diminished size serves as a reminder of their comparative vulnerability and fragility. We cannot deny the physical, sexual difference when the body is invoked as evidence. Meanwhile, the women speak longingly of their involvement in, and dedication to, the military. These images challenge the audience’s preconceived notion of women’s commitment to patriotism and involvement in militarism—something that is rarely addressed in public discourse that has masculinized national loyalty. The referent of a paternalistic fatherland that must be defended and to which filial loyalty is owed is represented by images of flags and military iconography in the photos of the young female recruits. This connection to the fatherland does not sustain for these women soldiers, and apparently it does not motivate all male soldiers to rally in defense of their “sisters.” These women quickly learned that the sentiment expressed by “we are all in this together” did not apply to them. The women who speak in The Invisible War refer to an idealized notion of their acceptance as that which drew them into military service. It is the loss of this camaraderie that they frequently mourned more than the physical pain of the assault itself. Several women state that they woke to find a “friend” raping them.

Figure 10.1 Kori Cioca as a new recruit in the US Coast Guard (Invisible War, Kirby Dick 2012)

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It is not just the visual of women wiping their eyes that offers their traumatized bodies as testimony of their experience, but it is as well their halting speech suggestive of the unheard screams lodged in their throats. They choke and stutter on the words that their commanders refused to hear. The testimonies offer a particularity to the recounting of an event that even a reenactment cannot offer. This woman’s story is a verbal reenactment bearing rhetorical emphasis that it is the truth spoken by someone who “knows.” But, according to Russell Strand, a retired United States Army Criminal Investigation Division special agent, the women could not actually witness their assault because they were experiencing it, which accounts for their uneasy recollection and their frequent disregard by investigators who think they are lying.43 Their posttraumatic stress imprisons them, yet they are now on camera and asked to testify in the harshest court of all—the court of public opinion. In this court, there is no assailant facing them and no cross-examination. How does this testimonial stand up to the military’s scrutiny, the cold logic of judgment, scientific evaluation, and legal analyses? Was she drinking? Was she underage? The audience will never know all the details. Could she be at fault for her own assault? The film offers only the survivor’s testimony as evidence, leaving each of us to grapple with knee jerk cultural victimblaming reactions. The film’s rhetorical strategy, however, resists victim-blaming by absenting the other side and the “he said she said” of assault cases. Assailants’ bodies are missing as evidence. Dick states that none agreed to be interviewed.44 It is the military generals and other Pentagon officials who then must answer for the men in their command. Responsibility for the assaults moves up the chain of command, an embedded institutional structure the military insists must be preserved at all costs to insure discipline and control. Dick does what the military insists needs to happen for all such criminal cases—he makes the commanders answer for their troops, allowing us to constantly judge their sincerity and contrition—or lack thereof.

Who is to blame? Male Soldier (stopping a frantic female soldier): Why are you by yourself? Where’s your buddy? Female soldier: I didn’t think I needed one. Narrator: Sexual Assault is preventable. Are you doing your part?45

The multiple testimonies of survivors are juxtaposed with interviews of various military personnel. The interruptions serve as a way to calm viewers, pulling them out of the emotionality of the stories of rape and injustice. What becomes immediately clear is that the military personnel included in the film (both men and women), who defend the chain of command and who support current training efforts, appear as ineffective speakers and thus ineffective agents of change. Their bodies provide another kind of evidence. They appear cool, emotionally detached, unconvincing,

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and uncommitted. They reassert the need for complaints and investigations to remain in the chain of command, thus leaving complainants at the mercy of commanders who are either involved in or complicit with the assault or its suppression. Dr. Kaye Whitley, Former Director, Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), the Department of Defense’s single point of accountability for all sexual assault policy matters until July of 2011, answers more than one rather easy question regarding the numbers of assaults with “that’s out of my area of expertise.”46 During filming Whitley was replaced by Major General Mary Kay Hertog who admits on camera that she has never spoken to an assault survivor. She finally suggests that if following the chain of command is ineffective, complainants could write their congressmen.47 Whitley and Hertog seem inept and untrustworthy at best, and ill-intentioned at worst. Both Hertog and Whitley represent the office within the military responsible for sexual assault prevention training awareness campaigns. Their training efforts, including the tagline as: “Don’t risk it. Ask when she is sober” or the victim blaming PSA suggesting that women are at fault for traveling alone while on base, are included as examples of their trivializing attempts to train enlisted personnel regarding sexual assault prevention. They illustrate the disregard that someone who has been assaulted would encounter when filing a complaint. Both Whitley and Hertog stand behind their efforts and it is clear they are not convinced that there is a problem at all. Dick intercuts Attorney Susan Burke with Hertog’s and Whitley’s clearly inept responses. Burke’s righteously indignant responses make Hertog and Whitley convenient villains for the audience to despise and even ridicule. While a somewhat humorous break from the otherwise intense interviews, it is a rather obvious ploy to edit their interviews intercut with Burke’s responses to emphasize Hertog and Whitley’s lack of sincerity and insight.

And where are the men? If the boy’s route to maturity, according to the Oedipal narrative, is to expunge the feminine from himself and become the heir to culture and a future mom/wife as he enters into the symbolic realm, the girl is heir to rape culture and the domestic sphere.48

Survivor testimonies are often supported by interviews with partners or fathers whose equally emotional screen presence underscores the reverberations of the experience within their now civilian families. This trauma permeates the screen, demanding the audience’s empathic attention. This is not just an individual woman’s problem, but also a problem for American families. It is among these families that Dick finds compelling stories that will reveal the discrimination, harassment, and systemic violence that is perpetuated against women in the American military. The husbands and fathers of survivors openly cry on camera. If the audience misperceived these women as somehow responsible for their own assaults, there is

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no mistaking the reaction of the husbands and fathers who falter, stutter, and sob. Here, the male bodies are further evidence of the pain reverberating through the families of women who were assaulted. The fact that all these men were or are in the military is a way that Dick recuperates the institution, reminding us that only some enlisted men are rapists. Hannah Sewell describes the assault that left her with physical and emotional scars including the loss of her virginity. Hannah’s father, Sergeant Major Jerry Sewell, a lifelong military man dressed in his uniform, tells of the day he received a call from his daughter telling him of her assault. He is clearly still emotional about what happened to her. Crying, he describes that he had told her they (the Navy) would take care of her. His confidence in the military chain of command is shaken and perhaps destroyed, though he never admits this. Major Sewell stands in for the men who have served in the military and who now encourage their sons and daughters to enlist. He emotionally asserts that his daughter’s virginity after the rape is still intact because she did not give it away. Factually, of course, this is not true, but the heartfelt sincerity of the statement allows an empathic moment of identification for the audience. Forcible violent assault of our most intimate physicality reaches what we believe is the core of our being, violating our emotional and psychological integrity. Hannah clearly lost a part of her identity that she and her father valued, and this loss, along with the physical pain she incurred and the military inaction in her defense, caused her to contemplate suicide. The male body count is further expanded by the brief testimonies from three men who suffered the humiliation of sexual assault perpetrated against them. Culturally, the male body of hegemonic discourse is conceived as intact, whole and

Figure 10.2 Hannah Sewell with her father, Sergeant Major Jerry Sewell (Invisible War, Kirby Dick 2012)

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impenetrable. It is unable to be victimized except in action movies where that bodily integrity is threatened and then heroically recuperated, such as in the films of Clint Eastwood.49 Though men are aware of the remote possibility of homosexual rape, their consciousness does not involve the level of fear of rape or bodily penetration experienced by women in a rape culture. This makes the discussion of male sexual assault even more upsetting to a general audience. Invoking statistical evidence, The Invisible War informs the audience that because of the sheer numbers of male recruits, even more males than females must deal with this horrific experience of rape. This facet of military sexual assault is not pursued in depth, and its brevity is now the subject of some controversy. Male victims feel they were used by the filmmakers and then ignored, stating that their stories deserved greater coverage.50 In interviews, Dick responds saying that he had better female subjects and that male sexual assault deserves its own film. He asserts that the film’s focus on women was a strategic decision based on the belief that a sense of protectionism toward women would generate the kind of systemic change in military policy the filmmakers sought.51 It is important to admit that the subject of male on male sexual assault requires a very different tactic than the one pursued by The Invisible War. Issues of homophobia and gays in the military warrant careful attention in treatments of the issue of male rape. Despite this controversy, the inclusion of male victims challenges the audience to consider why the horror of female sexual assault is so much more commonplace and extreme, yet is even tolerated and ignored. The constant news reports serve to raise our awareness of the rape culture in which we live while simultaneously causing the public to become numb to its constant threat to women and others considered less physically powerful.

Representing survival The Invisible War is not just a training tool that is being used by the military, but is also a tool for spouses of survivors for communication, understanding and growth.52 None of the women who provide testimonies speak for the experience of all women in the military. Without a voice-over, we are left to surmise the film’s meaning from the accumulated evidence of the bodies before us. The women speak only of their personal experience and do not generalize, though clearly there is sufficient commonality in their accounts that any of them might speak for others. Despite the differences in their branch of service or assignment, the similarity of their stories, their lack of support when filing complaints, and their struggles to overcome their trauma reveals a systemic problem in need of a systemic solution. Statistical evidence and the testimony of sympathetic military personnel (Russell Strand; attorney Susan Burke, who represents the women; and Anu Bhagwati, Executive Director and Co-

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Founder of Service Women’s Action Network) connect the stories pointing to an apparent web of deception and disregard, emphasizing the systemic nature of the problem. The Invisible War narrative frequently returns us to its main character, Kori Cioca. Kori’s story of her violent beating and assault constitutes the most compelling and complete story of the film. Dick expands her formal testimonial with illustrative footage she and her husband produced when the crew was gone. The footage reveals that she still (seven years later) awakes screaming in the middle of the night. Using footage acquired with a small camera the filmmaker left with Kori and her husband Rob, we see her outside in the middle of the night nervously playing with her toddler. She is trying to explain why she woke the child with her screams, while her husband narrates what has happened. Like many of the women who have been assaulted, Kori’s post traumatic stress and her recurring physical pain still reverberate through her life. The audience is visually privy to the effects of her trauma beyond the recounting of her assault. Further, Kori and her husband participate both in telling their story and, according to them, in their own healing. Nichols refers to this type of interaction as belonging to the participatory mode of documentary filmmaking. This method relies heavily on the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject calling attention to the film’s construction.53 Of course, it is the filmmaker who determines what is included and what is not and thus the level of true participation by the subjects is limited. Clearly, Dick chose the footage that served the narrative despite what the subject may have wanted him to use. Kori not only reveals her rape on camera but also delves into the intimacy problems that occur in the couple’s relationship as a result of her traumatic experience. According to her husband, Rob McDonald: I was unaware of details of Kori’s rape until the documentary. It helped our family that she was finally able to open up, and I finally understood why certain problems were happening. There were many days in our marriage where she was withdrawn and just angry. Hugging or showing affection was difficult. As her spouse, I thought it was me. I didn’t know there was so much going on inside that it kept spilling out on the outside, but since the film, she is actively seeking help.54

Thus, her on-camera testimony serves as a double confession, both to the audience and to her husband. The film also includes the couple’s video recording of an anxious discussion in their kitchen as Rob expresses his frustration at being unable to help Kori or approach her physically. It is difficult to imagine this kind of discussion transpiring in front of a film crew. This is a level of intimacy not typical in documentaries that deal with social issues, but The Invisible War explores this issue by looking both inside the family and outside at the institution. According to Rob, “I am proud of my wife’s bravery to stand up and speak. I will also stand up for survivors and stand up for this film that is helping many people on so many different levels of distress with sexual trauma. Thank

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you, Invisible War team.”55 Clearly, this act of recording a personal conversation about intimacy and sharing it with Dick and ultimately the audience required a good deal of trust between the subjects and the filmmaker, but the experience also served to help heal the family. Though Dick and Ziering stop short of interviewing our Commander in Chief, Dick does invoke even his body using an image of President and Mrs. Obama while Ariana Klay relates the story of her rape in the Marine Barracks in Washington. This image suggests that there is a connection between the marines who stand beside the president and those who party, drink, and rape. This image begs the question: Does the President know that the uniformed men standing by his side could be assailants?56

From victim to survivor Feminism is a vital part of current history only insofar as it spells out and embodies the links in between our uses of gender and reversal of our descent into nuclear and/or ecological hell. Maybe—who knows?—we can still manage this reversal.57

The Invisible War faced the same challenge that has existed since John Grierson’s early documentaries addressed the lives of workers and impoverished children in 1930’s Great Britain. Brian Winston describes the Griersonian “victim documentaries” with heroically suffering humanity as “substituting empathy and sympathy for analysis and anger. The ‘problem moment’ structure removes any need for action, or even reaction, on the part of the audience.”58 How can a filmmaker overcome the romanticization of these weeping victims? In Bill Nichols’s discussion of Brian Winston regarding the Griersonian tradition of the victim, Nichols states: As Winston notes, the urge to represent the worker romantically or poetically, within an ethics of social concern and charitable empathy denied the worker a sense of equal status with the filmmaker. The filmmaker kept control of the act of representation; collaboration was not in the air.59

The Invisible War strategically overcomes this by allowing the women access to cameras and then adding their clips into the final edit of the film. Dick’s inclusion of the women as participants serves the dual purpose of empowering them as equal participants (to some extent) in the telling of their stories and gives the audience insights into their private lives that no crew could have witnessed. It serves to transform the women from victims who need to be helped to survivors who are strong enough to help themselves. It was critical for Dick to avoid the notion of victimization in order to emphasize the belief that the women who were speaking

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up are survivors and potentially activists themselves. Their sense of empowerment (and ours as activists) depends on this rhetorical frame. Their trauma is not displayed for our voyeuristic pleasure. Instead, it is fuel for the subjects’ own activist desires. Importantly, women’s power is not demeaned through any reference to them as victims in the emphasis of this social action campaign that includes involving participants from the White House and Congress to a plethora of nonprofits focused on freedom from gender-based harassment and violence. Several of the women even joined Dick and Ziering at Sundance for the screening of the film in the way actors might join a director at the release of a narrative film. This underscores their importance to the documentary campaign even adding to the veracity of their testimonies. It also suggests that the entire project is more about them than about the filmmakers. Amy Ziering states that the filmmaker’s confidence in them was key to their openness and cooperation: I guess the other thing that made them comfortable was that I was very nonjudgmental and I believed them, which was somewhat revelatory because they were used to being disbelieved; usually the line of questioning was antagonistic or hostile or suspicious. And I totally did believe them.60

This act of listening to and believing in the women served a therapeutic purpose, helping them to believe their stories are valid and valuable, and so are they. Brian Winston discusses the ethical treatment of subjects, focusing on the ethics of informed consent.61 This concept is difficult to explain to a participant who enters the contemporary media spotlight where their images and stories will be publicized and repurposed. As Winston reminds us, channels of distribution as well as the use of the Internet give documentary footage a much longer shelf life than the moments that broadcast journalism or print journalism can hold our attention.62 The tear-stained faces of the women in The Invisible War confessing their anger, betrayal, and disappointment will live on in our collective imagination for some time, reverberating across Cable TV channels and cyberspace. While it may be the intention of the filmmakers to draw public awareness to this outrageous moral issue, it also serves to ensconce the figure of the emotionally distraught woman as a symbol of American hypermasculinity gone amok. What kind of real soldier (male or female) leaves the military and openly admits to being victimized? Beyond the language used in The Invisible War that refers to these women as survivors, it is their instant notoriety that offers the opportunity for them to change from survivors to activists. They have been transformed from silent victims to speaking subjects, and they are aware of and grateful for the change. Despite perhaps a full understanding of how their participation might ultimately change their lives, openly admitting what has happened to them has changed them from shamed women to courageous subjects.

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Kori acknowledges the healing she has undergone in the process of participating in The Invisible War campaign: … for the first time in my life I no longer have to feel the blame, embarrassment and shame of being raped. The military made me believe that if I would have protected my body better, he wouldn’t have entered it. I am sad to have been a victim, but fortunate to consider myself a survivor of our military’s invisible war.63

Clearly, Kori now believes in the healing power of open dialogue about this subject and is empowered by her subsequent activist experience. An additional benefit of her notoriety is the donation of funds to complete the surgical repair of her jaw, which was seriously injured during her assault and for which the Veteran’s Administration refused to pay. Thanks to the generosity of donors who watched the film, Kori’s jaw was surgically repaired and she is now able to eat solid foods.64 Another woman who was assaulted while in the service, Trina McDonald, has become an avowed activist and is working with Move-on.org. She reported on her June, 2013, trip to Washington, DC, complete with photos of her meeting with various senators. I traveled to Washington, D.C., for the first time in my life to carry my message of removing prosecutions of military sexual assaults from the military chain

Figure 10.3 Kori Cioca describes her constant neck and jaw pain as a result of her assault (Invisible War, Kirby Dick 2012)

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of command, with the support of more than 215,000 MoveOn members and supporters from the Courage Campaign. I started my MoveOn petition campaign more six weeks ago, and it was time to get answers from Congress (Emphasis in original).65

Kirby Dick’s focus on Kori Cioca has made her a minor celebrity for the moment. A Google search on her name returned 25,000 results in .25 seconds while an advanced Google search of “Trina McDonald, sexual assault, Navy” found over 660,000 results in .31 seconds. Obviously, Trina’s connection with MoveOn.org has given her name even wider Internet circulation and recognition.

Figure 10.4 Trina McDonald and her partner (Invisible War, Kirby Dick 2012) These women have taken it upon themselves to use their celebrity to advocate for change for other women in the military. In addition to lobbying Congress, they have attended screenings of the film, appeared on many public venues including “The View,” Katie Couric, and “Democracy Now.”66 Their involvement further emphasizes their transformation from victims to survivors, now activists in the campaign to change military policy. The Invisible War shows the women survivors filing a lawsuit in the film, meeting with the press and talking and listening to each other’s stories. These sequences represent the women as agents of their own recovery and possibly capable of effecting further change. Their participation in the larger campaign process empowers them to act on their own behalf while motivating us to participate in their activism. Later, we learn that their lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds that sexual assault in the military is an “occupational hazard” and our empathy is transformed into shock and indignation.

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Conclusion Just when it seemed as if we were on the verge of entertaining ourselves to death— to paraphrase the media critic Neil Postman—or at least zapping ourselves into a multichannel stupor, the social-issue documentary is making a comeback.67

The Invisible War has not succeeded at the box office like other major documentaries. Super Size Me has a domestic total gross in theaters of $11.5 million; Fahrenheit 9/11 has a domestic total gross of $119 million; and despite all of the media and publicity, The Invisible War’s domestic total gross is a mere $70,000.68 According to FilmIndependent.org’s case study of The Invisible War: Dick and Ziering held a screening on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC a month after Sundance, which sparked conversation among members of Congress. The filmmakers organized 30-40 private screenings for policymakers and devoted much of their time reaching out to politicians, advocacy organizations, journalists and military personnel.69

Clearly, this was an attempt to forestall negative press, as well as an effort to reach a broad audience of policymakers and politicians. Additionally, the filmmakers sought screenings and open forum discussions in as many venues as possible. These screenings required a minimal investment and drew crowds of committed and interested audience members. The filmmakers were not building a box office—they were building a network of motivated activists while empowering survivors to lead the movement. As Kirby Dick’s presence at a congressional hearing and his op-ed piece in the New York Times indicate, he is also a committed activist in this campaign. His work did not end with the release of the film. It is clear that The Invisible War was conceived from the start as a documentary campaign and not merely as a profitable entertainment venture. One of its major funding sources was ITVS, whose mission states: “ITVS supports a dynamic field of independent media makers whose programs creatively engage audiences, expand cultural awareness and catalyze civic participation.”70 The Invisible War film and social action campaign NotInvisible.org are designed to create a focus for activist participation. The success of this involvement includes an intense major media campaign. One example of this is that The New York Times has included over 100 articles on the subject of military sexual assault or The Invisible War or both in the past twelve months.71 Even as I complete this essay, debates in congress are ongoing and despite all the social media and national media efforts, the outcome at this time to move the investigation of sexual assaults out of the chain of command is not promising. Though changes have not yet happened in Congress, despite the efforts of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, at the end of 2013, the Whitehouse gave the

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Pentagon an ultimatum to clean up its act on sexual assault or be prepared for changes the military brass have resisted.72 The Invisible War’s documentary campaign has successfully blurred the boundaries between filmic world and the real world. Social issue documentary filmmakers now have a possible model for creating a social action campaign that is certainly impressive and potentially powerful. Though others have attempted this strategy (like Michael Moore’s films Bowling for Columbine, 2004 and Fahrenheit 911, 2002; Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, 2006 and Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, 2005), these attempts have not harnessed the power of the Internet and social media to create social awareness and political change like Dick’s The Invisible War, reaching simultaneously up and out. Its ultimate effectiveness for changing the discourse regarding military sexual assault and perhaps sexual assault in general is unclear at the moment. What happens next is up to all of us who live within the rape culture we call life. There is a feminist sensibility to this film that creates a spectatorial position that is both sensitive to the issues surrounding violence against women and outraged by assault against them. That perspective is not patronizing and critiques the hegemonic, patriarchal politics that guide American militarism. Certainly, its connection to realism is appropriate and effective. As Alex Juhasz notes in her essay on realist feminist documentary: “Realism” can function in any of a number of ways, including, but not limited to, the confirmation, perpetuation and reflection of bourgeois, patriarchal reality. It can testify to alternative, marginal, subversive or illegal realities; it can critique the notion of reality.73

Much as I might like to deny this fact, Kirby Dick’s strategic utilization of political connections to launch this entire campaign may have only been possible because he was a man who was clearly outraged by what he saw and heard. But his perspective invites other men to align with him on this issue. Clearly, fighting this war requires the involvement of men and women. It is conceivable that the military will lead the way to social change on the subject of sexual violence against women. This notion seems counterintuitive considering the culture of hypermasculinity so prevalent in the military, and yet The Invisible War has motivated a public dialogue on the subject of sexual assault that previously only occurred in bursts of media response to the announcement of yet another scandal. Perhaps the insistent public campaign the film has created using all aspects of social media and multiple organizations will finally pressure congress and the Pentagon to act on this horrific and embarrassing subject. The openness of the discourse on sexual assault against women may finally begin to eradicate the rape culture we live in. We can only hope.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Ruby, “Is This a Feminist War?,” 150. Mann, “How America Justifies its War,” 155–156. Wagner DeCew, “The Combat Exclusion and the Role of Women in the Military,” 56. Aufderheide, “The Camera as Conscience.” Participant Media, http://www.participantmedia.com/company/ ITVS (Independent Television Service), http://www.itvs.org/about (accessed July 2013). NotInvisible.org, http://www.notinvisible.org/ InvisibleNoMore.org, 2013. http://www.notinvisible.org/about (accessed July 2013). According to Barbara Salazar Torreon, Information Research Specialist, the 113th Congress held twenty-two hearings, reviewed eleven bills and issued four reports on military sexual assault. This does not include the numerous meetings held by the Department of Defense on the same subject. “Military Sexual Assault: Chronology of Activity in Congress and Related Resources,” July 30, 2013. http://www.fas.org/sgp/ crs/natsec/R43168.pdf Kirby Dick. “Don’t Trust the Military to End Rape.” The New York Times.com, Op-Ed, June 3, 2013. Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” 90. Haynes, “Documentary as Social Justice Activism,” 7. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 40. West and West, “The Invisible War Within the Military,” 13. Winston, Claiming the Real, 23. Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” 92. Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” 92. The Invisible War, produced by Amy Ziering and directed by Kirby Dick, 93 min, 2012, Docudrama films, Cinedigm.com, DVD. Jeffords, “Performative Masculinities,” 104. Vander Schaaf. “Deputy Inspector General, Department of Defense, Office Of Inspector General,” Tailhook 91, Part 1—Review Of The Navy Investigations. Chamallas, “Women and War,” 339. Amy Herdy and Miles Moffeit, “Betrayal in the Ranks.” Jeffords, “Performative Masculinities,” 106. Jeffords, “Performative Masculinities,” 111. Wagner DeCew, “The Combat Exclusion and the Role of Women in the Military,” 63. Wagner DeCew, “The Combat Exclusion and the Role of Women in the Military,” 71. Lifton, “Conditions of Atrocity,” 4. Jarhead, produced by Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher, directed by Sam Mendes, 123 min., 2005, Universal Pictures, DVD. Apocalypse Now, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 153 min., 1979, United Artists, DVD. Palmer, “Can The Invisible War Help Put an End to Military Rape?” Benedict, The Lonely Soldier, 3. Hannagan and Arrow, “Reengineering Gender Relations in Modern Militaries,” 307. Service Women’s Action Network, Issues, “Military Sexual Violence.” Mann, “How America Justifies Its War,” 158–159.

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35 Department of Defense News Article, Released January 24, 2013. http://www.defense. gov/news/ 36 Modleski, “Misogynist Films,” 101. 37 Nichols, “Getting to Know You … ,” 183. 38 Lesage, “Women’s Fragmented Consciousness,” 328. 39 West and West, “The Invisible War Within the Military,” 12. 40 Higgins, “Documentary in the Age of Terror,” 30. 41 Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” 10–11. 42 Benedict, The Lonely Soldier, 3. 43 Kitfield, “The Enemy Within,” 18. 44 West and West, “The Invisible War Within the Military,” 12. 45 Army Training Video, in The Invisible War, 2012. 46 The Invisible War, 2012. 47 The Invisible War, 2012. 48 Lesage, “Women’s Fragmented Consciousness,” 327. 49 Smith, Clint Eastwood, 156. 50 Williams, “Did ‘The Invisible War’ shortchange the male victims?” http://www.salon. com/2013/02/08/did_the_invisible_war_shortchange_the_male_victims 51 West and West, “The Invisible War Within the Military,” 12. 52 Huffington Post blog entry by Rob McDonald (Kori Cioca’s husband), February 1, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-mcdonald/the-invisible-war-beingt_b_2594055.html 53 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 179. 54 Huffington Post blog entry by Rob McDonald, February 1, 2013. 55 Huffington Post blog entry by Rob McDonald, February 1, 2013. 56 Recently, the president addressed the graduating class at Annapolis. He said, “those who commit sexual assault are not only committing a crime, they threaten the trust and discipline that make our military strong. That’s why we have to be determined to stop these crimes, because they’ve got no place in the greatest military on Earth” http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/24/remarks-president-unitedstates-naval-academy-commencement Yet, a week later The New York Times reported a female midshipman had been raped last April by two football players at the site of Obama’s speech. 57 Dinnerstein, “Survival on Earth,” 9. 58 Winston, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, 47. 59 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 213. 60 Bieze, “Military Malfeasance,” 16. 61 Winston, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, 160. 62 Winston, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, 161. 63 Cioca, Notinvisible.org (blog), December 10, 2012. 64 Joe Nocera, The New York Times blog entry, February 23, 2013, http://nocera.blogs. nytimes.com/2013/02/23/the-invisible-war-an-update/ 65 Trina McDonald, e-mail from Move-On. Org, June 4, 2013. 66 Kori’s interviews are publicized with numerous clips and accompanying analysis: Katie Couric Interview: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2277917/KoriCioca-tells-Katie-Couric-horrific-rape-contemplated-suicide.html The View: This video was no longer available. Democracy Now carried the interviews

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67 68 69 70 71

72 73

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with Kirby Dick and some of the women while they were at Sundance: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=IAKiCdD0hkE&sf=Relevancy#1 (recorded on January 30, 2012). Aufderheide, “The Camera as Conscience,” B7. www.boxofficemojo.com, accessed July 2013. Film Independent.Org, “Case Study of The Invisible War,” http://www.filmindependent. org/resources/case-studies/case-study-the-invisible-war/#.UbeBOoL5GK0 ITVS (Independent Television Service), http://www.itvs.org/about (accessed July 2013). There were sixteen articles about The Invisible War film, including articles regarding its awards and over ninety articles regarding a range of issues, including military sexual assault scandals, Veteran’s Administration issues, actions by congressional women, and posttraumatic stress. Epstein and Samuelsohn, Politico.com. Juhasz, “They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality,” 175. http://screen. oxfordjournals.org/

Bibliography Aufderheide, Patricia. “The Camera as Conscience: How Social Issues Inspire Moving Documentaries.” The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review, http:// chronicle.com, Section: Opinion & Arts, Page: B7, October 23, 1998 (accessed July 25, 2013). Benedict, Helen. The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009. Bieze, Katie. “Military Malfeasance: Exposing ‘The Invisible War’.” Documentary (Summer 2012): 16–17. Box Office Mojo. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/ (accessed July 2013). Chamallas, Martha. “Women and War: A Critical Discourse: Panel Two–Women Warriors.” Berkeley Journal of Gender Law & Justice 20 (2005): 338–339. Department of Defense. News Article, Released January 24, 2013. http://www.defense.gov/ news/ Dick, Kirby. “Don’t Trust the Military to End Rape.” The New York Times, Op-Ed, June 3, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/opinion/dont-trust-the-pentagon-to-endrape.html?_r=1& (accessed July 2013). Dinnerstein, Dorothy. “Survival on Earth: The Meaning of Feminism.” Peace Review 2, no. 4 (1990): 7–10. Epstein, Reid J. and Darren Samuelsohn. Politico.com, December 20, 2013 10:34 AM EST; Updated: December 20, 2013 1:06 PM EST. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/ barack-obama-military-sexual-assault-101378.html#ixzz2pYBunZeu Film Independent.Org. “Case Study of The Invisible War.” http://www.filmindependent. org/resources/case-studies/case-study-the-invisible-war/#.UbeBOoL5GK0 Gaines, Jane. “Political Mimesis.” In Collecting Visible Evidence 1999, edited by Jane Gaines and Michael Renov, 84–102. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Hannagan, Rebecca J. and Holly Arrow. “Reengineering Gender Relations in Modern Militaries: An Evolutionary Perspective.” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 12, no. 3 (2011): 305–323.

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Haynes, John. “Documentary as Social Justice Activism: The Textual and Political Strategies of Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films.” 49th Parallel 21 (2007): 1–16. http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue21/Haynes.pdf Herdy, Amy and Miles Moffeit. “Betrayal in the Ranks.” Denver Post, 2004. http://www. denverpost.com Higgins, Lynne. “Documentary in the Age of Terror.” South Central Review 22, no. 2 (2005): 20–38. Huffington Post blog entry by Rob McDonald, February 1, 2013. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/robert-mcdonald/the-invisible-war-being-t_b_2594055.html InvisibleNoMore.org, 2013. http://www.notinvisible.org/about (accessed July 2013). The Invisible War. DVD, directed by Kirby Dick (2012; Los Angeles: Cinedigm Entertainment Group and Docurama Films). ITVS (Independent Television Service). http://www.itvs.org/about (accessed July 2013). Jeffords, Susan. “Performative Masculinities or, ‘After a Few Times You Won’t Be Afraid of Rape at All.’ ” Discourse 13, no. 2 (1991): 102–118. Juhasz, Alexandra. “They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality—All I Want to Show Is My Video: The Politics of the Realist Feminist Documentary.” Screen 35, no. 2 (1994): 171–190. Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Periodicals Dept University Libraries Northern Illinois University. Kitfield, James. “The Enemy Within.” National Journal (September 15, 2012): 14–20. Lesage, Julia. “Women’s Fragmented Consciousness in Feminist Experimental and Autobiographical Video.” In Feminism and Documentary 1999, edited by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, 309–337. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Lifton, Robert Jay. “Conditions of Atrocity.” The Nation, May 31, 2004, 4–5. Mann, Bonnie. “How America Justifies Its War: A Modern/Postmodern Aesthetics of Masculinity and Sovereignty.” Hypatia 21, Autumn 2006: 147–163. Modleski, Tania. “Misogynist Films: Teaching Top Gun.” Cinema Journal 47, no. 1 (2007): 101–105. The New York Times blog entry by Joe Nocera, February 23, 2013. http://nocera.blogs. nytimes.com/2013/02/23/the-invisible-war-an-update/ Nichols, Bill. “ ‘Getting to Know You…’ Knowledge Power and the Body.” In Theorizing Documentary, edited by Michael Renov, 174–191. New York, NY: Routledge, 1993. ———. Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Notinvisible.org blog entry by Kori Cioca, December 10, 2012. http://www.notinvisible. org/kori_cioca_since_the_invisible_war ———, http://www.notinvisible.org/ Opposing Force. DVD, directed by Eric Karson. (1986; Los Angeles: Orion Pictures). Palmer, Nancy Doyle. “Can The Invisible War Help Put an End to Military Rape?” The Atlantic, May 14, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/can-i-theinvisible-war-i-help-put-an-end-to-military-rape/275843/ Ruby, Jennie. “Is This a Feminist War?” In September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter, 148–150. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press Pty Ltd., 2002. Service Women’s Action Network. “Major Moments in Women’s Military Service Fact Sheet,” February 2011. http://servicewomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/FinalMajor-Moments-Fact-Sheet-10.4.12.pdf

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Service Women’s Action Network, Issues. “Military Sexual Violence.” http://servicewomen. org/military-sexual-violence Smith, Paul. Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Svander Schaaf, Derek J. “Deputy Inspector General, Department of Defense, Office Of Inspector General,” Tailhook 91, Part 1—Review Of The Navy Investigations, September 1992. http://mith.umd.edu//WomensStudies/GenderIssues/SexualHarassment/ tailhook-91 Torreon, Barbara Salazar. “Military Sexual Assault: Chronology of Activity in Congress and Related Resources,” July 30, 2013. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R43168.pdf Wagner DeCew, Judith. “The Combat Exclusion and the Role of Women in the Military.” Hypatia 10, no. 1 (1995): 56–73. West, Dennis and Joan M. West. “The Invisible War Within the Military.” Cineaste 37 (Fall 2012): 10–15. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13. Williams, Mary Elizabeth. “Did ‘The Invisible War’ shortchange the male victims?” Salon. com, February 8, 2013. http://www.salon.com/2013/02/08/did_the_invisible_war_ shortchange_the_male_victims Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: BFI Publishing, 1995. ———. Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries. London: BFI Publishing, 2000.

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The Committed Documentary and Contemporary Distribution: A Look at Sin by Silence Heather McIntosh

The goal of making an impact on society drives the production of many documentaries. The people behind these productions hope to see some kind of change that results from their efforts. Impact, according to a report by The Fledgling Fund, begins with a compelling story that moves through layers of awareness, engagement, stronger movement, and ultimately social change.1 But as a report from the Center for Social Media points out, defining and tracking impact becomes complicated as efforts continue on for years, as messages proliferate across multiple media platforms, and as different publics engage or disengage from those messages.2 Sin by Silence (2009), directed by Olivia Klaus, is a committed documentary that, using the stories of convicted women who murdered their abusers, engages the myths surrounding domestic violence, addresses issues within the legal system, and offers support for these convicted women in coping with the many challenges they face. The documentary focuses on the Convicted Women Against Abuse (CWAA), a prison-based organization that supports these women and raises awareness about their situations. Sin by Silence focuses on six women—Brenda Clubine, LaVelma Byrd, Glenda Crosley, Glenda Virgil, Joanne Marchetti, and Rosemary Dyer—who recount the harrowing stories of their abusers, their injuries, their fights to survive, and then their fights for justice. The documentary also weaves in expert testimony from justice system representatives, including police, lawyers, even a former juror, and others touched by these cases, particularly families affected by the court’s decisions. The impacts of Klaus’s documentary, however, reach well beyond these women. What started as a documentary film telling these women’s stories and raising awareness about domestic violence and its myths grew into a movement that resulted in changes in California state legislation. California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma learned about this documentary and these women’s stories, and working with director Klaus and her team, Ma put together bills that would permit the admission into evidence of Intimate Partner Battering and its Effects for cases of women convicted of killing their abusers before 1992, allowing them to re-file based on the new evidence. AB 593 and AB 1593, known collectively as the “Sin by Silence” bills, passed the California Assembly, and on October 2, 2012, Governor Edmund Brown Jr. signed them into law.

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This chapter investigates the strategies used in the Sin by Silence campaign through an in-depth interview with the director, several years of following the campaign, and examinations of additional press coverage and secondary research. Drawing on themes of messages, audience, timing, and momentum, this chapter analyzes the campaign and its impacts from three angles. First, it considers the role of personal stories not only within the documentary, but also how these stories contributed to calls for action. The chapter then delves into the complexities of contemporary media distribution, detailing the challenges and choices Klaus faced in using these systems to bring her film to audiences, and outlining the campaign’s uses of online media to interact with them. It concludes with a look at the various impacts made by this documentary, as evidenced by audience responses and resulting activism and legal initiatives.

Telling the stories While some documentaries distance their representations of social and political issues through experts, factual footage, and omniscient narration, others choose to engage these issues through individuals’ personal stories and represent them as emblematic of larger issues. The skillful telling of these stories often lies at the heart of the committed documentary. Makers of committed documentaries begin with an ideological standpoint, and grounded within that standpoint, they seek to enact change through the making of their film.3 Recognizing the political implications of people’s lived experiences, these documentaries use personal narratives to humanize the issues they examine. This focus on valuing people’s experiences dates back to shifts in documentary production in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist filmmakers during that time created documentaries to raise awareness about women’s issues and women’s experiences, infusing personal stories into the politics of representation.4 They frequently used personal interviews, also called “talking heads,” to allow women to speak for themselves. Barbara Halpern Martineau outlines three types of talking heads that developed during this time: (1) interviews where the subject addresses someone who is either off-screen or on; (2) candid or informal discussions filmed in close-up; and (3) direct address to the camera, where the subject appears to be talking to the audience.5 Through these interviews, women gained a voice and, along with that voice, some authority. These interviews also offered some corrections to the stereotypes about women’s gender roles. Interviews involve complex dynamics of power, most importantly between documentary maker and subject. Though the subject gives consent, the documentary maker still retains control over the content, the filming, and its editing into the final product. While the subject knows about her own experiences, the documentary maker contributes ideas about bringing those experiences into larger contexts.6 Despite appearing conversational and even informal, an interview usually involves much

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preparation beforehand.7 This preparation is particularly important when interviewing survivors of gender-based violence in that they may feel vulnerable in telling their stories, they may risk their personal safety in appearing on camera, and they may experience re-victimization during the recounting.8 These interviews play important roles within advocacy documentaries. In particular, interviews consisting of people telling their own stories about their own experiences are important, not just in the political valuing of these stories but also in their potential for reaching audiences. People connect with other people and their experiences more deeply than they do with facts and statistics.9 More specifically, people connect with individual stories, which often carry more emotional impact and can capture greater attention than stories about small groups or even about two people.10 A powerful story not only makes a social issue more real, but it also makes that social issue more compelling. Sin by Silence offers in-depth interviews with six convicted survivors of domestic violence who killed their abusers. These women reveal details of their abusive situations, their court cases, and their prison sentences. They also recount their experiences with the CWAA. As founder of the group, Brenda Clubine played a central role both within and beyond the documentary. After enduring her husband’s abuse and trying to protect herself through restraining orders and even an arrest warrant, Clubine met him in order to get his signature on divorce papers and, fearing for her safety when he threatened her, hit him on the head with a wine bottle to protect herself. After her husband died from the head injury, she was charged with murder and sentenced to fifteen years to life in jail in 1983. While in prison, she formed the CWAA, and in part due to its efforts, she was released in 2008. Klaus recognized the importance of Clubine’s story to the documentary, not just as the CWAA’s founder, but also as an example showing the devastating effects on the convicted women and their families. Before her incarceration, Clubine had given up her son for adoption, and later her son’s adoptive parents informed her that her son had died. During the film’s production, her son Joe, who is still alive, found the documentary’s website and contacted his mother through them, and therein Clubine learned about how her son’s adoptive parents had lied to her about his death. The Sin by Silence promotional materials call Clubine’s story integral to the film: “The filmmakers, who were completing what they thought would be their last shoot inside the California Institution for Women, realized Brenda completed a missing piece of the film, and they continued production in order to include the legacy of CWAA from the founder herself.”11 The continued production time allowed them to include the story of Brenda’s son and their reunion. This accommodation and flexibility, even in the production process, demonstrates the importance of Clubine’s story to the overall messages of the documentary. While Clubine’s story begins within the film, it reaches past the film into communities, helping to connect the film and its issues with audiences. Klaus took the film on a tour across the country, screening at colleges and communities to help bring people together to talk about domestic violence. Clubine accompanied

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her and served as a key speaker at these events. Clubine embodied what the film and its advocacy efforts were trying to do, according to Klaus.12 Due to its unseen nature, domestic violence is frequently understood as something that happens to “someone else” or “other people.” With her appearance in the documentary and at these screenings, Clubine shows that domestic violence affects a “real” person, a named person, and not an anonymous other. Her presence also allows people who are experiencing these same issues or who know someone experiencing them a chance for connection and possibly motivation to seek help. In these ways, Clubine’s story and her presence made the issues even more “real” than simple facts could have done.13 The story of Glenda Virgil is also central to Sin by Silence. Virgil suffered abuse at the hands of her father and brother as a child, and at the hands of boyfriends as an adult. As she tried to leave one boyfriend, he beat her, locked her up, and came back with a shovel, at which point she shot and killed him. Convicted, Virgil spent more than twenty-five years in jail, and she consistently was denied parole until the Sin by Silence bills allowed her attorneys to seek a new parole hearing. Virgil’s story, too, extends beyond the boundaries of the film and connects with the advocacy actions organized around the film’s awareness efforts. In her case, a signature campaign drew more than 55,000 signatures petitioning the California governor for her release on parole.14 Sin by Silence used footage from the documentary and its other materials to tell Virgil’s story in support of this campaign, and she finally received parole in 2013.15 Sin by Silence uses these and other stories to raise awareness and create impacts in two ways. First, the efforts attempt to raise awareness about the issues of domestic violence itself, including discussions on why women stay, information about the patterns and signs of wife abuse, and what people can do to help. These efforts connect with the 1970s feminists’ efforts to make the private issue of domestic violence more public in attempts to show the pervasiveness of the crime,16 and resulted in changing public discourses and laws.17 By addressing these larger social issues, then, Sin by Silence positions itself as an important contributor to these discourses. Along with these efforts to bring domestic violence issues forward, Sin by Silence also works on behalf of the women in the documentary and other women enduring long prison sentences for killing their abusers and other related crimes. These women’s stories, both individually and as part of the larger discourses on women convicted of killing their abusers, motivate a variety of actions. Website materials, for example, encourage people to support these incarcerated women through actions such as writing letters or donating legal expertise. Other online campaigns encourage people to act on these women’s behalf through signing petitions, writing letters, calling politicians, and making donations. A similar campaign advocated for the release of Glenda Crosby, who, in spite of these efforts, passed away before seeing parole. By building these advocacy actions around these women’s stories, Sin by Silence is able to help these incarcerated women and reach those seeking more information about domestic violence.

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Getting the message out Traditional advocacy documentary distribution involved signing all rights over to a single distributor and letting that distributor manage the efforts to bring a work to audiences. Contemporary advocacy documentary distribution offers more windows of opportunity for audience access across multi-media, multi-platform options. Documentary distribution also involves access points outside the mainstream media system, such as festivals, colleges and universities, and communities. These rich opportunities offer potential for reaching varied audiences with advocacy messages. As a result, documentary makers attempt to retain as many distribution rights as possible in order to keep control and maximize their reach. For the distribution of Sin by Silence, Klaus engaged three groups: educational distribution, mainstream media, and film festivals. Each of these groupings comes with its own sets of possibilities and limitations for advocacy of documentary messages and for reaching audiences. Klaus’s strategies represent the flexibility required in order to navigate successfully this range of partnerships and further her mission. Educational distribution in the United States offers a system for bringing documentaries to educational institutions such as colleges, universities, and secondary and elementary schools. As documentary grew during the 1960s and 1970s, filmmakers struggled to bring their films to audiences, so many of these distributors formed in response to the need. These educational distributors frequently support projects that focus on social justice and advocacy issues, including domestic violence as Sin by Silence does. Though not written about extensively, these distributors play important roles in bringing documentaries to audiences outside the mainstream, and in supporting productions that otherwise struggle to find places on the mainstream media. These distributors also assist in bridging the gap between educational distribution and mainstream broadcast media. Founded in 1972, Women Make Movies responded to the lack of opportunities for women and minority filmmakers to receive training in filmmaking. By the 1980s, Women Make Movies (WMM) had reorganized to focus on distribution services. In addition to addressing higher and secondary educational institutions, WMM works with “organizations and institutions that utilize non-commercial, educational media in their programs” for North American rights, bringing its collection of more than 500 titles to museums, universities, hospitals, prisons, and other institutions.18 In addition to bringing the titles to audiences, Women Make Movies returns royalties back to its filmmakers. Women Make Movies invites submissions within particular guidelines, and it acquires about 15–20 films per year.19 Like many independent distributors, Women Make Movies faces challenges in choosing which projects to support from among a large number of submissions. Klaus adopted an unorthodox strategy for submitting Sin by Silence to Women Make Movies. Instead of sending along the finished film, she sent a rough cut of the work in progress. According to Klaus, executives at Women Make Movies watched the rough cut and fell in love with it. Although

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Women Make Movies wanted the final cut as soon as possible, Klaus convinced them to wait about six months to get the rest of Clubine’s story. Executives at Women Make Movies agreed. Keeping her audiences in mind, Klaus negotiated a unique deal with Women Make Movies. Domestic violence awareness remained a priority for her, and she wanted to make sure that awareness-raising groups could afford the film on their budgets. Pricing operates differently within educational distribution than it does within mainstream media. Mainstream films draw in audiences of millions at a time, and Hollywood can charge $25–$30 for a DVD and still make a significant profit. Educational DVDs, in contrast, cost between $200 and $500 and count sales in the hundreds,20 which means significantly lower profits when compared with Hollywood films’ grosses. According to Women Make Movies executive director Debra Zimmerman, the higher pricing helps cover the gap resulting from the lower numbers of sales.21 Also unlike Hollywood DVDs, which are licensed only for home exhibition, the DVDs from educational distributors sometimes come with public performance licenses. These licenses mean that buyers can show the films in classes and include them as part of events at schools or in communities without additional cost. Even though the public performance rights could prove beneficial for domestic violence advocacy groups in organizing community screenings, the higher pricing could prove too prohibitive for them to purchase the DVD. These groups consistently face threats to their funding, and their budgets mostly go to providing services to the women who need them. Klaus, however, wanted to ensure that these groups had access to Sin by Silence in order to further their awareness mission. She negotiated with the distributor for a special lower rate for these women’s domestic violence groups, and according to Klaus, Women Make Movies readily agreed to lower the price point. For Women Make Movies, Sin by Silence fits well within the mission of the distributor, which focuses on women and women’s issues and aids women filmmakers. Sin by Silence joins more than fifty other titles about domestic violence and sexual assault in the distributor’s catalogue. Through this partnership Sin by Silence gains prestige by working with one of the most visible and powerful women-focused distributors in the world, and more practically, it gains a partner who supplies DVDs to educational and other interested buyers. Women Make Movies also works with other media outlets to bring its titles to theaters and television. According to Klaus, Women Make Movies helped in connecting Sin by Silence with Investigation Discovery, which is part of the mainstream media in the United States. The mainstream media are an oligopoly that works to consolidate and retain control of production, distribution, and exhibition. Profits from advertising and other fees motivate these companies’ operations. Although television generated significant revenues from the network era into the mid-1980s, since that period, television companies have fought to retain the attentions of fragmented and niche audiences. As more devices for accessing content have become available, the competition has become even tougher.22 The pressures to generate profits for parent companies and cater to advertisers prevent television companies from taking too many

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risks with their programming choices. These companies tend to rely on entertainment programming that falls within recognized genres (comedy, drama) and follows specific formulas (key characters, scenes).23 This emphasis on entertainment and, in turn, on profits results in an aversion to the inclusion of more political content.24 While some political messages do appear, advocacy messages struggle for a place on the television schedule. Even when documentaries about domestic violence do land a spot on the schedule, the time slot is often less than ideal. For example, I Believe You: Faiths’ Response to Intimate Partner Violence aired on ABC and NBC affiliates, but it showed during the late weekend afternoons, one of the lowest-rated time slots. Independent media makers still try to work with these companies because they offer access to larger audiences, more promotional resources, and greater financial returns. While these offerings sound ideal, they also come with tight rules, such as signing over decision-making power in elements such as final editing and scheduling, and at times even facing cancellation. Cable channels frequently take an interest in independently produced documentaries that fit within their operating practices and channel branding. The Discovery Channel adopted this strategy in the 1980s and into the 1990s, building its strong foundation in part through the genre25 and becoming one of the largest producers of documentary in the world. The documentaries cultivated by Discovery emphasize entertainment over other virtues of nonfiction programming such as education, awareness, and advocacy. Instead, “current offerings across the spectrum raise questions about whether much so-called documentary programming, with its preponderant emphasis on celebrity, accidents, natural disasters, and true crime, qualifies as either information or education.”26 Discovery productions lean toward lighter fare. While some room for political commentary exists within these productions, the greater emphasis lies with the people in the shows than on the social implications of the socioeconomic structures shaping their lives. Investigation Discovery is a branded Discovery channel that focuses on true crime. The promotional materials describe the channel as “providing the highest quality investigative programming focused on fascinating stories of human nature from the past to the present,” and assert that “Investigation Discovery’s in-depth documentaries and series challenge viewers on important issues shaping our culture and defining our world.”27 Arguably, shows about domestic violence fit within these parameters, but despite the proclamation of its seriousness, many of the shows’ titles sound more exploitative than informative or even investigative. Examples include Happily Never After, How (Not) to Kill Your Husband, Dates from Hell, Wives with Knives, and Fatal Vows. As part of a strategy for building its programming, Investigation Discovery attempts to attract the work of independent filmmakers and claims to support them in an advertisement appearing in the winter 2013 edition of Documentary, a trade publication for United States documentary makers. This pursuit of independent documentaries was a new endeavor for the channel, which sought to pick up two to three films per year. When Olivia Klaus first received the opportunity to have Sin by Silence broadcast on Investigation Discovery, she turned it down. She claimed she

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worried about the story becoming sensationalized and about losing final editing rights, which allow the distributor to re-edit the original material in whatever way it wants, thus potentially compromising the women’s stories and the intended advocacy messages. What changed Klaus’s mind was that the channel allowed her to retain full editing rights, something almost unheard of on television. Sin by Silence aired on Investigation Discovery on October 17, 2011. The broadcast’s timing coincided with Domestic Violence Awareness month, and the channel published some web resources about the issue and links to more information on its website. At the time, Investigation Discovery brought in about 1 million viewers on an average Monday night, but the Sin by Silence debut more than doubled that number with 2.2 million. Throughout its run on the channel, Sin by Silence reached more than 8 million homes. Though initially reluctant, Klaus ultimately benefitted from the broadcast. Sin by Silence reached a larger audience than it would have through other distribution options, bringing messages about domestic violence awareness to the show’s viewers. Klaus retained control of her story and her advocacy messages, ensuring that they continued and reached a broad audience. Sin by Silence also gained momentum from this broadcast. According to Klaus, the broadcast helped bring the issue to the attention of the California Assembly, which started the process of creating new legislation regarding abused women convicted for killing their abusers. The final venue for Sin by Silence’s distribution is film festivals. Film festivals have become increasingly important for documentary and independent distribution in recent decades. In addition to growing in number, film festivals have become an integral part of promotional efforts for many films, since they provide marketplaces for potential distribution deals, and sometimes even invest in production alongside distribution and exhibition.28 Top tier, or market-level, festivals demonstrate this power in particular, as Hollywood studios and other distributors now attend festivals such as the Sundance Film Festival and HotDocs in North America, looking for the next independent or documentary film to bring to movie theaters and television. Niche festivals offer the opportunity to bring together films around a particular theme, such as identity, genre, social issues, or even smaller geographical areas.29 Several film festivals are dedicated to women filmmakers and women’s issues. These include the Women’s International Film and Arts Festival, the Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival, Lunafest, and Reel Sisters of the Diaspora. Others focus on domestic violence issues more specifically. Both New York and New Mexico have hosted festivals about raising awareness for domestic violence. Other festivals, particularly those focused on human rights, will screen films or adopt “themes” of domestic violence for a given year to help raise awareness for these issues. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival regularly screens these kinds of films. Either way, festivals offer opportunities to engage audiences in ways unavailable through television or home video. Klaus chose to debut Sin by Silence at the Cleveland International Film Festival (CIFF). A debut at a festival becomes a promotional event for both the film and the festival. More than 35 years old, CIFF chooses to focus on educational missions over

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commercial ones, claiming that it places “artistic and cultural merit above commercial appeal.”30 This mission draws films and audiences to the festival. In 2014, more than 350 films were screened and almost 98,000 people attended.31 Klaus’s reasons for debuting the film at this festival, however, go beyond the festival and its promotional potential and into the culture of the state and its social movements. In the history of domestic violence movements, the state of Ohio holds a unique place. Similar to California and other states, Ohio prohibited testimony about battered woman syndrome, and the rights to introduce other evidence varied from judge to judge.32 On December 22, 1990, Ohio governor Richard F. Celeste granted clemency to twenty-five women who had been convicted of killing their abusers, an action that represented the first mass release of incarcerated survivors.33 Klaus chose Ohio because of this important moment in the history of domestic violence awareness in part because it aligned with her advocacy goals. According to Klaus, this strategy for choosing festivals and other screening sites requires more research about the issues and their geographical variations. But, working with local organizations and advocates, she and her team identified important dates and events across the country to coincide with the film’s screening in particular areas. These screenings extended beyond festivals and into selected communities. Some community screenings occurred in areas that had some of the highest rates of domestic violence, including Indiana and New Mexico. But some of the screenings were not just about showing the film to audiences in order to raise awareness of domestic violence issues. Sometimes, Klaus attended, as did Brenda Clubine. The screenings helped create “safe spaces,” according to Klaus, so that people felt they could talk about their own experiences with domestic violence. Sometimes the screenings created an “emotional rollercoaster,” and she and Clubine would at times stay one to two hours afterward interacting with audience members who wanted to talk. Klaus recalled a New Mexico screening in which about fifty members of a batterers’ program attended. The men’s reactions varied from becoming uncomfortable and leaving, to breaking down in tears. Some of the men even hugged Clubine and apologized. Klaus’s hope for these screenings in particular is that they empower people to carry these messages forward into their own lives. She asserted, “This is my chance to empower them to continue on their own.”34 For Klaus, engaging audiences through domestic violence awareness messages in Sin by Silence comes first and foremost, and her strategies in working with different venues reflect these priorities. Targeting specific audiences about these messages and helping them move the messages outward is particularly important. The Investigation Discovery opportunity might sound amazing because of the immense reach it offered, but Klaus’s first concern was the editing of the story in way that would ensure that its messages come through. Women Make Movies offers distribution clout, particularly within higher education, but Klaus’s request for a special price for domestic violence groups still allows access to the film for many people who have experienced domestic violence, or who are committed to advocacy for victims and their rights. The careful selection of festivals and locations for screenings allows the film to connect with local groups and local history.

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The current multi-platform distribution options, coupled with the more traditional festivals and a screening tour, thus worked to Klaus’s advantage in bringing the messages to targeted audiences. Signing off the rights to one distributor would have made for less work and maybe even greater audiences, but by retaining the rights and working strategically with different opportunities, Klaus enabled the messages from the documentary to reach intended audiences. The advocacy messages behind Sin by Silence had first priority—as evidenced by the fact that Klaus originally turned down the Investigation Discovery opportunity. Clear movement goals make navigating these new media settings workable and reveal the possibilities of this new environment for motivated makers and their community partners. Klaus’s efforts demonstrate the ways in which successful negotiations can bolster an independent filmmaker’s efforts, though not all independent filmmakers fare so well within the tough competition in mainstream and independent media distribution.

Engaging audiences Online social media have changed the ways in which individuals, advocacy groups, and media organizations share their messages and interact. Instead of messages disseminating from a single source through traditional media channels, social movement advocates now can develop their own websites and use social networking sites to share their advocacy messages. These sites allow a range of advocacy activities, from making organizing protests easier, as in the case of the Occupy movements, to requesting that people engage in smaller activities such as signing online petitions or sharing messages with their own personal networks. They decentralize the dissemination of these messages, which offers audiences the opportunity to respond on their own terms. This change represents a shift from traditional advocacy movements. Within these technologies, users can personalize their online experiences to a high degree, surrounding themselves with their preferences through the connections they choose. This degree of personalization potentially threatens more traditional means of advocacy message dissemination that originates from a centralized location in terms of media and in terms of ideologies informing them.35 In their study comparing two groups’ advocacy efforts through social media, Bennett and Segerberg found that more personalized approaches to communication actually allowed for stronger connections among the people within the advocacy network.36 In other words, using technologies that allow potential supporters to become part of the movement on their own terms instead of being forced to use the technologies already chosen by the organization encourages greater degrees of participation, interaction, and support. Domestic violence advocacy is a particularly difficult subject to engage with in person, and online environments offer some freedoms and some challenges. The opportunity for anonymous interactions might help people find support for dealing with domestic violence situations when they otherwise might not have access to it. They might have a chance to learn about domestic violence and what options are

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available for help. They might have a chance to share their stories with others. But just as online environments offer freedoms, they also bring new concern about threats. Abusers can use online technologies to track their victims and use their victims’ online activities against them. They also can use these same technologies to inflict abuse in new ways such as through cyberstalking. For these reasons, many sites about domestic violence awareness offer a “quick escape” link, which redirects users to a more general site such as Google.com. Domestic violence advocacy online is a delicate territory for both survivors and for advocates. Sin by Silence has maintained a very active online presence that has shifted over the years in response to changes in advocacy goals and audiences. The story-driven messages and the awareness messages started with the main website, sinbysilence. com, and then expanded onto social-networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, MySpace, and, at one time, Ning. The website serves as the home base. Its content fluctuates depending on the priorities at the time. Early in the movement, the site supported the film’s release and the Stop the Violence! campaign. Later, it supported the California legislation as it moved from gestation to vote to governor’s signature. Continuing calls for action ask for help in writing to members of the CWAA, signing petitions for their release, and showing the film in classrooms or communities. While the site itself encourages people to get involved in various ways, efforts are focused largely on connecting people with activities happening offline. Only the site’s blog section offers interactive features, such as sharing a post on various other social networking sites, leaving a comment on a post, or donating money through another site. In addition to the advocacy initiatives, the site offers information—about the film, about the convicted women, about the filmmakers, and about the issues. One post on the site addresses friends of people who might be abused and suggests ways in which those friends might help, such as by assisting in the development of an escape plan or by listening to their friend’s story. Sheets in the press kit offer facts about domestic violence and tips for prevention. For a time, a Ning site offered a wealth of information about the issues related to domestic violence and the documentary. Ning is a website that allows people to create their own social network using the platform’s provided features. Originally, the site provided a free service and a tiered payment service. At the time, Sin by Silence maintained its own social network within the site, and the content there offered information on how to get involved in different ways. A forum showed users sharing their stories, asking their questions, and announcing events. A Resources section offered links to news stories and other stories from women who suffered from domestic violence or knew a victim of it, while a Learn section offered videos about the warning signs of domestic abuse, as well as a trailer and audience reactions. The forum allowed for people to remain anonymous in sharing their stories and their comments, but the maintainers of the site generally did not respond to users and their comments. By the time Ning eliminated the free service option in 2010, Facebook became the primary social media outlet for Sin by Silence. Klaus explained that their use of social networking sites was driven in part by where the audiences were, and in this

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case many were on Facebook. There, people interacted with the content and shared their stories, and the forum proved more interactive and active than the Ning site. Facebook requires that people use their real names and birthdates when creating profiles on the site. While the site offers opportunities for people to seek and find support,37 the lack of privacy could prove troublesome for domestic violence victims currently dealing with cyberstalking and other oppressive activities. Early Facebook posts about Sin by Silence redirected users to the Ning site, but even with the redirects a few women shared their experiences on the Facebook platform. One woman shared briefly how she had escaped from her abuser but she had been left permanently disabled and endured each day in constant pain. Eventually, the posts on Facebook became more action-oriented, seeking support for the women trying to gain parole, promoting activities in government legislation changes, and engaging audiences through various screenings and media appearances. With those shifts came more activity in the comments, and the comments moved toward supporting or responding to the actions. Overall, the online efforts of Sin by Silence attempt to connect with people in personal ways and allow them to respond in their own ways. Part of this personalization involves posting about the women involved in the film and offering updates about their lives and legacies. For example, Facebook posts honored the passing of Glenda Crosley and Dr. Elizabeth Leonard, an expert who wrote Convicted Survivors: The Imprisonment of Battered Women Who Kill and who appeared in the film Sin by Silence. Other posts celebrated the release of survivors who were not featured in the film. Still other posts continued the efforts of the website, by asking people to write holiday cards to members of the CWAA, requesting signatures on parole campaign, and asking for donations in order to help released women start their new lives. Another part of this personalization involves the ways in which people interacted with the messages. Though in part determined by the functionality of Facebook, the options of liking, sharing, and commenting still allow for a range of responses. Many responders choose to offer expressions of support, some ask questions, and some, though not many, share their own experiences. While the interpersonal exchanges of survivor stories diminished from the move from Ning to Facebook (and those exchanges were few in the first place), the overall interactions increased around the different actions and awareness calls posted on Facebook. The most important element to recognize in these efforts, however, is how Sin by Silence responded to audiences by using the same social networking sites as their audiences. Instead of forcing audiences to engage with them through the dedicated website or through Ning, Sin by Silence engaged audiences where they gathered.

Making impacts Making an impact inspired the activities behind the creation, promotion, and distribution of Sin by Silence, but the term “impact” itself proves difficult to define and evaluate. Earlier markers point to connections with the final film and individuals or

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dominant publics, which suggests a unidirectional flow of the impacts.38 In his research David Whiteman calls for an expansion of this approach with the coalition model, which takes into account the production process, social contexts, and community media.39 In their report Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact, Jessica Clark and Barbara Abrash break down impact questions through both quantitative and qualitative measures.40 Some of the qualitative measures, which connect the film with “a healthy participatory civic life,” prove useful for considering the impacts made through Sin by Silence.41 One measure points to the generation of audiences, which can be seen through the participation of people both online and in person.42 This evidence appears particularly on Facebook, with the ways in which people interact there, and in person, through the community screenings. Another marker calls for “mobilization around action issues,”43 which Sin by Silence achieves, for example, through its signature and telephone campaigns on behalf of those women up for parole. A third shows the film making its ways into policy-making venues, while a fourth notes the “impact” on law or policy.44 Taken together, these two markers bring about change that affects policies and practices into the future, and Sin by Silence makes claims to both. While many advocacy documentary makers seek to make a difference with their work, not many can claim such a large impact as a change in legislation as Olivia Klaus can. While these studies move past focusing on individual impacts and looking toward wider influence, Sin by Silence provides an example of the importance of balancing individual impacts and the larger social ones. Many committed documentaries tell people’s stories not only as a means of raising awareness about them and their issues, but in hopes that their efforts will in some way help the people represented in the work. The women in this film spent decades in prison for defending themselves from perpetrators who threatened their lives and their children. The documentary brought their stories to the public. The stories motivated further actions on their behalf with the signature and phone campaigns, and they garnered support for the women in ways they might not otherwise have had, from letters to legal assistance. Many women gained their freedom from prison in part due to these efforts.

Concluding thoughts Four themes emerge throughout the main sections of this chapter: messages, audiences, timing, and momentum. These themes manifest in multiple ways. The personal stories draw audiences to the messages. Broadcast television, educational distribution, and festivals make the film available to larger general audiences and more targeted groups and individuals. Online venues offer audiences more agency in interacting with the messages. Two key audiences are targeted with the documentary’s messages: the potential partners who help carry them forward and the women in the film who hopefully benefit from the resulting support and advocacy.

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Timing and momentum, such as with the cable television broadcast of the documentary during Domestic Violence Awareness Month, were also important. This timing connects the documentary’s messages with the larger domestic violence initiatives. The broadcast also helped in generating government interest in these women’s situations, bringing about the eventual policy changes. It is also important to consider impacts not as end points, but as momentum builders, such as with Virgil and her parole campaign and then the subsequent crowdfunding campaign. Making impacts motivated the activities behind making Sin by Silence, as well as the advocacy efforts that accompanied it. Klaus’s clear vision of the film and its messages about domestic violence and the situations of the convicted women who killed their abusers drove the documentary’s production, distribution, and engagement. While impacts prove important in driving a committed documentary and its advocacy efforts, this chapter focused particularly on the processes and motivations informing these strategies. Committed documentary makers face multiple decisions about storytelling, media distribution partners, and social media outlets. Each partnership, such as with participants and media distributors, and each technology application, such as Ning and Facebook, offer both opportunities and limitations. Those relationships influence the messages, the audience, the timing, and the momentum. Key to making those impacts, then, are flexibility and vision in seeing the possibilities without compromising the overall mission. While the larger articulated mission of making impacts drives Sin by Silence, its applications reveal the importance of flexibility while keeping that mission in mind. The overall success of Sin by Silence was brought about by carefully orchestrated synergy that prioritized messages and audience and built momentum toward making significant impacts.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

Barrett and Leddy, “Assessing Creative,” 15. Clark and Abrash, “Designing,” 4–5. Waugh, “Introduction,” xiv. Juhasz, “They Said,” 181. Martineau, “Talking About,” 259. Ellis, Documentary, location 1365. Ellis, Documentary, location 1376. See Ruth Goldman’s chapter (12) in this volume for further insights into this preparation. Miller, The Nonprofit, 77–90. Slovic, “If I Look.” “Brenda Clubine.” Olivia Klaus, personal interview, March 27, 2012. See Britt, “Listening Rhetorically,” for an interesting reaction to viewing Defending Our Lives, another documentary about domestic violence survivors who murdered their abusers and received prison sentences. May, “Let Virgil.” Ma, “Domestic Abuse.”

Committed Documentary: A Look at Sin by Silence 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

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Staggenborg, Social Movements, 71. Staggenborg, Social Movements, 72. Women Make Movies, “General Information.” Woman Make Movies, “Distribution Guidelines.” Aufderheide and Zimmerman, “From A to Z,” 1469–1470. Aufderheide and Zimmerman, “From A to Z,” 1469–1470. Curtin and Shattuc, American Television, 1–31. Turow, Media Today, 43–46. McChesney, Rich Media, 1–2. Chris, “All Documentary,” 9–12. Chris, “All Documentary,” 12. Discovery Communications, “Investigation Discovery.” de Valck, Film Festivals. Wong, Film Festivals, 51–63. Cleveland International Film Festival, “Our Mission.” Cleveland International Film Festival, “Facts + Statistics.” Gagnè, Battered Women, 62. Gagnè, Battered Women, 1. Also Wilkerson, “Clemency Granted.” Olivia Klaus, personal interview, March 27, 2012. Castells, Networks, 15. Bennett and Segerberg, “Digital Media,” 794. Baym, Personal Connections, 72–98. Whiteman, “Coalition Model,” 51. Whiteman, “Coalition Model,” 54. Also Abrash and Whiteman, “The Uprising,” 92, and Whiteman, “The Impact.” Clark and Abrash, “Designing,” 9–10. Clark and Abrash, “Designing,” 10. Clark and Abrash, “Designing,” 10. Clark and Abrash, “Designing,” 10. Clark and Abrash, “Designing,” 10.

Bibliography Abrash, Barbara and David Whiteman. “The Uprising of ’34: Filmmaking as Community Engagement.” Wide Angle 21, no. 2 (1999): 87–99. Aufderheide, Patricia and Debra Zimmerman. “From A to Z: A Conversation on Women’s Filmmaking.” Signs 30, no. 1 (2004): 1455–1472. Barrett, Diana and Sheila Leddy. “Assessing Creative Media’s Social Impact.” 2008. http:// www.thefledglingfund.org/resources/impact (accessed June 8, 2014). Baym, Nancy K. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Malden, MA: Polity, 2010. Bennett, W. Lance and Alexandra Segerberg. “Digital Media and the Personalization of Collective Action.” Information, Communication & Society 14, no. 6 (2011): 770–799. “Brenda Clubine.” http://www.sinbysilence.com/pressmaterials/brendaclubine.html (accessed June 7, 2014). Britt, Elizabeth C. “Listening Rhetorically to Defending Our Lives: Identification and Advocacy in Intimate Partner Abuse.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 10, no. 1 (2012): 155–178.

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Castells, Manuel. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Malden, MA: Polity, 2012. Chris, Cynthia. “All Documentary, All the Time? Discovery Communications Inc. and Trends in Cable Television.” Television & New Media 3, no. 1 (2002): 7–28. Clark, Jessica and Barbara Abrash. “Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact.” 2011. http://www.cmsimpact.org/tags/impact/designing-impact (accessed June 8, 2014). Cleveland International Film Festival. “Facts + Statistics.” http://www.clevelandfilm.org/ about/statistics (accessed June 8, 2014). ———. “Our Mission.” http://www.clevelandfilm.org/about (accessed June 8, 2014). Curtin, Michael and Jane Shattuc. The American Television Industry. London: British Film Institute, 2009. de Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Discovery Communications. “Investigation Discovery.” 2014. http://corporate.discovery. com/brands/us/investigation-discovery/ (accessed June 7, 2014). Ellis, John. Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation. New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. Kindle edition. Gagnè, Patricia. Battered Women’s Justice: The Movement for Clemency and the Politics of Self-Defense. New York, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Juhasz, Alexandra. “They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality—All I Want to Show Is My Video: The Politics of the Realist Feminist Documentary.” In Collecting Visible Evidence, edited by Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, 190–215. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Klaus, Olivia. Personal interview with Heather McIntosh. March 27, 2012. Ma, Fiona. “Domestic Abuse Victim Glenda Virgil Is Freed.” San Francisco Chronicle. June 24, 2013. http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Domestic-abusevictim-Glenda-Virgil-is-freed-4619772.php (accessed June 7, 2014). Martineau, Barbara Halpern. “Talking about Our Lives and Experiences: Thoughts about Feminism, Documentary, and ‘Talking Heads.’ ” In “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, 252–273. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. May, Dixie. “Let Virgil Spend Her Last Days with Her Family.” http://www.change.org/ petitions/let-virgil-spend-her-last-days-with-her-family (accessed June 7, 2014). McChesney, Robert W. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. New York, NY: The New Press, 2000. Miller, Kivi Leroux. The Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Slovic, Paul. “ ‘If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act:’ Psychic Numbing and Genocide.” Judgment and Decision Making 2, no. 2 (2007): 79–95. Available: http://journal.sjdm. org/7303a/jdm7303a.htm (accessed June 7, 2014). Staggenborg, Suzanne. Social Movements. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010. Turow, Joseph. Media Today. New York, NY: Routledge, 2011. Waugh, Thomas. “Introduction: Why Documentary Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change the World, or Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries.” In “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, xi–xxvii. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984.

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Whiteman, David. “The Impact of The Uprising of ’34: A Coalition Model of Production and Distribution.” Jump Cut 45 (2002): http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc45.2002/ whiteman/uprisingtext.html (accessed June 8, 2014). ———. “Out of the Theaters and into the Streets: A Coalition Model of the Political Impact of Documentary Film and Video.” Political Communication 21 (2004): 51–69. Wilkerson, Isabel. “Clemency Granted to 25 Women Convicted for Assault or Murder.” The New York Times. December 22, 1990. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/22/us/ clemency-granted-to-25-women-convicted-for-assault-or-murder.html (accessed December 8, 2013). Women Make Movies. “Distribution Guidelines.” http://www.wmm.com/filmmakers/ distribution.shtml (accessed June 8, 2014). ———, “General Information.” http://www.wmm.com/about/general_info.shtml (accessed June 7, 2014). Wong, Cindy Hing-Yuk. Film Festivals: Culture, People and Power on the Global Screen. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

12

Anatomy of Filmmaking Practice: Documentary and Gendered Violence Ruth Goldman

I have the possibility to give back what I have. And what I have is a camera. It’s the power to give them the possibility to talk about what’s happened in their life. Provencher1 I feel—and I think we all do as documentary filmmakers—that we have a responsibility here. In my case, with respect to this story, I felt a huge sense of responsibility to get it right. Welsh2 It’s so important because the whole issue around sexual assault is the issue of silence…The more people that are speaking out publicly in documentaries, the more people that come forward outside of the film. Dick3 It’s a privilege just to make a living in this business but if you can make a living without selling out and make a living by selling responsible messages, that’s the best thing in the world. Jackson4

As we can see by the wide range of scholarship presented in this collection, the topic of documentary and gendered violence lends itself to myriad approaches and interpretations. Because we are most familiar with the end product—the documentary—and the compelling stories it contains, we often focus our scholarship there, utilizing close readings to illuminate the core of a film. And, because documentary filmmakers who make films about gendered violence often work in the service of humanitarian storytelling—empowering survivors to frame the issues in such a way that will shift social and political discourse—it is not surprising that more attention is often paid to the subjects of a film than to its makers. For example, in June of 2014, Raymonde Provencher’s 2002 film War Babies was screened at the Global Summit to end Sexual Violence in Conflict. However, Provencher was not

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invited to attend.5 Indeed, too rarely do we look past a documentary film’s narrative in order to consider the expertise and practice of the filmmaker as it intersects with the topic of gendered violence. Because filmmakers are the conduits for the narratives we see, understanding their embodied practice is important. And that is precisely my intention for this chapter: to provide an anatomy of the practice of four documentary filmmakers who have made films about gendered violence and, in doing so, provide the beginnings of a theory of the practice itself.6 Through in-depth interviews, I set out to illuminate the particular complexities, challenges, and rewards facing four directors of such films at each stage of production, and especially the points at which they interacted intimately with survivors. I selected Kirby Dick, Lisa F. Jackson, Raymonde Provencher, and Christine Welsh, all internationally acclaimed, award-winning filmmakers whose work in the area of gendered violence has been especially noteworthy, breaking and replacing painful silences with remarkably powerful stories that have been used to significant social and political effect in diverse communities and countries.

Setting the scene Films need to feed us in some way. They need to give us courage, inspiration, hope –they need to give us a place to go from. You can’t leave people with a story of 500 [missing or murdered] women. It has to take that story somewhere else.7 Making documentary films about gendered violence requires an extraordinarily strong commitment from filmmakers. In order to highlight both the extent of this commitment and the range of documentary film work on gendered violence in North America, I interviewed two veteran filmmakers from the United States— Kirby Dick and Lisa F. Jackson—and two veteran filmmakers from Canada— Raymonde Provencher and Christine Welsh. Each of these filmmakers practices humanitarian storytelling through utilizing the camera as a witness, dedicating her or his career to employing documentary as an empowered tool for under- or un-represented issues, groups, or individuals. Their films on gendered violence continue to make critical impacts in many areas, including education, policy, and media representations. Christine Welsh, Métis filmmaker, teacher, and scholar, has been producing, directing, and editing documentary films in Canada for more than thirty years. Welsh uses documentary as a vehicle to present complex representations of Indigenous women in Canada and, in doing so, deeply engages with historical and contemporary issues that affect Indigenous women and their communities. Welsh notes that when her filmmaking career “first started in the early 1990s, those films were appearing in a media landscape where nobody was seeing any kind of images of Aboriginal women that were in any way positive or accurate.”8 This led to a lifelong commitment to challenging media stereotypes and silences and using documentary to enrich Aboriginal women’s lives.

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Figure 12.1 Christine Welsh, reprinted by permission of Banchi Hanuse Welsh’s most recent documentary, Finding Dawn,9 is part of a larger, ongoing movement to illuminate and address systemic abuse and disrespect of Aboriginal women in Canada. Inspired to help bring attention to the shocking number of Aboriginal women who had disappeared or been murdered in Canada,10 Finding Dawn is both testimony and call to action. Welsh takes us on a moving and contemplative journey from British Columbia to Saskatchewan, tracing the stories of Dawn Crey, Ramona Wilson, and Darleen Bosse, three missing or murdered women, and the grassroots efforts to find or memorialize them. She also presents two inspirational and empowered survivors who are now community and national Indigenous women activists—Janice Acoose and Fay Blaney. She explains her choice to include a “memorializing and an activist side” in this way: I couldn’t do a film that was going to leave the impression that being an Aboriginal woman was a death sentence, that this is the burden we bear. It had to clearly show that it is a burden we bear with deep historical and social roots but we’ve got what it takes to turn that around. We do that individually, we do that collectively. The young women watching this film have to find something that they take and use in their lives to keep them safe, to do the work that they need to do in their own families, lives and communities.11

The film begins with the story of Dawn Crey, an Aboriginal woman who disappeared from Vancouver’s skid row, known locally as Downtown Eastside. Dawn’s DNA was the

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twenty-third match in the discovery of the remains of sixty-seven women—twentysix of whom were Aboriginal—on Robert Pickton’s pig farm outside Vancouver. Long interested in and aware of the issues, Welsh was compelled to embark on a filmic journey on the topic of violence against Indigenous women after reading an article about Dawn Crey’s brother Ernie, who had become an advocate for all of the women who had disappeared from the streets of Downtown Eastside. Shortly thereafter, Amnesty International released a report titled Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada.12 The report served as both further evidence and impetus for Native women activists working to educate the public about horrific conditions for Aboriginal women in Canada, and Welsh’s film became part of that movement. As Welsh explains, “They had been doing this work already, only nobody had been listening. So people listening in a bigger way was part of the purpose of this film.”13 Finding Dawn has significantly contributed to local, national, and international dialogues about the conditions for Indigenous women in Canada. In addition to a Canadian broadcast and screenings in a wide variety of educational settings, the film was screened at the 51st session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and won the Audience Gold Award at the 2006 Amnesty International Film Festival in Vancouver. Finding Dawn’s greatest impact has been as a tool for Indigenous activism and education. The film has been utilized in Memorial Marches for missing and murdered Aboriginal women and the Native Women’s Association “Sisters in Spirit” campaign, and also is extensively used by educators at all levels. An international news correspondent and documentary filmmaker for more than forty years, French-Canadian Raymonde Provencher has made several films about gendered violence, especially as it affects women in war. She is a committed humanitarian storyteller, as she says in her opening quote, using her camera to bring attention to sanctioned violence against women in Canada and around the world, and to fight for global gender equality. In our conversation, she spoke about her documentary film practice through her work on War Babies14 and Grace, Milly, Lucy … Child Soldiers.15 Both films explore the effects of gendered violence on individuals, communities, and societies. War Babies presents the stories of five people from different countries whose lives were irrevocably affected by rape as a tool of war. To help locate potential interviewees, Provencher partnered with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), but finding willing participants proved to be a monumental challenge. In several cases, she found only one woman willing to be interviewed on camera. “Nusreta” (whose identity was protected) and her daughter were both raped in Bosnia during the Balkan war. Ryan B. Good’s biological father was a Pakistani soldier who raped his Bangladeshi mother. Ryan was adopted three weeks after his birth by a Canadian couple. Mrs. Chung is a South Korean woman forced into prostitution as a “comfort woman” to Japanese soldiers during World War II. Hailing Martines’s mother was raped during the Nicaraguan Civil War. Savera was raped, and her husband and all of their children were murdered during the genocide in Rwanda. The father of her only living daughter is Savera’s rapist. Over the course of the film, Savera locates and begins a relationship with

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her biological father, the soldier who raped her mother. The issues that each of these people confront are impossibly complex, and their first-person narratives are stunning. The multiple award-winning film continues to be used worldwide as testimony to the prevalence and deleterious effect of rape in international warfare. Most recently, it was screened at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland (March 2014), and the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London, England (June 2014).

Figure 12.2 Raymonde Provencher, reprinted by permission of CÉRIUM (Centre d’études et de recherches internationales), Université de Montréal

In her second film, Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soldiers, Provencher uses an observational style combined with interviews to introduce three young women who survived torture, rape, and indoctrination, and who were shaped and used, according to former child soldier Grace Akallo, as “killing machines.” As Provencher illustrates, Uganda’s twenty-plus-year civil war, set against a hauntingly lush landscape, is unbelievably harsh. Eighty percent of the soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) are children. More than 30,000 children have been abducted in Uganda and forced to serve in the L.R.A., and 30 percent of these children are girls. Grace served “only” seven months in the L.R.A., but her experiences inspired her to devote her life to fighting for recognition of the effects of war on child soldiers, a fight that takes her in front of the United Nations and into graduate school. Milly Auma and Lucy Lanyero were abducted at the age of seven and spent their entire childhood in the L.R.A., forced to fight and also raped by older male officers. Milly and Lucy were finally

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able to escape at age 17. Both already had children of their own. Not surprisingly, their lives and relationships with biological families, Ugandan society, and one another are impossibly complicated. They and their children are constant reminders of an army that committed reprehensible acts against the people of Uganda. Clearly survivors but deeply troubled by a childhood of violence, Grace, Milly, and Lucy helped found an international organization called Empowering Hands (EH), through which they work with other former child soldiers and help them cope with the challenges of adjusting to adulthood in civilian life. The message the film leaves us with is one of cautious and complicated empowerment; only Grace—who spent just a tiny fraction of her childhood in the L.R.A.—seems to be on truly solid footing. Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soldiers has been screened extensively internationally and in Canada and is used in educational settings to raise awareness about the plight of girl child soldiers. In partnership with Amnesty International and the International Bureau of Children’s Rights, Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soldiers opened in Canadian theaters on the International Day against the Use of Child Soldiers. Because the film is distributed through the National Film Board of Canada—Canada’s federal film production and distribution organization—the film is also available for free to Canadian students and teachers. American filmmaker Kirby Dick is currently working on his eleventh documentary feature. Called “one of the indispensable muckrakers of American cinema” by A.O. Scott of the New York Times,16 Dick has made investigative, hardhitting documentaries about a wide range of previously underexplored topics. The Academy award nominee, Twist of Faith,17 tells the story of a man who was sexually assaulted as a teen by a priest and is seeking justice from the Catholic Church. Outrage18 illuminates the duplicity of closeted and conservative gay politicians who promote anti-gay legislation. We spoke about The Invisible War,19 a ground-breaking exposé on rape in the military, codirected with Dick’s longtime producer Amy Ziering. Inspired by an article on the shocking prevalence of sexual violence against women in the military by Helen Benedict in Salon magazine,20 Dick and Ziering present more than sixty on-camera interviews with military sexual-assault survivors, their family members, and active-duty and retired military tasked with sexualassault investigations, policy and/or prevention, as well as legal experts, scholars, and politicians. The sheer scope of the film—and the issue—is overwhelming, but the heart of the story lies with survivors like Kori Cioca. Cioca’s commanding officer raped her and broke her jaw, yet she has been unsuccessful in gaining either legal or medical recourse for the assault. The carefully constructed, pervasive evidence combined with the raw power of the survivor’s stories results in a documentary that is equally devastating and infuriating. The film’s impact has been monumental: The Invisible War has transformed policy, politics, and public awareness around the issue of sexual assault in the military. The military currently uses the film as part of its sexual-assault trainings, and The Invisible War has been viewed all the way up the chain of military command to United States President Barack Obama. Furthermore, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York was so affected by the harrowing stories presented in The Invisible War that she has made policy reform on the prosecution of rape in the military one of her signature issues.21

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Figure 12.3 Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, reprinted by permission of Debbie Zeitman

Emmy-award-winning American filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson has been making documentaries for thirty-five years and exploring the topic of gendered violence for more than twenty years. A noted humanitarian storyteller, her recent documentaries include Sex Crimes Unit,22 a cinéma vérité study of the Manhattan District attorneys who prosecute sex crimes, and The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo,23 which won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. We spoke about The Greatest Silence and a film currently in postproduction, It Happened Here.24 The Greatest Silence is a devastating exploration of the normalization of gendered violence against women in the decades-long war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Accompanied only by a translator, Jackson recorded unprecedented hours of testimony from Congolese women survivors and their perpetrators, whose accountability is held only through the survivor’s memories and our witnessing of the stories. The Greatest Silence has been screened worldwide and continues to be used extensively in educating people about the prevalence of rape as a tool in war and its destructive effects on women and communities. Jackson’s self-proclaimed mission as a documentary filmmaker is “making people mad and churning things up. It is putting people’s stories out there that will affect other people and will affect policy and attitudes.”25 The Greatest Silence so affected attitudes that it was screened at the opening of the first United States Senate hearing on rape and war and in 2008 inspired the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1820, which states that “rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.”26 Jackson explains: “What the film allegedly did—the wife of the then Ambassador to the UN saw this film and the bill did not have a sponsor and after viewing the film he was

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Figure 12.4 Lisa F. Jackson and Major Munyole (The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Lisa Jackson 2007)

inspired to have the United States sponsor the bill. It was truly amazing.”27 The film undoubtedly has also helped build a climate in which women sexual-assault survivors feel more empowered to tell their own stories. Herself a rape survivor, Jackson is a tireless advocate for women survivors of gendered violence. She has appeared publicly many times with The Greatest Silence and, in doing so, met survivors of sexual assault. She is currently in postproduction on It Happened Here, a documentary about rape on campus inspired by college rape survivor and activist Angie Epifano. Epifano’s article in the Amherst College newspaper launched a movement to reform campus policies on the handling of sexual-assault victims.28 The documentary follows the stories of five women from Amherst College, Vanderbilt College, and the University of Connecticut. Several of those women met Jackson when she appeared on their campuses with The Greatest Silence. It Happened Here will be released in 2015.

The challenges of funding I was surprised at how difficult it was to get money. My producer and I actually had to fund it ourselves for more than a year.29

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Finding funding for films on gendered violence is a constant struggle, especially in the United States. The United States does not have a national film board or a federal funding body. Statewide public arts and private foundation grants are available but extremely competitive and often quite restrictive in regards to subject matter and approach. PBS—primarily through independent programs such as Independent Lens and Point of View (POV)—and cable networks like HBO produce and/or air documentaries, but it is extraordinarily rare for them to provide full funding through every stage of production. Furthermore, because of its precarious public-funding status, PBS generally avoids controversial topics, and this has been especially true for independent documentaries.30 For all of these reasons, American documentary filmmakers working on issues of gendered violence and critiquing systemic and/or institutional problems have considerable challenges obtaining adequate funding at the start of, and even sometimes well into, their projects. And, unfortunately, unlike narrative films, making successful, high-impact documentaries does not necessarily lead to greater funding opportunities. Because of the National Film Board of Canada’s commitment to funding underrepresented issues and communities, Raymonde Provencher and Christine Welsh received comprehensive financing for their films on gendered violence. However, both Provencher and Welsh had prior successful relationships with the NFB and were well-established documentarians, and both noted that funding opportunities through the NFB appear to be getting more difficult to obtain. Lisa Jackson has a long and stellar record as a documentarian, yet she identified funding as the most difficult aspect of making documentary films on gendered violence. Often Jackson acts as a one-woman crew, works without a producer, and doesn’t receive funding until well into the production process: If the story grabs you, you have to shoot it. That’s the way it was with the Rape in the Congo film and with the Sex Crimes Unit and with this one too [It Happened Here]. Networks would never commission the kind of film that I’m making so you get most of it shot and present it to a network and they acquire it.31

She is, however, working with producer Marjorie Schwartz Nielsen on It Happened Here and that has meant some money earlier in the process. Jackson describes Nielsen as “relentless” in her fund-raising efforts—raising about $80,000—“but that barely covered expenses” for the nonstop shooting Jackson did from April to December in 2013.32 Jackson has strong network interest in the film and is waiting for it to be acquired. However, she stressed that it is a high-risk topic area, financially: Often the films don’t get finished. I shot for over four years on a film with these three internally displaced women in Bogota, Columbia, and I couldn’t get funding for it…I started to make a film about sexual violence as an element and forced displacement as a weapon in Columbia’s intractable war. That was a huge investment and it never got finished. You have to know that for some films, the audience just isn’t out there.33

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This willingness to pursue projects at all costs is part of the extraordinary dedication necessary to make films on gendered violence. I asked Jackson about other solutions like the possibility of a strategic partnership with an NGO or a grassroots nonprofit to help fund a film. She cautioned against such an arrangement, explaining that You want to keep a little firewall that might affect any editorial content…if they had helped me financially with flights and post-production, then it gets highly problematic because you don’t want one of your characters to be in a position of providing you with funding or that kind of support.34

Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering were able to shift around some grant funds to begin work on The Invisible War. Because he had made nine previous documentary features that received widespread distribution and critical acclaim, Dick expected procuring funding for The Invisible War would be relatively easy. However, that was not the case: I was surprised at how difficult it was to get money. My producer and I actually had to fund it ourselves for more than a year. Once we got into it, we were completely committed to the issue. We knew how important a film on this subject was, and we also knew that it would really explode on the publics’ consciousness. We didn’t think it would lead to this kind of change, but we knew that it would really bring awareness to this issue and we knew we could make a very powerful film so we were going to make it anyway…But it’s always a challenge to get funding when going up against revered institutions like the military.35

Many documentary filmmakers have turned to crowdfunding—using Internet sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter to raise money from individuals—but a successful campaign requires one, if not two, full-time people to run successfully. Most documentaries are chronically understaffed and even when documentary filmmakers do run crowdfunding campaigns, they do not typically raise huge amounts of money. Therefore, this was not an option that either of the American filmmakers had pursued as yet. The two films made in Canada, Grace, Milly, Lucy … Child Soldiers and Finding Dawn both received funding through all stages of production from the NFB. At the time that Welsh and Provencher made their respective films, the NFB was actively funding innovative documentaries and, in Welsh’s case, had funds earmarked for Aboriginal filmmakers. Welsh explains that she “had paid researchers and a fabulous producer at the Film Board … . He just was a terrier on behalf of that film and got us what we needed to do it the right way.”36 When I mentioned to Welsh that documentary filmmakers in Canada had a distinct advantage over their counterparts in the United States, she cautioned that the situation in Canada appeared to be changing. Because

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of cuts to the NFB’s budget and an accompanying readjustment of funding priorities to web-based documentaries, Welsh speculated that it would be less likely that a film like Finding Dawn would receive the same type of support today. Lack of consistent funding opportunities is a serious issue that cannot be overlooked: there are countless untold stories about gendered violence that will never be publicly told—or perhaps effectively told and distributed—because procuring funding for narratives that challenge deeply rooted systems and institutions is increasingly difficult in both the United States and Canada (and presumably elsewhere in the world).

Building the frame Pre-production is the general preparation stage for documentary. The scope and nature varies by film and filmmaker, but it usually includes conducting background research and identifying interview participants in addition to planning logistics such as scheduling, securing locations, and hiring a crew. Thoughtful and thorough preproduction is essential to the success of any documentary film, but all of my interviewees emphasized its paramount importance when dealing with the topic of trauma and gendered violence. Gendered violence is what Jackson calls “high voltage” material: Survivors accept varying degrees of risk in speaking publicly and filmmakers need to use preproduction to fully understand the issues underlying those risks and the topic itself in order to help build a framework for a successful working relationship with participants. The actual practice involved in documentary preproduction varies widely by film but for our purposes here I will be concentrating on preproduction research. Jackson, Dick, Provencher, and Welsh each undertook extensive and somewhat different research processes. The research took many forms, including in some cases pre-interviews or intake interviews. Pre-interviews and intake interviews are initial interviews that serve many functions in documentary film. They help the director gain deeper insight into the larger topical issues and the interviewee’s personal story, establish rapport, and build trust between the director and interviewee, help the director identify the strongest stories and storytellers, and ultimately help the director understand how to shape and frame on-camera interviews. They do not necessarily take shape as a formal interview but may instead be a conversation or series of conversations between director and interviewee. Because the video camera can constitute an additional layer of intimidation, filmmakers sometimes forego recording initial interviews altogether or record them in audio only. The potentially constructive and destructive power of the camera was something that all of the filmmakers noted. Raymonde Provencher remarked that when making War Babies “in Bosnia it was very difficult to get the women to talk to me about what happened. They would talk to me without a camera but with a camera they wouldn’t do it.”37 There can be physical, emotional, and/or social danger for survivors who speak publicly about their assaults and assaulters. Therefore, filmmakers may need to

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spend extensive time in pre-interviews building the trust necessary to allow them to capture and represent survivors’ stories on video. There was a general consensus among Lisa Jackson, Raymonde Provencher, and Christine Welsh that the best practice when dealing with the retelling of traumatic stories was to meet in person before putting them on camera. Provencher tells this story from her experience making War Babies: I was filming an old lady in Korea and she had been a “Les Repouse des Comfort” [comfort woman]. She was the only one I found still alive who had a child … . She was living at Pyeongtaek, which is far away from Seoul … I went with friends from Korea and we had tea and I explained that I wanted her to tell her story. And finally she accepted to be filmed and so I said, “Ok, I will try to come back as soon as I can but it will be several months.” It took me a year and a half before going back because of financing … .When I returned she was waiting outside her house. She was looking at me—she was 86 and a half years old—and said, “Finally! I could have died!” But you know, we already had a relationship. And that gives you the permission to use the camera.38

Kirby Dick has a different approach, and the pre-production and production phases are not necessarily discrete. As part of the research for The Invisible War, he and Ziering conducted more than 125 intake interviews. They also embarked on a ten-day cross-country road trip during which they interviewed more than twenty survivors. The trip was so influential for the team that Dick refers to it as “the emotional core” of the film. They used a camera to record the interviews, and some of these stories ended up in the film. During this trip, they interviewed Cory Scioca, the main subject of The Invisible War, and although they returned multiple times to capture her ongoing story, they chose to use her initial interview in the film because it was the most powerful. During the initial interview, Scioca takes more than 30 seconds to name the act of violence committed against her as rape. According to Dick, this was the first time Scioca’s husband or anyone other than her commanding officer had heard the full story. I asked Dick why he uses the camera during initial interviews: I try to turn on the camera as early as possible for a number of reasons. Oftentimes, when you’re hearing the story for the first time in depth, you’re in the same position that the audience is in. If you’ve spent time with them previously, you know their story inside and out. Interviews I find are better if the interviewer doesn’t know all of the details.39

Because of the risks inherent in interviewing sexual-assault survivors, I asked Dick how he gauged when it was safe to turn on the camera. He emphasized that comprehensive research laid the essential groundwork for every aspect of documentary practice in The Invisible War:

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We talked to a lot of therapists and victim advocates … We did Google searches and even when we found oblique references to sexual assault we reached out to people in online forums for background research. We did months and actually years of research on this. We wanted to find every person we could possibly find … coming in as a documentary filmmaker you sort of have to make a voracious attack on the subject … . We had to understand it from every angle from the psychological to the political to the legal to the technical policy side.40

Based on information gleaned from this research, Dick and Ziering followed an interview protocol that was very similar to that practiced by Provencher, Jackson, and Welsh: We told them that their [the interviewees’] comfort was the most important thing. We told them they could stop and start the interview whenever they wanted, that they could not say certain things and that if they said something and then decided later that they didn’t want it to be public that it wouldn’t be; that they could have whoever they wanted in the room or not in the room, depending on how they felt.41

Part of the difference between Dick and Ziering’s approach and that of the other filmmakers is that Dick and Ziering were conducting formal initial interviews. The other filmmakers were spending time with potential interviewees, but their interactions were more conversational as they were primarily intended to build rapport and trust. Dick emphasized that the research (including intake and initial interviews) that he and Ziering conducted was critical in creating a film that inspired action: Hearing hundreds of survivors’ stories gives you a perspective. The decision makers in the Pentagon don’t have that experience, and that’s why they don’t understand this issue. That’s why survivor advocacy organizations understand these issues in ways that people who have been in the military for years do not. If you don’t look at it from the survivor’s perspective, you can’t really understand the necessary policy changes that have to be made.42

Christine Welsh also deeply values the role of preproduction in creating socially responsible and effective documentaries. Her collaborative approach, however, results in a different practice. Because Welsh had a rare budget that allowed her a year of “on-the-ground” research, her preproduction included multiple trips to visit the collaborators in her film. These were opportunities for Welsh and her interviewees to get to know one another and for Welsh to practice deep listening, hearing their stories sometimes multiple times, and visiting key (production) locations with them. She explains: I knew Fay [Blaney] before I made the film but I didn’t know her well. I made a research trip where we went up to her territory, we went out on the boat, we

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looked at those places, we talked. I knew those stories up and down and all around before I filmed any interviews.43

Her pre-interviews were conversations without a camera present. Documentary filmmakers often worry about losing the intensity of a moment by going over questions and stories in advance, but for Welsh this familiarity was an asset: I saved the questions until the interviews, but it was all based on stories that I had been told. When I went and spoke to Ernie and he told me about Dawn, I was just getting the facts about the story, listening to how he told it, understanding where he was prepared to go and not prepared to go.44

These preinterviews helped Welsh and her collaborators build a foundation through which incredibly painful and intimate stories could be shared safely. Finding Dawn has a contemplative pace that allows the audience time with the interviewees’ stories. Welsh is a character too, appearing with her interviewees on screen and narrating the story. In one scene, she sits in a field on a blanket with survivor-activist Janice Acoose, in front of the housing project where Acoose grew up. Acoose talks about the challenges of moving from the reservation into the city, why children from these projects end up in jail or on the streets, and then tells a story from her own childhood of watching a man put a knife to her mother’s throat and rape her. The audience, like Welsh, is there as Acoose says, “We couldn’t do anything. We were just little kids.”45 Indeed, sitting with her subjects extends the shared relationship to the audience: I had the sense when doing interviews with people that I could sit with them and have a conversation that was about our shared experience and shared stories resonate with audiences. Because it was also part of an experience that was shared by Aboriginal women all across the country, they could see a piece of themselves in it. And it was a way of a figuring out how the stories speak to each of us. It was a way of saying, this is how they speak to me…how might they speak to you?46

Thus, by putting herself in the film, Welsh invites the audience to put themselves there too. When I asked Welsh about how she navigated the emotional risks to survivors in physically and emotionally revisiting such traumatic places, she replied: It was Janice and I deciding where were the best places for us to go to see and to tell the story; Going back to the valley where we go, sitting on that blanket in front of the housing project where she grew up. We very carefully, together, plotted out the phases of her story and where she wanted to tell them. That’s all part of the pre-interview process.47

No matter the degree of care in developing protocols for documentary practice, there are still no guarantees that survivors would not be triggered or re-traumatized.

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However, thorough and sensitive research and preparation is essential for creating a safe foundation for interview subjects.

Framing the stories The most important thing is to make the person feel that they’re in charge, that they are in control, that the experience will not be re-victimizing. It is their narrative, their story to tell in any way they feel comfortable.48 The production process involves capturing all of the footage required for the film. As discussed previously, conducting on-camera interviews and handling material on gender-based violence presents a unique set of challenges to documentary filmmakers. While standard ethical best practices in interviewing exist, unlike many other fields, documentary filmmakers do not have oversight committees or professional organizations that impose rules or guidelines. Instead, documentary filmmakers have an informal code of conduct that guides us in the handling of traumatic material.49 As we have seen in the handling of pre-production, much of documentary practice is context-dependent and requires individualized research. Ultimately, filmmakers must find their own style, taking great care to protect and support their interviewees while still effectively capturing the story. To understand individual practices for handling material on gendered violence in production, I asked each of the filmmakers about their protocol in conducting interviews on traumatic topics, as well as their own best practices in self-care. These protocols also applied to interviews conducted in pre-production. While different choices were made in the implementation of production interview practices, all of the filmmakers identified common key foundations in building successful relationships with survivors. These included working with the smallest crew possible, using deep and careful listening to fully support the survivor, extending control over all aspects of the interview to the survivor, and suspending expectations about the course of the interview process. The filmmakers also all observed a shared goal that helped guide the process: filmmakers and participants felt compelled to disseminate the truth about experiences of gendered violence in order to effect positive change. In addition, an interview practice built on a careful, supportive foundation was often cathartic and empowering for survivors. And finally, each one had different strategies for, and observations about, caring for herself or himself during the production process. All of the filmmakers cited the importance of a small crew in creating a safe space for the discussion of traumatic experiences. Kirby Dick has been working with producer Amy Ziering for more than ten years. During production on The Invisible War, Ziering conducted the interviews with survivors, and Dick was on camera and sound. The small crew allows intimacy; Dick describes the space of the interview as “cocoon-like.” Lisa Jackson often works as a one-woman crew. When I asked her about

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the distraction of handling the equipment and concentrating on the interview, she commented: The interview parts are the toughest. It’s so much easier to have the camera set up and not have to worry about the frame, and the shifting light, and the focus, and the tape running out, or the card getting full, but you just kind of build that in … I find it’s easier to get a connection with whomever you’re talking to if it’s just you rather than three people because you have to work triple hard to make all of those people invisible. With myself I just have to make my camera invisible.50

As Jackson indicates in her comment about hiding the camera, small crews help de-emphasize the formal documentary production and instead create a more intimate and safe space. Filmmakers must also consciously work to support the survivor while conducting the interview. Unless the filmmaker chooses to include herself or himself in the narrative (as Welsh does in Finding Dawn), the audience loses track of the director, focusing instead on the interviewee and her story. But, the underlying relationship still frames every aspect of production. And, although the director’s body often remains unseen, she or he is the conduit for the story. Therefore, interviewer and interviewee must have a real partnership, especially during the retelling of traumatic events. Lisa Jackson cites this moment as central: “I think the most challenging [aspect of dealing with material about gendered violence] is dealing with your subject when they are going back to that place. You need to be exquisitely present and empathetic.”51 The need to be “exquisitely present,” as Jackson so eloquently puts it, when survivors tell their stories means that filmmakers accept responsibility as witness, confidante, and then storyteller in post-production. Raymond Provencher describes it using the French verb “accompagner”—to accompany, to support—“I am in the story with her, through my eyes, through the support I’m trying to give her.”52 Christine Welsh characterizes the relationship as carefully holding both the person and the moment: The filming process is about how do you hold this in your hands for the time that you have it. That’s about making sure people are fed…and that they’re in a place where they feel comfortable speaking and that if they want certain people around them, those people are there. And that if you need to stop or if you need to go back or you need to take another day, you do it.53

Each filmmaker emphasized the need for support throughout each stage of production, but especially during the interview process. Extending support and ceding control to survivors often means suspending expectations about schedules and formats and thus working outside a normal documentary structure. Kirby Dick explains: When you do even intake interviews with survivors of sexual assault … it’s always an involved story. When a survivor starts telling their story, you have to really

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sit and listen. It’s going to be an hour or an hour and a half of your life and that’s just the way it’s going to be because you have to let them process the whole thing. To do anything else would be wrong because it’s a very important moment for them.54

Raymonde Provencher also emphasized the importance of suspending expectations and allowing the survivor to control the interview process, even if that means interviews go on much longer than usual: In Bosnia it was very difficult to get the women to talk to me about what happened. They would talk to me without a camera but with a camera they wouldn’t do it. But finally I found a woman who would talk to me…[T]his woman started to explain her entire story and she spoke for three hours. And I remember the cameraman was looking at me like, “Are we going to stop?” But it’s impossible to stop because it’s a kind of therapy…you just roll the camera and you don’t intervene. They just have to tell their story.55

As Provencher notes, when survivors began telling their stories, they demonstrated a remarkable sense of purpose and the effect was often cathartic. Jackson noticed something similar when interviewing Congolese women for The Greatest Silence: A lot of NGOs told me that I would never get women to talk to me and, on the contrary, especially when I returned several times to this village in the Bush, women would line up until there was no light to talk to me, to share their narratives, to talk about what happened to them with someone who listened without judgment, with sympathy and just to be able to own their own narratives. I think that’s an incredibly important part of the interview process, to make it empowering for survivors. And if you do it right, it is.56

Again, nurturing the process and the filmmaker/interviewee relationship is paramount in conducting successful interviews with survivors of gendered violence. Welsh observed that when the relationship was properly nurtured, survivors undertook calculated risks in partnership with the filmmakers to share their stories in pursuit of effecting positive change: You’re absolutely holding them in your hands throughout. It’s demanding but it’s absolutely necessary and unless you accept that that’s what you’re going to be doing and take it on with full knowledge that it’s part of your job then it won’t work. Then you have the potential for people to be re-traumatized. Which is not to say that they weren’t anyway. When you’ve built that relationship and taken that time and laid yourself out for people to understand who you are, why you’re doing this, who you are in that moment in that relationship, they’re making a decision to do this. And there was a real sense of purpose with all of the people who decided to participate in this film. They all decided to do it for a reason and they were

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doing it with their eyes wide open, they knew what the consequences could be, they knew that there was potential for them to be triggered, for there to be impacts from their participation and they chose to do it anyway because they felt that it was important, not just for their loved ones but for all of the other people who were carrying a piece of this story.57

Dick and Ziering also observed this sort of cathartic empowerment. Many of The Invisible War interviewees had not previously told their stories publicly (or sometimes even privately). And some survivors had no idea of the prevalence of sexual assaults (and serial rapists) in the military or that others had received the same despicable treatment after reporting assaults. But the validation of the film crew, while not without risk, was transformative for some: “Sometimes their friends and families tell them just to get over it and then this film crew comes in and says, ‘we’re part of this and we believe you.’ ” Dick sums it up like this: There’s no question that retelling a traumatic story like this is emotionally draining at least. People would tell us afterwards that they might have nightmares for a few days but no one said that it was so difficult that they couldn’t recover. Almost every person said, “The reason I’m doing this is because I want to do anything I can to prevent another woman or man from being sexually assaulted in the military.” So what happened is they took the most traumatic experience of their lives in most cases and turned it into something positive. They became part of something that was going to help change things—and I think that was very meaningful to them.58

Based on all of the filmmakers’ experiences, if every aspect of the interview process is handled respectfully, the interview can be rewarding for survivors. But, what of the filmmakers handling this incredibly intimate and—as Lisa Jackson calls it—“highvoltage” material? What happens when they bear witness, sometimes as the first person to hear these stories in their entirety? I asked each filmmaker how they prepared themselves emotionally to listen to these often incomprehensibly horrific stories of pain and sexual violence. How did they stay present and engaged throughout each person’s story and for the duration of the production process? All of the filmmakers responded initially by affirming that their commitment to humanitarian storytelling gave them a foundation through which to practice this very challenging aspect of filmmaking. Christine Welsh reflects: When you have a sense purpose—and I did right from the beginning of that film—I just felt like it was something I was supposed to be doing. That sense of purpose helps you get on with it. Your job is to make the film and get on with it.59

But, while this sense of purpose motivated their work, it did not insulate them from the traumatic effects of working with survivors of sexual violence. Each filmmaker had an extensive background in working with survivors and cited that experience as helpful but acknowledged that the interview process was always

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challenging, emotionally exhausting, and often overwhelming. Raymonde Provencher captures this reality: I have been making work on human rights abuses for thirty years. I know what is going to happen. I know what they are going to tell me. For women, it’s always about torture, it’s always about rape…I have filmed in Rwanda, Bosnia, Korea, Bangladesh and Nicaragua. I have been making this type of film for a long time but I am never very well prepared by the end because you never know what people will tell you. Sometimes I imagine worse and sometimes their stories are much worse than I ever could have imagined.60

No matter how many times you hear stories of sexual abuse, they are never wholly predictable and, if fully engaged with interviewees, filmmakers cannot shield themselves from secondary effects. Lisa Jackson identified the retelling of the traumatic event as her most challenging moment but, like Welsh, reaches back to her role as conduit for survivors’ empowerment: “The thing that helps is that you have such a strong sense that women want to own their own narratives.”61 As mentioned previously, Jackson typically works alone on shoots and therefore does not have support from other crew. Christine Welsh and Kirby Dick both identified crew support (usually just one other person) as key to self-care. I had a very tight little crew…By the end it was just me and Mo [Moira Simpson, the cinematographer]. Mo Simpson was my support. We didn’t know each other that well when we started out on the project and I now consider her to be like my sister. We really held each other up for the duration…62

But conducting interviews on gendered violence can be traumatic, especially when the process is condensed. Dick noted that despite dedicated time in between interviews to “processing and decompressing,” during their ten-day road trip, Ziering “did begin to experience some secondary PTSD symptoms.” Ziering then began practicing very conscientious self-care and “was very careful in what she ate and in getting enough sleep and exercise.”63 Christine Welsh commented that she got acupuncture throughout the production process and also identified community support as critical: “The other part of it, from an Aboriginal view, is that we had a lot of people praying for us and doing ceremonies for us and with us at various points through the making of the film and those held us up too.”64 Because of a generous production budget from the NFB, Welsh also had more time with which to process her experiences. Jackson and Dick both work under very tight production schedules and Jackson mentioned becoming completely overwhelmed at one point last fall, when working nonstop on It Happened Here. Dick characterized himself as possessing a higher tolerance for difficult material due to his many years’ experience working on taboo topics. Since he was shooting the interviews and Ziering was conducting them, I asked him if the camera provided a sort of buffer for him:

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It’s true, being behind the camera, there is a barrier there. But you’re just as intensely involved. I teared up at just about every interview. But it was interesting, when we would leave the interviews Amy was just emotionally drained and often crying and I was enraged. I think the film reflects those two emotional reactions: a combination of anger and this incredible pain that these people experienced.65

The camera may have given Dick enough of a buffer to gain perspective (and become angry) while Ziering was more directly connected to survivors’ raw emotions as they retold their stories. Ultimately, no one present is without risk during the retelling of traumatic material, but maintaining a partnership based on trust, respect, awareness, and a clear sense of purpose for all involved helps facilitate humanitarian storytelling practice.

Final thoughts on the practice of making documentaries about gendered violence The film production process has three stages: pre-production, production, and postproduction. The core of post-production is editing. For all but one, Christine Welsh, the filmmakers’ approaches to editing did not differ markedly from standard documentary editing practice. Filmmakers worked closely with their editors to create the most powerful story possible from the material they had gathered, guided by the protocols developed through thorough and thoughtful research and production. Filmmakers kept communication channels with survivors open and, as Dick mentioned, as is standard in most documentary practice, gave them the opportunity to change their minds about using all or parts of an interview. Due to the profoundly collaborative process practiced in the production of Finding Dawn, Welsh took things one step further, extending participants the opportunity to work with her in shaping their edited sections: If you’re going to be telling stories about violence with people who have experienced it, they need a lot of control of that. I just felt that I had to give people the opportunity to participate in the postproduction process to whatever extent they wanted.66

One of Welsh’s collaborators took an active role in post-production but the others entrusted Welsh with the process. An additional participant complicated the editing process, of course, but because collaboration was at the core of Welsh’s documentary practice, the complication was well worth it. It is fitting to end on the topic of trust; based on these interviews, the root of creating documentaries about gendered violence that are capable of both empowering interviewees and educating and inspiring audiences to action is a compassionate, observant, flexible, and intensely respectful relationship between filmmaker and interviewee. I ended each interview by soliciting advice for someone new to the field of documentary and gendered violence, and the filmmakers’ comments work well

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as a summation of their sometimes contradictory, but always thoughtful, theories of practice. Lisa F. Jackson reflected on the overall approach: You have to know what your own limits are. What’s your angle? Who’s your audience? Is this an advocacy film? A character-driven film? Do you have an agenda?67

Raymonde Provencher stressed the importance of building a solid foundation of trust in preproduction: When you want to make this kind of documentary, you need to know how to work with a person who has faced distress. Be delicate, be sensitive…Take time to go without the camera before and try to make her comfortable with you because this is the most important part: the trust between her and you.68

Kirby Dick emphasized the need for comprehensive, in-person research and the need to be flexible in production in order to capture the best stories. I would say talk to as many survivors and experts as possible. You cannot do enough research in person. Start shooting as early as you can. Sometimes that early footage you get may be some of the most interesting footage. Even if you’re just shooting yourself, audiences are very forgiving of the quality of footage if the footage is interesting. And documentary filmmaking may be one the most labor intensive art forms so you have to be prepared for an intense amount of work over a long time period.69

And Christine Welsh foregrounded the filmmaker’s tremendous responsibility to the survivors in every stage of production: This is people’s lives at their most vulnerable and it’s a huge responsibility to get that right. Take time to listen to their story and to involve them in how it’s going to be told so that people stay safe. Because the repercussions of this—you can’t predict them … . So take that responsibility really, really seriously.70

Raymonde Provencher, Lisa Jackson, Kirby Dick, and Christine Welsh share decades of success in the fields of journalism and documentary film. They also share a commitment to humanitarian storytelling, putting themselves in intimate and intensive contact with people whose lives have been irrevocably affected by individual and/or systemic violence. It is a process that is emotionally and physically challenging for both filmmakers and survivors, and all parties embark on this journey with the utmost of gravitas. Each filmmaker embraces a practice through which she or he conscientiously gathers testimonies from survivors while simultaneously supporting and empowering them and then translates those testimonies into powerful stories that

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have resulted in tangible change. Hopefully, providing an anatomy of their practices offers a model of exemplary practices for both scholars and filmmakers.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Provencher, Interview with Author. Welsh, Interview with Author. Dick, Interview with Author. Jackson, Interview with Author. In a recent email exchange with Monteal-based documentary filmmaker Raymonde Provencher, she told me about an upcoming screening of her 2002 film, War Babies, “a big event concerning rape during war time will be held … . Unfortunately, we, documentarists, are never invited to join the meeting!!! Only my film will travel to London!” I will briefly show my own hand to reveal my bias: I am a documentary filmmaker, editor, and teacher, and am therefore profoundly interested in the work and relationships underlying the finished film. Welsh, Interview with Author. Welsh, Interview with Author. Finding Dawn, Directed by Christine Welsh, 2006. A May 2014 report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) documents that since 1980, there have been a total of 1,181 cases—164 missing and 1,017 murdered Aboriginal women. These new statistics far exceed the 500 reported in the early 2000s and according to the report “indicates that Aboriginal women are over-represented among Canada’s murdered and missing women.” Welsh, Interview with Author. Amnesty International, “Stolen Sisters,” 2004. Welsh, Interview with Author. War Babies, Directed by Raymonde Provencher. Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soldiers, Directed by Raymonde Provencher, 2010. A.O. Scott, “For Some Who Served, an Awful Betrayal of Trust.” The New York Times, June 21, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/movies/the-invisible-wardirected-by-kirby-dick.html?_r=0 Twist of Faith, Directed by Kirby Dick. Outrage, Directed by Kirby Dick. Dick and Ziering, The Invisible War. Benedict, “The Private War of Women Soldiers,” 2007. Huval, “Sen. Gillibrand Credits The Invisible War with Shaping New Bill.” Sex Crimes Unit, Directed by Lisa F. Jackson, New York, 2011. The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Directed by Lisa F. Jackson, New York, NY: Women Make Movies, 2007. It Happened Here, Directed by Lisa F. Jackson, 2014. Jackson, Interview with Author. UN Security Council. “Resolution 1820.” June 19, 2008. Jackson, Interview with Author. Epifano, “An Account of Sexual Assault at Amherst College.” The Amherst Student. October 17, 2012. http://amherststudent.amherst.edu/?q=article/2012/10/17/accountsexual-assault-amherstcollege.

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29 Dick, Interview with Author. 30 For an excellent chronology of PBS’ uneasy relationship with independent documentaries, see Bullert, Public Television, 1997. 31 Jackson, Interview with Author. 32 Jackson, Lisa F., Interview with Author. 33 Jackson, Lisa F., Interview with Author. 34 Jackson, Lisa F., Interview with Author. 35 Dick, Interview with Author. 36 Welsh, Interview with Author. 37 Provencher, Interview with Author. 38 Provencher, Interview with Author. 39 Dick, Interview with Author. 40 Dick, Interview with Author. 41 Dick, Interview with Author. 42 Dick, Interview with Author. 43 Welsh, Interview with Author. 44 Welsh, Interview with Author. 45 Finding Dawn. 46 Welsh, Interview with Author. 47 Welsh, Interview with Author. 48 Jackson, Interview with Author. 49 Resources do exist but are not widely distributed. Lisa F. Jackson worked with Witness, an international nonprofit storytelling organization that facilitates the use of video as a tool to document human rights abuses and empower grassroots social change, to develop a best practices guide entitled, “Conducting, Safe, Effective and Ethical Interviews with Survivors of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence.” 50 Jackson, Interview with Author. 51 Jackson, Interview with Author. 52 Provencher, Interview with Author. 53 Welsh, Interview with Author. 54 Dick, Interview with Author. 55 Provencher, Interview with Author. 56 Jackson, Interview with Author. 57 Welsh, Interview with Author. 58 Dick, Interview with Author. 59 Welsh, Interview with Author. 60 Provencher, Interview with Author. 61 Jackson, Interview with Author. 62 Welsh, Interview with Author. 63 Dick, Interview with Author. 64 Welsh, Interview with Author. 65 Dick, Interview with Author. 66 Welsh, Interview with Author. 67 Jackson, Interview with Author. 68 Provencher, Interview with Author. 69 Dick, Interview with Author. 70 Welsh, Interview with Author.

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Bibliography Amnesty International. “Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence Against Indigenous Women in Canada.” October, 2004. Anaya, James. “The situation of Indigenous peoples in Canada.” United Nations Human Rights Council Special Report. New York, NY. May 7, 2014. http://unsr.jamesanaya. org/country-reports/the-situation-of-indigenous-peoples-in-canada (accessed May 14, 2014). Benedict, Helen. “The Private War of Women Soldiers.” Salon. March 7, 2007. http://www. salon.com/2007/03/07/women_in_military/ (accessed January 28, 2014). Bullert, B.J. Public Television: Politics and the Battle over Documentary Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1997. Dick, Kirby. Interview with Ruth Goldman. Digital Audio Recording, February 2, 2014. Epifano, Angie. “An Account of Sexual Assault at Amherst College.” The Amherst Student. October 17, 2012. http://amherststudent.amherst.edu/?q=article/2012/10/17/accountsexual-assault-amherst-college Finding Dawn. Directed by Christine Welsh. Canada: National Film Board. 2006. Grace, Milly, Lucy… Child Soldiers. Directed by Raymonde Provencher. Montréal: National Film Board of Canada in association with Macumba International. 2010. Huval, Rebecca, “Sen. Gillibrand Credits The Invisible War with Shaping New Bill.” Independent Lens Blog. May 13, 2013. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/sengillibrand-credits-the-invisible-war-in-shaping-new-bill (accessed May 3, 2014). It Happened Here. Directed by Lisa F. Jackson. 2014. Jackson, Lisa F. Interview with Ruth Goldman. Digital Audio Recording. January 30, 2014. Outrage. Directed by Kirby Dick. Los Angeles, CA: Magnolia Home Entertainment. 2010. Provencher, Raymonde. Interview with Ruth Goldman. Digital Audio Recording. January 24, 2014. Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview.” May 2014. http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/aboriginal-autochtone/ mmaw-fada-eng.htm (accessed June 1, 2014). Scott, A.O. “For Some Who Served, an Awful Betrayal of Trust.” The New York Times. June 21, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/movies/the-invisible-war-directed-bykirby-dick.html?_r=0 (accessed January 27, 2014). Sex Crimes Unit. Directed by Lisa F. Jackson, New York, NY: HBO Documentary Films in association with Jackson Films Inc. 2011. The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. Directed by Lisa F. Jackson, New York, NY: Women Make Movies. 2007. The Invisible War. Directed by Kirby Dick & Amy Ziering. Sausalito, CA: Roco Films Educational. 2012. Twist of Faith. Directed by Kirby Dick. New York, NY: HBO Video. 2006. United Nations Security Council. “Resolution 1820.” New York. June 19, 2008. http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/CAC%20S%20RES%201820.pdf War Babies. Directed by Raymonde Provencher. Montréal: Macumba International. 2002. Welsh, Christine. Interview with Ruth Goldman. Digital Audio Recording. January 31, 2014. Witness. “Video for Change Guide.” http://www.mediafire.com/view/vc7rn17gtvsqoeq/ Conducting-Safe-Effective-and-Ethical-Interviews-with-Survivors-of-Sexual-andGender-Based-Violence_v1.0.pdf (accessed April 10, 2014).

Select Filmography and Distributors List The following filmography offers representative film and video titles of documentaries about gender-based violence. The titles focus on these issues from around the world, and they are grouped thematically by subject. Distributor names and addresses appear at the end. The films labeled “self-distributed” can be obtained through each film’s website.

Child abuse and incest 2 Or 3 Things But Nothing for Sure. Dir. Tina DiFeliciantonio and Jane C. Wagner. 12 min. 1997. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories. Dir. Catherine Tatge and Dominique Lasseur. 56 min. 2005. Distributed by PBS. The Children We Sacrifice. Dir. Grace Poore. 61 min. 2000. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Grace, Milly, Lucy… Child Soldiers. Dir. Raymonde Provencher. 52 min. 2010. Distributed by Women Make Movies. The Healing Years. Dir. Kathy Barbini. 53 min. 2010. Distributed by Big Voice Pictures. Hidden Victims: Children of Domestic Violence. Dir. Susan Carney. 30 min. 2000. Distributed by Discovery Education. Paulina. Dir. Vicky Funari. 88 min. 1998. Distributed by Icarus Films. Runaway. Dir. Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini. 87 min. 2001. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Suzanne, Suzanne. Dir. Camille Billops and James Hatch. 30 min. 1982. Distributed by Third World Newsreel.

Domestic violence 3 Times Divorced. Dir. Ibtisam Salh Mara’ana. 74 min. 2007. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Breaking the Rule of Thumb. Dir. Andrea K. Elovson. 35 min. 1997. Distributed by Women Make Movies. The Children Next Door. Dir. Doug Block. 36 min. 2012. The Day You Love Me. Dir. Florence Jaugey. 61 min. 1999. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Defending Our Lives. Dir. Margaret Lazarus. 30 min. 1994. Distributed by Cambridge Documentary Films. Domestic Violence. Dir. Frederick Wiseman. 196 min. 2001. Distributed by Zipporah Films.

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Domestic Violence 2. Dir. Frederick Wiseman. 160 min. 2002. Distributed by Zipporah Films. Domestic Violence and Healthcare. Dir. Peter Cohn. 20 min. 2010. Distributed by New Day Films. Every F-cking Day of My Life (also called One Minute to Nine). Dir. Tommy Davis. 83 min. 2007. Distributed through Amazon.com. Honoring Our Voices. Dir. Judi Jeffrey. 33 min. 1992. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Hummingbird. Dir. Holly Mosher. 48 min. 2005. Self-distributed. Love, Honour, and Disobey. Dir. Saeeda Khanum. 61 min. 2005. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Men Are Human, Women Are Buffalo. Dir. Joanne Hershfield. 29 min. 2007. Distributed by New Day Films. Moving On. Dir. Tina Horne. 28 min. 1986. Distributed by National Film Board of Canada. The Nature of the Beast. Dir. Ondi Timoner. 60 min. 1993. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources. Power and Control: Domestic Violence in America. Dir. Peter Cohn. 50 min. 2010. Distributed by New Day Films. Private Violence. Dir. Cynthia Hill. 81 min. 2014. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Rule of Thumb: Order of Protection. Dir. Jill Evans Petzall. 22 min. 1989. Distributed by Women Make Movies. A Safe Distance. Dir. Tina Horne. 27 min. 1986. Distributed by National Film Board of Canada. Saving Face. Dir. Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. 40 min. 2011. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Sin by Silence. Dir. Olivia Klaus. 49 min. 2009. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Sisters in Law. Dir. Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi. 104 min. 2005. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Telling Amy’s Story. Dir. Joe Myers. 60 min. 2010. Distributed by PBS. Voices Heard Sisters Unseen. Dir. Grace Poore. 1995. 75 min. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Why Women Stay. Dir. Debra Zimmerman. 30 min. 1980. Distributed by Women Make Movies.

Female genital mutilation The Day I Will Never Forget. Dir. Kim Longinotto. 92 min. 2002. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter. Dir. Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater. 60 min. 2009. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Sarabah. Dir. Maria Luisa Gambale and Gloria Bremer. 60 min. 2011. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Warrior Marks. Dir. Pratibha Parmar. 54 min. 1993. Distributed by Women Make Movies.

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Femicide Finding Dawn. Dir. Christine Welsh. 73 min. 2006. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Killer’s Paradise. Dir. Giselle Portenier. 83 min. 2007. Distributed by Icarus Films. Señorita Extraviada, Missing Young Women. Dir. Lourdes Portillo. 74 min. 2001. Distributed by Women Make Movies.

Forced marriage Pink Saris. Dir. Kim Longinotto. 96 min. 2010. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Red Wedding: Women under the Khmer Rouge. Dir. Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon. 58 min. 2012. Distributed by Women Make Movies.

Honor killings Against My Will. Dir. Ayfer Ergun. 50 min. 2003. Distributed by Icarus Films. Banaz A Love Story. Dir. Deeya. 70 min. 2012. Distributed by Fuuse Films. Crimes of Honour. Dir. Shelley Saywell. 44 min. 1998. Distributed by Icarus Films. Dishonored. Dir. Sigrun Nordervai and Gard A. Andreassen. 52 min. 2007. Distributed by Icarus Films. In the Name of the Family: Honor Killings in North America. Dir. Shelley Saywell. 60 min. 2010. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Quest for Honor. Dir. Mary Ann Smothers Bruni. 63 min. 2009. Distributed by Women Make Movies.

Human trafficking Anonymously Yours. Prod. Gayle Ferraro. 88 min. 2002. Distributed by Berkeley Media. Call + Response. Dir. Justin Dillon. 100 min. 2008. Self-distributed. The Day My God Died. Dir. Andrew Levine. 54 min. 2003. Distributed by PBS. Gai Shanxi and Her Sisters. Dir. Ban Zhongyi. 80 min. 2007. Distributed by Icarus Films. Human Traffic: Past and Present. Dir. Frances-Anne Solomon. 34 min. 2012. Distributed by Third World Newsreel. Karayuki-San, The Making of a Prostitute. Dir. Shohei Imamura. 75 min. 1975. Distributed by Icarus Films. The Peacekeepers and the Women. Dir. Karin Jurschick. 80 min. 2003. Distributed by Women Make Movies. The Price of Sex. Dir. Mimi Chakarova. 73 min. 2011. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Sex Slaves. Dir. Ric Esther Bienstock. 56 min. 2006. Distributed by PBS. Sita: A Girl From Jambu. Dir. Kathleen Gyllenhaal. 48 min. 2007. Distributed by New Day Films.

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Teenage Sex for Sale: Panorama. Dir. Gerry Northam. 36 min. 2008. Distributed by BBC. Trading Women. Dir. David A. Feingold. 77 min. 2003. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources. Very Young Girls. Dir. David Schisgall and Nina Alvarez. 83 min. 2007. Distributed through Amazon.com.

Immigration/Migration Maria in Nobody’s Land. Dir. Marcela Zamora Chamorro. 86 min. 2010. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Pushing the Elephant. Dir. Beth Davenport and Elizabeth Mandel. 83 min. 2010. Distributed by Women Make Movies.

Rape and sexual assault After the Rape: The Mukhtar Mai Story. Dir. Catherine Ulmer. 58 min. 2008. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Another War. 31 min. 2010. Distributed by Norwegian Refugee Council. Calling the Ghosts: A Story About Rape, War, and Women. Dir. Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic. 63 min. 1996. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Central Park Five. Dir. Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon. 119 min. 2012. Distributed by PBS. Fighting the Silence: Sexual Violence Against Women in the Congo. Dir. Femke and Ilse van Velzen. 53 min. 2007. Distributed by Women Make Movies. The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. Dir. Lisa F. Jackson. 76 min. 2007. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Home Avenue. Dir. Jennifer Montgomery. 17 min. 1989. Distributed by Women Make Movies. The Invisible War. Dir. Kirby Dick. 98 min. 2012. Distributed by Cinedigm. It Was Rape. Dir. Jennifer Baumgardner. 60 min. 2013. Self-distributed. The Line. Dir. Nancy Schwartzman. 24 min. 2009. Distributed by Media Education Foundation. No! The Rape Documentary. Dir. Aishah Shahidah Simmons. 94 min. 2006. Distributed by AfroLez Productions. Rape. Dir. JoAnn Elam. 35 min. 1975. Distributed by the Chicago Film Archives. Rape Is… 32 min. 2003. Distributed by Cambridge Documentary Films. Rape in a Small Town: The Florence Holway Story. Dir. Jeffrey Chapman. 72 min. 2004. Distributed by HBO. Sentencing the Victim. Dir. Liz Oakley. 83 min. 2002. Distributed by PBS. Sex Crimes Unit. Dir. Lisa F. Jackson. 90 min. 2011. Self-distributed. Variety Survival Talkshow. Dir. Jo Se-young. 72 min. 2009. Distributed by Third World Newsreel. Waking Up to Rape. Dir. Meri Weingarten. 35 min. 1985. Distributed by Women Make Movies. Weapon of War. Dir. Femke and Ilse van Velzen. 59 min. 2009. Distributed by Women Make Movies.

Select Filmography and Distributors List

Distributor information Berkeley Media www.berkeleymedia.com 2600 Tenth St Suite 626 Berkeley, CA 94710 USA

California Newsreel newsreel.org Main Office 44 Gough, Suite 303 San Francisco, CA 94103-5424 USA

Cambridge Documentary Films www.cambridgedocumentaryfilms.org P.O. Box 390385 Cambridge, MA 02139-0004 USA

Cinedigm www.cinedigm.com 902 Broadway, 9th Floor New York, NY 10010 USA

Documentary Educational Resources www.der.org 101 Morse St Watertown, MA 02472 USA

Films Transit International www.filmstransit.com 21 Place Epernay Lorraine, Québec J6Z 4K9 Canada

Icarus Films www.icarusfilms.com 32 Court St Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA

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Media Education Foundation www.mediaed.org 60 Masonic St Northampton, MA 01060 USA

National Film Board of Canada www.nfb.ca P.O. Box 6100 Station Centre-ville Montreal, Quebec, H3C 3H5 Canada

New Day Films www.newday.com P.O. Box 165 Blooming Grove, NY 10914 USA

PBS www.pbs.org www.shoppbs.org 2100 Crystal Drive Arlington, VA 22202 USA

Third World Newsreel www.twn.org 545 Eighth Ave. Suite 550 New York, NY 10018 USA

Women Make Movies www.wmm.com 115 W. 29th St Suite 1200 New York, NY 10001 USA

Zipporah Films zipporah.com 1 Richdale Ave. Unit 4 Cambridge, MA 02140 USA

Index Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes Abeles, Mark 48, 62, 64 aboriginal women 242–4, 250, 254, 259, 262, 264 Abrash, Barbara 235–7 Abu Ghraib 201 Acoose, Janice 243, 254 activism 4, 23, 37, 40, 45–61, 68, 74, 78, 84, 98, 107–15, 131–41, 194–8, 204, 212–14 Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape 41, 200 Agmata-Tucker, Marlene 90–5 Alexenko, Natasha 28–9, 35–6, 41 antitrafficking campaigns 64, 114 Arine Mardorossian 76, 79 Aufderheide, Patricia 20, 23, 217, 219, 237 autobiography 2, 13, 16, 20–2, 90, 94, 101, 102, 104, 142, 148, 149, 173, 220 awareness campaigns 136, 207 Balbert, Colleen 32–3 Bapu, Asaram 76, 79 Batistic, Francisca 94–5, 101, 102 Benedict, Helen 41, 201, 204, 217–18, 246, 262, 264 Biemann, Ursula 17, 21, 114–27 Blaney, Fay 243, 253 Bought and Sold: An Investigative Documentary about the International Trade in Women 113–14, 127, 128 Brave New Films 196, 220 Britt, Elizabeth C. 15, 20, 21, 236, 237 Bullying 17, 132–8, 142–6 Burke, Susan 203, 207, 209 Caldwell, Gillian 113, 127, 128 Call + Response Chapter 3 Castells, Manuel 15, 20, 21, 131, 237, 238

Center for Social Media 223 Central Park Five, The 35 child soldiering 53, 54, 244–6, 250, 262, 264 Chopra, Joyce 5, 13 Chowdhry, Renuka 68, 74 cinema vérité 5–9, 25–40, 42, 49, 247 Cioca, Kori 203, 205, 210, 213, 214 Citron, Michelle 7, 8, 19, 20, 21 Cleveland International Film Festival 230, 237, 238 Clubine, Brenda 223, 225–6, 228, 231 Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) 110, 112, 124, 125, 126, 129 committed documentary Introduction 40, 41 consent 8, 9, 20, 31, 35, 38, 49, 63, 72, 97, 110, 126, 150, 212, 224 Convicted Women Against Abuse (CWAA) 17, 223, 225, 233, 234 Cosmopolitanism 114, 118, 119, 122, 123 Cowie, Elizabeth 14, 21 Crey, Dawn 243, 244 criollo 93 Crosley, Glenda 223, 234 crowdfunding 236, 250 Davidson, Julia O’Connell 49, 63, 65 debt bondage 63, 113, 125, 177 Defending Our Lives 15, 21, 236, 237 Democratic Republic of Congo Chapter 9 247 Deportation 89, 98, 114, 147, 154–60, 165–6 Dhanraj, Deepa 10 Diaspora 58, 86, 92, 230 Dick, Kirby Chapter 10, Chapter 12 digital video 2

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Discovery Channel, The 229 DNA 28, 34–9, 243 Doezema, Jo 111, 124, 125, 126, 129 domestic violence 1, 2, 15, 17, 223–36 educational distribution 227–8, 235 Elam, JoAnn 9, 12 England, Lynddie 201–2 Epifano, Angie 248, 262 esclavage 90 ethnography 10 Facebook 15, 78, 195, 233–6 Fairstein, Linda 34–8 female genital mutilation 1, 9, 108 femicide 1, 5, 183 film festivals 1, 227, 230, 244–5, 247 Finding Dawn 243, 244–60 fistula 176, 180–7 Freedom Network 109 Freire, Paolo 149 Friel, Lisa Chapter 2 Gaines, Jane 197, 198 Galster, Steven 113 Gillibrand, Kirsten 216, 246 Global Action Project 138, 139 Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (G AATW) 113, 126, 127, 129 Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict 241, 245 global survival network 113–14 Grace, Milly, Lucy ... Child Soldiers 244–50 Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, The 182–3, 247–57 Hanisch, Carol 5, 18 Home Box Office (HBO) 15, 16, 25, 249 home movies 132, 142 homophobia 209 human rights 12, 15, 45–50, 57–62, 83, 107–14, 119, 123, 182, 230, 244–5, 259 human trafficking 1, 2, 10, 16, 23, 45–62, 109–13, 177–83 identification 14–15, 26–7, 30, 36, 40, 51, 84, 90, 107–14, 120–3, 198, 208 immigrant 17, 60, 85–98, Chapter 8

INCITE Collective 48 Independent Lens 249 Independent Television Service (ITVS) 125, 215 indexicality 67 Indiegogo 250 indigenous women 56, 60, 154, 242–4 internet 48, 51, 68, 78, 120–3, 132–4, 195, 212, 214, 216 intimate partner violence 87–9, 229 Invisible War, The Chapter 10 It Gets Better Project 17, 132–44 It Happened Here 247–9, 259 Jackson, Lisa F. Chapter 2 John Doe indictment 35–6 Johnston, Claire 6, 26 Juhasz, Alexandra 8, 12, 26–7, 216 Kapur, Ratna 78, 108 Keck, Margaret 109 Kendrick, Luwalhati 93–6 Kennedy, Megan 137 Kickstarter 250 Kidnapping 34, 39 Klaus, Olivia 223–36 Kristof, Nicholas 107, 123n, 124n Lesage, Julia 8, 13, 26, 27, 30, 203 LGBTeens 135–6, 142 Longinotto, Kim 9 Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) 245–6 mail-order bride Chapter 5 Mangalore Horror 68–73 Mann, Bonnie 193, 201 Martineau, Barbara Halpern 7, 26, 27, 224 Mattachine Society 141 McDonald, Trina 203, 213–14 McGarry, Eileen 6–7 memory 11, 88, 91, 172, 200 mestizo 93 Métis 242 Military 86, 93, 110, 122, 175, 176, 183, 187, Chapter 10 Mimetic theory 11 mise en scene 73 Mitra, Chandan 74–5

Index Mohan, Reena 10 Mohanty, Chandra 9, 47 Morgenthau, Robert 34, 36 Mukwege, Denis 182, 187 murder 5, 15, 17, 75, 76, 83, 87–9, 141, 184, 223, 225, 242–4 MySpace 233 narration 3, 13, 14, 75, 76, 92, 139 omniscient 5, 224 National Commission for Women (India) 72 National Film Board of Canada 246, 249 National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month 45 neoliberal 16, 46, 48, 57, 60, 68–74, 78, 85, 119, 155 Netty, Adelia 83, 97 New York Radical Feminists 37 New York Times, The 37, 107, 123n, 132, 185, 196, 215, 246 New York Women in Film and Television 25 news 3, 16, 30, 38–9, 46, 48–9, Chapter 4, 107, 139, 171, 194, 195, 200, 209, 233, 244, 248 Newshour, The (India) 16, 67–78 Nichols, Bill 4, 47, 49, 197, 202, 210, 211 1975 racial discrimination act (Australia) 86 NO! The Rape Documentary 10 nongovernmental organization (NGO) 48, 61, 112, 114, 115, 118, 127n, 244, 250, 257 Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography 47, 178 notinvisible.org 195–6, 198, 215 Nottage, Lynn Chapter 9

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pedagogy / pedagogical films 114, 132–44 photovoice 17, 148–9 Pink Chaddi (Pink Underwear) campaign (India) 78 pinterest 233 posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 259 POV (Point of View) 249 prostitution 17, 28, 32–3, 38–9, 49–50, 85, 88, 98, 107–12, 116–19, 123, 178–80, 244 Provencher, Raymonde Chapter 12 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) 249 public service announcements (PSA) 132–4, 137, 207 Pulitzer Prize 17, 172–3 queer 132–3, 137–9, 141, 144

Obama, Barack 211, 246 objectivity 5, 67, 74, 77 observational footage 3, 245 othering 15, 84, 149 Outrage 246

race 9, 10, 25, 38–40, 47, 50, 84, 86, 90, 92–8, 111, 155–9 Ramadoss, Anbumani 68 rape acquaintance 31–5 culture 74, 75–8, 202–9, 216 gang 16, 25, 72, 75, 175, 178, 182 homosexual 193, 209 kit 35–6 myths 15, 16, 25, 27, 31–40 shield law India 72 United States 35, 36 trial 35 (Chapter 2) Rape Stories (1989) 13 reenactment 203, 206 refugees 91, 118, 171, 174 Remote Sensing (2001) 114–22 revictimization 2, 72, 74, 109 rockumentary 45, 55 Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival 230 Rothschild, Amalie 13 Rouch, Jean 10 Ruby, Jennie 193 Rwandan Genocide 175, 244, 259

participant media 195, 197 participatory mode 9, 70, 72, 78, 134, 149, 210

Sangtin Writers 48 self-care 8, 255, 259 self reflexivity 6, 7, 13, 77

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Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman) 5 servage 90 Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) 200, 210 Sewell, Hannah 207–8 Sex Crimes Unit Chapter 2 sex tourism 110, 121 sex work 50, 53, Chapter 6, 177–9 sexage 90 sexual assault 9, 25–39, 174–5, 187, 194, 196, 198–216, 228, 241, 246, 248, 252–8 sexual harassment 193–5, 199 shaming 108 Sin by Silence bills (AB 593 and AB1593) 223, 226 Singh, Jyoti 67, 72–6 Skin Deep (1998) 10 slavery 45, 51–60 Smith Anna Devaere 174 So Deep a Violence: Prostitution, Trafficking, and the Global Sex Industry (2000) 17, 110, 113 social change 4, 16, 17, 25–7, 36–40, 134, 196, 197, 216, 223 social media 15, 17, 68, 131–3, 194–5, 203, 215–16, 232–6 See also Facebook; Twitter spectacle 16, 71, 73, 89, 108 Spivak, Gayatri 91, 95 split screen 74 stereotypes 2, 12, 47–8, 50, 62, 84, 86, 88, 98, 111, 120, 153, 224, 242 Storytelling 61, 236, 241, 242, 258, 260–1 Strand, Russell 206, 209 Strosser, Margie 13–14 subaltern 85, 91, 95, 123 suicide 17, 84, 176, 208 teen 132–6 Sundance Film Festival 194, 197, 212, 215, 230, 247 Supafriends 138–9 surveillance 69–78, 119, 123 survivor 134, 171, 175–83, 194, 197, 201–14, 231, 233–4, 241–61 symbolic violence 83

testimonio 90–1, 96, Chapter 8 testimony 5, 12, 15, 36–8, 49, 56–7, 61, 91, 109, 174, 187, 202–10, 223, 231, 243–7 TimesNow Television Network 67, 70–1 Torchin, Leshu 12, 15, 49 Trafficking Victims Protection Act 49 trauma 2, 3, 10–17, 27–30, 37, 56, 71, 76–7, 90–8, 180–7, 199–212, 251–60 truth claim 3, 4, 55, 57 Twist of Faith 202, 246 Twitter 15, 195, 233 undocumented status 49, 154–7, 164 United Nations 1, 46, 48, 51, 174, 244–5 Commission on the Status of Women 244 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, 1 Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking 50 Human Rights Prize 182 United States agency for international development USAID 112 US office of refugee resettlement 158 US victims of traffic and violence protection act of 2000 (TVPA) 111 user-generate video Chapter 7 victims 1, 5, 9–17, 27–40 trafficking Chapter 3, Chapter 6 video blogs 134–5, 143 visible evidence 67–78 visual anthropology 10 Waldman, Diane 6, 7, 10, 13, 14 Walker, Janet 6, 7, 10, 13, 14 WeHappyTrans 140–2 Welsh, Christine 241–4, 249–61 whiteness 9, 55, 93 witness 2, 3, 7, 10, 12, 15, 25, 29, 32, 40, 49, 52, 55, 91, 113, 114, 149, 174–6, 180, 184, 206, 211, 242, 247, 256, 258

Index Womenandchildren 54 Women Make Movies 9, 115, 227–8, 231 Women’s International Film and Arts Festival 230 Writing Desire (2001) 17, 114–22

Xyrakis, Leonor 93 YouTube 15, 17, 132–44, 233 Ziering, Amy 246, 250, 252–60 Zimmerman, Debra 228

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