Book Review: Pink-Slipped
Sep. 29th, 2018 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI was all excited when I got Jane M. Gaines' Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, but this excitement quickly dissipated when I actually started reading it and discovered that Gaines has no intention of actually answering the question in the subtitle. "Thus in chapter 1, 'What Happened to Women in the Silent U.S. Film Industry?' I refused to answer the question posed, using the 'what happened?' query to anticipate a theory of history in which past and present are put into constant relations."
Well aren't you edgy.
This is particularly maddening because right afterward, literally in the next few sentences, Gaines articulates a few more topics that I want to know more about, which Gaines just as clearly has no intention of exploring: "1) Silent-era women as writers, actresses, producers, and directors disappeared from the limelight. 2) They were left out of historical accounts of the era. 3) They slipped away along with silent cinema and remained buried in the 1970s when they might have been uncovered again. But in the present, I intervene, deferring an answer to my question and asking the reader to take a detour through the book's chapters to find out how the 'answer' to the 'what happened' question eludes us."
I suspect that a slightly less lily-livered writer might have found the "answer" less "elusive," and might indeed have posited some possible "explanations." Gaines instead opts for the argument that "they did not know and we cannot know" what happened, which - for the reader, if not Gaines - inevitably raises another question: "Then why the hell are you bothering to write this?"
It's cowardice thinly veiled by post-structuralism. Rather than saying anything substantive, you say, "Ah, but when we write about the past are we not in truth writing about ourselves?" - and of course from a certain point of view the answer to this has to be yes, because the questions we bring to the past inevitably reflect the issues we care about now. So as long as this sort of bloviating is all you ever do, you'll never be really wrong.
But you'll also never make any real contribution, and I find this especially galling in this context, when gender discrimination in the film industry is still so strong. Gaines may be right that "feminist discourse is academically automatic," but outside of academia it is not such a potent force - and even in academia, the fact that everyone can talk the talk doesn't mean that the academy actually walks the walk of hiring and promoting and publishing and giving tenure to women on an equal basis with men.
And it's such an enormous missed opportunity! She's steamrolled over so many potentially interesting things in order to say absolutely nothing! She brings up, for instance, Gene Gauntier, an actress in the 1900s and 1910s who starred in a series of films as a cross-dressing spy and then directed films in her own production company (!!!!!) till it fell apart around 1915 - and then does nothing with it! Nothing! How do you do nothing with a cross-dressing spy heroine?
Well aren't you edgy.
This is particularly maddening because right afterward, literally in the next few sentences, Gaines articulates a few more topics that I want to know more about, which Gaines just as clearly has no intention of exploring: "1) Silent-era women as writers, actresses, producers, and directors disappeared from the limelight. 2) They were left out of historical accounts of the era. 3) They slipped away along with silent cinema and remained buried in the 1970s when they might have been uncovered again. But in the present, I intervene, deferring an answer to my question and asking the reader to take a detour through the book's chapters to find out how the 'answer' to the 'what happened' question eludes us."
I suspect that a slightly less lily-livered writer might have found the "answer" less "elusive," and might indeed have posited some possible "explanations." Gaines instead opts for the argument that "they did not know and we cannot know" what happened, which - for the reader, if not Gaines - inevitably raises another question: "Then why the hell are you bothering to write this?"
It's cowardice thinly veiled by post-structuralism. Rather than saying anything substantive, you say, "Ah, but when we write about the past are we not in truth writing about ourselves?" - and of course from a certain point of view the answer to this has to be yes, because the questions we bring to the past inevitably reflect the issues we care about now. So as long as this sort of bloviating is all you ever do, you'll never be really wrong.
But you'll also never make any real contribution, and I find this especially galling in this context, when gender discrimination in the film industry is still so strong. Gaines may be right that "feminist discourse is academically automatic," but outside of academia it is not such a potent force - and even in academia, the fact that everyone can talk the talk doesn't mean that the academy actually walks the walk of hiring and promoting and publishing and giving tenure to women on an equal basis with men.
And it's such an enormous missed opportunity! She's steamrolled over so many potentially interesting things in order to say absolutely nothing! She brings up, for instance, Gene Gauntier, an actress in the 1900s and 1910s who starred in a series of films as a cross-dressing spy and then directed films in her own production company (!!!!!) till it fell apart around 1915 - and then does nothing with it! Nothing! How do you do nothing with a cross-dressing spy heroine?
no subject
Date: 2018-09-30 02:11 pm (UTC)