Entangled Discursivity: Women's Social Relations in a Collaborative Filmmaking Process

This paper raises questions about and difference as spheres of struggle. Focussing on a filmmaking of two women, I investigate difference as a matter of gendered and racialized discursive practices that shape how relations are sustained and constrained. I work with a feminist poststructuralist approach to analyze interviews with the filmmakers and to discuss the discursive repertoires that the women engage. Linking discourses of family, locality, and labour, I argue that this entanglement shapes the social relations of the filmmakers.Significances and DirectionsFor many years in Toronto, I have produced feminist work as a writer, choreographer, and performer in theatre, performance art, video, and film. Much of this work was jointly conceived and developed with other women. My recollections of numerous collaborative projects are framed in pleasures and difficulties, upsets and exhilarations. I recall a great deal of time spent on ideas and on practicalities of production with little energy available for addressing the complex social relations of cultural production. There was so much struggle and so little attention to the hows and whys of struggle and to conflict in practices. And this was often where I would long to go. To ask: How are doing this? What is at stake for you/me/us in our practices? Why/how are struggling? What does collaborative artwork mean to you? How are social differences operative in what feels possible and impossible in our work together?Following from these urgencies, I decided to engage in a research project to investigate collaborative cultural production across difference and the ways in which contradictory, uncertain, and disputatious social relations are negotiated. In this article, I draw from the larger research project focussing on collaborations in film and theatre to discuss one particular of two women filmmakers, Shelley Niro and Anna Gronau. Difference is investigated as a matter of gendered and racialized discursive practices that organize advantages and disadvantages for differently positioned subjects.My focus on conflictual social relations is produced within the context of emphases on conflicts in feminism and on practising conflicts in feminism in a number of edited collections.(1) These works address conflicts in theory and politics, critical response, alliance-building, affiliations, and women's relations across differences. What is missing for me, however, in these texts, are the gritty and messy details of how conflict is lived, worked, resisted, embraced, and negotiated in specific relations of power and in particular arrangements at particular times. Such details are significant since we are at a socio-historic moment when contestations about what and who constitute we and about the limits of homogenizing discourses for transformative theories/politics are particularly keen.Where theories of collaboration are particularly central is in the literature about collaborative approaches to qualitative inquiry. Such approaches include critical action research, participatory research, feminist collaborative research, activist research and empowerment and emancipatory research.(2) Discourses of in such research approaches most often emphasize the unity in community, notions of giving voice and empowerment, a normalization of harmony, and regulative ideals of collaborative interaction.(3) My reading of this body of literature compelled me to interrogate understandings of, and desires for, harmony as the goal and outcome of collaboration.Literature about artwork tends to emphasize the study of representation, reception and consumption, art histories, art biographies, description of methods, and various intersections with cultural theory. Eager to find work that examines everyday processes and practices in collaborative art production and which troubles harmony and heterogeneity in discourses of collaboration, I discovered Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell's The Book of Jessica: A Theatrical Transformation (1989). …

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