Entangled Discursivity: Women's Social Relations in a Collaborative Filmmaking Process. (Research Articles/Rapports De Recherche)

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. Get article souleve des questions concernant la et la difference comme lieux de lutte. En me penchant sur la cinematographique entre deux femmes, je sonde la difference comme decoulant de pratiques discursives genrees et racialisees qui faconnent le maintien et les contraintes d'un tel rapport. Mon approche feministe et post-structuraliste sert comme fond 'analyse dentretiens avec les cinematographes et la discussion des repertoires discursifs auxquels font appels ces femmes. En faisant le lien entre les discours touchant la famille, la localite et au travail, je propose que cet enchevetrement faconne les relations sociales des cinematographes. Significances and Directions For 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 hannony, and regulative ideals of collaborative interaction. …

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