Reflections on the Intersections of Feminism

            For our group documentary project, Pablo, Sydney, Monica, Theresa and I intended to make a documentary that defines our own interpretations of feminism. In completing this documentary, we had to confront and ask ourselves not only ‘why are we feminists?’ but how our identification as a feminist intersects with our race, sexuality, gender, religion, and academic achievement.  In looking at each of our unique answers and personal stories, we highlight differences in interpretation through our conversations with one another.  The documentary ultimately brings to light that there is no one definition of feminism. Instead feminism is a complex and dynamic concept, which changes with our own experiences.  Our intent in creating this project is to ultimately create a truthful depiction of what we consider reflections on the intersections of feminism.

To make this project, we interviewed ourselves and two other individuals who are not part of our class.   By interviewing each other, this project gave us the unique opportunity to be insiders on a piece of work.  Because a majority of the content was provided through personal anecdotes and conversations that we had with each other, this project became a self-reflexive discovery of how our own backgrounds influenced our decision to be feminists. In this way the documentary is not only a reflection on feminism as topic, but also the relationship we as filmmakers have as our positionalities reflect the notion that the type of feminist action we participate in is influenced by our personal backgrounds and struggles.

To bring outside voices to our project, we also interviewed two other individuals, Monica and Theresa’s stepdad who did not consider himself a feminist and a feminist professor at CGU who teaches economics.  We specifically chose these interviews to provide counter arguments and to provide a depth to our trajectory, as we saw how intersections of feminism are not unique to ourselves, but is something that appears across diverse backgrounds.

When we started this project, we each had personal opinions on how we should regard feminism.  Some of the questions we bounced back and forth included looking at depictions of feminism in nontraditional fields, seeing why/why not some people consider themselves feminists, how feminism relates to one’s personal background and how one conducts feminist activism?  I appreciated that our documentary stayed away from typical and stereotypical depictions of feminism such as over-sexuality, but instead focused on the internal struggles people experience and made these thoughts visible through a visual medium.

Fortunately, even as a group of 5, we collaborated extremely well together.  We each played a role in interviewing people, interviewing each other, finding clips on YouTube (which we ultimately cut out), editing, and conceptualizing ideas. Over the past couple of weeks we have regarded the documentary different from ethnography in part because of its classification as an art form.  Pablo found a quote by Gloria Anzaldua that broke everything we had brainstormed: ideas regarding identity, inner struggles, societal connections, awareness of feminism, activism and protests, into one larger context. As a group, we analyzed this quote and framed our interview questions around the message portrayed through Anzaldua’s words. Inspired by the WE CARE documentary, we chose to read the Anzaldua quote out loud as a group at the end of the film.  The reading of the quote out loud synched with a montage of images that represented our identification with feminism symbolizes that the issues that the quote references affect us all, yet in differing ways.  Through using the camera to examine the Anzaldua quote and our self-reflexive interviews, we aimed to focus specifically on how our relationship to feminism derives from individual yet mutual experiences.