What Is A Feminist Film?

Many students decided that since Jai Santoshi Maa focuses on two female characters, it is a feminist film, but the best essays on Jai Santoshi Maa were written by students who considered evidence for and against the view that this is a feminist film. In order to consider that, you need to think about what exactly a feminist film is.

Many students did not even comment on the fact that the film contains two scenes of attempted rape. I gave credit to those who did, and who considered whether these scenes might count against the film's feminist credentials. Of those few students who considered this question, some handled it better than others.

Here is one way of thinking about it:

What about Banke (male character that represents a villain) constantly trying to rape Satyavati? Feminism is not only about having equal power, rights, opportunities and status among gender in society, but respect as well. The saddest part of all is that rape did not disappear with the evolution of the human race and is still happening nowadays.

So, rape is bad, and feminists in particular want to stop rapes from taking place. The film contains two attempted rapes, so that is a reason for a feminist not to like the film. Or is it?

Here is a more sophisticated discussion of the first attempted rape scene:

The attempted rape implies that women are sexual objects and cannot defend themselves against the sexual advances of men without needing assistance from a different man. To promote female confidence and authority in a film, the heroine Satyavati should be able to save herself or give the perpetrator enough difficulty to escape.

A feminist film, surely, is not a film that is blind to the problems women face, including the terrible problem of rape. A film that simply depicted the perfect world that feminists would like to build would not be so helpful to the feminist cause. So it is perfectly possible to have a feminist film in which someone attempts to rape the main character - that is, sadly, a problem some women face. What matters is how the character deals with this. If she is seen fighting off the attacker, or using her ingenuity to escape, then she is a role model for women who face that kind of situation. Or, a feminist film might show how a woman deals with being raped - perhaps she is able to bring the rapist to justice afterwards. The reason the attempted rape counts against the film's feminist credentials is not because feminists think rape is bad (although of course rape is bad), but because it presents the heroine as a damsel in distress who needs the help of a man.

Some students thought that perhaps the film is not a feminist film because Satyavati does not have a job. But, if she was shown working in a job, that would have made the film totally unrealistic. Satyavati's situation has to be similar to the situation of the intended audience - women living in rural India in the 1970's - so that they can identify with her. One student suggested:

It was between the 1970s and the 1990s that there was an actual spark that triggered the fight for equality. Given that the fight barely began in the 1970's and during that time not yet accomplished a lot, the film still holds the belief of female inferiority.

The suggestion seems to be that because of when it was made, the film could not be an accurate depiction of the society that existed, a patriarchal society, and also be a feminist film. But if the film was made when the spark that triggered the fight for equality was being lit, was it part of the solution or part of the problem? Of course it depicts a woman living in a patriarchal society - but does it present the kind of problems such a woman was likely to face, and offer realistic solutions that she could adopt? The fact that it does not offer a good female role model for American women today does not necessarily mean that it is not a feminist film.

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