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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1300