Destabilizing Journeys: The Chicago Feminist Film Festival and The Fits
Abstract
The Chicago Feminist Film Festival aims to decenter and destabilize Hollywood norms, including Hollywood’s tendency to place cis-gendered white male protagonists at the center of films structured according to the hero’s journey. Thus, The Fits (2016) was a natural opener to the inaugural festival, embodying many of the festival’s values in destabilizing what constitutes “normal” ways of seeing the world. In particular, in centering black girlhood, The Fits subverts the white and male gaze. Main character Toni takes on the active gaze usually reserved for white and/or male characters, subverting the objectified status generally prescribed to female characters. The Fits also unsettles the heroine’s journey by troubling Toni’s transformative return. While it may seem that through “the fits” Toni is assimilated into normative gender relations, it is also possible to read Toni’s transformation in the film as form of insubordination, a resistance to this assimilation.
References
Bradley, R. (2018) “Black Cinematic Gesture and the Aesthetics of Contagion.” TDR: The Drama Review 62:1, 14-30.
Butler, J. (1992) “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Diana Fuss, ed. London: Taylor and Francis.
Gaines, J. (1986) “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory.” Cultural Critique 4: 59-79.
Mulvey, L. (1988) [1975] “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Feminism and Film Theory. Constance Penley, ed. New York: Routledge.
Smith, S. - L., M. Choueiti, Katherine Pieper, Ariana Case, and Angel Choi (2018) “Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT & Disability from 2007 to 2017.” USC Annerberg Inclusion Initiative and Annenberg Foundation. http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inequality-in-1100-popular-films.pdf.
The Fits (2015) Directed by Anna Rose Holmer. Yes Ma’am Productions.
White, P. (2017) “Bodies That Matter: Black Girlhood in The Fits.” Film Quarterly 70:3, 23-31.
--- (2009) “Watching Women’s Films.” Camera Obscura 24:3, 153-161.
Los autores/as que publiquen en esta revista ceden los derechos de autor y de publicación a "Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación", Aceptando el registro de su trabajo bajo una licencia de atribución de Creative Commons, que permite a terceros utilizar lo publicado siempre que de el crédito pertinente a los autores y a esta revista.
