Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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sexuality.

However, the stereotypes of the past still persist. Across the United States, certain parts

of traditional “femininity” are still upheld as the ideal standard for women. Mainstream

America also continues to believe that females are inherently “feminine” due to their

biology. The idea of a unified feminine essence still pervades our culture.

ee also:

gender and sexuality

Further reading

Butler, J. (1990)

Gender Trouble,

New York: Routledge.

ELIZABETH A.GALEWSKI

feminism

The term “feminism” first came into use in the 1910s to describe an emerging movement

committed to mobilizing women as a distinct social group and eliminating social

hierarchies between men and women. As contemporary feminist Naomi Wolf succinctly

puts it: “Feminism can be defined as women’s ability to think about their subjugated role

in history, and then to do something about it.” But feminism has had a fragile hold on

women’s consciousness in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, achieving great

strides towards gender equality and then receding, only to re-emerge once the modest

gains already achieved start to slip.

The leaders of the first wave of feminism in America were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and

Susan B.Anthony whose work eventually helped women gain the right to vote in 1920

with the enactment of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Feminism then

disappeared from the American scene for several decades, giving way to a “post-

feminist” period in which the earlier suffragists were decried as “man-haters” out o

touch with the needs of contemporary women. But feminism re-emerged in the 1960s,

more influential than ever. It is this second wave of feminism, roughly starting with the

publication of Betty

Friedan’s

The Feminine Mystique

in 1963 and ending with the

defeat of the

Equal Rights Amendment

in 1982, which epitomizes modern American

feminism.

Gloria

Steinem,

the founder of

Ms Magazine,

and Friedan, are widely viewed as the

leaders and icons of this movement. With the

Civil Rights movement

providing an

inspirational backdrop, Friedan’s fledgling group, the

National Organization for

Women (NOW),

advocated for

abortion

and reproductive rights, equal opportunities in

the workplace and at school, and passage of an Equal Rights Amendment to the US

Constitution. Women got all but the latter. In 1973 the

Supreme Court

affirmed a

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 416

woman’s right to an abortion in

Roe v. Wade

. Under Title VII of the

Civil Rights Act

1964, it was declared unlawful for employers to discriminate on the basis of sex. By 1986

the US Supreme Court had interpreted this provision to include a claim for

sexual

harassment

as well. In 1972 Congress passed

Title IX,

which prohibited discrimination

on the basis of sex in any federally funded educational program or activity.

But, with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, followed by Geraldine

Ferraro’s

failed vice-

residential bid in 1984, the golden age of American feminism came to an

end. Feminism again lay dormant with the coming of another so-called “post-feminist”

era. A

Time/

CNN poll found that only 33 percent of women were willing to call

themselves “feminists,” and only 16 percent of them were college-aged. College-age

women in the 1980s (who had not participated in the

women’s movement

of the 1960s

and 1970s, but had nonetheless benefited from gains made during that time) forgot, or

never knew, that the struggle for the vote took over seventy years, that abortions had not

always been legal in America, or that in their mothers’ lifetimes women could not obtain

credit on their own. They wrongly believed that sex discrimination was a thing of the

ast. The repercussions for women were serious: without an active feminist movement,

there was decreased access to abortions, abortionclinic violence and limited funding and

public support for rape-crisis centers, women’s health facilities and battered women’s

shelters.

Then, in 1991, two events converged to revitalize the movement: the publication o

Pulitzer Prize

-winning journalist Susan Faludi’s

Backlash: The Undeclared War Agains

merican Women

(1991) and the confirmation hearing of future US Supreme Court

Justice Clarence

Thomas,

at which his former colleague Anita

Hill

testified that he had

sexually harassed her at work.

Backlash

in particular, which documented a “

owerful

counter-assault on women’s rights” and an intense societal resistance to the modest

advances towards gender equality achieved by the women’s movement, provided a

clarion call to widespread action.

This wake-up call resulted in a “third wave” of feminism in the 1990s. This third wave

did not reflect a single monolithic view of the appropriate path to gender equality.

Instead, it encompassed many disparate strands of thought, such as liberal feminism,

difference feminism, radical feminism and critical feminist theory. Feminism also

blended with more traditional legal, political and film theories to provide a broad, multi-

disciplinary perspective on women’s status in society.

ee also:

women’s liberation

Further reading

Faludi, S. (1991)

Backlash,

New York: Crown.

MacKinnon, C. (1987)

Feminism Unmodified,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Schneir, M. (ed.) (1994)

Feminism in Our Time,

New York: Vintage.

Rowbotham, S. (1997)

A Century of Women,

London: Penguin.

Entries A-Z 417

MARY-CHRISTINE SUNGAILA, ESQ.

Feminist Art

As the second wave of

feminism

awakened a generation of American women in the late

1960s, so too did it galvanize a community of women artists. Where such artistically

matriarchal figures as Georgia

O’Keefe,

Helen Frankenthaler and Eva Hesse had

ambivalently occupied their identities as women artists, producing work that while

critically construed as “feminine” was never resolutely feminist, the post-1968 generation

of female artists was proud and defiant in its assertion and celebration of female identity.

Motivated by the very real conditions of discrimination and inequality this first

generation of feminist artists sought to redress the historical condition into which they

were born.

Producing their most influential work during the 1970s, such artists as Eleanor Antin,

Judy Chicago, Adrian Piper, Faith

Ringgold,

Carolee Schnee-mann and Miriam Schapiro

returned to the historically objectified female body and reclaimed it as a subject. In such

collaborative art projects as

Womanhouse

(1972) and

The Dinner Party

(1979), Chicago,

Schapiro and their artistic sisters elevated women’s experience and an iconography of the

female body to the realm of high art.

While the activism of that first generation of feminist artists saw its continuation in the

work and demonstrations of such political organizations as the Guerilla Girls and the

Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), by the 1980s a second generation of feminist artists

had emerged, displaying markedly different aesthetic and political strategies. Renouncing

the celebratory language and bodily imagery of their predecessors as deeply essentialist,

such women as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler and Cindy Sherman sought

to deconstruct, rather than reconstruct, culturally normalized conceptions of gender and

identity. Working primarily with

photography

and written text, these artists avoided the

representational practices and corporeal iconography that so marked the work of their

antecedents and sought instead to expose, explore and dismantle the rigid binary logic o

sexual difference. At the same time, such deconstructive strategies opened up a space for

a more expansive investigation of issues of

race,

as is exemplified in the work of Sandra

Bernhard, Anna Deavere Smith, Lorraine O’Grady Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker and

Carrie Mae Weems.

From the vantage of the late 1990s, it is possible to celebrate the extraordinary gains

achieved by women artists in little more than twenty-five years. Yet it is also worth

considering whether the founding politics and ideals of feminism, rooted in the

experiential difference of women, have been eroded, if not lost, to the theoretical forces

of deconstruction and anti-essentialism that continue to shape and inform the production

and reception of contemporary art.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 418

Further reading

Broude, N. and Garrard, M. (1994)

The Power of Feminist Art,

New York: Henry N.

Abrams, Inc.

Isaak, J. (1996)

Feminism and Contemporary Art,

London: Routledge.

LISA SALTZMAN

Ferraro, Geraldine

b. 1935

First female candidate for

vice-president

of the United States; former New York

congressional representative and senatorial candidate. Her 1984 nomination to the

Democratic Party’s

ticket as candidate for vice-

resident signaled the emergence of the

women’s movement as a force in mainstream politics, highlighted the power of women

voters and the significance of the

gender gap

and redefined the possibilities for

American

women in politics

. Although she was ultimately defeated, Ferraro’s presence

on the ticket encouraged other aspiring female politicians to run for office and caused

female voters to contribute more money than ever before to a candidate’s campaign.

MARY-CHRISTINE SUNGAILA, ESQ.

field hockey

In the United States this is almost exclusively a women’s sport that spread through

women’s colleges in the

Northeastern

and

Mid-Atlantic

states during the early

twentieth century in spite of its vigorous aspects—

elieved inappropriate for young

women. Since becoming an

Olympic

sport for women in 1980, it has spread beyond its

“Seven Sisters”

image. In the 1990s, heated debates also have erupted, especially in

high

schools,

about boys playing field hockey on girls’ teams. Such debates may intensify as

immigrants arrive from areas such as

South Asia,

where field hockey has been popular

among schoolboys and men.

ROBERT GREGG

Entries A-Z 419

figure skating

Sport popularized in the 1930s by the

Olympic

championships and performances in ice

shows and films of Norwegian Sonja Henie, who deviated from the staid dress and

mannered skating style of her predecessors. Tenley Albright became the first American

Olympic gold medal winner in 1956; her achievement increased the popularity of the

sport in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first American skater to gain national

attention (both in the rink and in the world of

advertising

), Dorothy Hamill, combined

athletic prowess with the grace and musicality of a dancer. Hamill challenged

assumptions about women’s athleticism in her 1976 Olympic triumph and created the

spin known as the “Hamill Camel”—now standard in women’s competitions. But, while

able to perform triple jumps in practice, Hamill was the last woman to win an Olympic

gold medal without triple jumps.

Men’s figure skating, marked until recently for its accentuation of athleticism over

grace, has never matched the popularity of women’s skating. In the 1980s, however, the

ascendancy of Olympic medallists Scott Hamilton and Brian Boitano on a tide o

atriotic fervor brought attention to the sport. Pairs figure skating and ice dancing have

een dominated until recently by Russian skaters, and the best American skaters, perhaps

lacking enthusiasm for the ballroom style of dancing, have steered clear.

The growth of commercialism in the sport has been very noticeable in the 1990s, with

multimillion dollar advertising and professional contracts offered to those who win major

amateur competitions. Quite strict divisions between amateurs and professionals remain

in the sport (so that only the former are eligible to perform in the Olympics), while sports

soccer, basketball

and

hockey

have eased up in this regard. Skaters generally

therefore, use the amateur competition as a stepping stone to riches to be gained from a

rofessional contract, which includes traveling competitions as well as more thematic ice

shows—

Disney

on Ice, Grease on Ice, Icecapades, etc. In 1991 and 1992, Kristi

Yamaguchi won the World Championship and the Olympics and then turned

rofessional, while the notorious assault on Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 was prompted by the

desire of Tonya Harding’s handlers to benefit from the possibility that she might win a

medal at the upcoming Olympics. Michelle Kwan is one American skater who has held

ack from turning professional. Losing out on a gold medal at the Nagano Winter

Olympics in 1998, she has waited for 2002. Meanwhile, Tara Lipinski, the fifteenyear-old

star who surpassed Kwan, immediately turned professional.

ROBERT GREGG

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 420

Filipino Americans

Filipino Americans constitute the second-largest group of Americans of Asian descent;

almost 60,000 Filipinos enter the US every year. Filipino

immigration

to the US prior to

the annexation of the Philippines to the US in 1898 was negligible. By 1910, Filipinos

could travel freely to the US, which started a slow trend that continued after Philippine

independence in 1934 (when immigrants reached 100,000). Most immigrants were male

farm workers. Military collaboration also facilitated naturalization and acceptance during

and after the Second World War.

The 1965 Immigration Act, coupled with neocolonial economic difficulties in the

Philippines, increased the number of Filipino Americans from 200,000 in 1965 to over

1,400,000 by 1990. Women now predominate among the immigrants, some to join their

husbands, but most because there are now more employment opportunities for women

than men, especially as nurses. The largest Filipino American

communities

are found in

California

(52 percent) and

Hawai’i

(12 percent), but they have also spread out to the

Midwest

and the East Coast. Most reside in metropolitan areas, including, for example,

Manila Town in

Los Angeles, CA

and middle-class enclaves like Daly City near

San

Francisco, CA

Filipinos, despite their long presence in the US have a muted media exposure in

comparison with other Asian groups. By contrast, the US has become a central locus o

Filipino life and identity in the works of Filipino novelists such as N.V.M. Gonzalez and

Jessica Hagedorn.

Further reading

(1986–7) “Filipinos in American Life,”

Amerasia Journal

13(1), Los Angeles: Asian

American Studies Center, UCLA.

Hing, B.O. (1993)

Making and Remaking Asian American Through Immigration Policy,

1850–1990,

Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Root, M. (ed.) (1997)

Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity

Thousand Oaks:

Sage.

CINDY WONG

film

Hollywood and various genres documentary; independent films/videos; road

movies, etc.

Entries A-Z 421

film criticism/theory

Before James Agee’s tenure as film critic for

The Nation

and

Time

from 1941–8,

American film criticism was rarely taken seriously. Agee’s incisive reviews paved the

way for the most significant journalistic critics of the postwar era—Manny Farber,

Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael.

While Agee’s literary sensibility enlivened his work, the more idiosyncratic Farber

brought a painter’s eye and a superb command of the American vernacular to his quirky

assessments of everything from neglected “B-movies” to the experimental films o

Michael Snow. Active from the 1940s through the 1970s, Farber is probably best known

for his distinction between “white elephant art”—

restigious, but empty and

selfimportant films—and “termite art”—unpretentious movies redeemed by their low-key

stylistic innovations.

Sarris and Kael were the dominant critical voices of the 1960s, and both writers

attracted numerous disciples and imitators. Sarris’

The American Cinema

proposed an

American version of the highly polemical auteurism of

Cahiers du Cinema

. His elaborate

rankings of American

directors,

which he only half-ironically labeled his pantheon,

proved extremely controversial. Kael demolished Sarris’ auteurism in a characteristically

acerbic article entitled “Circles and Squares.” Famously hostile to theoretical generalities

(her critique of Sarris included the assertion that “film aesthetics as a distinct, specialized

field is a bad joke”), Kael favored intuitive, visceral evaluations of movies and was

praised for her slangy wise-cracking prose.

By the 1970s, academic theorists rejected the impressionistic, relatively apolitical

criticism of Kael and Sarris.

Cineaste

and

Jump Cut,

leftist film journals radicalized by

the antiwar movement and the

Civil Rights movement,

published translations o

European theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer, while devoting considerable space to

third-world films and radical documentaries ignored by mainstream critics. While Kael

oasted that she never saw a film more than once, American academics, under the sway

of semioticians like Christian Metz, favored meticulous textual analysis.

The impact of the academic engagement with European theory was particularly

profound in feminist circles, and a journal such as the Berkeley-based

Camera Obscura

synthesized post-structuralist analysis and second-wave feminism’s critique of male

ideology.

Camera Obscura

theorists deployed the work of Jacques Lacan and Louis

Althusser (especially as filtered through the work of French film-theorist Raymond

Bellour) to claim that most

Hollywood

narratives were animated by an oedipal impetus

that reinforced patriarchal attitudes. Subsequent feminist theorists paid more attention to

the role of the female spectator; Mary Ann Doane and Tania Modleski, for example,

challenged the view that women were incapable of deriving some form of pleasure from

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 422

the maledominated commercial cinema.

The penchant for occasionally hermetic “grand theory” which reached its zenith during

the 1970s, inspired an inevitable backlash. The 1980s marked a revival of historical

criticism informed by empirical research—David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet

Staiger’s delineation of what they termed the “classical Hollywood cinema” is a

aradigmatic example. Their emphasis on normative elements in prototypical Hollywood

films, particularly an ingrained tendency to foreground characters as “causal agents,” set

the stage for publications advocating cognitive theory as an alternative to semiotics by

Bordwell and his colleague Noel Carroll. Cognitivism aligned formalist analysis with an

interest in the vicissitudes of human perception, but, as Robert Stam points out, the

cognitivist agenda—despite its rhetoric—is not always antithetical to semiotics or

psychoanalytic theory

By the 1990s, burgeoning interests in

multi-culturalism,

postcolonial theory and

queer

theory infused new life into film studies. These disparate, although undeniably

related theoretical strands, derived sustenance from broader tendencies in

cultural

studies

that emphasized popular art instead of high culture. Multiculturalists and queer

theorists nevertheless retained much of the skepticism concerning the “dominant culture”

which inspired the New Left.

Multicultural film theory moved quickly from an earlier generation’s preoccupation

with “negative images” of

African Americans, Latinos

and

Asian Americans

to a more

nuanced critique of how Eurocentric assumptions permeate popular culture, as well as a

parallel exploration of how alternative cinematic practices can offer an anti-dote. Post-

colonial theory was more concerned with the intersection of

race

and film in the

“Diaspora”—the terrain where exiled Africans, Asians and Latin Americans created what

was termed a “hybridized” cinema in the West. Post-colonial theory was unquestionably

indebted to the radical assault on Eurocentrism outlined by Edward

Said

Orientalism

(1978). Yet Ella Shohat argued that postcolonial theorists, in their zeal to transcend the

Third Worldism of the

Cold War,

ignored the fact that the ravages of colonialism have

not disappeared.

Queer theory mirrors many of the tensions and contradictions that inform multicultural

and post-colonial theory Cinematic queer theorists, unlike an earlier generation of gays

and lesbians, were equally disinclined to promote politically correct “positive images.”

Prominent queer theorists such as Alexander Doty championed the decidedly “incorrect”

images that fueled the “New Queer Cinema” and dissected “queerness” in heterosexual

entertainers like Jack Benny.

Although the chasm between popular film criticism and academic theory often seems

unbridgeable, a handful of film reviewers—Jonathan Rosenbaum, B.Ruby Rich and

J.Hoberman—encouraged a dialogue between film journalism and academic film theory

during the 1990s.

Further reading

Entries A-Z 423

Cook, P. and Bernink, M. (eds) (1999)

The Cinema Book,

London: British Film Institute.

Farber, M. (1998)

Negative Space,

New York: Da Capo.

Hill, J. and Gibson, P. (eds) (1998)

The Oxford Guide to Film Studies,

Oxford: Oxford

University

Stam, R. (2000)

Film Theory,

Malden: Blackwell Publishers.

RICHARD PORTON

film festivals

The first US-based international film festival was launched in

San Francisco, CA

1956, twenty-four years after Mussolini endorsed the first of its kind in Venice. Today

more than 100 film festivals run from January to December every year, from Park City,

Utah, to

Houston,

New York

City, to Sarasota. Some festivals, like Sundance and

WorldFest Houston, attract a great deal of attention. Others specialize in formats such as

animation

and documentary or films about Native Americans, gays and lesbians,

Asian

Americans,

Latinos, African Americans,

Underground issues,

children,

ethnography

women’s issues and many other issues.

America lagged behind Europe in launching film festivals in the 1950s because o

Hollywood

. The all-

owerful studios did not want to supply many films to European

festivals, diminishing American exposure. Furthermore, film festivals have been

showplaces for art films. Early Hollywood had no interest in mixing commerce with art,

while many Europeans did not find Hollywood films worthy of their attention. Not until

the breakdown of the studio system and the development of independent films would

world film festivals start to value American products. At the same time, more and more

festivals sprang up in the US to showcase the variety of American productions (including

studios).

The second major US festival was launched in New York in 1963, when foreign film-

going was in vogue as a highbrow cultural activity; it landed the unknown Roman

Polanski on the cover of

Time

. By the early twenty-first century, the festival in New

York, with its limited number (twenty-five) of films shown, is no longer as important;

many of its films already have distributors lined up. Film festivals, in the latter part of the

twentieth century have been important outlets for

independent films,

making these films

as well as their film-makers known to the critic and the public, and thus creating a

marketplace.

In many ways, successful independent films and the film festivals that promote them

benefit each other.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape,

with a $1 million budget, won the Audience

Prize at Sundance in 1989. It was then picked up by Miramax and grossed $7 million.

Since then, Sundance (founded in 1981 by Robert

Redford

) has become the premier film

festival in the US for both “Hollywood types” and aspiring independent

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 424

producers/directors

who brave the cold in Park City, Utah. Sundance has promoted

ative American film and has also established an Independent Film Archive at the

University of Southern California. An alternative to Sundance, Slamdance, established in

1995, shows films rejected by Sundance.

Some cities use film festivals to attract visitors and to promote the image of the city

like the Nortel Palm Spring International Film Festival (started by the late Sonny Bono, a

former entertainer and mayor of Palm Springs) or the French Film Festival in Sarasota,

Florida. Other film festivals focus on distribution, like the American Film Market in

Santa Monica, California, which screens over 600 films in nine days. This is a prime

distribution event for English-language films, including such hits as

Silence of the Lambs

Yet film festivals can be small and less mainstream. Nextframe, for example, is a

student film and video festival organized by Temple University in Philadelphia. The San

Francisco International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival has just finished its twenty-three-

year run, obviously focusing on

queer

cinema. Resfest Digital Film Festival is devoted to

the exploration of digital form in film. The Chicago Underground Film Festival only

accepts films with a budget below $1,000 per minute.

ee also:

film noir

CINDY WONG

film noir

Although French critics coined the epithet “black film,” film noir represents a unique,

indigenous American genre. Emerging after the Second World War, noir’s images and

lots swirled with moral ambiguity skewed destinies and fractured relationships:

inverting the American dream. Urban rather than suburban, sensual rather than domestic,

driven by fate rather than any bright future, they spoke of postwar changes, nuclear

threats and McCarthyite paranoia.

While underworld films had appeared in the 1930s, noir really erupted in the 1940s,

drawing initially on hard-bitten mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett (

The Maltese

alcon,

1941), Raymond Chandler and James M.Cain (screenplay and original novel for

ouble Indemnity,

1944). Noir was especially identified with RKO, although other

companies like Paramount

(Double Indemnity)

and United Artists (

D.O.A.,

1949)

produced classic examples. As Senator

McCarthy

evoked the Red specter abroad and at

home, production swelled in the 1950s, surviving the dismantling of the studio system.

Production diminished rapidly with changing domestic and foreign concerns of the

1960s:

Manchurian Candidate

(1962) was withdrawn from circulation because of the

dark shades it cast on the

Kennedy

assassination. Noir also lost to color and new

marketing techniques as movies competed with the sunnier worlds of

television

The characteristic visual style of film noir relied on high contrasts in black and white,

Entries A-Z 425