aka Sento

Davis Darrel davis
Thu Jan 15 02:04:16 EST 1998


Re: Kawase and feminism

My research area is not in Japanese film, but Aaron's and Markus' comments on Sento's name change and the state of feminism in Japanese film bothers me a bit.  I remember when I was writing my master's thesis on  representations of women in Taiwanese cinema, one of my committee members was a black woman filmmaker named Carmen Coustaut.  She had problems with my methodology, i.e., western feminist film criticism which she thought was problematic to apply to any non white cultural texts, including her own work and certainly, my subject area.  I value my feminist education in the States but I appreciate even more her skepticism toward the imposition of feminism upon the world outside of  white academic, social, and political contexts.  I appreciate the feminist anxiety expressed in the writing of Gerow and Markus, but I think what is more important is not the lack of feminist education in Japan but how and why feminism is pertinent and essential in analyzing films made by women and in this case, those by the filmmaker formerly known as Kawase.    


Yeh Yueh Yu
Dept. Of Cinema-TV
Hong Kong Baptist University
Hong Kong




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