Matt Raimondo, Blog #5

In Anderson's Imagined Communities, Anderson seems to rarely touch upon the subject of women or what constitutes womanhood.  He does mention the scenario of women in a political role, such as ruling monarchs taking foreign princesses for political ties, but Anderson says little beyond that.  I know that this has been touched upon by bloggers below this post, but it is interesting to think that a book about nationhood seems to have such little substance on women or womanhood.  I do think that the films we have seen recently address this topic better than Anderson does.  

Over the past few weeks, we have started to explore the concept of women and womanhood through our film experiences as well as our discussions.  I think that the films we have seen have really allowed us to remove ourselves from sitting in a classroom and place us right in the film on the projector.  For example, in La Noire de (Black Girl) we witness interactions between French citizens and a Senegalese woman named Diounna.  We see how these African women lined up in the streets for a simple maid job, and we also see how poorly Diounna was treated by her mistress.  To me, this ties us back into the previous film Roots, where we see how poorly white Americans treated African slaves, particularly in the scene where Kunta Kite is whipped; this scene screams of de-humanization.  I see the same thing when Diounna is serving the mistress and her guests - they speak of Diounna as if she is some sort of animal or exotic import.  I think that this dehumanization not only speaks of racial attitudes present in France in the 1950s, but also of a thinly-veiled lower status reserved for women as well.

Conversely, I feel that women actually play a more prominent role in the documentary Who Killed Vincent Chinn, in part because the directors of the film are women.  I also feel that Chinn's mother plays a huge role, namely because she is featured throughout the film after her son's death.  She serves as a strong contrast to Vincent Chinn's alleged killers, who seem to have little sympathy or remorse for the loss of Ms Chinn's son.  Despite only speaking broken English, I feel that Ms Chinn represents a strong depiction of a woman, especially when viewed in context with the circumstances surrounding the Chinn family.  Ms Chinn came here for a better life with her son, yet she loses him in an act unbefitting of her new home; she is often seen asking, "what's wrong with this country?".  The Chinn family was living in a city hostile towards Asian Americans, particularly with the success of Japanese cars in the American markets; despite being Chinese, disgruntled Americans simply grouped all Asians into this "Japanese" category.  Ms Chinn is also a single mother in a foreign country, vesting all of her hopes on moving in with her son and his fiance which, of course, never occurs.  Yet despite all this, Ms Chinn still asked the tough questions, namely posing a what-if scenario if two Chinese men beat a white man to death.  Ms Chinn basically says, "this happened to my son because he is Chinese", which would not have been easy to say in 1980s America.

It seems that the trending topic so far on this blog post regards stereotyping women, and in some films that may be the case.  Mayssa's piece referencing the disturbing nature of the woman laying the egg is on point: it does seem that women are being painted as reproductive beings above all else.  Perhaps the director is trying to tell us something here, that women are being portrayed in this negative, stereotypical light, and that we should be disturbed by it.  Maybe we are supposed to have this negative reaction to these stereotypical scenes, and in-turn we are better at recognizing stereotypes in our future life interactions.