Feminist Ironic Montage to Dismantle Gender Essentialism

• Published in: Framework 2022-04, Vol.63 (1), p.62-76
• Main Authors: Seguí, Isabel, Tedesco, Marina Cavalcanti
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Documentary films; Essentialism; Feminism; Friedan, Betty; Gender; Italian language; Militancy; Montage; Motion picture directors & producers; Oppression; Patriarchy; Political activism; Short films; Women
• ISSN: 0306-7661; 1559-7989; 1559-7989
• DOI: 10.1353/frm.2022.a875876

For women forced to be the object of male desire, the beauty industry offers, in exchange for money, all kinds of devices that will make them more palatable: clothing, cosmetics, hairdressing, gymnastic equipment, and so on. [...]two birds are killed with one stone: social control and economic gain. Leonor Calvera (in Rodríguez and Ciriza) highlights that Bemberg and Gabriela Christeller, an Italian countess based in Argentina, "trafficked and translated—although in a less systematic and traditional way—the texts that in those years were produced by northern feminists"4 such as Margaret Mead, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, and Shulamith Firestone.5 Bemberg was a pioneer in defining herself as a feminist in the Argentine public sphere. The problem of the waves, the geopolitics of knowledge, and other academic distortions In order to analyze the complex positionality of the above-mentioned filmmakers and to introduce these films to a potentially broader audience, we were tempted to state that Woman's World is a classic example of second wave feminism, and Miss Universe in Peru is a move towards what will be considered the third wave, in terms of diversification of the representation and the inclusion of intersectional analysis. First of all, it is a chronology underpinned by events that occurred in the Anglo-Saxon world—to name some: suffragism, the publication of iconic books (such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, 1963), the Anita Hill case (1991), the #MeToo movement.