A methodological study of #Female Pleasure

ABSTRACT

The serious presence of cinematographic productions, particularly documentaries, in academic sociological studies is the reason for this comparative study between a documentary, #Female Pleasure, as a non-academic social study, and academic sociological research to show their methodological differences. Departing from Weber’s teachings, this paper examines the methodological aspects of #Female Pleasure as a quasi-research documentary, in four steps: presenting a brief description of the film, indicating reasons that justify this film as sociological research, outlining the principles of Weber’s methodology for Social Sciences, and then comparing Weber’s proposed criteria with the analytic method of this film.

KEYWORDS:

• Weber’s methodology
• #Female Pleasure
• Idealtypus
• non-academic research
• value judgment

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Michael Noble for reading the draft of this paper and making useful remarks. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See announcements of these lecture series, [Accessed: 01.2022]:

https://courses.ceu.edu/courses/2021-2022/documentary-social-change

https://socweb.hkbu.edu.hk/undergraduate/courses_detail/79/?back=/undergraduate/courses/?page=2

https://www.soas.ac.uk/anthropology/events/ethnographic-film-series/index.php?showprevious=1;

https://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/events-1;

https://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/events_conf_seminars/contentbox-green-vision/index.html.

2. For example, see: Jeffrey Geiger (2011) and Peter W. Williams (2000).

3. Like Minh-Ha Trinh T (1991) and Olivieri (2012).

4. “Women of Vision” Research Meeting on Feminist Film and Video History, New York, 1994, https://womxn-of-vision.netlify.com/item/research-meeting-1994/ [Accessed: 05.2021].

5. https://www.locarnofestival.ch/pardo/festival-del-film-locarno/home.html, [Accessed: 08.2019].

6. For example, on 03.08.2018 at Cedars Centre of Development and Resources for Students at University of Hong Kong (https://www.cedars.hku.hk/ge/programme/detail?id=590, [Accessed: 08.2019]); A session in Munich, on 22.05.2019 in Monopol-Kino with professors of the University of Munich. (https://www.bwl.uni-muenchen.de/service_und_beratung/beratungsangebote/frauenbeauftragte/frauen_aktuelles/female_pleasure.pdf, [Accessed, 08.2019]); And a session in Women in German Conference at the university of Tennessee. https://www.femalepleasure.org/ [Accessed, 05.2021].

7. See Arch A. Mercey (2016).

8. Expository documentary is a term developed by Bill Nichols and belongs to the six main types of documentary exposing a person or a topic and emphasizes verbal commentary and often includes a narrator (Bill Nichols 2001, 34). So, #FP is a documentary with a predominantly expository style combining various modes of representation.

9. Portrait film is depiction of a stage of life of a known or unknown person as opposed to biographic films that are of more a fictional expression and cover a wider extent of life (Paul Arthur 2003, 95).

10. Manga means whimsical drawings and is used for “comic books” representing pieces of Japanese culture and history (Macwilliams 2008, 352).

11. Participatory Mode emphasizes the interaction between filmmaker and subject (Nichols 2001, 34).

12. Docudrama, as a genre, reconstructs old social and political real events by unknown actors (Ibid, 182).

13. Performative Mode emphasizes the subjective or expressive aspect of the filmmaker’s own engagement with the subject and an audience’s responsiveness to this engagement (ibid, 34).

14. See Stella Bruzzi 1997a in which she talks about the voice-over in documentaries from a theoretical orthodox perspective that condemns it for being inevitably didactic. Bruzzi (1997b) differently shows clothes’ role for making special types to evoke certain trans-textual impression in minds.

15. Weber’s methodology counters to the methodology of both experimental sciences and sociological positivism and is essentially a method for all sociological studies and anthropology, without being bound to academic sociological studies.

16. Verstehen in Weber translates to “meaningful or empathetic understanding” or “putting yourself in the shoes of others.” Interpretive sociology differs from positivist sociology having a rigid and closed methodology.

17. “Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy,” and “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences” were published in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, in 1904 and 1905, to define the standards which the editors of the journal would apply as a pattern for sociological studies. “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” was published in Logos in 1917. However, this collection does not comprise all Weber’s methodological essays (1949, Ⅵ).

18. See: Ricardo F. Crespo (1997), for his focus on the concept of the Wertfreiheit or value-neutrality, as the principal condition of scientificity.

19. See Donna Haraway (1988) and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2012).

20. There is a paradigm shift in the ethnographic filmmaking from the claims of objectivity to a reflexive shift that took place in anthropology as a discipline (Olivieri 2012, 25).

21. https://www.femalepleasure.org/ [Accessed: 2019]

22. Olivieri 2012, 114: “Although clearly spelled‐out rules about these techniques are hard to find, they seem to be common knowledge and common practice, to the extent that most viewers would notice something is wrong when watching a film wherein such standards are not followed.”

23. Carlos Ruiz Carmona (2019): “Cinema needs to be technically credible to engage audiences’ narrative comprehension […] to satisfy certain cultural or social expectations […]. It also means to overcome specific technical restrictions. It is for this reason that representing an event it is not just a question of what an event is but also of what the event should appear technically to be on the cinema screen.”

24. See also Grant and Sloniowski (1998).

25. See: Calderón Sandoval 2019, for more about this way of approaching feminist objectivity in documentary cinema.

26. Unlike Windelband who saw them restricted to idiographic studies (Wilhelm Windelband 1894).

27. See: Oriana Aketzalli Calderón–Sandoval (2017); Zhang, Zhen and Xiaoming Ai (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zarrin Monajati

Zarrin Monajati (PhD, LMU Munich, Germany) is a Post-Doc Researcher at Faculty of Theology and Religions, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, and a member of the Directory Board of the Iranian Association for Religious Studies. Email: [email protected].