The politics of video intimacy: Julie Gustafson’s feminist documentary practice

ABSTRACT

This article historicizes and theorizes the feminist documentary practice of Julie Gustafson, focusing on The Politics of Intimacy: Ten Women Talk About Orgasm and Sexuality (US, 1973) and Desire (US, 2005). Employing archival research and original interviews with Gustafson, it argues that both works interrogate intimacy’s use value for navigating new modes of documentary witnessing afforded by video. It begins by contextualizing The Politics of Intimacy’s modes of ‘intimate witnessing’ in relation to 1970s guerrilla TV movements, feminist documentary filmmaking, and women’s video art, as well as in terms of Gustafson’s involvement in the Manhattan-based Global Village Video Resource Center. It then analyzes how The Politics of Intimacy utilizes a ‘voice-centered’ feminist documentary method, which foregrounds video’s intimate appeals and polyvocal modes of address to create a multilayered account of women’s sexual experiences. Finally, the article contends that The Politics of Intimacy’s voice-centered approach crucially informs the interplay of generational voices in Desire, which documents Gustafson’s long-term collaboration with the Teenage Girls’ Documentary Project. Gustafson’s documentary practice takes on added complexity in Desire, as it maps emergent solidarities across generations of women video makers to reveal feminist voicing to be a complex, at-times contradictory expression of the self-in-relation.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist documentary
• documentary witnessing
• 1970s alternative video
• documentary histories
• Julie Gustafson

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Rachel Fabian and Julie Gustafson, ‘Virtual Talks with Video Activists,’ Media Burn Archive Virtual Talks Series, 12 August 2021, https://mediaburn.org/events/5-27-21-virtual-talks-with-video-activists-julie-gustafson-2/. Digitized versions of Gustafson’s documentary works are available at https://mediaburn.org/category/videomakers/julie-gustafson/.

2 Ingrid Wiegand, ‘Global Village at Anthology,’ Soho News, 1 April 1975, np, series 1, box 1, folder 10, Guerrilla TV Archive, Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. A portion of the multi-channel version of The Irish Tapes can be seen in the recording of the 1975 broadcast ‘Video and Television Review,’ located in The Irish Tapes, Reserve Film and Video Collection, New York Public Library.

3 Though organizations like Raindance Corporation espoused video’s egalitarian potential, Deirdre Boyle notes in Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (1997) that in many cases its peer video groups operated as ‘“good ole boy” organizations in which a few women worked hard but were rarely acknowledged for their contributions’ (142).

4 ‘Conversation with Julie Gustafson and John Reilly,’ Videography, May 1982, 62, series 1, box 1, folder 10, Guerrilla TV Archive. Global Village further showcased works by feminist curators, video artists and filmmakers through artist-in-residence programs, weekly screening series, and other programs like the independent documentary series produced for public television Other Visions, Other Voices. Those involved included Peggy Ahwesh, Lynne Sachs, Chris Choy, Dara Birnbaum, Renee Tajima and Kelly Anderson.

5 For an in-depth account of this landmark festival, see Melinda Barlow’s article ‘Feminism 101: The New York Women’s Video Festival, 1972–1980’ (2003).

6 ‘Program for 2nd Annual Global Village Documentary Festival,’ 1976, np, series 1, box 1, folder 18, Guerrilla TV Archive.

7 Lifestyles: An Experiment in Feedback was collaboratively made as part of a Global Village training course led by John Reilly. This title, The Irish Tapes, and other Global Village works have been preserved and digitized by Media Burn along with Gustafson’s documentaries. See https://mediaburn.org/category/video-from-the-global-village/.

8 In ‘At Last . . . ?: Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, Race and History’ (2011), which examines recent pop culture references to the Storyville portraits, Farah Jasmine Griffin notes that ‘Bellocq was best known for his images of Storyville’s octoroon prostitutes’ (139). The mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds of the models who posed for the portraits signaled both New Orleans’ ‘permissive interracial sexual culture’ (140) as well as the city’s outsized role in the buying and selling of enslaved Africans prior to the Civil War.

9 Jodi Dean’s (2010) analysis of popular teen blogger Ashley ‘AshBo’ Qualls explains how ‘accessed through the intense emotional world of networked adolescence, blogs aren’t confined to a sphere separate from other media. They are situated in a rich communicative habitat consisting of multiple platforms and applications (mobile phones, social network sites, video, music, and photo sharing sites). Blogs seem, then, to be ways that anyone of us could report on, share, experience, and even market our social lives’ (63).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Fabian

Rachel Fabian is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema and Television Studies at Purchase College, SUNY. She earned her PhD in Film and Media Studies in 2019 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also received her MA. She is the recipient of a 2022 American Council of Learned Societies Project Development Grant for her book project in progress, which historicizes and theorizes women's contributions to collective media production in local and transnational contexts during the 1970s–80s. Fabian is the former Managing Editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, and her article “Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston,” published in Feminist Media Histories, was awarded the 2020 Annette Kuhn Prize by the journal Screen.