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Abstract
Currently, scholars grapple with media that depict Third World women as either victims of unchanging contexts or agents of liberation. To explore how a widely distributed and popular documentary film can destabilize a First World gaze, this essay examines Iron Ladies of Liberia (ILL), which traced Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's first year as president of Liberia. ILL foregrounded women's rhetorical and political agencies to alter a postwar context, while it also situated their agencies within an enabling and constraining constellation of power relationships. Through its unique relationships between filmmaker and subject, ILL suggested a transnational feminist perspective on women in media.
Notes
[1] Amy Farrell and Patricia McDermott, “Claiming Afghan Women: The Challenge of Human Rights Discourse for Transnational Feminism,” in Just Advocacy?: Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation, eds. Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 47; Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol, “Introduction,” in Just Advocacy?: Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation, eds. Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 4–5. See also Makau W. Mutua, “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights,” Harvard International Law Journal 42, issue 1 (2001): 203.
[2] Raka Shome, “Transnational Feminism and Communication Studies,” The Communication Review 9, issue 4 (2006): 257.
[3] Ella Shohat, “Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, eds. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 184, 183. See also Shome, “Transnational Feminism,” 258.
[4] Elora Halim Chowdhury, Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Violence in Bangladesh (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2011), xviii.
[5] Regarding documentary film and filmmaking and women generally: Paula Rabinowitz, They Must be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (London, UK: New Left Books, 1994); Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, eds., Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Regarding film and filmmaking by and about African women, see Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Filmmakers of the African & Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997); Kelly Hankin, “And Introducing … The Female Director: Documentaries about Women Filmmakers and Feminist Activism,” NWSA Journal 19, issue 1 (2007): 76–78.
[6] Hankin, “And Introducing,” 81.
[7] Beti Ellerson, “Jacqueline Kalimunda: ‘Single Rwandan’ and Her Crowdfunding Campaign on Indiegogo,” African Women in Cinema Blog, November 3, 2014, http://africanwomenincinema.blogspot.com/2014/11/jacqueline-kalimunda-single-rwandan-and.html.
[8] “Africa is a Woman's Name,” Women Make Movies, http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c809.shtml (accessed December 10, 2014); “Africa, Africas,” Women Make Movies, http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c570.shtml (accessed December 10, 2014).
[9] “Africa is a Woman's Name,” Women Make Movies, http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/collect8.shtml (accessed December 10, 2014).
[10] Foster, Women Filmmakers, 1.
[11] Raka Shome and Radha S. Hegde, “Culture, Communication, and the Challenge of Globalization,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, issue 2 (2002): 182.
[12] Nancy A. Naples, “The Challenges and Possibilities of Transnational Feminist Praxis,” in Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics, eds. Nancy A. Naples and Manisha Desai (New York: Routledge, 2002), 267.
[13] The version of ILL that played in theaters in the United States is longer (01:17:00) than the versions that aired on BBC (00:52:30) and PBS (00:56:46). This essay draws evidence from the longest version, because it is the only version available to purchase, and because all of the footage of the BBC and PBS versions is represented in the longer version. Iron Ladies of Liberia, directed by Daniel Junge and Siatta Scott Johnson (Denver, CO: Just Media, 2007).
[14] Drawing upon James Jasinksi's articulation of constitutive rhetoric, this essay values “the imbrication of the performative and representational capacities of language” to exhibit “discursive forms” that “enable and constrain” audiences to act. James Jasinksi, “A Constitutive Framework for Rhetorical Historiography: Toward an Understanding of the Discursive (Re)constitution of ‘Constitution’ in The Federalist Papers,” in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, ed. Kathleen J. Turner (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 74–75.
[15] Michelle Citron, “Fleeing from Documentary: Autobiographical Film/Video and the ‘Ethics of Responsibility,’” in Feminism and Documentary, eds. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 271.
[16] Citron, “Fleeing from Documentary,” 271.
[17] Citron, “Fleeing from Documentary,” 271.
[18] “Independent Television Service,” http://itvs.org/films/iron-ladies-of-liberia/filmmaker (accessed November 5, 2014).
[19] “Just Media,” http://www.just-media.org (accessed June 23, 2014).
[20] “Independent Lens,” http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/ironladies/credits/html (accessed June 23, 2014).
[21] “Independent Lens,” http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/ironladies/credits/html (accessed June 23, 2014); “Just Media,” http://www.just-media.org (accessed June 23, 2014).
[22] Joanne Ostrow, “Denver Filmmakers See Stars Rise,” Denver Post.com, March 16, 2008, http://www.denverpost.com/ci_8564776?source=infinite (accessed November 5, 2014).
[23] “Follow the Leader: A Film Portrait of Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf,” International Museum of Women, http://www.imow.org/wpp/stories/viewStory?storyId=924 (accessed November 5, 2014).
[24] Hesford and Kozol, “Introduction,” 4–5.
[25] “Follow the Leader.”
[26] “Filmography,” Jungefilm, http://jungefilm.com/about/filmography/ (accessed June 23, 2014).
[27] “Independent Television Service,” http://itvs.org/films/iron-ladies-of-liberia (accessed June 23, 2014); Film Catalog, Women Make Movies, http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/ (accessed June 23, 2014).
[28] Lisa Kennedy, “Liberia's ‘Iron Ladies’ Forge Nation's Recovery,” DenverPost.com, November 15, 2007, http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_7464170 (accessed December 10, 2014).
[29] Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, issue 1 (2005): 3.
[30] Thomas W. Benson and Brian J. Snee, eds., The Rhetoric of the New Political Documentary (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008); Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles, “Meta-Imagining, The War Room, and the Hyperreality of US Politics,” Journal of Communication 49, issue 1 (1999): 28–45.
[31] Alexandra Juhasz, “They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality—All I Want to Show Is My Video: The Politics of the Realist Feminist Documentary,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), 195.
[32] Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro, Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 2, 4.
[33] Spence and Navarro, Crafting Truth, 21–22.
[34] This perspective is grounded in classical rhetorical theory, especially in Aristotle's enunciations of ethos. Kenneth Burke provides a modern iteration of this concept as identification or consubstantiation. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. (Mineola: New York: Dover, 2004), 7–8; Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 23.
[35] Walter Fisher, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), 237.
[36] Spence and Navarro, Crafting Truth, 22.
[37] In rhetorical theory, scholarly emphasis on “conditions of possibility,” a term introduced by Immanuel Kant, provides a counterpart to emphases on agent-centered studies of rhetoric.
[38] Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Rhetorical Criticism 2009: A Study in Method,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address Studies, eds. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 101.
[39] Rebecca Belle-Metereau, “Iron Ladies of Liberia.” Film & History 39, issue 2 (2007): 65; United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), National Human Development Report: Liberia 2006, 42. Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/national/africa/liberia/LIBERIA_2006_en.pdf.
[40] Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London, UK: Sage Publications, 1997).
[41] Leymah Gbowee and Carol Mithers, Mighty be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War (New York: Beast Books, 2011), 141.
[42] Gbowee and Mithers, Mighty be Our Powers, 162.
[43] Oyeronke Oyewumi, “Family Bonds/Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies,” Signs 25, issue 4 (2000): 1096.
[44] In this essay, all quotations of the dialogue and descriptions of film's scenes were drawn from Iron Ladies of Liberia, 2007.
[45] Emphases added to reflect Sirleaf's vocal inflection.
[46] Consider, for example, that the forum was held at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, DC, hosted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the UN, the US government, and the European Commission—all governing bodies considered key agents of economic and structural inequalities worldwide. “World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz opens Liberia Partners Forum,” World Bank, Feb. 13, 2007, http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21219218~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html (accessed May 15, 2013).
[47] Heather Nunn, Thatcher, Politics, and Fantasy: The Political Culture of Gender and Nation (London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart, 2003), 70–71.
[48] Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. chapter 6.
[49] Geographically, Liberia is a “Western” nation, since it is located in the Western and Northern hemispheres. However, in terms of Liberia's perceived status as a Third World nation, and one that held its first democratic elections in 2005, it is typically not considered a First World, Western nation.
[50] “Iron Ladies of Liberia,” CinemaPolitica, http://cinemapolitica.org/film/iron-ladies-liberia (accessed December 10, 2014).
[51] Sany, comment on Iron Ladies of Liberia, http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/ironladies/talkback.html (accessed December 10, 2014).
[52] Sandra J. Sucher, Harvard Business Review Blog Network (blog), May 10, 2010, accessed December 10, 2014, http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/05/ellen-johnson-sirleaf-moral-le/.
[53] thello1, comment on Iron Ladies of Liberia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpo4oyIJQs8 (accessed December 10, 2014).
[54] Alexis Lockman, comment on Iron Ladies of Liberia, International Museum of Women, http://www.imow.org/wpp/stories/viewStory?storyId=925 (accessed November 3, 2014).
[55] Astride Charles, “Iron Ladies Who Bend,” Seeingblack.com, January 10, 2008, http://seeingblack.com/printer_353.shtmlmovies/tv (accessed December 9, 2014).
[56] Angus Wolfe Murray, “Iron Ladies of Liberia,” Eyeforfilm.com, February 26, 2008, http://eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/iron-ladies-of-liberia-film-review-by-angus-wolfe-murray (accessed December 10, 2014).
[57] Wendy Tai, “iron ladies,” hypergraphia, March 8, 2009, http://www.wendytai.com/blog/?p=401.
[58] Marcia Texler Segal and Esther Ngan-Ling Chow, “Analyzing Gender, Intersectionality, and Inequality in Global, Transnational and Local Contexts,” in Analyzing Gender, Intersectionality, and Multiple Inequalities: Global, Transnational and Local Contexts, eds. Esther Ngan-Ling Chow, Marcia Texler Segal, and Lin Tan (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2011), 8.
[59] Rebecca Dingo, Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 8; Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, eds. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 17; Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr, “Introduction: Theorizing Transnational Feminist Praxis,” in Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, eds. Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 3–4.
[60] Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 4.
[61] Rey Chow, “Postmodern Automatons,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 373.