Jennifer Fox's Transcultural Talking Cure

Abstract

A coproduction for Danish public television, the six hour-long episodes comprising Jennifer Fox's most recent longitudinal documentary share a similar impetus to that underpinning feminist confessional literature and ethnographic filmmaking. During five years of travel to seventeen countries, she became habituated to living with the handheld digital camera as a means of examining the assumptions implicated in her own gender socialization and that of other women around the world. She also passed the camera among her participants to enact a dialogical mode of communicating that could weave a “red thread” across cultural differences. This essay investigates how confessional discourse articulates Fox's belated feminist awakening, but also betrays specifically western assumptions about the production of truth and unified subjectivity. Moments of footage that escape narrative determinism reveal that, as technologies and signifying practices travel across borders, they do not necessarily induce greater self-understanding or emancipation.

Keywords:

• autobiography
• confession
• documentary
• ethnographic filmmaking
• transnational feminism

Acknowledgements

This research arose out of Jennifer Fox's visit to the University of Toronto in the autumn of 2007, which was funded by the Cinema Studies Institute, the Centre for Transnational and Diaspora Studies, and the Institute for Gender and Women's Studies.

Notes

1. For example, the writings of Saint Augustine, Margery Kempe, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as the nineteenth-century confessions of Saint Thérèse Martin.

2. See the official websites for Sex and the City (HBO n.d.) and Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (n.d.).