From: Matt Teichman (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Feb 17 2004 - 16:58:57 PST
James Kreul wrote:
>I was confused by this in response, since I don't think I took up subject
>positioning as a reason why it might have been a good idea to have a woman
>on the selection committee (though you were not just responding to my
>post).
It was a response to Shelly's initial claim that curators have a tendency
mostly to include work with which they identify, with the Essential Cinema
scandal as an example. To quote, "we tend to identify more closely with
our own experiences, the work that tends to get classified as 'great art'
is often tied to the experiences of the programmer/curator/writer...if i
think to the long list of filmmakers at the beginning of essential
cinema...i can only remember a few women being there."
>The "15+ challenge" seems an inappropriate response because it comes across
>as a skeptical and somewhat condescending "Oh yeah, name some?"
There is no reason it should. I am tempted to say that interpretation is a
result of your positioning me as a "man" and wanting to fit my post into
the rather cliched stereotype of the man who is deeply threatened by
feminism (which, by the way, is a myth held largely by fanatics; the
standard masculine reaction to feminism is one of indifference, not
outrage), but that would perhaps be too grand a claim to make.
>I think it is absurd to look for a smoking gun to pin an individual with
>institutional sexism.
I'm really not sure what this means--whether you want to claim the gun or
the pinning is absurd.
>Addressing and correcting these problems is not just about individuals,
>it's also about making people aware of larger patterns that they fall into
>or participate in sometimes indirectly.
Of course, it is easy to fall into similarly problematic patterns in so
doing. Reading these patterns into human behavior is an interpretive move,
and any exegesis requires justification.
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