13 Exploring Transnational Feminism and Indigenous Feminisms in Filmmaking

Emrys Yamanishi

Profe Esther Hernández-Medina

GWS 180

7 November 2023

Introduction: Indigenous Women and Film Theory

“I know nothing / of great mysteries / know less of creation / I do know / that the farther backward / in time that I travel / the more grandmothers / and the farther forward / the more grandchildren / I am obligated to both.” – Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege, along with the other students of Asian American Women on Screen with Professor Ann Kaneko at Scripps College, of listening to a guest speaker talk by Erin Lau. Lau is a Native Hawaiian director, producer, and writer who has created seven films and screened them at over 50 festivals across the globe. She began her talk with the aforementioned quote from Lee Maracle, a Stó:lō writer and academic. With this quote, she wanted to highlight the way in which she always enters a space by talking about who she is and where she comes from. She ultimately grounds all of her filmmaking projects in a desire to help her Native Hawaiian community, and to find the most pono[1] and decolonial ways of approaching filmmaking.[2]

Lau’s talk sparked in me an interest in the intersections between feminism, decolonization, and filmmaking, and the powerful dialogue that can come out of this discursive space. From this interest, I seek to explore the transformative potential I see in transnational feminism and Indigenous feminisms for filmmaking, in terms of content, form, and reception, as well as for film studies as an academic discipline. I will structure this exploration around two short films, Erin Lau’s The Moon and the Night Ka Mahina A Me Ka PŌ (2018) and Erica Tremblay’s Little Chief (2019), by analyzing their technical composition, audience reception, and the processes of the filmmakers themselves, among other aspects. Through the conversations created by these short films, which both feature Indigenous storylines, I also seek to better understand the relationship between transnational feminism and Indigenous feminisms in filmmaking as well as more broadly, via the theorizing of both feminisms.

Theoretical Framework: Feminist Film Theory Over Time

Feminist critiques of filmmaking have developed over time as filmmaking has evolved and, especially, as the field of filmmaking has diversified. Early feminist film theory largely reacted to the high prevalence of (usually white) male filmmakers creating films about men, or otherwise films about women written by men. Laura Mulvey sparked some of the first feminist film theory with her Freudian, psychoanalytic theorizing of the “male gaze” in film[3] as the phallocentric female character and the scopophilic male viewer, who gains sexual pleasure from the control offered by watching women perform sexual acts on the screen. This theory necessarily focused on a lack of female agency in filmmaking at the time but has since been criticized heavily for its centering of Freud and white feminist views . One line of critique, for example, was introduced by Corinn Columpar, who, amidst an increase in films about non-white and non-male subjects (usually still being created by white men), rather sought to understand the “ethnographic gaze” and the “colonial gaze” as they appear in cinema and contribute to the creation of the “visibility of difference and the overidentification of certain groups with their bodies”.[4]

As the demographics of filmmakers and the contents of films have changed over time, these conversations have grown in complexity. Zahra Khosroshahi and Sara Saljoughi, writing of films from Southwest Asia and North Africa, seem to criticize both Mulvey and Columpar. They caution against the use of language models which further contribute to the otherizing of groups, including “ethnic cinema”, “minority cinema”, and “immigrant cinema”, all of which they deem “ghettoizing rubrics”.[5] This conversation stemmed from an increase in the availability and awareness of films made by and about people of color and transnational subjects. Thus, transnational feminism began to enter the conversation. As Evren Savci outlines, transnational feminism importantly distinguishes itself from “global” and “international feminisms”, as the latter perpetuate understandings of national borders and fabricated difference or “Othering”. Transnational feminism, rather, strives to decenter Western, homogenizing feminisms, and engages in rich conversation about borders as porous and illogical.[6] This transnational understanding of borders has often been integrated into other feminist studies and ethnic studies conversations, as a way of understanding the fluidity of many experiences, including gender and sexuality identities and conceptualizations of time. [7]

Khosroshahi and Saljoughi’s discussion of “ghettoizing rubrics” aligns well with transnational feminism’s articulation of the need to choose terminology that isn’t reductive or homogenizing, and which emphasizes “location-specificity” rather than “location-bound” analysis .[8] Gayatri Gopinath, in her comparison of public reactions to Ismat Chughtai’s short story “The Quilt” and Deepa Mehta’s film Fire, further supports this type of analysis, as she calls out Western feminist responses to these pieces, such as portraying the film as evidence of “India as a site of regressive gender oppression, against which the West stands for enlightened egalitarianism”. [9] Gopinath argues that these responses forced Western gender and sexuality norms onto both works, neglecting to engage in any sort of cultural and contextual analysis.

Luhui Whitebear (Chumash, Huastec, Cochimi), a professor of Indigenous studies and Indigenous feminisms, defines Indigenous feminisms as a project which grounds itself in multiplicity, and in a deep understanding of colonialism and coloniality.[10] While transnational feminism focuses on the fluidity of borders and identity[11], Indigenous feminisms emphasize Indigenous land sovereignty and stewardship, as well as Indigenous and Indigenous feminisms’ understandings of connections between the land and the body.[12] Turning back to filmmaking, then, we note once again the correlation between the recent increase in Indigenous presence on the film scene with an increase in Indigenous feminisms film theory. We can thus begin to explore the relationship between Indigenous feminisms and transnational feminisms, and what each field can bring to filmmaking.

A strong point of connection between Indigenous feminisms and transnational feminist projects is their emphasis on decolonization. Astrid Aure discusses decolonization in film, noting that it can be achieved by “assert[ing] [I]ndigenous control of the camera”[13] and “revers[ing] the shot”.[14] She further argues that it can be achieved by “[t]urning the lens around” to create “a total shift of perspective so that the placement of ‘self’ and the ‘other’ is also reversed”[15] and creates a sort of visual and representational sovereignty for Indigenous filmmakers. José Esteban Muñoz discusses queer futurity and queer utopianism[16], projects that ground themselves in a rejection of staticness and a need to always strive for a better world. This sort of radical optimism and imagination serves well the project of transnational feminism and Indigenous feminisms in filmmaking, such that in striving to negotiate and work past borders, they also principally reject dominant forms of storytelling and film structure, via the usage of Indigenous ways of storytelling in Indigenous filmmaking, for example.

An interesting connection can be made here to Jasbir K. Puar’s “assemblage theory”[17] as that which must complicate the dominant feminist discourse of “intersectionality”. Intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is one of the basic tenets of (mainstream) modern feminism, and describes the ways in which systems of oppression work to multiply oppress those holding more than one marginalized identity.[18] Puar, however, argues that intersectionality fails to represent the fluidity and complexity of experience and creates normalizing and othering categorizations of identity by defining intersectional identities only in relation to how they differ from the white, cisheterosexual, able-bodied, etc. individual. Puar notes that under assemblage theory, the human body is de-privileged to recognize that “multiple forms of matter can be bodies”[19], thus recognizing the ways in which all of these bodies are constantly interacting with and affecting one another, even going so far as to describe a television as being capable of motivating domestic violence. Another way to frame assemblage theory is offered by Shogo Tanaka, expanding on the work of French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on “embodied knowledge” and “affordances”, in which a physical object provides an opportunity for someone to interact with/on it. Thus, assemblage theory highlights the slippages and fluidity of traditional understandings of the borders between human and non-human, actor, and object.

Transnational and Indigenous feminisms filmmaking also unite around their subjects: both focus on not only who is being filmed but also who is doing the filming. In discussing transnational and Indigenous feminisms filmmaking, we can also see the ways in which the filmmakers’ experiences of being transnational and/or Indigenous people impact their films. Josefina Baez, a Dominican actress, speaks of El Ni’e[20], or the is, “[b]order as a place, a meaning. Border as a place of being. More than limiting [her], it is that space of creation”.[21] Hamid Naficy operates off a similar understanding of border to note the ways in which transnational filmmakers destabilize boundaries, since exilic transnational filmmakers as liminal subjects “become neither the society’s others against whom its overarching identity could be formed nor its full citizens who could be pressed into servicing its values,”[22] thus arguing for the subversive potential of transnational filmmaking.

Naficy explores the translating of this sort of understanding of borders onto films created by transnational filmmakers via an interesting conversation about symptoms of agoraphobia and claustrophobia in these transnational exiles, which result in the creation of phobic spaces[23] in their films. This resonates with Puar and Tanaka’s theorizing, as the phobic space becomes an affordance off of which the film subject “experiences” exile and transnationalism. Further, the transnational filmmaker utilizes these cinematographic techniques to create an immersive experience of exile for the viewer.

The Films

Using these understandings of film, transnational feminism, and Indigenous feminisms, I will be focusing on two short films to further explore these ideas. The first film, Erin Lau’s The Moon and the Night Ka Mahina A Me Ka PŌ (2018) follows Mahina, a Native Hawaiian teenager. In the film, we learn that her father faces job insecurity due to being formerly incarcerated, and struggles with alcoholism. Mahina works hard to balance taking care of her father (filling out his job applications, picking him up when he has had too much to drink), taking care of her house (cleaning out the fridge when the power has been shut off), and attending school. Eventually, though, this all loses meaning for her after her dog, Po, dies in a dog fight that Mahina’s father had entered him in in order to make money. The film concludes with Mahina breaking down the fence that formerly housed Po.

The second film, Erica Tremblay’s Little Chief (2019) follows a teacher, Sharon, and an elementary school student, Little Bear, living on an Indigenous reservation in Oklahoma. The film opens with Sharon stealing supplies from a casino hotel in order to provide supplies to her school, and then introduces Little Bear via Sharon finding him attempting to walk all the way to school in cold, windy conditions. The film then follows Sharon and Little Bear as Little Bear struggles with economic insecurity and bullying, and concludes in a rather despondent manner as Sharon and Little Bear sit together in a field after Little Bear has run away from the borders of the school grounds.

Film criticism often focuses on filmmaking and the movies themselves, but it is also important to understand the impact these works of art have on their audiences. In order to gauge audience responses to these films, I will be pulling reviews from Letterboxd, a popular site for media viewers to leave reviews. Both films seem to generally generate quite emotional responses among audience members. For instance, Letterboxd user auroramegan writes of Lau’s film: “[f]uck. This one’s going to stay with me for a while,”[24] while user hyperpension writes of Tremblay’s film: “I’m fairly certain I’ve never seen this before but now it struck a nostalgic chord in me that felt more like an alarm”.[25] Based on reviews that left numerical ratings, both films come in at an average of 3.5 out of 5 stars, above the average of 3.0 out of 5 stars across all content on Letterboxd.[26] Written reviews center around similar themes for each film, including their emotional impact, usage of lighting and other technical elements, and resonance with the Indigenous storylines being told. Writes Letterboxd user Schon Duncan of Tremblay’s film, “As a native teacher of anative [sic] students…I….am…moved”.[27]

“Phobic Spaces” and Filmic Resistance

By bringing together the literature on transnational and Indigenous feminist filmmaking with audience reviews of each of these films, we can begin to see the transformative potential of these feminisms for the field of filmmaking. Although neither Lau nor Tremblay explicitly claim to have created their films through an Indigenous feminisms lens, I have chosen each of these films because I see them as excellent examples of a careful negotiation of Indigenous feminisms and transnational feminism in filmmaking. As both of these films tell Indigenous stories and are created by Indigenous filmmakers, I seek to unveil what these films teach us specifically about Indigenous feminisms and, through this, what Indigenous feminisms filmmaking could add to transnational feminist filmmaking. I seek to be careful even within this discussion, however, as it is important to note the complex, varying, and differing histories of loss of land sovereignty with and without displacement amongst mainland Indigenous communities and Native Hawaiians. Importantly, although I have thus far been prioritizing a discussion of formal feminist spaces and theorizing, I seek to emphasize how these decolonial filmmakers could enrich, complicate, and challenge “formal” or academic conversations around feminist filmmaking and filmmaking more generally.

One of the major elements of Lau’s film is the fence that delineates the home for Mahina’s dog, Po, which is perhaps the most easily relatable to borders of any of the elements I will be discussing in this section. Early on in the film, we see Mahina sitting within the fence, comforting Po after he has been used by Mahina’s father for a dog fight. We then see Mahina having a conversation with her Dad across the fence, which overlays their faces. Despite  the camera being relatively close to each of their faces, the fence causes the viewer to feel a sense of disconnection from and between Mahina and her Dad.

The Moon and the Night | Erin Lau

Here, we see a more concrete representation of the borders between father and daughter, largely caused by her father’s alcoholism and inability to provide them with a stable income. As Letterboxd user Shane James writes, “[t]he film looks a lot at how poverty and colonialism affects Hawaiians”.[28] The film reveals more broadly the widespread economic struggles of Native Hawaiians, who continue to be displaced and unhoused on their native land.

We also see the fence separating Mahina and Po at timestamp 11:17, as Po sleeps in his cage, foreshadowing timestamp 12:24 at which Mahina comes home to find Po missing from his cage, only to learn that he has been killed in a dog fight. In this way, we see a complicated narrative being formed, in which the fence serves as both a place of protection for Po (a place where he is able to rest and play with Mahina) and a place of destruction (as his rest is only preparation for his dog fighting, which in itself represents the economic struggles of Mahina’s father, and further separates him from Mahina and the rest of the world, limiting his freedom). At the end of the film, we see Mahina breaking down the fence, and thus releasing, in a way, herself, her father, and Po from all that the fence has represented. Here, we see Lau aligning her work and Mahina’s storyline with Columpar and Aure’s calls to assert Indigenous control of the camera (and in this case, for Mahina to assert control over her life and her storyline as an Indigenous woman). Thus, the fence throughout the short serves to craft a nuanced, complex conversation of borders and the ability to cross borders—or, as Baez would say, the act of living in the is[29]—as both painful and freeing, simultaneously undesirable and yet often necessary.

The Moon and the Night | Erin Lau

Please watch from timestamp 17:00 – 17:50.

Lau’s commentary on borders in her film accords with transnational feminist theories of borders as ultimately being far more complex than just the mapping of a nation-state, or the square footage of a property.[30] We can also understand the fence through Puar’s assemblage theory as well as Tanaka’s affordances, as the fence can be seen as an actor in the interactions between Mahina, her Dad, and Po, seemingly providing a space for them to come together and unite around Po but ultimately failing to bring them together, leading to its destruction at the end of the film. Indigenous feminisms complicate the fence further, as they force us to see the borders that exist between Native Hawaiians and various forms of life security, despite being on their own native land. This harkens back to transnational feminism’s critique of global and international feminisms, as it challenges any romanticization of exile and diaspora, and reminds us to be critically aware of the complexity of the diasporic/settler individual.[31] We further see this discussion as relating to Gopinath’s analysis of public reactions to Fire and “The Quilt”, as “that fact that Mehta [the creator of Fire] was a diasporic filmmaker was repeatedly cited as evidence of her lack of knowledge about the erotic and emotional lives of “real” (Hindu) Indian women”.[32]

Lighting and other technical effects are important in both Lau and Tremblay’s films. The Moon and the Night is generally dark, whether due to nighttime, stormy weather, or the lack of power in Mahina’s house. As Letterboxd user Shane James writes, “[t]he color and lighting are excellent throughout the film. Shots of looming peaks and foggy mornings show a different side of Hawaii than the usual sunny beach flicks”.[33] Lau has spoken about this element of her film, noting that she wanted to interrogate the “ethnographic” and “colonial” gazes[34] typically used in films about Hawai’i in order to reveal what she refers to as the “grey areas” of Hawai’i. In doing so, she strives to push back against the typical tourist’s understanding of Hawai’i to unveil the actual experiences of Native Hawaiian people in all of their nuance, especially through a framing of the effects of settler colonialism.[35] It is interesting to return to Muñoz’s queer futurity and utopianism here. While Hawai’i is often thought of as a sort of utopian place to the (willingly or unwillingly) uninformed mainlander, Lau’s “grey areas” insist upon unveiling the struggles facing Native Hawaiians—as much as these struggles are usually hidden behind the veil of touristic bliss—and simultaneously open up a space for imagining how these struggles could be aided.

The only exceptions to this dark lighting are found when Mahina is learning about or connecting with her Indigeneity, such as in history class at school or when she is running in the field with Po. This usage of bright lighting and color aligns with Indigenous feminisms’ rooting of resistance and knowledge in connection to the land and to Indigenous knowledge.[36] The other, more emotional exception occurs at timestamp 11:40, when Mahina sees Po in her dream, only to wake up and soon learn that he has died. This brightness and color of Po’s location in her dream might allude to the freedom Po has found in death, away from the pain and stress of dog fighting (standing in as a larger symbol for the struggles facing Mahina and her Dad), as well as the brightness Po brought into Mahina’s life.

Regarding the second film, the rural Oklahoma setting of Little Chief is also generally dark, dreary, and cold, due to the winter weather and generally grey lighting scheme of the various sets. The film only beautifully finds more bright and colorful lighting in moments when Sharon is able to help her community: timestamp 3:45 when she lends a bright yellow sweatshirt to Little Bear, timestamp 4:18 when she gives toilet paper and soap to the kitchen workers, and timestamp 4:35 when she literally and metaphorically provides light and love to her students by entering her classroom and turning on the lights. The second of these examples is particularly interesting, in that the kitchen workers who have received the supplies stand in brightness, while Sharon stands in darkness just outside the kitchen.

Little Chief | Erica Tremblay

The contrast in lighting between these scenes and the rest of the film is not without intention. In a similar vein to audience reviews of Lau’s film, Letterboxd user Messofanego notes the ways in which “[t]he ravages of economic depression and impoverished conditions by settler colonialism [are] exemplified”[37] throughout the film. Thus, the lighting serves not only to tell the story of Little Bear’s bullying, but also of the greater oppressive conditions under which Sharon and Little Bear live on the reservation.

Here, it is interesting to return to Naficy’s ruminations on liminal spaces and the transnational exilic filmmaker. The skillful usage of lighting in both films conveys the emotions felt by each filmmaker in relation to their relationships with their Indigenous lands, and the often poor living conditions of Indigenous people on their own lands across the globe. Despite both films taking place on the native land of their protagonists, we see similar film techniques to Naficy’s phobic spaces being employed, such as the borders of the fence and the kitchen window (“barriers within the mise-en-scene”[38]) and the generally dark and dreary lighting (“lighting scheme that creates a mood of constriction and blocked vision”[39]). Thus, a careful relationality begins to form between the Indigenous subject and the transnational diasporic subject, and specifically their nuanced experiences with borders, via these film techniques.

Through this conversation, we must always strive to avoid a collapsing of Indigeneity and transnationality, or as Chandra Mohanty quotes from Foucault, a “threshold of disappearance”.[40]  After all, as Mohanty writes in response to critiques of her theorizing of antiracist, postcolonial, transnational feminism, this sort of theorizing (in this case in respect to Indigenous feminisms) doesn’t “entail inattentiveness to local contradictions or contexts of struggle”[41] but rather “enables recognition of those moments of rupture and possibility that counterhegemonic movements can use to build solidarities across borders”.[42] Thus, we must stray away from overly simplistic discourses, such as parts of Naficy’s theorizing of the transnational exile as liminal subject:

“Capitalism continually reterritorializes its liminars and transnationals through strategies of assimilation and co-optation, transforming them into ethnic subjects and productive citizens. By barricading themselves [in claustrophobic spaces], however, these liminars reterritorialize themselves as exiles, as refuseniks– physically and socially. As a result, they become neither the society’s others against whom its overarching identity could be formed nor its full citizens who could be pressed into servicing its values”.[43]

Although this sort of self -“reterritorialization” is spoken of in a liberatory sense here, invoking connections to Muñoz’s queer unarrival, this analysis teeters dangerously on the edge of a complete disavowal of any sort of land-based identity, or rather that having a land-based identity morally prevents one from being in opposition to the state. Indigenous feminisms, however, allows us to recognize the value of both transnational and Indigenous forms of resistance. While Indigenous people become refuseniks through their love of the land, transnational subjects maintain their refusenik status through and despite their disconnection from the land. While both Lau and Tremblay’s film feature Naficy’s close-composition, claustrophobic scenes, they also contrast this with wide, landscape shots, further emphasizing the importance of land-based connection for Indigenous feminisms and resistance. For example, as was mentioned before, Lau features bright, colorful landscape scenes of Mahina and Po playing together; Tremblay ends her film with Little Bear and Sharon finding refuge in a field, after Little Bear has run away from school.

Naficy’s claim might be better framed and aided by a refocusing on the potential of film for transnational feminisms, such as via the following framing provided by Columpar, writing of the power of cinema for the transnational diasporic subject. Columpar cites scholars Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, writing on Eurocentrism and multiculturalism in media: “Given the geographically discontinuous nature of empire, cinema helped cement both a national and an imperial sense of belonging among disparate people”.[44] Keeping this quote in mind, we can focus on the power of cinema to articulate the experiences of both transnational and Indigenous subjects, and to connect these communities across diaspora and displacement.

Conclusion: Negotiating Disciplines, Negotiating the Academy

As a student of Asian American studies and Gender and Women’s studies, I am keenly aware of the prioritization of theory and complex language in academic spaces. I frequently find myself questioning and feeling frustrated by this, especially given the inaccessibility of this sort of language to many of those who are being “theorized” about. This question is central to my emphasis on the lessons the films I have chosen can provide for feminist spaces. During Lau’s guest speaker talk to my class, she spoke at length about her commitment to the practice of decolonizing film, and frequently working outside of “formal” film industry spaces . She emphasized a practice of non-exploitative filmmaking that centers reciprocity, community, empathy, humility, accountability, and regular communication between filmmakers, those being filmed, and all others involved in the filmmaking process.[45]

This commitment to working outside of formal academic spaces, and even formal film industry spaces, is reminiscent of the struggles transnational and Indigenous feminists (and women of color feminists in general) have faced and continue to face: denial of access to academic, organizing, and other liberatory spaces, and a lack of interest from these spaces in working towards the liberation of women of color. As the Combahee River Collective notes in their piece, “A Black Feminist Statement”, “Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation”.[46] Transnational and Indigenous feminisms filmmaking, then, can provide a space for unveiling and addressing the oppressions facing these specific groups via a more widely accessible medium. In both films explored in this essay, we see a careful, caring story being crafted about Indigeneity, which doesn’t shy away from telling the truth of the experiences of the characters in all of their joy, love, frustration, and sadness. We also see equally honest and nuanced portrayals of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and their land.

Exploring the theories of transnational feminism and Indigenous feminisms reveals intimate connections between the two, which encourages us to develop an incredibly nuanced understanding of borders as well as the lived experiences of those who hold identities that fall under the transnational and/or Indigenous subject categories. When depicted visually through filmmaking, we are further encouraged to understand the assemblages present in the lives of these subjects. While this conversation is one that I have only just begun to explore, I hope that I have at least made clear that Indigenous feminisms and transnational feminism provide ample knowledge from which both filmmaking and the academy can learn and grow, particularly as filmmaking functions both as a creative space and as a form of knowledge-production that is often more accessible than those of the academy and other “formal” thought spaces .

The Moon and the Night | Erin Lau

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