Neither/Nor: IDFA's "The Female Gaze" as subaltern public sphere for feminist discourse.

Abstract

This thesis has conducted research into the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA). In 2014, IDFA had a subcategory named “The Female Gaze,” which focused on the question as to whether women make different films. This interpretation is limited in its conception, leaving important aspects of the female gaze (such as individuality and agency) aside altogether. Moreover, IDFA failed to provide an actual definition of the female gaze; instead, it merely posed a question. This thesis analyzed if a subaltern public sphere for feminist discourse could arise within the parameters of IDFA’s “The Female Gaze” subcategory. Nancy Fraser’s alterations to Habermas’ public sphere conceptions were presented as the main theoretical framework, and the method involved conducting a close reading of the booklet created for the subcategory. The main result of this research revealed that the festival placed a considerable amount of emphasis on the collectiveness to which female representation is often condemned within patriarchal society. Both in the interviews with directors and the descriptions of programmed films, IDFA’s editors seemed stuck in a traditional way of thinking and were manifestly unable to establish a subaltern public sphere for feminist discourse. IDFA, being a documentary festival, could have had the possibility to represent marginalized discourse as a larger festival. Programming a subcategory to highlight women in film seems to be a positive stepping-stone for such discourse; however, IDFA missed the mark for representing feminist discourse by adhering to a highly limited interpretation of the female gaze, entirely excluding the components that make the female gaze emancipatory and representing women as merely a collective of domestic beings.