Histories of The Watermelon Woman

Research Article| September 01 2008 Histories of The Watermelon Woman: Reflexivity between Race and Gender Catherine Zimmer Catherine Zimmer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Camera Obscura (2008) 23 (2 (68)): 41–66. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-002 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Catherine Zimmer; Histories of The Watermelon Woman: Reflexivity between Race and Gender. Camera Obscura 1 September 2008; 23 (2 (68)): 41–66. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-002 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCamera Obscura Search Advanced Search This essay explores Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (1997) in the context of reflexive practice in film. The film has been variously approached as queer cinema, women's autobiographical and documentary cinema, and black cinema; this essay emphasizes how one might add to all of these discussions and explore their interrelations, by looking at the film through a history and analysis of cinematic reflexivity. As a metacinematic work both by and about an African American lesbian director, the film has much to say about the means of its own production and, even further, about the way that cinema “at the margins” has been framed within film studies. First examining the manner in which reflexive work, particularly work that seems to address the loss of authorial control by a film director, has in fact functioned to reinstall the primacy of a dominant subjectivity, the essay then turns to The Watermelon Woman to suggest how reflexivity might be used otherwise. A discussion of the film's reflexive movements illuminates the ways that certain feminist filmmaking practices, though highly influential, are excluded from theoretical discussions on modes of cinematic discourse and maintained instead in a circumscribed arena in which women's film is allowed to speak about women but not about film. More specifically, The Watermelon Woman both presents and represents the negotiations, mediations, and tensions triangulated among dominant film history, white feminist film studies and production, and black film history and production n the United States. The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2008 by Camera Obscura2008 Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content

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