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Kum-Kum Bhavnani Shifting Passions, Changing Genres

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MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Kum-Kum BHAVNANI

Shifting Passions, Changing Genres

Often the worker or the peasant don’t have time to pause on the details of theirdaily lives; they live them and do not have time to tie them down. The film-maker, though, can link one detail to another to put a story together.

(Ousmane Sembene, 1987: 46)

As I move across what is, at times, a rather bleak landscape in which scholarlyefforts, political passion and intellectual commitments rarely collide, I reflect onwhat I have managed to achieve through my own commitments and passion tosee change occur, not only through protest, organization and the creation of genuinely democratic structures, but also as a result of stories being told and ideasbeing debated. I have always hoped that my work will unsettle the reader byexposing prevailing myths – for example, about culture, biology, gender, ‘race’.

For instance, in 1994, when I was an Associate Editor of Feminism &Psychology, I co-edited, with Ann Phoenix, a special issue of the journal called‘Shifting Identities, Shifting Racisms’. In that volume, Donna Haraway and I hada conversation, ‘Shifting the Subject’ (Bhavnani and Haraway, 1994) in which wediscussed how our personal biographies, alongside our political and academiccommitments, had led us to work in the way we did. We spent some ink reflect-ing on psychology as a discipline and how the area of study we know as psychology could be shifted to live up to its promise of being the study of the soul,the mind and human behaviour. We also talked about how central culture is tohuman life, and what each of us had tried to do to develop our own understand-ings of culture as a dynamic process that is racialized, gendered and class based(Donna insists she is a ‘dogged Marxist’ – see Haraway, 1989; 1996: 8; 2003).

Our desire to think about psychology as interdisciplinary or even anti-disciplinary has stayed with me and my comparatively recent turn to documen-tary film-making (The Shape of Water, Bhavnani, 2006b) has been influenced

Feminism & Psychology © 2008 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)http://fap.sagepub.com, Vol. 18(1): 21–34; 0959-3535DOI: 10.1177/0959353507084952



greatly by that conversation with Donna. In the past two decades, I have movedaway from critical and feminist psychology, via feminist sociology and episte-mology to Third World Development Studies. This move has been what hasensured my interdisciplinary passions continue to be realized, because to doThird World Development Studies I need to understand economics, politics, lit-erature and culture as well as sociology and psychology.

My work in Third World Studies focuses on women and the ways in whichwomen negotiate their/our conditions of existence. This has led to the developmentof a new paradigm, Women, Culture, Development (WCD), which I discuss later inthis article. Teaching about women, culture and development has meant that I havescreened a number of great documentaries in my classes, most of which centre onwomen living in the Third World (e.g. Love, Women, Flowers [Rodriguez andSilva, 1988]; Something Like a War [Dhanraj, 1991]; Amazon Sisters [Sweeney,1992]). What I found, however, was that, while there are many wonderful documentaries around, none quite did what I wanted to do – that is, show the livedrealities of women in differing regions of the Third World while documenting theirstruggles as they create social justice for themselves, their communities and others.In other words, I wanted films that presented women’s realities as the realities ofthose who are both experiencing hardship and are, simultaneously, active in the creation of a new world, and not only as people who are victims who need to berescued or saved by women and men living in the First World.

I also use novels in my classes, and have been able to find a good number ofnovels that do not fall into the victimology or salvation ‘trap’ of far too manydocumentary films. Using novels in classes (such as In the Time of the Butterflies[Alvarez, 1995], or Nervous Conditions [Dangarembga, 1988], or Beirut Blues[Al-Shaykh, 1995], or The Chosen Place, The Timeless People [Marshall, 1969],or The God of All Small Things [Roy, 1997]) permits students (both undergradu-ate and graduate) to be engaged with real people’s lives and stories. The novels Iuse are intended to complement the subject matter of my courses at the Universityof California and thus focus on people and issues who are seemingly distant –physically, experientially, emotionally and politically. What I have learnt is that, paradoxically, novels bring people’s stories to life in a way that standardacademic scholarship often does not. The irony for me, as a social scientist, there-fore, is that reading novels allows the reader to better comprehend the lives andstruggles of seemingly distant people while, often, academic work turns thosepeople into hypothetical constructs who are viewed as dealing with abstract,rather than grounded, lives.

I also knew that all of us who live in the First World have much to learn fromhow women in the Third World make change. And while I had conductedresearch, taught about the work done by women around the globe and writtenabout women in scholarly articles, I knew in my heart that their lives, strugglesand celebrations should be known by an audience wider than those who arepresently at universities. In this article, I will discuss how I have attempted torealize some of the potential of the WCD paradigm – its focus on lived experi-

22 Feminism & Psychology 18(1)



ences and creating social justice – through The Shape of Water. Following myreflections on film-making as art and as fieldwork, I will briefly describe thewomen and organizations featured in my documentary and how their presence inthe film renders the WCD paradigm relevant to key issues at the beginning of the21st century.

FILM-MAKING

Film-making is most often considered to be an art form. However, film can alsobe considered as fieldwork, for the making of a film/documentary demandsresearch that ultimately brings the subject/issue/topic/people much more directlyinto view. I turned to documentary film-making because documentary film, likenovels, has the potential to bring people’s stories to life in a powerful and imme-diate way. At the same time, however, like the scholarly analyst, the documen-tary film-maker integrates their own standpoints into the work. Standpointsbecome integrated through the selection of shots, how interviewees and theirwords are represented and through choices about what stories to tell. At the sametime, decisions are made as to what type of context to provide for those stories.For example: is it mainly a statistical context that is offered for the story? Whatintimate details of the key characters’ lived experiences should be highlighted?To what extent are ‘experts’ asked to offer analyses of the lived experiences? Itis these dimensions that documentary film conveys, offering a depth and texturedifferent from that of academic work, and that novels also offer, albeit in a different way. My desire to make a documentary emerged, therefore, because,like academic ethnography, I wanted to depict people speaking about their lives,yet always with the understanding that there has been substantial editing andchoices made as to what is presented on screen (I have previously written aboutthe meanings that emerge when presenting interviews in academic research, andhow the editing of those interviews is also reflective of the author(s)’ standpoints.See e.g. Bhavnani, 1993).

Despite the shifts in the topics of my intellectual passions, from critical socialand developmental psychology, to ‘race’ in the US imaginary, to the lived experiences of women in the Third World, my passion for ethnographic enquiryhas never been diluted (Bhavnani 2006a). Documentary film, however, allowsme to conduct ethnographic enquiry and simultaneously opens up the possibilityof seeing and creating those ‘unexpected connections’ about which Haraway(1988) writes so powerfully. Many agree that ethnographic work inevitably raisesissues about the accountability of the ethnographer (e.g. Tsing, 2005) and issuesof representation (e.g. Lutz, 2006). I consider it a public accountability becausethe discussions are often made in public via e.g. academic journals and publicevents, and are directed to a number of constituencies including the academy, theinterviewees and communities, and one’s own integrity. Documentary film-making is also subject to such public accountability.

BHAVNANI: Shifting Passions, Changing Genres 23



Of course, documentary is also different from academic work, because itshows the immediacy of people’s lives with a depth that the academic printedword seldom, if ever, can accomplish. Film also offers the chance to feel the textures and wholeness of those lives, which scholarly writing is seldom able todo. Although scholarly work can provide a depth of explicit analysis and contextthat is often impossible to achieve with documentary film, documentary filmallows us to witness dialogue and relationships among people, institutions andcultures in a unique way. That is, film is a special way to depict culture in action,and thus offers a set of truths in a form that scholarly writings cannot. InOncomouse, Donna Haraway (1996: 230) uses ‘stories to tell what I think is thetruth – a located, embodied, contingent and therefore real truth’. Haraway (1996:3) also discusses this idea of witnessing, when she states that the ‘modest witness. . . is suspicious, implicated, knowing, ignorant, worried and hopeful’. It is thosecharacteristics that informed my approach and style when I directed The Shape ofWater. Below, I discuss my academic research on development studies, cultureand gender in order to give readers some background into my theoretical sympa-thies before I return to the specifics of my documentary.

WOMEN, CULTURE, DEVELOPMENT

Development, when used in relation to the Third World, is an idea widely usedto understand how to ameliorate poverty in the Third World. ‘Development in anarrow sense refers to the planned processes by which resources, techniques andexpertise are brought together to bring about improved rates of economic growthin the Third World’ (Kabeer, 1994: 69). Thus, the conventional approach todevelopment studies draws on economistic frameworks as the foundation formeasuring change in all societies. After the Second World War and during theCold War era, the assumption was that, once economic modernization and indus-trialization were achieved, poverty would be lessened and Third World nationscould ‘catch up’ with First World societies.

One example of development in action was the recommendations put forward inthe Brandt Report of the 1970s (International Commission on InternationalDevelopment Issues, 1980). This policy document strongly suggested that thecountries of the First World needed to realize that the countries of the Third Worldhad to become ‘developed’ so that the inhabitants could become consumers for themanufactured goods produced in the First World. That way everyone would benefit – the producers in the First World would thereby halt the decline in manu-facturing with its attendant high unemployment rates, and people in the ThirdWorld, once they had the income to use to purchase consumer durables, could attainthe lifestyles of the people in the First World. Thus, it was hoped that the falling rateof profit could be assigned to the status of an extinct species.

Today it is apparent that this has not worked. It is now common knowledge thatmultinational corporations pay rock-bottom, or lower, wages to people of the




Third World – who are frequently but not exclusively women – to produce manufactured goods for the people of the First World to buy at ‘competitive’prices. It is well documented that this form of employment has led to an increasein the gap between the rich and the poor (UNIFEM, 2000). Even as labour hasbecome increasingly feminized – that is, as more and more women are enteringthe ranks of workers throughout the world – so, simultaneously, poverty is alsoincreasingly feminized as more and more women enter the ranks of the poor(Peterson and Runyan, 1999). We know that in 1998 2.8 billion people lived onless than (US) $2 a day, with 1.2 billion of that number living on less than $1 perday (World Bank, 2000). This number barely changed through the 1990s, thedecade of globalization. The United Nation’s (UN) Development Program Reportof 2002 suggests that, while the percentage of the world’s population living inextreme poverty dropped between 1990 and 1999 from 29 percent to 23 percent,this drop was due solely to the increase in population (HDR, 2002: 18). That is,as the population of the world went up, the ratio of people living in poverty wentdown, but the absolute numbers of people living in poverty hardly changed.Many now argue that this is because of, not despite, the much touted and laudedachievements of a global economy.

It is now accepted that the solution to world poverty is not to aim for a standardof living for poor people that approaches what is mistakenly thought of as thecommon lifestyle for people residing in the First World – cars, washing machines,dishwashers and so on (Mies and Shiva, 1993). This is because, as many know, 20percent of the world’s population (living in the First World) produce 80 percent ofthe world’s waste and pollution, harming both human and non-human (Bradshawand Wallace, 1996). Moreover, poverty in the First World is approaching dire levels. We see that the numbers of people who are incarcerated continues toincrease at a frightening rate (Bhavnani and Davis, 1996); the polemical cry oftwo decades ago that the way in which capitalist states best deal with poverty is toimprison the poor seems to have been realized (Reiman, 2003). Meanwhile,obscenely increasing salaries for the Chief Executive Officers and managers ofthe multinational corporations such as Enron (see Gibney, 2005) – people whohave no democratic accountability and yet control the futures of many in theworld – are also assumed to be how things have to be if the world is to progress.

In the last several years, the implications of both global warming and the newerthreat of the decline in oil production (‘peak oil’) have risen to public conscious-ness, as have the ominous consequences of such warming (see e.g. Savinar,2004). The 2003 war in Iraq initiated by President George W. Bush in the USAand supported eagerly by Tony Blair, then Prime Minister of the UK, is a recenthorror unleashed on the world with devastating effects on the people of Iraq. Thiswar, at the time of writing, is also likely to have massive negative implications forthe house of cards that is the US economy, and, beyond that, the world economy.

At the same time as we painstakingly gather all these pieces of information so that we may narrate a story that is persuasive and plausible, we know thatmerely giving figures or similar information about what is going on leads to a




numbness coupled with paralysis on the part of those who are being informed, as well as on the part of those who consider ourselves more fortunate than otherpeople – it all just seems hopeless. And, to state the obvious: it is the poorest populations who will be the most hurt by these crises. The only people whoappear to have any agency seem to be the rich and the very rich, and the rest (ofus) are either victims whose poverty only increases, or groups and people whofeel themselves buffeted by the prevailing winds of globalization.

In other words, many agree that development is at an impasse and has failedthe Third World (Bhavnani et al., forthcoming). However, if one thinks ofdevelopment as a form of planned social transformation (Kabeer, 1994), whetherby the state, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or grassroots organiza-tions, it becomes possible to see a way out of the impasse. That is, if the economicis not privileged above other frameworks – the cultural, gendered and sexual –there may be ways to initiate social transformations that ameliorate poverty andimprove life for the poor. This is where WCD comes in. This new approach todevelopment studies that I, along with Peter Chua, John Foran, Priya Kurian andDebashish Munshi, have begun work on, focuses on the integration of productionand reproduction in peoples’ lives (Chua et al., 2000; Bhavnani et al., 2003). It isa perspective that brings culture and the economic together alongside gender. TheWCD approach to culture argues that, although economic, political and socialstructures are important in shaping women’s lives, it is simultaneously necessaryto centre the relationship between production and reproduction (both biologicaland social), both of households and of communities, to ensure that women’sagency is visible. Thus, WCD suggests that it is lived experiences and structuresof feeling that must be the nodal points for scholarly analysis – not merely glob-alization, transnationalization and internationalization, which can be terms thatsilence how interdisciplinary analysis could contribute to an understanding of thepresent social and cultural conjunctures. In addition, because ‘global’ usuallyfocuses on the First World (Europe and the USA) and its relationship to the ThirdWorld, thereby continuing to privilege the First World even as it analyses globalrelationships, we argue that this focus turns the analytic gaze away from the ThirdWorld (Bhavnani et al., 2003). Thus, WCD begins from a concern with placingThird World women firmly at the centre. WCD focuses on women, not in orderto exclude men, but to suggest that alternative approaches to development aremost fruitful when they begin by centring women, because women’s lives showmost clearly how the private and public spheres are totally enmeshed with eachother for both women and men (Bhavnani et al., 2005). While the elements inWCD are not new (e.g. Sen and Grown, 1987), what is new is that we have putthem all together into one theoretical framework at a time when development –thought of as planned projects for social transformation whose starting point wasto alleviate poverty and inequality – is coming to be a less and less familiar term;at a time also when the horrors of globalization and its underlying philosophy ofneoliberalism – both being the very antithesis of the potential of a developmentthat centres people’s needs and lives – are taking its place. In addition, WCD is




self-consciously interdisciplinary and works in and against development studies,feminist studies and cultural studies to forge new lenses for comprehending in the21st century. In sum, this new paradigm for development studies is one that putswomen at the centre, culture on a par with political economy and keeps a focuson critical pedagogies, practices and movements for justice.

THE SHAPE OF WATER

The Shape of Water narrates the stories of powerful and peaceful-minded womenwho confront the destructive development of the Third World by infusing it withnew cultures and a passion for change. It journeys to Senegal, Jerusalem, Braziland India. This passion fosters, in Senegal, an end to female genital mutilation(FGM), initiated by the women who might, in a different temporal and culturalcontext, have had their daughters cut; in Jerusalem, it nourishes overt oppositionto the Israeli occupation of Palestine; in Brazil, it is the renewing of resources andpreservation of the rainforest spearheaded by women who tap trees to obtain rubber that ground the passion; and, in India, it is both the creation of a vast co-operative of rural women in India (the Self Employed Women’s Association) andthe foundation of a farm, Navdanya (in the foothills of the Himalaya), to preservenature and biodiversity through women’s role as seed keepers. The themes of thefilm – change, new traditions, peace, the environment, social justice – arerevealed through the personal stories of five women. By interweaving imageswith the words and actions of Mariam, Gila, Vandana, Dona Antonia andHiraben, my documentary offers fresh and nuanced insights into the lives ofwomen in the Third World.

As I said earlier, through my teaching and research, I have found that narra-tives of rescue and salvation often underlie documentaries about women’s livesin the Third World, a function, perhaps, of the discourses that are (un)consciouslytrapped in racism, ethnocentrism and an inability to see Third World peoples asagentic. In contrast, The Shape of Water presents a glimpse into women’s livesthat engages the tensions women encounter as they make change. The rise ofglobalization, the end of the Cold War, environmental degradation and faileddevelopment in the Third World have made the world’s contradictions even moreexplicit and evident than ever before. My film offers a look into women’s effortsto dispel apathy and extirpate poverty as they generate vibrant economic, socialand political alternatives.

The Shape of Water is based on the academic paradigm of WCD (e.g.Bhavnani and Chua, 2000; Bhavnani et al., 2003; Bhavnani et al., 2005 ); it isabout changing the dialogue about Third World women in the West by show-casing the women’s efforts to refashion Third World development. The intercon-nectedness of the women’s struggles and their day-to-day experiences offer aglimpse into global processes as they touch down into the lived experiences ofpeople around the globe. This film tackles the contradictions of such processes as




they unfold in the 21st century to show how the struggles of people in the ThirdWorld offer new ways for thinking about how to create social justice in both theThird and First Worlds.

The genre of film offers a different language through which to understand theworld. The visual quality of film – vision is also a metaphor about which I havelearnt a lot from Haraway (e.g. 1988) – means that the viewer is able to see thenon-verbal gestures and movements that accompany the inflections of the humanvoice, to experience the emotional tones through sight as well as some of the othersenses, and better able to comprehend the meaning of the pauses, emphases,silences and laughter for the characters on screen. Indeed, film permits the watch-ing of tensions and contradictions in people’s words, in their personalities and intheir analyses. Film allows gestures and facial expressions to fill the screen. For example, the look a 25-year-old Senegalese woman rubber tapper gave at the endof a moving two-sentence description of how she felt when she was cut at the ageof six – her contemporary persona is one of a rather tough woman who is clearabout her commitment to women’s rights – could not be captured except throughfilm, nor could the evident surprise of her band members at hearing about thisevent be related adequately through a scholarly sentence. We also see a womanrubber tapper taking a break from tapping trees by sitting down, rolling a cigaretteand then smoking it in the middle of the rain forest, an image that, for me, capturesher easy independence and her comfort inside the rain forest. What is made of itis up to the viewer, of course. But, as the director, I structured the film in order tocapture such moments in the hope of eliciting multiple and varying insights.

Almost everyone is aware that editing in film is a way in which one cannotonly convey ideas but also manipulate people. There is less acknowledgementthat all scholarly research (textual, historical, quantitative, ethnographic – tomention a few) is subject to the same editorial processes. My work in both docu-mentary film and ethnographic research has helped me to better grasp how eachworks with this dilemma; in both film-making and ethnography, I deal with pagesof field notes, many interviews and structural contexts, and also the return ‘home’(‘post-production’ in the language of film). Once I am ‘home’, I am much betterable to see what did happen and what people were/are saying about their lives,about social inequality, and about their relationships to social change. Editing isclearly a key part of the research process when the research is written – Whosevoices are to be represented? Which quotes are selected to illuminate what point?(see e.g. Bhavnani and Davis, 2000) – and film is no different. Yet, unlike themajority (but not all) of scholarly writings, a good film is one that traces andhence reflects in its very form the inconsistencies in people’s lives as we bumpup against those unexpected connections of which Haraway writes. However,coherence and consistency are injunctions, and rightly so, for written scholarlyresearch.

Because film uses a different language, it allows me to speak truths in a man-ner that is different from those I put forward in my written work. For example, inThe Shape of Water, I use the visual metaphor of a baobab tree along a dry, dusty




roadside in Senegal, and trust this evokes both the Amazonian rainforest and thedeserted and destroyed Palestinian dwellings in Jerusalem. At times, this image isaccompanied by Vidhya Rao singing, a cappella, a classical Indian song aboutwater. This image is also used to close the film and is intended to bring to mindlife on the planet and human inequalities as we look at the bare and dusty land-scape, and to remind us how privatization of water and seeds has created a loss inthe biodiversity of the planet. Yet, in using this same symbol in the opening shotsof the film, it is meant to suggest to viewers the possibility of new cultures beingcreated because we see the shoots of the baobab and its lonely fruit swayingslightly on a very still and hot day as we listen to the opening narration. Sameimage, different meanings.

Organizations in the Film

The idea for the film emerged from my own research, which explores the notionof alternative development by examining four examples of successful women’smovements for empowerment through the lens of the WCD paradigm. The fourorganizations I researched are the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA)in India, the Xapuri Women’s Group in Brazil (women rubber tappers plus others), Women in Black in Jerusalem (women against the Israeli occupation)and Tostan in Senegal (prominent in achieving the recent declarations to endfemale genital mutilation in that country). These organizations have beenresearched before but not as examples of alternative development or to betterunderstand why development strategies in the Third World have been generallyunsuccessful in reaching the poor, who are increasingly women. All four havebeen initiated by women for women (in contrast to, for example, the GrameenBank, which was set up by an academic male economist to help poor womenobtain credit). Each explicitly attends to the relationship between production andreproduction in women’s lives; taken together, they provide a thorough diversityin terms of region and issues.

SEWA was founded in 1971 as a trade union for women working in the infor-mal sector in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Since its success in defending the rightof women market traders to sell their wares in the market place, SEWA has setup a bank for microcredit (each of its members is a share holder), and provideschild care and access to health care for its members as well as literacy and otherskill development classes (Rose, 1992). SEWA is seen as a model of empower-ment for many organizations in India and also advises women on how best to create cooperatives (Singamma Sreenivasan Foundation, 1993; Bhowmik andJhabvala, 1996). It has over 220,000 members, 362 producer groups and 72 co-operatives (Srinivas, 1997).

While Chico Mendes, the now assassinated rubber tappers’ union president,was well known, very little scholarly work has attended to the women of Xapuri,Acre, Brazil, who were part of that union (see Campbell, 1995, for an exception),despite the fact that almost two-thirds of the women in Acre have tapped for




rubber at least once (Kainer and Duryea, 1992, cited in Campbell, 1995). TheXapuri Women’s Group – an organization of women rubber tappers – has been in existence since 1987, and provides rights and skills education, alongside achallenge to domestic violence.

Women in Black was started in January 1988 by Jewish women protestingagainst the war in Israel/Palestine. ‘The black clothing symbolizes the tragedy ofboth people, the Israeli and Palestinian’ (Women in Black, 1993). Since 1988,Women in Black have been standing at a weekly vigil, in silence, in Jerusalemand Tel-Aviv. There are presently Women in Black peace groups in many coun-tries (including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, India,Israel, Kosovo, Montenegro, Palestine, Serbia, Slovenia and the USA) and thereare also networks that exist via e-mail communication and art exhibits, as well asan annual peace conference (Cockburn, 1999).

Amnesty International (2004) estimates that 100–140 million girls and womenhave undergone FGM and that approximately 2 million are at risk of FGM everyyear. It is also an issue that leads to heated discussions about the roles of culturalpractices in the subordination of women, and calls to change such practices. Thepractice is opposed by local and international women’s organizations on thegrounds of health concerns for women (the cutting is often conducted in un-sanitary conditions and the women’s sexual health is also at risk), as the violationof a woman’s basic human right to enjoy sexual relations and as a form of insti-tutionalized violence against women (Kassindja and Bashir, 1998). As a result ofthe protests of women, by January 1999, the practice was banned in BurkinaFaso, the Central African Republic, Djibouti, Guinea, Senegal and Togo.

Tostan is an NGO in Senegal that has worked with rural peoples for some timein a basic human rights education program (Melching, 2001). In 1996, some ofthe women who had come together through Tostan established a series of pledgesthat FGM should be ceased, and spearheaded a widespread grassroots oppositionto it. Although the practice was declared illegal by the Senegalese government inJanuary 1999, many villages are still issuing public declarations against FGM asthe women persuade individuals to abandon the practice.

As a result of drawing on the above organizations, what might be being createdis a new form of comparative empirical work that is sociological in its origins butultimately interdisciplinary. To me, film is one form of comparative ethnographythat recounts stories with more dimensions than academic ethnography is able to,because film can visually and physically situate people and their relationships byembodying them in their spaces of work and home, and of community. In thatvein, film is particularly valuable for showing how people come together throughtheir daily lives and the multiple environments in which they have to operate. Itcan demand that the viewer, just as well as some written scholarship, immediatelyconsider issues of poverty, autonomy and accountability in relation to the ThirdWorld. I also suggest, a little hesitantly, I must confess, that because I am an academic I also can draw on skills and training not always present in documen-tary film-makers. For example, I have been trained to consider the multiple




angles on an issue and to compare and contrast different sites and cases. I havehoned my methodological skills as an ethnographer and interviewer, and myinsights as a feminist and anti-racist scholar are fairly sharp. I aim to be the modest witness who is not merely oppositional but someone whose suspicionsand hopes, anxieties and ignorances embroil me and my work into discourses ofchange.

IN CONCLUSION

The devastating destruction that I know and see of people, environments anddemocracy has led me to explore the theoretical, empirical, cultural and politicalinterconnections of women, culture and Third World development. In doing so,previous interests in critical social and developmental psychology (Bhavnani,1988), ethnography (Bhavnani, 1991), feminist epistemologies (Bhavnani, 1993)and racism in First World feminisms (e.g. Bhavnani and Coulson, 2003) are notlost but remain, layered and ever present, in my field of vision.

This particular intellectual and political history, set within the changing land-scape of globalization, has also allowed me to discover new forms of expressionand analysis. Film-making can take us a step closer to the active struggles of ordinary women and men against the future being written by elites. Film offers away to give back something to the subjects whose stories and voices make thefilm possible and bring it to life, and potentially also to others all around theworld facing related problems in the context of their particular struggles. In bring-ing together stories from across the world, it can generate dialogue and learningthat would otherwise be missed, among activists, scholars and audiences. It is yetanother way of fostering the ‘imaginative connections and hard-won practicalcoalition[s]’ (Haraway, 1996: 199) that we urgently need. Its promise under-scores our common hopes for a different future.

REFERENCES

Al-Shaykh, Hanan (1995) Beirut Blues. London: Chatto & Windus.Alvarez, Julia (1995) In the Time of Butterflies. New York: Plume.Amnesty International (2004) ‘International Zero Tolerance To FGM Day: Effective Meas-

ures Needed To Protect Girls From Female Genital Mutilation’, press release, accessed10 September 2005. Available: http://news.amnesty.org/index/ENGACT770182004

Bhavnani, Kum-Kum (1988) ‘Empowerment and Social Research’, TEXT 8(1): 41–51.Bhavnani, Kum-Kum (1991) Talking Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Bhavnani, Kum-Kum (1993) ‘Tracing the Contours: Feminist Research and Feminist

Objectivity’, Women’s Studies International Forum 16(2): 95–104.Bhavnani, Kum-Kum (2006a) ‘Interconnections and Configurations: Towards a Global

Feminist Ethnography’, in Sharon Hesse Biber (ed.) Handbook of Feminist Research,pp. 639–50. London: Sage.




Bhavnani, Kum-Kum (2006b) The Shape of Water, accessed 1 October 2007. Available:http://www.theshapeofwatermovie.com

Bhavnani, Kum-Kum and Chua, Peter (2000) ‘From Critical Psychology to CriticalDevelopment Studies’, International Journal of Critical Psychology 1(1): 62–78.

Bhavnani, Kum-Kum and Coulson, Meg (2003) ‘Feminism and “Race”’, in MaryEagleton (ed.) The Concise Companion to Feminist Theory, pp. 73–92. Oxford:Blackwell.

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Kum-Kum BHAVNANI is a Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Women’sCulture Development Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara,USA. She was trained as a developmental and social psychologist but now carries out research on women in the Third World. She considers herself to be afeminist scholar and has previously conducted research with youth in the UKand on ‘race’, class, gender and celebrity in the USA. Her first foray into film-making, The Shape of Water (www.theshapeofwater.com), has inspired her tocontinue making films based on her research.ADDRESS: Dept of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA93106–9430, USA. [email: [email protected]]




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