Feminist Political Practice

Feminist reviewers “met” Personal Best as issues of lesbianism, representation of women’s bodies, and feminist sexualities were becoming increasingly controversial within and between various feminist communities. Lesbian feminists, academic feminists, liberal feminists, radical feminists, feminists of color, all formed competing interpretive strategies around these issues. Those communities’ responses to cultural practices aside from cinematic representation informed the terms in which reviewers associated these issues with Personal Best.

The configuration of discourses that defined the stance of the U.S. women’s movement toward pornography became the primary mechanism through which reviewers linked Personal Best to issues of lesbianism, representation of women’s bodies, and feminist sexualities. After an initial euphoria of mass demonstrations against pornography in 1979 that reaffirmed solidarity reminiscent of the early seventies, alternative interpretations of pornography emerged and gained legitimacy within some communities (primarily academic communities). Lesley Stern distinguished five trajectories of dissent within feminists’ criticism of the anti-pornography movement: its moralism, calls for censorship, focus on patriarchal imaging of women, exclusion of female erotica or pornography, and failure to theorize the codes and conventions of pornographic representations.¹¹

The dissent around pornography contributed to a continuing controversy over feminist sexualities that added to the interpretive strategies available to feminist reviewers of Personal Best. Objections to some feminist discourses on lesbianism and proscriptions of certain sexual behaviors erupted in Heresies No. 12 and at the highly controversial conference at Barnard in April 1981. Entitled “The Scholar and the Feminist IX: Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” that conference addressed “women’s sexual pleasure, choice, and fantasy.”¹² It raised the questions of “whether the intensity of the ‘gay/straight’ split (in the mid 1970s) caused feminists to back away from sex as an issue and why there’s been a ‘desexualization’ of lesbianism—an emphasis on lesbianism as a political and social choice rather than a sexual, erotic one.”¹³ One of the legacies of this split is that feminist communities have placed themselves in the position of formulating strategies against pornography and homophobia without an adequate theory of sexuality.

Reports and debates on the conference (in The Village Voice and Off Our Backs), books on “politically incorrect sexuality”¹⁴ and “workshops” on “incorrect” sexuality at gatherings of lesbians and feminist at events like music festivals have added to the repertoire of interpretive strategies available to feminist reviewers about the “issue” of lesbianism.

Feminist reviewers of course also met Personal Best on the terrain of the wider culture’s ongoing negotiation of what counts as legitimate and illegitimate sexuality. The film appeared not long after an alleged lesbian lover named tennis player Billie Jean King in a “palimony suit.” Reviews of the film appearing in dominant media referred to this incident as proof of realism in the film. Feminists discussed how and whether they should address inferences in the dominant press that lesbianism was common in women’s sports.

The film also appeared in the context of a series of films from major American studios that tried to appeal to the gay market. It was the first to depict a lesbian relationship. This trend had as much to do with the attractiveness in 1982 of “the recession proof,” “upscale” market of gay men with high earning power and low financial obligations as it did with shifts in public attitude about the social acceptability of homosexuality.

Personal Best thus became an event within feminist communities not solely because its “surface subject matter” apparently referred to real events that were relevant to the political positions of women in 1982. Feminist reviewers actively gave it the status of event by using it in ongoing debates within feminist communities themselves. It gave reviewers the chance to ask how well their own interpretive strategies met the task of assessing patriarchal salients in a variety of cultural “messages” (like the news, Olympic competition policies, soft core pornography and popular culture) not directly related to Personal Best. This particular film gave feminist communities the chance to apply their already constructed interpretive strategies to Hollywood mainstream films and a new instance of filmic representation of women and women’s issues like lesbianism. In this way it became the occasion for feminist reviewers to process internal controversies by directly or implicitly referring to the shortcomings of competing feminist reviews and positions. At the same time, they negotiated positions from which to oppose interpretations by Hollywood’s promotional campaign and by non-feminist or anti-feminist film reviewers in the dominant press.

Pressbook Prereadings of Personal Best

A pressbook is made up of feature articles about the film’s text, actors, and production; glossy photos of scenes from the film, its production; and “glamour” portraits of the stars. It constitutes the industry’s interpretation of the film event in light of its specific economic imperatives. It is a mechanism for meeting those imperatives that mobilizes dominant interpretive norms to attempt, but never achieve, a unified, univocal definition of the film event designed to attract and satisfy the target audience.

Hollywood’s promotion of its own products suggests which interpretive strategies can be legitimately applied to the film, and by implication, which contexts of reception (made up of which audiences and which interpretive communities) can be legitimately inhabited.

In the seventies, the film industry responded to the increasingly fragmented nature of filmgoing audiences in the United States by targeting films to specific audiences. Some feminist audiences (primarily white, middle-class feminists) found themselves addressed by the film industry as the market audience for a number of “New Women’s Films” produced and distributed throughout the seventies.¹⁵ Promotion for films like Julia (1977), Girlfriends (1978), It’s My Turn (1980), An Unmarried Woman (1977), The Turning Point (1977), Rich and Famous (1982), and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1975) authorized interpretive strategies that see their protagonists as “strong,” “independent” women defining their lives in some ways against patriarchal norms, but not against capitalist values. This type of promotion privileged readings of the films through definitions of feminism current within the dominant media and within dominant culture.

Personal Best’s intertextual relations with these new women’s films and Hollywood’s gay theme films open its reading to both feminist and lesbian feminist interpretive strategies. But the pressbook prereading of Personal Best set up discursive salients that refused to lend legitimacy to reception contexts that would interpret Personal Best as a “lesbian” film. Instead, the prereading mobilized dominant interpretive norms in an attempt to define the film as a sports movie starring beautiful, scantily clad women in (hetero) sexualized motion.

For example, the pressbook relied upon dominant notions of realism and authenticity to establish a discursive salient to support its claim that the film was primarily about sports and women athletes (not about a lesbian relationship). The pressbook gave most weight and description to the money and time spent on insuring the authenticity of the film’s representation of women as athletes in track events. It celebrated facts like these: some scenes were shot on location during the 1980 Olympic trials, 19 world class athletes made up the cast, director Robert Towne consulted with athletes for technical accuracy throughout the planning and production of the film, Mariel Hemingway spent a year training for her role as an Olympic pentathlete, Towne chose Patrice Donnelly to co-star because of her athletic ability as much as for the likelihood that she could act.

The most detailed description and interpretation of their relationship appears in the pressbook’s “production notes.” That article defines their relationship with: “They met as strangers at the 1976 Olympic trials. They became friends, lovers, and ultimately competitors facing each other in the pentathlon at the Olympic trials in 1980.” It goes on to interpret their relationship this way:

Theirs is a relationship that suggests that the “war between the sexes” is not a battle over gender, but over sexuality. Male or female, how do you compete with a body you have already surrendered to your opponent?

Wars and races inevitably come down to one moment, and whatever you call that moment, “going for it,” or “laying your ass on the line,” it calls for everything in you—total risk fueled by fierce discipline and even fiercer desire. It’s the surest way to win a race, and the surest way to lose a lover.

These references to “gender” and “sexuality” are so ambiguous that they border on unintelligibility. What is clear is the attempt to explain the relationship between the two women from within the structures of heterosexual relationships. It is a heterosexual orientation that defined their relationship as a “war between the sexes.” While that phrase could be read in the “traditional” sense, within the historical context of the film’s release it constitutes a discursive salient against feminist interpretive strategies. It asserts that “male or female,” sexuality is the same, since sports, sexuality and feminism are all characterized by a competitiveness that both men and women share. In the second paragraph, it asserts that fierce competition, discipline and desire (sexual/competitive?) is the “surest way to lose a lover”—i.e. that feminism makes heterosexual relationships impossible.

Unlike the production of Making Love (1982), for which scriptwriters consulted with gay men for matters of “authenticity,” and then tried to attract gay male audiences by publicizing this fact, no members of the lesbian or feminist communities were hired as technical assistants to insure the authenticity of the portrayal of the lesbian relationship or the position of women/lesbians in Olympic sports. This is consistent with other instances in which media producers (like those for broadcast television’s Dynasty) hire gay consultants to insure the “correct” representation of a gay male couple, but lesbians remain comparatively “invisible” within dominant culture.

The pressbook prereading further resisted feminist or lesbian feminist interpretive strategies by constructing a second discursive salient around the issue of the nature and significance of the relationship between Chris and Tory. Pressbook feature articles and photo captions marginalized their relationship by confining references to their becoming “lovers” to single sentences, like: “They become friends, lovers, and ultimately competitors at the 1976 Olympic Trials.” The pressbook further marginalizes their relationship by undercutting whatever potentially radical critique of heterosexual relations it might imply. Pressbook features tried to “tame” the lesbian relationship by using heterosexual norms to explain it—describing it in terms like “the war between the sexes,” as competitive, as “only sexual,” as erotic spectacle, as romance—all norms that are the objects of vigorous critique by feminist communities. The feature article on Scott Glenn, the coach, describes him as “always trying to guess how his demands for excellence are best served—by their [Chris and Tory’s] being in each other’s bed or at each other’s throat.” Even this explicit reference to their sexual relationship subordinates it to competition and male control.

But of course, the radical potential of their relationship cannot be contained within these norms. The pressbook attempts to make the excess safe by trivializing lesbian sexuality as adolescent (describing the women as “awkward,” “embarrassed,” and “rambunctious” when together). Photographs and captions masculinize Tory and feminize Chris, thus perpetuating butch/femme stereotypes and protecting the star (Mariel Hemingway) from the stigma of lesbianism. The pressbook uses the word “love” to describe only one relationship in the film—the heterosexual Chris/Denny couple in a photo caption that reads: “Time for Love—Mariel Hemingway is comforted by her boyfriend Denny Stites, played by Kenny Moore, in a tender moment from Personal Best.”

Dominant Media Reviews

Dominant media reviews of the film show how the institution of popular, liberal film criticism established a discursive space that challenges the attempted unity and univocality of the promotion’s interpretations. As a result, dominant reviews draw the pressbook into alternative discursive formations competing within the hegemonic bloc. As such, the dominant reviews register the contradictions that the hegemonic bloc tolerates—in fact celebrates as pluralistic.

Reviews of the film appeared in the dominant media in the context of the feminist movement’s ongoing production of increasingly numerous and visible oppositional interpretive strategies. This context required the dominant reviewer to ignore, argue against, adopt, or adapt feminist positions when interpreting the film. Reviewers recognized elements of Personal Best as “issues,” or “interesting,” or “significant” and worthy of comment because the antagonisms raised by alternative feminist interpretive strategies around these issues made simple application of dominant interpretive strategies problematic.

The ethic of journalistic “objectivity” and “fairness” and the dominant political ideology of pluralism made it difficult for dominant media reviewers to aggressively undercut the numerous, visible feminist interpretive strategies constructed by the women’s movement. Unlike the pressbook, dominant reviewers typically resisted feminist interpretive strategies by acknowledging them, but deforming them in the service of a sexist and heterosexist hegemony.

For example, two central feminist interpretive strategies redefine the private as public and socially constructed; and redefine women as a social group united in struggle against common oppressors. Each of these is deformed by dominant reviewers who, against the pressbook, acknowledged that the women in Personal Best engaged in a significant sexual relationship and gave much space to interpreting that relationship. But they psychologized and individualized the lesbian relationship, describing it in terms of the problems and passages of individuals. In Rolling Stone, Sragow asserts that “Towne imbues the film with a carnality that’s completely pure: the euphoria of an adolescent’s struggle for self-creation . . . the movie itself is, in part, a panegyric to female youth.”¹⁶ This defines the relationship as a stage in each woman’s individual development, not as an end in itself or as a mutual exploration of alternative social relations. Parfit’s review in The Runner accepts director Towne’s interpretation without question: “. . . it has nothing to do with lesbianism—it just has to do with people whose bodies are really a mode of knowledge. They learn their limitations and coincidentally, they struggle with the burden of their own sexuality, whatever it is.”¹⁷ This interprets the relationship not as a struggle existing within politics and sexuality, but as a natural, “innocent” consequence of circumstances. Dominant reviewers consistently gave the lesbian relationship the status of the film’s plot device for drawing out more worthy, primary themes like competition, coming of age, goal seeking.

Feminist Reviews of Personal Best

Recently, cultural critics have begun to investigate the social production of the conditions for pleasure and the historically specific nature of formations of pleasure. Feminist communities’ interpretations of Personal Best became illicitly pleasurable when oppositional viewing contexts and interpretive strategies allowed them to reject the terms for pleasure offered by the pressbook and dominant reviews—namely, that women spectators identify pleasurably with their own oppression and objectification. An analysis of the terms by which feminist communities appropriated Personal Best shows two very different types of interpretive activities and the illicit pleasures which they make possible.

First, reviewers writing in both liberal and socialist feminist publications seemed “satisfied” with strategizing for what Terry Lovell calls intellectual pleasures. Their activity validates film studies rhetoric of “audience as producer of meanings,” which defines the work of meaning production as “intellectual labor of thinking.”¹⁸ For example, liberal feminist reviewers expressed pleasure in seeing satisfaction of that community’s goals within a dominant media text, namely the undermining of stereotypes, the achievement of women in male-dominated fields, and the representation of women athletes as beautiful, graceful, and strong. Pleasure in viewing became a possibility as liberal feminists matched the “positive” and “negative” representations of women already existing in the liberal feminist communities’ discourses about how media images affect women’s social status to the representations in Personal Best. Socialist feminist reviewers reported finding pleasure in undermining the press-book’s prereading or the dominant reviewers’ interpretations and the patriarchally defined pleasures they offered. Their pleasure lay in the intellectual activity of exposing the working of patriarchal discourses and constructing a discourse in opposition to it.

Liberal and socialist reviewers rejected dominant media interpretations of Personal Best without altering the conventional significance of what most popular and academic audiences consider to be fundamental formal and stylistic elements of narrative films. For example, liberal and socialist feminist reviewers assessed the ending within its “own terms.” That is, they retained the conventionally agreed upon status and significance of the ending to the interpretation of the film’s overall theme. They left “intact” dominant definitions of how length of time on screen defines major and minor characters, and what counts as causes and effects in the narrative chain of events.

But this does not describe the appropriation of Personal Best by the lesbian feminist reviewers. The position within feminist communities that is one of the most marginalized, silenced, and debased by the current hegemonic bloc launched the most radical rewriting of the film event of Personal Best. Lesbian feminist reviewers launched this rewriting in order to create discursive conditions supportive of what Terry Lovell calls social pleasures in addition to “intellectual” pleasures—pleasures of identification, of recognition, of validation.

Lesbian feminist reviewers strategized for those pleasures through a variety of interpretive moves. Some resisted the narrative’s heterosexist closure and imagined what would happen to the characters in a lesbian future. For example, one reviewer offered a fantasized description of a romantically successful reunion of Chris and Tory at the next Olympics that would complete her rewritten version of the film in which the two women really were in love and committed to each other, despite what she recognized to be the film’s attempt to trivialize their commitment.¹⁹

Most lesbian feminist reviewers ignored large sections of narrative material focusing on heterosexual romance, making no reference to their existence or conventionally obvious implications for the film’s preferred heterosexist “meaning.” Some redefined “main characters” and “supporting character” in order to elevate Patrice Donnelly as the film’s star despite the publicity’s promotion of Mariel Hemingway as star and the relative length of screen time each character occupied. Lesbian feminist reviewers consistently referred to Patrice Donnelly’s performance as convincingly “lesbian” and pleasurable to identify with, reinterpreting Donnelly as the appropriate “object of desire” against the pressbook’s and dominant media reviews contextualization of Mariel Hemingway as appropriate object of heterosexual desire.

In a move that points to possibilities of strategizing for pleasure that go beyond reading films “against the grain,” some reviewers named and illicitly eroticized moments of the film’s “inadvertent lesbian verisimilitude.” The “otherness” of lesbian cultures’ codes of body language, facial expression, use of voice, structuring and expression of desire, and assertions of strength in the face of male domination and prerogative, makes these codes unavailable and inaccessible to most dominant media producers and audiences, except as they enter dominant discourse in antiquated or stereotyped and clichéd forms. Those aspects of Donnelly’s performance the dominant reviewers labeled “lesbian,” i.e., her “bawdiness,” “fierce combativeness,” and “loyalty” (read: “clinging”), were interpreted by lesbian feminist reviewers as antiquated, stereotyped, or cliched representations of lesbian behavior. They expressed pleasure in watching the dominant media “get it wrong,” in watching it attempt, but fail, to colonize “real” lesbian space.

The otherness of lesbian culture thus raises the possibility for films like Personal Best to “get it right”—unintentionally. Lesbian feminists employing their own communities’ interpretive strategies “recognized” moments of lesbian verisimilitude in Donnelly’s performance, for example, as “definitely lesbian” within those communities’ current practices. Lesbian reviewers referred to the verisimilitude of Donnelly’s body language, facial expression, use of voice, expression of desire, and strength in the face of male heterosexual dominance. Reviewers celebrated these moments with references to the viewing behavior of other lesbians in theaters—clapping, laughter, and feelings of validation in a context otherwise reserved for the reproduction of heterosexist romance.

Lesbian feminist reviewers interpreted inadvertent verisimilitude as uncolonized by dominant discourse, that is, unrecognized as part of those private, personal spaces created by oppositional cultures and therefore unarticulated to dominant stereotypes and myths of lesbianism. Those moments became opportunities for pleasurable identification with Patrice Donnelly as lesbian, who could become the object of lesbian desire in terms that felt uncontrived, “real,” unthreatening, unco-opted.

I am claiming that in addition to intellectual pleasures, lesbian feminist appropriations of Personal Best consciously engaged with discursive fields of what Terry Lovell calls intersubjectively constituted social pleasures:

The pleasures of a text may be grounded in pleasures of an essentially public and social kind. For instance, pleasure of common experiences identified and celebrated in art, and through this celebration, given recognition and validation; pleasures of solidarity to which this sharing may give rise; pleasure in shared and socially defined aspirations and hopes, in a sense of identity and community. Thus, film viewing is turned into an oppositional act when lesbian feminist audiences are able to find pleasure and objects for illicit desire in that which is most threatening to dominant sexual politics.²⁰

Collectively constructed social pleasures define, in part, the possibilities and limitations of feminist and lesbian feminist sexualities, including erotically pleasing identifications with aspects of the film image and narrative. The history of lesbian feminist communities is primarily one of struggles to carve out of dominant discourses space for their own sexualities, identities, and existence as communities. Lesbian feminist reviewers seem to have responded to the marginalization, silencing, and debasement that dominant discourses work on lesbian feminist discourses by moving the field of social pleasures described by Lovell to the center of their interpretive activities. Social pleasures like identification, recognition, and validation became, in the case of Personal Best, the articulating terms through which reviewers inflected dominant discourses with changes in meaning.

The terms of lesbian feminist social pleasures require a rejection and alteration of discourses and practices at the very center of the hegemonic bloc. These changes send reverberations throughout the social formation. Likewise, lesbian feminist viewing pleasures depend upon interpretive strategies capable of rejecting and altering the “meaning” of film practices considered central to filmic representation. This sends reverberations throughout the film’s system of signification. For example, against dominant interpretations of Hollywood film practice, but consistent with the conditions for lesbian feminist social pleasure, lesbian feminists interpreted Donnelly as the main character in the narrative. The result: the significance of key narrative events is altered in a way that makes it possible to interpret the film’s ending as a validation of lesbianism.

Contemporary ideological film criticism is capable of discussing how we can see Personal Best as a limit case that defines what is currently possible and acceptable within dominant discourses like Hollywood films for the representation of lesbian communities and sexualities. I am suggesting that we try to understand lesbian feminist reviews of Personal Best as limit cases of what is currently possible within that community’s strategizings for pleasure. For example, lesbian feminist reviewers stopped short of rearranging the film’s chronological order, severing or rearranging cause-effect relationships in the narrative and changing who does what in the narrative.

These limits in oppositional appropriation are set in the specific relations between this film event and this audience, and the antagonisms between this audience and other audiences. The terms of the antagonisms between groups generate constraints, pressures, possibilities and desires that inform the nature and priorities of their interpretive strategies.

Dominant mechanisms of promotion and criticism mounted discursive salients against feminist initiatives around the status of women in sports, the representation of women and lesbianism by co-opting, deforming, or ignoring those initiatives in the production and promotion of Personal Best. Liberal feminists adapted to these constraints, social feminists exposed them, and lesbian feminists found pleasure in moments of un-colonized verisimilitude of the “otherness” of their culture. An understanding of this process can help protesting groups use the public discourses their communities generate around film events as indicators of the constraints on their own oppositional interpretive strategies and as challenges to generate interpretive strategies and political action that meet current political imperatives.

NOTES

Another version of this article appears in Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture, ed. Leslie G. Roman and Linda K. Christian-Smith (Philadelphia: Falmer Press, 1988).

1. Personal Best is a 1982 Warner Brothers release about two women athletes, Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) and Tory Skinner (Patrice Donnelly), who meet at the 1976 Olympic Track Trials and become friends and lovers. They live together for three years, but after their male coach places them in direct competition with each other for a place on the Olympic Pentathlon team and hints that Tory is deliberately sabatoging Chris’s training progress, they break up. Chris has an affair with a male Olympic swimmer, Denny. The two women meet again at the 1980 Olympic Track Trials. They reaffirm their friendship after Chris sacrifices her own chance to place first in the trials by burning out the lead runner early in the race so that Tory can place in the 800 meter event. Both women win a place in the 1980 Olympic team.

2. When referring to feminist and lesbian feminist communities throughout this article, I use the plural to indicate the multiplicity of feminist positions and identities in the United States women’s movement depending upon race, class, and sexual orientation.

3. Richard Johnson, “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Occasional Paper No. 75, Birmingham, England: Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1983), 44.

4. The liberal and socialist feminist reviews I used appeared in the following publications in 1982: The Feminist Connection, Madison, WI; New Directions for Women, Westwood, NJ; Sojourner: The New England Women’s Journal of News, Opinion, and the Arts, Cambridge, MA; The NOW Times, Washington, DC; Jump Cut, Chicago, IL; Amazon, Milwaukee, WI; Valley Women’s Voice, Northampton, MA. The lesbian feminist reviews appeared in Gay Madison, Madison, WI; The Lesbian News, Los Angeles, CA; Off Our Backs, Washington, DC; TeleWoman, Pleasant Hill, CA; Lesbian Connections. This article summarizes conclusions and implications drawn from my larger study entitled “The Power of Interpretive Communities: Feminist Appropriations of Personal Best,” unpublished dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1984.

5. The concepts of “interpretive conventions” and “interpretive communities” have been offered in contemporary literary criticism as a way of understanding how readers determine the reading experience. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text In This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1980) and Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1982). For a critique of these concepts and a politicization of their use, see Ellsworth.

6. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1984).

7. Richard Corliss, “Coming on Strong, The New Ideal of Beauty,” Time, August 1982, 75-76.

8. Ibid., 76.

9. Camille Kittrell, “Better, Not Best,” Sojourner, April 1982, 22.

10. Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” Culture, Society, and the Media, London: Methuen (1982), 78.

11. Lesley Stern, “Feminism and Cinema: Exchanges,” Screen 20, Nos. 3/4 (1979-80), 89-105.

12. A collection of papers presented at this conference has been published in Ann Snitow, ed., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, New York: Monthly Review (1983).

13. Lisa Orlando, “Bad Girls and ‘Good’ Politics,” The Village Voice Literary Supplement, December 1982, 17.

14. See for example, Samois, Coming to Power: Writings and graphics on Lesbian S/M, 2nd ed., Boston: Alyson Publishing (1982).

15. Charlotte Brundson, “A Subject for the Seventies . . .” Screen 23, No. 3 (1982): 20-29.

16. Michael Sragow, “First-time Director Robert Towne Comes Upon Winner,” Rolling Stone, 15 April 1982, 34.

17. Michael Parfit, “ Personal Best,” The Runner, February 1982, reprint, 2.

18. Terry Lovell, Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics, Pleasure, London: British Film Institute (1980), 94.

19. Anne J. D’Arcy, “ Personal Best,” Telewoman, May 1982, 5.

20. Ibid., 95.