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Show COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ABSTRACTS Emma McFarland 46 FILM AS FEMININE LANGUAGE: THE PRIVILEGE OF LIMINAL SUBJECTIVITY IN SINK OR SWIM Emma McFarland (Margaret Toscano) Department of Languages and Literature University of Utah Sink or Swim, the title of Sue Friedrich's avant-garde filmic essay, lays bare the stakes of w o m e n within patriarchal systems of language: they must either sink or swim. The tides of feminism turned as Jacques Derrida elaborated the notion of linguistic "phallocentrism/'Derrida states that the masculine perspective is privileged in the construction of meaning; ergo, phallocentric language creates and maintains patriarchal power and dominance. Post-Derridian feminism began to focus on language as the locus of oppression. Sue Friedrich personalizes this struggle against language as she contemplates her relationship with her father, a professional linguist and an avid swimmer. But more than make a film about her struggle for independence, Friedrich turns the medium of film into a realization of feminine language that lies outside phallocentric construction. Sink or Swim speaks in multitudes as it combines the signifying modes of text, image, music, and verbal narration in a way that denies an assumed correlation. Friedrich refuses the directness of masculine language as she creates meaning in between what is said, shown, heard and read. Situating its ideas in the interstices of utterances, Friedrich's project can be read retroactively through Rosi Braidotti's theory of nomadic subjects. Braidotti too places female subjectivity in the gaps between the physical, symbolic, and social orders in which meaning is created. Largely influenced by the work of Luce Irigaray, Braidotti moves to break through the constraining hierarchy of binary oppositions in order to claim a more positive place for gender difference. This project imagines the film Sink or Swim as a performance of Irigaray's and Braidotti's feminisms that privileges the liminal subjectivity of w o m e n . Friedrich's film speaks between and around masculine language in a way that embraces both a proliferation of meaning and interpretation. Sink or Swim claims space amid phallocentric structures and Friedrich represents herself through the subversion of their terms. |