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What are the terms of evaluation that seem relevant in deciding whether a
film is feminist or anti-feminist? Which critical practices should be engaged in such
an evaluation? In recent and contemporary critical feminist practices, feminist
arguments are no longer based on a stable subject category of ‘‘woman’’ and there is
no longer any particular methodology upon which feminist theorists rely. The
category of ‘‘woman’’ has been revealed to be not an ahistorical, stable category but
an effect of material and representational practices. Further, feminist methodologies
have been concerned to contextualize the framing of the questions they ask, as well
as their place in the methodologies they employ. In addition to the refusal of an
essentialized female subject, feminists have called into question the idea that it is
possible to produce a ‘‘feminist method’’ based on the standpoint of a female
subjectivity, even where this subjectivity is admitted as a construct, arguing that this
extrapolation to the general from a particular point of view produces political, and
frequently racist, effects. In this essay, I consider Lars von Trier’s controversial film
Dogville (2003) as a case study to explore the relation of practices of representation
to questions of feminist justice. I argue that the film does a lot of good critical work
in showing the ways in which certain practices of representation can be mobilized to
produce a collectivity (or ‘‘sovereignty’’) that is seen to emanate from ‘‘the people’’
and to thereby instantiate authority, while simultaneously disguising the material
and political effects of its subjugation of ‘‘others.’’ However, in doing this work the
film produces its own problematic construction of universality and particularity.
Further, the film instrumentalises representations of sexual violence and subjection
in order to prove its point, and as productive as these tactics are to illuminating
questions of social justice, I argue that this representational practice produces
effects that need to be read as anti-feminist.