Gaines’ Gaps: Political Mimesis in Racialized, Gendered, and Non-Human Bodies
ABSTRACT
When I reflect on the readings I have enjoyed most in this course, I keep coming back to Jane Gaines’ essay on political mimesis. What I enjoyed most about this piece was the way that it encourages readers to inhabit the world—or in this case, a screen—in a way that mimics Escobar’s theory of world-in-formation (participation in addition to observation). This essay uses Gaines’ theory of political mimesis to make better sense of Choy and Tajima’s film Who Killed Vincent Chin? as well as Livingston’s Paris is Burning and Castaing & Barbash’s Sweetgrass. Examining these films through scholarly works by Jane Gaines, Judith Butler, and Kim TallBear, this essay considers how bodies—both human and animal—becomes an important tool in film for eliciting mimesis, the audience connecting with the film through this lens of shared body-ness/shared humanity. This film also works to fill the gaps that Gaines’ essay fails to acknowledge—how mimesis works in settings where bodies are racialized and gendered, for instance. In all cases, this piece of writing aims to expose the ways in which mimesis makes that which is institutionally or culturally invisible more ethnographically visible, as the audience is put back in touch with the lives of others so as to humanize the big, political picture.
INTRODUCTION
Throughout the semester, I have been intrigued by Jane Gaines’ 1999 essay Political Mimesis (published in Collecting Visible Evidence). Here, Gaines defines political mimesis as a process that “begins in the body. Actualized, it is about the relationship between bodies in two locations—on the screen and in the audience—and it is the starting point for the consideration of what the one body makes the other do” (Gaines, 90). Political mimesis is, effectively, a “powerful mirroring” device—one capable of “produc[ing] on the bodies of spectors an almost involuntary mimicry of emotion or sensation [as felt by] the body on screen” (Gaines, 90). In countless course texts, particularly films by Christin Choy & Renee Tajima, Jennie Livingston, and Lucien Castaing & Ilisa Barbash (Who Killed Vincent Chin?, Paris is Burning, and Sweetgrass, respectively), we have witnessed Gaines’ theory in action—this idea that ethnographic film can teach us that “politics are not exclusively a matter of the head but can also be a matter of the heart” (Gaines, 88).
Figure 1: A 2019 study conducted by Kimora et al. on the Emotional State of Being Moved Elicited By Films found that film “can successfully induce the emotional state of being moved” (Kimura). Analysis of audiences’ emotional responses revealed “an increase in corrugator electromyography activity and skin conductance responses which in turn were modulated by the arousal level” (either arousal moving, low arousal moving, amusement, attachment, calmness, neutral) in accordance with the anticipated intensity level of each film (Kimura). To echo Gaines point, mimesis—and the emotional response it triggers—does indeed begin “in the body” (Gaines, 90).
The body, which Gaines does not gender or racialize (but implies is human) in her argument, becomes an important tool for inciting emotional responses from a viewer because the depiction of an on-screen body reminds the viewer of her own body—a moment of reflexivity where the audience is asked to connect with the film through this lens of shared body-ness/shared humanity. And yet, because it was written two and a half decades ago, Gaines’ essay does not hold as much weight in today’s world of representation as it once did. Now, films more frequently address issues of race, gender, and even filmmakers that contemplate what it might mean to be non-human or animal—all identities for which political mimesis is not as universally accessible. To see the film most clearly, an audience then needs to be able to understand the consciousness that a filmmaker—or that the camera itself—holds. While Gaines’ theory of body holds weight in the analysis of these films, it does not properly account for the ways in which cultural norms influence a camera—even in the most objective attempts to observe truth. Ultimately though, political mimesis captures so much that is right, especially in its ability to model how one might inhabit the world—or a screen—in a way that mimics Escobar’s theory of world-in-formation, making that which is institutionally invisible more ethnographically visible, as the audience is put back in touch with the lives of others so as to humanize the big, political picture.
WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?
Like the anecdotal story of Anita from Paul Farmer’s essay The Anthropology of Structural Violence, each of these three films relies on the emotional connectivity of human story to transport audiences onto the screen itself. In Who Killed Vincent Chin?, Choy and Tajima rely on human faces to achieve this effect, often juxtaposing scenes where Ronald Ebens—Vincent’s killer—emotionlessly recounts the facts of his murderous act with moments of distraught Lily Chin—Vincent’s mother—as she powerful mourns the loss of her son, whose photo-ed face also makes the occasional appearance (Choy & Tajima, 28:15).
Figure 2: Juxtaposing faces
These three images reveal not only the racial juxtaposition (between white and asian) within this film but also the different ways that camera works to frame these two types of faces. When examining Figure 2, we immediately recognize the more distanced view of Ebens that the camera establishes whereas the Chins faces are filmed so up-close that only part of their faces can fit on the screen. Through these juxtaposing shots, the camera already makes visible its consciousness. By shooting Ebens’ body from further away, the camera paints him as cold and distant, as less worthy of intimate, in-person connection, and the audience is less likely to establish a feeling of mimesis with him as a result.
Figure 3: Reversing preconceived notions of race
While subtle, the camera’s framing technique in these scenes isn’t accidental and is, instead, a strategic attempt to reverse an audience’s invisible but preconceived, structural notions about what it means to be asian in America. As revealed in Figure 3, even today, people of color are far more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than their white counterparts. The two ways that the camera frames its white and non white characters (distanced and up close, respectively) encourages us to re-relate (relationality!) to the two racial groups presented. But it is not only through the up-close framing of asian faces that Choy and Tajima work to create mimesis but also through the bodily emotions that Ms. Chin expresses.
Figure 4: Body in states of emotion
Choy and Tajima use Ms. Chin’s body to “…make struggle visceral, to go beyond the abstractly intellectual so as to produce a feeling of bodily swelling” in viewers (Gaines, 91). Ms. Chin’s grieving body is a potent site of mimesis not only because audiences are likely to know what it means to feel loss but also because they understand what it means to care for and love members of their own, individual families. Through Ms. Chin’s pain, audiences learn to see her, first and foremost, as a mother and to see Vincent as a son rather than a victim—the love between parent and child ultimately transcending the negative, institutional notions of asian-ness, which operate as an invisible background to the film. While Gaines’ essay does not detail how mimesis works amongst racialized bodies, the techniques that Choy and Tajima use in their film help reveal how Gaines’ theory can remain relevant in ethnographic films on race.
PARIS IS BURNING
Jennie Livingston’s film, Paris Is Burning, and Judith Butler’s essay, Paris Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion—are also important lenses through which to view Jane Gaines’ essay and to make sense of its gendered shortcomings. We watch Livingston harness a similar body-based technique (mimesis!) in Paris is Burning, but Livingston relies more so on the female body rather than the racialized body to humanize the film’s political context and to empower the film’s characters. In one scene, Livingston makes the concept of a sex change more visible and, therefore, more relatable or human for the audience by framing the female body as familial, as communal, as connective.
Figure 5: “All she wants for Christmas is her two front tits!” the Xtravaganza House sings, as they hug and kiss the body of their mother, Angie Xtravaganza (Livingston, 28:27).
Here, Livingston relies on the sensual body—Angie’s exposed breasts, which look like any woman’s exposed breasts—to make the idea of a sex change less startling for an audience and more empowering. The family-like support for Angie’s sex change only further humanizes the concept, as Livingston—like Choy and Tajima in Who Killed Vincent Chin?—mirrors back to us (via mimesis) some semblance of how the audience traditionally imagines a family’s matriarch, her body. This framing of the female body empowers Angie because it celebrates the parts of her that connect her back to the audience, that make her female and, therefore, human.
While Gaines’ theory of body works here, it does not, Butler argues, get at the whole picture, especially once the film starts digging more deeply into these more invisible ideas of gender. Butler argues that this is because the scope of the camera is actually gendered and presides over the film’s female bodies as much as it empowers them. Butler imagines the camera as a tool that embodies patriarchal notions of surveillance and control. She writes: “The camera itself is empowered as a phallic instrument. Moreover, the camera acts as a surgical instrument and operation, the vehicle through which the transubstantiation occurs. Livingston thus becomes the one with the power to turn men into women who, then, depend on the power of her gaze to become and remain women” (Butler, 135). Butler, put simply, is imagining the camera as having a consciousness or a body of its own—a gendered body—that mimics the male gaze, which can be defined as a man’s ability to control how society perceives the body of a female.
The consciousness of the camera as Gaines and Butler both imagine it—its ability to empower and disempower the female body—is best exhibited in Venus Xtravaganza’s final interview where it becomes clear that the way in which the camera captures Venus’ body—as powerfully feminine—is also what kills her, her death an erasure not only of what makes her feminine but also of all the cultural progress that she made through her body when she was alive.
Figure 6: The camera first frames Venus’ female body as powerful, as capable of destabilizing society’s definition of masculinity: “I’m so petite. I’m tiny—the blond hair, the light skin, the green eyes, the little features…The client’s features are bigger than my hands. Mine are perfect and little” (Livingston, 53:53). And yet, Venus’ body also entraps her: “I was with a guy, and he was playing with my titties until he touched me down there…He said you’re trying to give me AIDS…I should kill you” (Livingston, 55:00).
An audience then needs to be able to understand the consciousness that a camera itself holds is what ultimately permits or prevents mimesis from occurring in this film. While Gaines’ theory of body holds weight in the analysis of this film, it does not properly account for the ways in which gender influences a camera. Female bodies, Butler seems to argue, cannot be framed in the same ways that a male body can be, proving that Gaines’ theory of body is not as universally accessible as she originally imagined. And yet, while political mimesis, in the context of Paris is Burning, does not fully free a gendered body from societal trappings, Livingston’s use of political mimesis—its body-based connectivity—does grant her characters pockets of freedom—whoops of laughter—in moments that both move the audience and make all that the subjects risk worth risking.
Figure 7: In Paris is Burning, members of the Xtravaganza house feel free on the beach. In Sweetgrass, herders celebrate the return from the mountains in similar (bodily!) positions of joy.
SWEETGRASS
Sweetgrass is filmed more in a cinema verite style than Who Killed Vincent Chin? and Paris is Burning—Lucien Castaing and Ilisa Barbash adopting a fly-on-the-wall approach to filming. But still, Sweetgrass is not a strictly observational film. Instead, it is aware of its own relationality, its own use of political mimesis to establish connections between the audience and the film’s animal bodies, its herders, its landscape—creating an “interspecies community” (TallBear, 1). But Castaing and Barbash don’t just use mimesis to establish bodily connection between audience and subject. They also use it as a tool through which the film’s viewer might emotionally submerge herself within another species’ life. Because Sweetgrass deals with a whole series of non-human bodies (sheep, dogs, natural landscape), mimesis becomes, in this film, a kind of world-in-formation where viewers “can imagine [herself] in the first place as a participant, immersed with the whole of [her] being in the currents of a [world]: in the sunlight we see, the rain we hear and the wind we feel in” (Escobar, 87). Ultimately, the use of cinema verite—the perspective shots it offers, its insistence that we see (and participate in) the world as animals do—enhances the mimetic effects of this film, making the lives of non-humans, which are not just invisible but more often completely inaccessible to the human eye, ethnographically visible. To counter TallBear’s worry that “animal studies or the rhetoric of human/nonhuman may be an inadequate construction for capturing relations between beings and across cultures, be those Aboriginal, national, or disciplinary cultures,” Sweetgrass, as a mimetic ethnography (while not as indigenous-orineted as TallBear advocates for) still does a better job of getting at the essence of an animal—how it sees and moves through the world—than the non-ethnographic film does (TallBear, 5-6).
Figure 8: Meeting the sheep
From its beginning, Sweetgrass puts the audience in touch with a visual/audio perspective of what it means to be a non-human. Figure 8 offers three thumbnails of our first introduction to the film’s animal subjects. First, we see them from a distance—as a human would. Next, we are no longer observing the sheep but, instead, become the object of the animal’s stare. The scene becomes both comical and unsettling because, while the sheep is really staring at the cameraperson behind the lens, it feels as though the sheep is actually staring at us. Castaing and Barbash then become part of the mimetic process—something that we and the sheep both look and emote through. They become a part of the landscape that, invisible to the audience’s eye, allows for a new set of relations between audience and animal to take place, for the film’s human audience to begin viewing the animal as more of an equal—and for the camera to begin taking on a consciousness of its own. The third and final thumbnail camera encourages the audience to immerse itself in the body of the animal—for the audience to view the ground, the process of eating as a sheep would. This progression of thumbnails—which appear so early on in the film—offer a preview for the kind of work Sweetgrass hopes to get done. Like Castaing, who wears a camera on his head for parts of the film so as to make the camera an extension of his own body, Sweetgrass understands that “the world is not something that is given to us but something that we engage in by moving, touching, breathing, eating” and that through this act of participatory viewing/hearing we can more easily become a part of this new world that we are observing (Escobar, 82).
Figure 9: Zipple et al’s 2023 study on Animal Emotions and Consciousness: Researchers’ Perceptions, Biases, and Prospects for Future Progress
Perhaps Castaing and Barbash offer this perspective of eating because it is also an act that we, the human audience, partake in. The filming of human-like acts encourages an audience to connect with the film’s non-human subjects in the same way that Choy & Tajima and Livingston use familiar, human body parts to create mimesis (ie. faces, breasts). As seen in Figure 9, Zipple et al’s 2023 study on Animal Emotions and Consciousness: Researchers’ Perceptions, Biases, and Prospects for Future Progress actually reveals that humans are more likely to have an emotional response to a non-human species if the animal revealed its ability to act as a human does—to socialize, group live, show facial expressions, and more.* Put simply, by revealing what makes an animal a living, sentient being—such as eating—Castaing and Barbash were more likely to inject the feeling of mimesis into their audience, moving them.
Figure 10: The visible relationship between farmer and sheep—how close he must get to it in order to shear it and care for it…and how connective (and parent-like) this work is as a result.
Perhaps this is also why Castaing and Barbash focus so much on the parent-like relationship that occurs between sheep and farmer, especially in the first few days of a sheep’s life (Figure 10). We see this dependency play out in several scenes, such as when the farmers actually nurses a lamb back to life. In many ways, the birth of these lambs—their very coming into the world—is mediated by humans, who almost play a mother-like role to the lamb, which the audience connects with more easily as a result of its baby-like qualities.
Figure 11: Parental relationships among humans
Even in this moment above (where technology permeates the natural bubble of the mountains), Castaing and Barbash promote a sense of nature-based relationality, highlighting—still—the connections between human and non-human, as this farmer turns to his own mother in the same way that the sheep/lambs turn to the herders in earlier scenes for mother-like comfort, a feeling that the audience can also relate to.
Figure 12: Cacophony of sound across distance
Gaines writes that “films often make their appeal through the senses to the senses,” a statement that feels most true in the context of Sweetgrass (Gaines, 92). Instead of music, this film uses equal layers of human and animal voice to achieve the feeling of relationality through sound in addition to visuals. When filming, Castaing and Barbash also actually attached microphones to the film’s animals, allowing the filmmakers to capture animal noises across distance. As a result, many of the sounds that we hear in Sweetgrass are body-based—that of humans, of animals, of the landscape itself. This disconnect between what we hear and what we see—across distance— teaches us, I think, to not only relate to the film through sight but also through what we hear. This new way of seeing and hearing often across distances counters the audience’s typical mode of exploring the world, and in this sense, the film is asking us to newly experience the west and to trust the filmmaker throughout this process.
CONCLUSION
While Sweetgrass also relies on images of bodies to evoke a mimesis, because this film also relies on non-human subjects, it must also use other, more immersive, mimetic techniques in order to truly establish emotional connection between on-screen animal and off-screen viewer. Castaing and Barbash’s use of camera consciousness (seeing as an animal would), mother-child-like parallels, and animal voice all work together to establish a deeper, more meaningful mimesis, which spans more than Who Killed Vincent Chin? and Paris is Burning. Sweetgrass, like its counterparts, uses mimesis to sew closed the distances between screen and audience as well as kinds of human difference, but most importantly, it works across species, putting us back in touch with the lives of lifeforms so utterly different than our own. But ultimately, in all three of these films, Gaines’ political mimesis achieves something similar. By making that which is institutionally invisible more ethnographically visible (in the contexts of race, gender, and non-humans), mimesis moves audiences, spurring them to act—or at least to pursue the bigger, more honest political picture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Butler, Judith. 1993, “Paris Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” Ch. 4 in Bodies that Matter.
Castaing-Taylor, Lucien & Barbash, Ilisa. 2009, Sweetgrass.
Choy, Christin & Tajima, Renee. 1987, Who Killed Vincent Chin?
Escobar, Arturo. 2017. “The Background of Our Culture: Rationalism, Ontological Dualism, and Relationality,”
Fleck, Anna. “Infographic: U.S Hate Crimes Overwhelmingly over Race in 2023.” Statista, 21 Oct. 2024, www.statista.com/chart/33300/number-of-hate-crime-incidents-reported-in-the-united-states/.
Gaines, Jane. 1999, “Political Mimesis,” in Collecting Visible Evidence
Kimura, Kenta, et al. “Emotional State of Being Moved Elicited by Films: A Comparison With Several Positive Emotions.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, 2019, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0193.
Livingston, Jennie. 1990, Paris Is Burning.
TallBear, Kim. 2011, “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints.”
Zipple, Matthew N, et al. “Animal Emotions and Consciousness: Researchers’ Perceptions, Biases, and Prospects for Future Progress.” Pic, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 17 Oct. 2023, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10638804/.
