Re/turning the Gaze: Unsettling settler logics through multimedia storytelling

Rice, C., Dion, S.D., Fowlie, H., & Mündel, I. (2020). Re/turning the Gaze: Unsettling settler logics through multimedia storytelling. Feminist Media Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1707256

Abstract

Drawing on three decolonizing feminist arts-based research projects, we discuss possibilities for making multimedia stories that counter, respond to, and re/turn the heteropatriarchal settler colonial gaze. All three projects use a participatory videomaking method that involves misrepresented communities producing short films to advance social justice. We explore how the creation of narrative videos by Indigenous researchers, educators, students, and artists, and allies offer multiple avenues for re-turning the interconnected gaze of heteropatriarchy and colonialism, creating a feminist decolonizing aesthetic—an embedded and embodied aesthetic—that consciously weaves together process and form. We consider moments of re/turning, refusing, and reckoning with the colonizing masculinist gaze through analyzing the videos organized along three themes: the catalyzing effects of educational experiences, both destructive and empowering; the complex decolonizing affects of love; and the pervasive and debilitating effects of everyday gendered racism in/beyond school. We offer reflective analysis by drawing on feminist decolonializing theories on the power in looking and in interrogating heteropatriarchal colonial discourse. Each of the stories that we analyze re/turns the interconnected gaze of heteropatriarchy/colonialism in ways that extend responsibility for colonialism, for misogyny, for racism, for gender/sexual normativity, to the viewers of these films—to all of us.