Week 8: Difference (Trinh T. Minh-ha)

 

Blog Post Topic:

"Difference: 'A Special Third

World Women Issue'"

by Trinh T. Minh-ha

Trinh T. Minh-ha was asked in the late 80s to write this piece as a part of a special edition magazine on Third-World Women filmmakers. She is an award-winning filmmaker, but her Vietnamese background and identity was commonly emphasized as special when she was considered by the art community. Her writing goes over so many vital topics and I found this reading to be full of our most significant and deeply rooted societal issues. From the very beginning, she outlines that racism, superiority, and oppression are major elements in what she is talking about, and these points become clearer throughout. She covers how differently women are treated when they are not white, and how they are asked to prove and do more for just existing in this way. Duality is a concept Minh-ha goes over multiple times in the way that differences are meant to be both good and bad. The superiority of white women is assumed in most professional spaces, and the “specialness” of Third-World differences is supposed to mask this deficiency in a more pleasant and palatable manner. She spoke to the erasure and conformity of Third-World Women whenever efforts were made to “fix” the lack of diversity through tokenism (symbolic performance representation for the purpose of balancing inequal rights) and other superficial means. Although the feminist movement has worked to create space for women, this author distinguishes that we are still using the master’s tools and ideologies to reform definitions and ultimately are not affecting real change.

Still from "What About China?," Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2022,
HD video, color, sound, 135 minutes.
All images courtesy and copyright of the artist and Moongift Films.

bombmagazine.org/articles/2022/07/18/trinh-t-minh-ha

The concept of “I” was interesting to me as Trinh T. Minh-ha was effective in using a literary device of lowercase and uppercase “i” throughout her writing. She didn’t explain its use until the very end, where she spoke almost poetically about identity and our relative positions. It was challenging to follow some of what she said, but my understanding of what she was trying to say starts with how we all exist here on Earth, in our galaxy, together as a diverse unit. Even if our identities feel separate, no one exists in a vacuum alone and none of us can say that we’re not affected by other people, life, and environments. Minh-ha says there are infinite layers within us that add up to who we are, and we cannot say we are one fixed identity as a single, static person. (I’m a mom so I think of the movie “Inside Out” and how Joy gets upset and Anger can be happy.) Along those same lines, we are all complex people in our society who are part of the community we inhabit. Our identities overlap with each other and our communities overlap, too, in how we function and relate to each other, so we can all find many ways to understand each other. Her finishing idea seemed to be about how things should be interpreted and that We should investigate more carefully. Taking differences and varying representations into account is something that I have always noticed, but will put more thought into for my own artwork moving forward.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. “Difference: ‘A Special Third World Women Issue.’” Discourse 8, no. Fall-Winter, 1987.

Radhakrishnan, Shivani. “Trinh T. Minh-Ha by Shivani Radhakrishnan.” BOMB Magazine, July 18, 2022. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2022/07/18/trinh-t-minh-ha/.