Current Forum: Session 1: Images and Representation	Read 11 times 	
Date: 16-Jan-2001 00:43:28	
Author: MCKAHAN, JASON G. <jgm8530@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Stereotype: Essence or Essentialism? 	
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       I enjoyed Jeneen's insightful post and am very convinced that she understands well the real issues at stake in stereotyping. We should not be concerned with the positiveness or negativeness of the stereotype but how individual stereotypes and the very concept of "stereotype" is socially constructed within specific regimes of bourgeois, Western culture. The word did not exist until 1798, ironically in context with Didot’s discovery in making print more readily a mass media, and if words signify ideas, then the concept cannot have been discussed
or problematized until precisely then. Universalizing accounts for a great gulf of loose talk about "human nature". Some have even called stereotyping instinctive and genetic. Yet, no one 
stopped to ask how ideas are locked into certain frameworks ofidea and form (as David Simmon remarks, the two often have been considered inseparable, viz. Bordwell, Eisenstein, etc.) in 
particular historical periods. These frameworks can by no means be reduced to essence and biology. Stereotype is modern framework, not an essence. The problem with Lippmann is that the reader often walks away with "necessity" and "economy" as rationalizations for stereotyping. Although this may be true, he also specifically says that its application works directly within the "blooming, buzzing, confusion" of a specific modern society. If we can put stereotypes in their rightful context, then the analysis of the exact construct falls in behind. Stereotypes are only necessary for humans as long as they live within the regimes of mass society and when they are  removed from sexist, racist, classist - and foremost, alienated and imaginary - society, stereotypes may very well run out of fuel. I am not sure that this explanation leads to the end of critically studying stereotypes, but it does encourage us towards the view that they are not the inevitable bear traps of all mental life. 
       D. W. Griffith's film Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1914) provides a good example of how stereotyping in both content and form is constructed within a specific and non-arbitrary state policy against the Native American. The stereotyping does not come from any natural necessity, but is an expressive form of a committed racist and xenophobic society. Stereotypes were more than efficient and convenient, they were a means of state justification and interpellation under expansionism and colonialism, i.e. state policy and ideology. The common denial of Native American holocaust was projected on the screen in the inverted terms of "manifest destiny" and "savage."  The Indian attack, the primary spectacle that Battle at Elderbush Gulch offers, is a stereotype construction ringing forth in the words of the Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America:"He has incited domestic insurrections among us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our [sic] frontier the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." 
       The stereotypic content made American films look quite different in form from other films. The narrative and physical separation of the parallel montage constructs a delineated "white" 
and "savage" stereotype through spatial metonymy, the former pure and virtuous, the latter perilous and villainous. The "close shot" (CU) and POV interpellates the spectator as white. 
The siege of the natives threatens life and whiteness by anti-miscegenistic phobia (shoot the women rather than let them be captured) and the unannounced long shot of the empty frontier, 
but motivated by the gradual appearance of the US Cavalry, provides the melodramatic "last minute" rescue sequence that glorifies the white spectator. Some have argued that the formal 
and technical devices in cinema were introduced, or their meaning normalized, by reference to the white family and xenophobia. 
       Against the concept of positive stereotypes, I recall that Biograph Pictures boasted they, "always endeavored to depict the Redman [sic] as he really is, and not as cheap literature would
portray him" (quoted in Films in Review 26 [8] [1975] 459). However, all Griffith manages to do is synthesize racial stereotypes through the ideological conceptions of his specific 
historical period of 1914, which is very characteristic of both "positive" and “negative” stereotyping.