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conducted by Rainer herself, with the exception of the interview with Jenny, which is conducted by "Yvonne Washington," Rainer's African-
American alter ego. Essentially, the use of this alter ego allows Rainer to develop two levels of inquiry in the film. The first involves menopause, as it affects women of various economic and ethnic backgrounds, positively and negatively. The second involves race: "Yvonne Washington" is able to explore and critique Jenny's attitudes and the degree to which the shape of her thinking is determined not simply by her maturation as a woman, but by her privileged social status as a white woman with financial resources. Or to put this another way: since Jenny's flashback is based on Rainer's experiences after first moving to New York City, "Yvonne Washington" allows Rainer to interrogate herself as she questions other women. More fully than either
Near the Big Chakra
(which includes the vulvas of two black women among the thirty-seven) or
Riddles of the Sphinx
(where the relationship of Louise and Maxine crosses racial lines, without comment by either woman, and where the issue of the relationship of ethnic background and social class is raised only by implicationwe see a black woman cooking for the telephone operators in the company lunchroom),
Privilege
explores the complex set of relationships and distinctions between the loss (and gain) of "privilege" as a result of menopause and as a function of ethnic background. For Rainer the issue is not simply the woman's body as an index of Western society'sand the Western camera'sattitudes about gender; it is also an index of attitudes about race and language (Digna's marginalization as a Spanish speaker and the marginalization of other forms of languagesystems of signing employed by the deaf, for exampleare also explored in the film).
As a trio of films,
Near the Big Chakra, Riddles of the Sphinx,
and
Privilege
chart a trajectory of feminist concern over the past two decades. In a sense, each film builds from and subsumes the concerns of the previous films:
Riddles of the Sphinx
is as much a response to the fetishization of a restricted sense of the female body as Severson's film is; and
Privilege
responds both to that issue and to the issue of women's economic marginalization within modern social structures (and in the films that reflect these social structures). Together, the three films reflect a growing awareness that our assumptions about the female body and the economic marginalization of women must be conditioned by an awareness of the ways in which our "local" experiences of such issues are contextualized, both
inter
nationally, by the experiences of women and men around the world, and
intra
nationally, by virtue of the fact that nearly every modern nation has become a nexus of racial and ethnic experiences.
My discussion with Severson was accomplished through an exchange