Designated Identities In The Film Ricerche By Sharon Hayes

Designated Identities

Ricerche: three a film created by Sharon Hayes depicts the artist interviewing thirty- five women at an all women’s college, Mount Holyoke College. Hayes questions the group of women about their sexuality and gender with different women answering questions and arguing their points. She empowers their voices and equalizes their different opinions, allowing them to debate and question each other. Hayes explores the elements of an identity as well as how labels act to suppress an individual through her questions and the responses she receives.

The setting of the video starts at Mount Holyoke College and stays set in the same location throughout the interview. Initially, it isn’t apparent how many women are present

Women’s colleges were originally thought of as being a school for lesbians and feminist ideals. Now they are considered backwards with only forty-seven schools still existing in America but as Hayes discovered although the institution is old it isn’t as conservative as many would assume. In retrospect Mount Holyoke’s students have proven within the video to be extremely progressive in their opinions on sexuality and gender. As one woman stated most women are more open to sexual experimentation when surrounded by peers of the same gender and similar mindsets. Another woman also talked about being able to be more vocal on female rights without backlash that could be found at coed colleges where feminism may not be a popular idea. Furthermore, despite being a college specifically meant for women some students find themselves identifying as male within their four years and Mount Holyoke makes accommodations allowing them to stay. In comparison many coed colleges don’t recognize transgender students and some may not even admit them. However, the video goes beyond simply learning about the conflicts women at women’s colleges face and is acknowledging the labels everyone places on themselves to define who they

All of Hayes’ questions circled back to the major theme of her past work as well as a question that plagues most college-aged students; What defines your identity: race, sexual orientation, gender? Hayes used a small focused community in order to see if they had a greater or lesser struggle when characterizing themselves as well as how they differed from other communities. The results of her interview demonstrated that as one girl said “they are in a community that seems like a fairytale but they still face the same problems as the outside world.” Even within such a small community where women are grouped together into a single category by the observing world there is still an abundance of individuality and diversity of race but also of opinion. It seemed as though Hayes used questions that asked about their choices in coming to a women’s college, their sex lives, and their political ideology in relation to their school to make them identify as being straight, lesbian, or bisexual, male or female, feminist or not. While the video never directly focuses on identity the conversation progressively is guided into a deeper discussion about the differences between women at a women’s college. In the end a student speaks up to talk about how she doesn’t want to be grouped by her race, sexuality, or gender and that’s the problem that everyone