Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) and Darren Aronofsky’s
Black Swan (2010) are films about women directed by men. Both films unorthodoxly
chart women artists’ struggle with the discipline imposed on them by
the arts and by their live-in mothers. By portraying mothers as their daughters’
oppressors, both films disturb the naïve “women = victims and men = perpetrators”
binary. Simultaneously, they deploy audiovisual violence to exhibit the
violence of society’s gender and sexuality policy norms and use gender-coded
romance narratives to subvert the same gender codes from within this gender
discourse. Using Judith Butler’s and Michael Foucault’s theories, we argue
that Haneke and Aronofsky “do” feminism unconventionally by exposing the
nexus of women’s complicity with omnipresent societal power structures that
safeguard gender norms. These films showcase women concurrently as victim-products
and complicit partisans of socially constructed gender ideology to
emphasize that this ideology can be destabilized only when women “do” their
gender and sexuality differently through acts of subversion.
