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Journal Central

American Factory is a feature-length documentary co-directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, which won Best Feature Documentary at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020. The film can be seen as a thematic follow-up to the filmmakers’ previous work, The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2009). In American Factory, Bognar and Reichert dramatize the labor crisis triggered by multinational corporations driving neoliberal globalization. The film specifically examines the crises that unfold when Fuyao, a Chinese multinational automotive glass manufacturer, reopens a closed GM plant in Ohio, USA, and hires local workers. Initially, Fuyao’s management exacerbates the labor crisis through global labor arbitrage, drastically reducing wages for U.S. workers to less than half of their former wages at GM. This leads to a sharp decline in workers’ living standards, jeopardizing their ability to maintain a middle-class lifestyle and threatening their basic survival. A second labor crisis arises from the nationality of capital. When Fuyao’s management realizes the company is losing money, they impose Chinese management methods on the American factory by further reducing benefits, freezing wages, increasing labor intensity, and compromising occupational safety. A third labor crisis occurs when Fuyao systematically prevents workers from forming a legitimate union. The company pressures workers by threatening to close the factory, hires a union-busting consulting firm to placate employees, and fires those who actively organize the union, aiming to suppress and ultimately defeat union efforts. The final labor crisis depicted in American Factory is driven by the company’s active introduction of automation to replace human labor, leading to widespread layoffs. Through American Factory, Bognar and Reichert highlight the failure of American workers’ attempts to unionize but also emphasize the urgent need for workers worldwide to organize within multinational corporations to defend their wages, working conditions, and jobs, and to respond effectively to labor crises.

Edward Albee’s works often explore the dissolution of traditional American family values, focusing on the relational emptiness of middle-class heterosexual couples. In his later work, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, Albee challenges the heteronormative family ideology by dramatizing Martin’s queer desire towards a goat. Previous studies have interpreted Martin’s bestiality through Freudian psychoanalysis but have failed to provide an in-depth analysis of desire. In Freud’s theory, the forbidden desire of Oedipus is repressed and considered the cause of the tragedy that dismantles the traditional family structure. However, in The Goat, Albee portrays Martin’s desire for Sylvia as an epiphany, emphasizing a positive perspective of soulful resonance rather than the negative connotation of desire as a product of lack. Albee’s perspective on desire resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “desiring-production,” thereby giving Martin’s desire a productive meaning of “becoming.” Furthermore, Martin’s epiphany implies both a private awakening to queer desire and a realization of the social reality imposed upon him. Thus, the play suggests that the ultimate cause of the tragedy is not Martin’s desire but rather the heteronormative family ideology that confines desire. In conclusion, considering the positive essence of desire, the play calls for a more tolerant attitude towards sexuality and a need to establish more inclusive family structures.

Pam Gems’ Stanley (1996), centering around one of the most renowned British male painters, Stanley Spencer, with two seemingly stereotypical female characters—very vicious lesbian Patricia and self-sacrificial Hilda—does not provide straightforward feminist slogans. However, despite the absence of easy statements, the play contains numerous feminist agendas and questions related to patriarchy and gender. The play eventually suggests that compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchy ironically contribute to masculinity in crisis and the collapse of binary gender. The play dramatizes that Stanley, embracing heterosexual patriarchism as a universal norm, lacks the sensitivity to discern someone’s sexual orientation, marries Patricia, a lesbian who refuses to consummate the marriage, and becomes the butt of ridicule. The play implies that Patricia’s Machiavellian approach to Stanley is the only way for her to survive in a compulsory heterosexual society. The play also dramatizes the numerous instances in which binary genders become deconstructed. In the emotional and financial entanglements with his two wives, Stanley becomes more passive than his wives, while his wives reveal very decisive and so-called “masculine” characteristics. At the end of the play, Stanley is redeemed from crisis and portrayed as a respectful artist. His survival is due to the imaginative integration with Hilda’s spirit, which reflects his artistic vision of the unification of opposing forces. Stanley, who used to regard women as objects, in the end accepts Hilda as a subject on equal footing, and his emotional and artistic wounds become healed. The play shows that integration rather than segregation is the key to healing gender conflict.