Feminine Ways of Knowing and Humanitarian VR Film

Narrative Virtual Reality is a new form of digital storytelling, promoted by a handful of global tech companies such as Meta, HTC, and Apple, who are presenting VR as the medium of the future. At the origin of this new mass medium, the VR industry advanced the myth of VR as the “ultimate empathy machine” (Chris Milk, 2015). Although this myth has been widely critiqued (Crawford-Holland, 2018; Gruenewald, 2019; Hassan, 2020; Suzuki, 2022), in its wake a large number of humanitarian VR films were produced, many of which were funded by large supranational organizations such as the United Nations.

We argue that many of these VR films perpetuate age-old gender stereotypes under the cloak of cutting-edge digital technology, because they often present feminine ways of knowing in negative contexts. As part of a larger GRF funded project on VR film, we are building a database that currently consists of over 1500 VR films, of which we classify more than 5% as humanitarian. Astonishingly, over 90% of those films feature passive female victims. By contrast, the few male characters in such films usually take on a more active role, e.g. as soldiers or as wildlife guards. Our argument results from a quantitative analysis of ca. 70 humanitarian VR films that shows how five types of women’s ways of knowing are represented: silence, received knowledge, subjective knowledge, procedural knowledge, and narrative inquiry (Belenky et al, 1986). In addition, we will present a qualitative analysis of three paradigmatic VR films to show how they employ embodied negative experiences of feminine epistemology. We will conclude with a contrasting discussion of four indigenous VR films, which present examples of feminine knowledge creation in a more active and hopeful way.