The month-long retrospective of Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi’s films at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York provides for a unique angle of vision on the role of women in both cinema and society—as well as an overdue consideration of whether or not feminism is truly a “Western” phenomenon.

Watching them as a woman of color was a fascinating exercise in self-discovery and a reminder of why cultural relativism can be so deleterious to our empowerment; shuffling different peoples of color into separate silos not only denies us empathy with whites, but with each other, and cribs our ability to learn and grow together. Cultural relativism would hold that I, as a Puerto Rican lass who grew up ...