Is the Gaze Male?

E. Ann Kaplan

Introduction

• “As we struggle towards meaningful theory, it is important to note that feminist criticism, as a new way of reading texts, emerged from the daily, ongoing concerns of women re-evaluating the culture in which they had been socialized and educated”
• First wave of feminist critics assessed high art and mass entertainment as simply “positive” or “negative” - films feature fully autonomous, independent women characters?
• Problems with this approach:
• Influenced by semiology, feminists critics stressed the crucial role played by the artistic form as the medium for expression
• Influenced by psychoanalysis, they argued that Oedipal processes were central to the production of art works
• In other words, increased attention to how meaning is produced in films, rather than their content

Introduction Cont...

• “Why, given many feminists’ hostile rejection of Freudian and Lacanian theory, do I see psychoanalysis as a useful tool?”
• Psychoanalysis does not necessarily uncover essential “truths” about the human psyche which exist across historical periods and different cultures
• Connection between Oedipal themes in art and, more recently, film and Oedipal themes in psychoanalysis
• “Relevance of psychoanalysis only to the state of industrial social organization characteristic of the twentieth century”
• “It is extremely important for women to use psychoanalysis as a tool, since it will unlock the secrets of our socialization within (capitalist) patriarchy… psychoanalysis becomes a crucial tool for explaining the needs, desires, and male-female positionings that are reflected in film. The signs in the Hollywood film convey the patriarchal ideology that underlies our structures and that constructs women in very specific ways - ways that reflect patriarchal needs, the patriarchal unconscious”

Understanding Psychoanalysis

• Important to understand and master the psychoanalytic discourse to know exactly how psychoanalysis has functioned to repress what women could potentially become
• A number of questions are necessary:
• Is the gaze necessarily male (i.e. for reasons inherent in the structure of language, the unconscious, symbolic systems, and thus all social structures)?
• Could we structure things so that women own the gaze?
• If this were possible, would women want to own the gaze?
• What does it mean to be a female spectator?
• “Using psychoanalysis to deconstruct Hollywood films enables us to see clearly the patriarchal myths through which we have been positioned as Other (enigma, mystery), and as eternal and unchanging”
• Family melodramas geared toward women - function “both to expose the constraints and limitations that the capitalist nuclear family imposes on women and, at the same time, to ‘educate’ women to accept those constraints as ‘natural,’ inevitable - as ‘given.’”

Melodrama

• Melodramas are explicitly concerned with Oedipal issues - illicit love relationships (overtly or incipiently incestuous), mother-child relationships, husband-wife relationships, father-son relationships
• Written on the Wind (Sirk, 1956), Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945), All that Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1955), Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959), Now, Voyager (Ripping, 1942)
• Brooks: “The process of repression and the status of repressed content”
• Mulvey: “The family melodrama is important, she says, in ‘probing pent-up emotion, bitterness and disillusion well known to women”
• Good for women who lack any culture of oppression
• “The simple act of recognition has aesthetic importance”
• However the ends of these films are usually never beneficial to women

Women and Melodrama

• “So why is it that women are drawn to melodrama? Why do we find our objectification and surrender pleasurable?”
• Girl turns away from illusory unity with mother at mirror stage - becoming subject and object (lack)
• “She is the recipient of male desire, passively appearing rather than acting.”
• “Her sexual pleasure in this position can thus be constructed only around her own objectification”
• “Furthermore, given the male structuring around sadism, the girl may adopt a corresponding masochism”
• Passive recipient of male desire - or watching a woman (through melodrama) who is passive recipient of male desires and sexual actions
• “But simply to celebrate whatever gives us pleasure seems to me both too easy and too problematic: we need to analyze how it is that certain things turn us on, how sexuality has been constructed in patriarchy to produce pleasures in the dominance-submission forms, before we advocate these modes”

Dominance-Submission

• Dominance-submission patterns are apparently a crucial part of both male and female sexuality as constructed in western civilization
• Men have a wider range of these positions: both dominant and submissive, supreme control and supreme abandonment
• Women are consistently submissive, but not excessively abandoned. They don’t exchange men even though that may be a male fantasy
• “The passivity revealed in women’s sexual fantasies is reinforced by the way women are positioned in film”
• Doane: In Melodrama, which creates a female spectator, “she” is made to participate in masochistic fantasy
• In CHC, the woman’s body IS sexuality, providing the erotic object for the male spectator
• In the woman’s film, the gaze must be de-eroticized, but in doing this, the film disembody their spectator
• The repeated masochistic scenarios effectively immobilize the female viewer

Dominance-Submission Cont...

• “She is refused pleasure in that imaginary identification which, as Mulvey has shown, repeats for men the experience of the mirror phase”
• “The idealized male screen heroes give back to the male spectator his more perfect mirror self, together with a sense of mastery and control”
• “In contrast, the female is given only powerless, victimized figures who, far from perfect, reinforce the basic sense of worthlessness that already exists”
• “When women are in the dominant position, are they in the masculine position? Can we envisage a female dominant position that would differ qualitatively from the male form of dominance? Or is there merely the possibility of both sex genders occupying the positions we now know as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine?’”
• Traditionally male stars didn’t have to be good looking to be powerful or idolized (John Wayne, Clint Eastwood). These men as ego-ideals for male spectators

Women’s Gaze...

• Examples of woman’s gaze and sexual objectification of men for women
• John Travolta: Saturday Night Fever, Urban Cowboy, Moment by Moment
• Robert Redford: Electric Horseman
• Channing Tatum: Magic Mike
• When this happens, the woman takes on the “masculine” role as bearer of the gaze and initiator of the action
• “She nearly always loses her traditionally feminine characteristics in so doing - not those of attractiveness, but rather of kindness, humaneness, motherliness. She is now often cold, driving, ambitious, manipulating, just like the men whose position she has usurped”
• The binary of feminine and masculine clearly privileges the masculine (through the mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism (Vertigo), which are male operations, and because his desire carries power/action where woman’s usually does not)
• However, the roles have been reversed recently, so long as she assumes his role and he assumes hers, keeping the binary intact

“Women in films thus do not function as signifiers for a signified (a real woman), as sociological critics have assumed, but signifier and signified have been elided into a sign that represents something in the male unconscious”

Voyeurism and Fetishism

• “The gaze is not necessarily male (literally), but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the ‘masculine’ position”
• Dominant, Hollywood cinema is constructed according to the unconscious of patriarchy
• “Voyeurism and fetishism are mechanisms the dominant cinema uses to construct the male spectator in accordance with the needs of his unconscious”
• Voyeurism and fetishism used to explain what exactly woman represents on screen
• Voyeurism is linked to the scopophilic instinct (i.e. the male pleasure in his own sexual organ transferred to pleasure in watching other people having sex)
• Film screen/frame as voyeuristic “keyhole”
• Women always sexualized, regardless of sex scene or otherwise

Three Looks and then some...

• Three looks according to Mulvey:
• Look of the camera: pro-filmic event, technically neutral, but inherently voyeuristic and usually “male” in the sense that a man is generally doing the filming
• Look of the men within the narrative: structured to make women objects of their gaze
• Look of the male spectator: imitates (or is necessarily in the same position as) the first two looks
• However, things aren’t as simple as women being eroticized and objectified. Two further elements suggest themselves:
• “Men do not simply look; their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession which is lacking in the female gaze. Women receive and return a gaze, but cannot act upon it”
• “The sexualization and objectification of women is not simply for the purposes of eroticism; from a psychoanalytic point of view, it is designed to annihilate the threat that woman (as castrated and possessing a sinister genital organ) poses”

Fetishism and Voyeurism

• Men endeavor to find the penis in women (clinically known as fetishism) in the cinema
• “The camera (unconsciously) fetishizes the female form, rendering it phallus-like so as to mitigate woman’s threat”
• “In the cinema, the twin mechanisms of fetishism and of voyeurism represent two different ways of handling this dread”
• Fetishism: builds up the physical beauty of the object, turning it into something satisfying in itself
• Voyeurism: linked to disparagement, has a sadistic side, involved with pleasure through control or domination and with punishing the woman (guilty for being castrated)
• The use of psychoanalysis is still argued within feminist circles
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a CHC example of strong women who care for one another, providing a model women need
• Although taken as a whole film, not just isolated scenes, they’re positioned as objects for a specifically male gaze
• All images are basically male constructs...

Feminist Films?

• Kristeva posits that it’s impossible to even know what the “feminine” might be, outside of male constructs
• “Woman” = “that which is not represented, that which is unspoken, that which is left out of meanings and ideologies”
• Flitterman and Barry suggest that “A radical feminist art would include an understanding of how women are constituted through social practices in culture” and argue for “an aesthetics designed to subvert the production of ‘woman’ as commodity”
• A feminist cinema has to be a counter-cinema
• Feminist films would have to lack pleasure
• We have a need for feminist films that at once construct woman as spectator without offering the repressive identifications of Hollywood films and that satisfy our craving for pleasure