From-Contemporary-Approaches-To-Film-And-Media-Series-.Pdf

Part 1 gazing outward The Spectrum of Feminist Reception history In many ways, one might say that feminist film history begins in 1975 with Laura Mulvey’s essay “visual Pleasure and narrative Cinema.” Certainly, it could be argued the essay generated cinema/feminist studies’ historical turn in response to Mulvey’s focus on the “male gaze” and her declaration of visual pleasure as essentially masculine, thereby seemingly eliding or erasing women’s actual experience in the movie theater. But I would argue Mulvey’s essay was in itself the moment of a “turn” to history, at least within feminist film studies. While there had been other noteworthy examinations of the representation of women in film, especially Mollyh askell’s From Reverence to Rape and Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus (both published in 1974), the need for a historical approach, that is, an effort to explain as well as describe events1 in cinema’s development from a feminist critical perspective now became crystallized around Mulvey’s essay. “visual Pleasure and narrative Cinema” adds gender to the idealized spectator of 1970s film theory, thereby immediately inserting the concept in a social/cultural context. hence, I would argue that Mulvey’s essay functions as a metahistory, but a history nonetheless, since it outlines a larger social/cultural category as the driving internal mechanism of cinema. Whether or not we label this as history, Mulvey’s close textual analysis of the politics of looking, which made women solely objects and never subjects of the gaze, generated a search for women’s agency elsewhere than on the screen itself. Regardless of an individual film’s narrative details, the look of the camera invariably seemed to reinforce women’s secondary sta- tus, an effect seemingly out of sync with what women in the audience sometimes felt. Many feminists found this perspective far too limiting and 9 01 Chapters_1_3.indd 9 1/13/10 11:57 AM I n troductio n to part I thus suggested that perhaps the gaze needed to be reconsidered or, at the very least, directed outward.2 Even beyond such variable and difficult-to- measure emotive factors, there was, however, the material reality of cinema’s production context and the explicit use of film to engage (and to construct) the modern woman as consumer. Miriam hansen’s work on valentino pointed out not only his films’ direct appeal to the female audience but also the complications added to a politics of vision when a male star serves as the erotic object on the screen.3 Mulvey’s organization of the gaze around exclusively sexual difference also reinforced a range of binary logics around sexuality, with the cultural prescription toward heterosexuality especially unexamined and racial, eth- nic, and class difference equally erased from the screen. For Manthia Dia- wara, the “color blind” approach offered by a gendered theory of the gaze did not account for the historical specificity of black men’s experience, or their “resisting spectatorship” with regard to hollywood cinema.4 If black male spectatorship was misrepresented or framed by white privilege, then black female spectatorship was doubly oppressed by both patriarchal gendered looking (which black men did not completely “resist”) as well as rac- ism both on the screen and within feminist theory.5 For bell hooks, neither Mulvey nor Diawara spoke to the possibility of a critical black female spectatorship and her “oppositional gaze,” which chooses to identify neither with patriarchy nor white womanhood, marking a spectator who not only “resists” but “create(s) alternative texts” and “see(s) our history as a counter memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future.”6 The focus on the cinema audience and the larger social conditions and discourses in which they were situated was vital to rethinking the dynam- ics of textual practices. While the relation between text and context might vary widely and feature any number of other methodologies in conjunc- tion with the approach (e.g., besides feminism, critical race theory, Marx- ism, poststructuralism, queer theory), reception studies became an important component in feminist history. Janet Staiger’s research and writings in this area have been exemplary both in defining and employing “reception studies” as a rich and diverse umbrella concept for film historiography.7 As Staiger notes, reception studies encompasses a rather larger area of research, some of it rather uncomfortably or inappropriately fitting within our historical rubric but all potentially constructive to the task of thinking about where meaning is located and how to outline the parameters, fields, or boundaries of text and reader. Usefully, Staiger maps out reception studies into “text-activated,” “reader-activated,” and “context-activated” groups, 10 01 Chapters_1_3.indd 10 1/13/10 11:57 AM The Spectrum of Feminist Reception History all of which can be, though not necessarily so, historically grounded, the distinction among the categories being where the locus of meaning oc- curs.8 Many feminists have found the “reader-activated” approach a partic- ularly important corrective to the “absent” female spectator in Mulvey’s account of mainstream cinema. Jackie Stacey’s ethnographic study Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship features a close ex- amination of the responses by female film viewers to various classical-era cinema stars in an attempt to complicate our understanding of “identification” beyond the singular psychoanalytic account complicit with dominant ideology.9 Stacey’s explicitly sociological investigation provides some compelling testimony from women viewers and a complex account of the different levels of identification (both off screen and on, visually and at the level of narrative) with attention to the emotive power accompanying the women’s commentary.10 The focus on women’s voices and emotions is crucial to Annette kuhn’s advocacy of “memory work” as a historical method in her book Family Secrets. In this case, however, the viewer’s recollection or memory does not represent apodictic evidence as much as provide access to “un- told” and unofficial stories. Most important, unlike many feminist crit- ics, kuhn feels no compulsion in her analysis of remembrances to choose between psychoanalytic or sociological/cultural paths of investigation. As she notes, “Engaging as it does the psychic and the social, memory work bridges the divide between inner and outer worlds. It demonstrates that political action need not be undertaken at the cost of the inner life, nor that attention to matters of the psyche necessarily entails a retreat from the world of collective action.”11 Moreover, the language of kuhn’s memory work is not the immediately obvious, linear, and coherent speech associ- ated with public or official discourse (and narrative) but rather discontinu- ous, fleeting, and fragmented.12 The radicality of this method, for kuhn, is not only in the identification of voices heretofore at the margins but also in the process of critical recollection itself, which becomes an act of writing ourselves into history.13 If these ethnographic or “reader-activated” efforts seem at times like different paths along a well-traveled “talking cure,” we are reminded of the central role of language and discourse—alongside images and the gaze—in shaping sexual identity. For Judith Butler, identity is a performative “effect” that is not an essential quality or a momentary and completely willful “performance” but rather a product of reiterative discursive practices.14 We 11 01 Chapters_1_3.indd 11 1/13/10 11:57 AM I n troductio n to part I “understand,” for example, gendered, lesbian, or heterosexual identity, be- cause we use the terms in everyday speech and have an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries of these terms in public and private contexts. however, it is crucial to remember that Butler’s understanding of identity is neither relativist nor reductive, and that, following Michel Foucault, it points toward not a discourse of sex but a “multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions.”15 These multivalent factors on identity do not deny the possibility of agency, notes Butler, but prevent a single space outside of language/discourse. “Agency” or resistance to dominant discourse comes for Butler through a subversive testing of the reiterative practices, a repetition of gender practices, as for example in the case of drag, which foregrounds the practice itself as a performance rather than a truth or normative action.16 While some might see Butler’s poststructuralist approach as antitheti- cal to a historical project, some theorists argue for a necessary connection between these two paths of analysis. For Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, poststructuralism presents a thoroughgoing critique of all essential or idealist categories, thus clearing the way for less totalizing and hege- monic accounts, whereby more marginalized histories might be heard.17 For Tony Bennett, poststructuralism and deconstruction provide a needed self-critical tool for historical work in that they enable one to reveal the “discursivity” or political consequences of any methodology regardless of its relationship to our own preferred and seemingly transparent (i.e., objec- tive) philosophy.18 The first section of the collection highlights the complicated interplay between text and context, theory and history across this diverse spectrum of reception. Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Unmasking the Gaze,” is not so much a correction as a supplement to or recontextualization of her groundbreak- ing work on the gendered operations of the cinematic apparatus. As Mul- vey points out, both the text and the theorist are therefore altered by the economic, social, political, and technological conditions under which they exist. Thus, history should not be seen as a static entity but rather a process or ongoing conversation with the materiality of the moment.

Load more