Gender, Power, and the Gamic Gaze: Re-Viewing Portal and Bayonetta
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
***THIS IS AN UNPUBLISHED DRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE. IF YOU DID NOT RECEIVE THIS DIRECTLY FROM THE AUTHOR, PLEASE CONTACT [email protected] FOR AN UPDATED VERSION. Gender, Power, and the Gamic Gaze: Re-Viewing Portal and Bayonetta The Persistence of the Gaze in Gaming This chapter begins, as so many accounts of gender and gaming do, with Lara Croft. Though she was not the first action heroine in gaming, the star of Tomb Raider was an early focal point for the feminist critique of video games. An international media sensation, Croft was a digital iteration of the action heroines that emerged in 1990’s cinema. Crude polygon resolution, which made it difficult to render human figures in photorealistic detail, meant that markers of the action hero/ine—sweaty hair, “bulging biceps and striated shoulders”1—were not feasible except in cartoon style, requiring exaggerated proportions and lighting details. Tomb Raider, which followed the rest of the industry in pursuing photorealism in conjunction with three-dimensional graphics, opted to represent Croft’s femininity visually and her masculine power procedurally: she had famously large breasts, a small waist, and wide hips, but also the ability to drag giant stone blocks, climb sheer cliffs, and blast dinosaurs into oblivion with dual- wielded pistols. The gamic camera in the original Tomb Raider remains in a voyeuristic position: a few feet behind Lara, with her buttocks featured in the frame, relentlessly pursuing as she moves in response to the gamer’s control (See Figure 1). Her physical design, too, appeals to a sexualizing gaze that undermines her credibility as an action hero exploring ancient ruins: short shorts, thigh-mounted pistol harnesses, ample bosom straining at a small white tank top. Figure 1. Screenshot of Tomb Raider The breakaway transmedial success that Tomb Raider achieved, for better or for worse, turned Lara Croft into an icon for women in gaming and popular culture, and by extension, the first major focal point of feminist analysis of video games by fans and critics.2 Unsurprisingly, early work critiqued Lara and the preponderance of sexy women in video games using the language of the male gaze, a concept developed by Laura Mulvey in her foundational essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”3 The male gaze is the realization of heteronormative masculine power in Hollywood cinema, an effect of patriarchy that becomes apparent in visual techniques that slows a woman in action and renders her body maximally available for the viewing pleasure or disciplinary desires of an assumed straight, male audience. This way of looking prevents a woman from achieving full subjectivity in cinema, as it literally turns her into an object in the visual scene. Mulvey worked within a particular school of feminist theory organized around reformulating psychoanalytic perspectives on power and identity formation, and in the essay she carefully lays out the psychic stakes that force the male gaze to do its work: namely, that the woman herself represents the terrifying lack of a penis, and her threat must be neutralized by turning her into an image that will not remind the man of this fact.4 Mulvey’s take on the scopophilic encounter, perhaps minus the psychoanalysis, was useful for describing a prevalent orientation toward the feminine body that resonated with many women’s experiences: sexual objectification, in which men are active gazers and women passive objects. In game studies and popular games criticism alike, most discussions of Lara Croft and other sexualized women ultimately look to Mulvey’s male gaze to explain the character’s representation on screen. The male gaze was a controversial and contested concept even in its time,5 but it has come to stand in for the more heterogeneous body of feminist criticism about the gaze that emerged alongside and after the piece. Indeed, when Jen Malkowski and TreAndrea Russworm call for game studies to finally take up feminist criticism in a broad way, they do so under the banner of the “Laura Mulvey moment,” placing the movement of feminist film studies (and, by extension, contemporary feminist game studies) under the sign of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”6 The question of identification with the screen, of course, is much more nuanced in feminist and queer theory. Competing psychoanalytic perspectives emerged at the same time as “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” such as Constance Penley’s “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Popular Culture,” which argued for a more complex understanding of cross- gender libidinal identifications amongst consumers using the example of slash fanfiction.7 Other versions of the cinematic gaze have been exhaustively explored, critiqued, and dismissed in the literature, from bell hooks’ oppositional gaze that refuses identification with either subject or object of the camera8 to Carol Clover’s insistence that film induces visual pleasure through identification with multiple subjects.9 Critics have exploded the cinematic gaze and its relation to identity politics to the point that Nick Mirzoeff in the introduction to The Visual Culture Reader characterizes the work of the field as operating with “a transverse look or glance—not a gaze, there have been enough gazes already.”10 Engaging further with discourse about the gaze may seem like an anachronistic gesture at this moment, and my continued use of feminist film theory in the rest of this chapter might feel imprecise (if I put it generously) to specialists in the field. However, I am operating within a particular analytical space that holds multiple contradictory perspectives in tension with one another. On the one hand, there is the lofty register of psychoanalytic feminist film theory, whose historical depth and disciplinary specificity developed in response to the technologies and practices of cinema and was in place long before video games emerged, but also has trained generations of academics, filmmakers, and fans in certain modes of visual literacy. On the other hand, there is game studies, which has spent many decades attempting to differentiate itself from cinematic interlopers. On yet another hand (if you’ll permit me some imprecision with this analogy as well), there is the popular reception of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which seems to inspire every subsequent generation that encounters it. Karen Boyle, in Feminist Media Studies’ special issue on the 40th anniversary of Mulvey’s essay, describes the “excitement, relief, and joy” students inevitably express when she teaches the essay,11 an experience that I and many of my colleagues also share. Despite its age, and despite the developments and conversations that have come after it, this particular essay continues to resonate in the study and understanding of popular culture. Today, the vocabulary of the male gaze, largely removed from the rigorous psychoanalytic context that Mulvey constructed around it, is central to how mainstream audiences, the video games industry, and game studies itself understands and responds to feminist concerns in video games. In this form, it serves largely as shorthand for the way women are objectified for a presumably straight male viewer whose desire and power are channeled through the technologies of cinema. Important community resources like Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog,12 TV Tropes,13 and the Geek Feminism Wiki14 all have entries dedicated to the male gaze, and they invariably credit Laura Mulvey with inventing the term even if they do not engage deeply with her theoretical framework. The popular webcomic Dinosaur Comics, featured in the epigraph, offers a typical definition: The idea is that the camera is situated by and for men! Thus, we always see more of the woman’s body than we do of the man’s in film—the camera possesses the (heterosexual) male gaze, and thereby disenfranchises the woman by reducing her to the passive object of the gaze, while the male is elevated to the active gazer. It is a NOT UNCONTROVERSIAL theory.15 In more recent years, the widespread popularity of Anita Sarkeesian’s “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” video series, which went viral in the wake of a massive harassment campaign that preceded #GamerGate, signals the legibility of analyzing the representation of women based on the vocabulary of the male gaze. These high-profile conversations, in turn, inform how game designers understand and attempt to address feminist concerns in gaming. This reason alone merits continued engagement with “the gaze” as matter to think with,16 whether or not I am able to preserve its original contextual and theoretical purity in my appropriation of the much-appropriated term. I find the word “gaze” useful, additionally, in its colloquial meaning, because visuality does structure the relationship between user and apparatus in video games beyond character representation—though there are, as with cinema, many other cognitive and bodily connections as well. There are few words sufficient to describe the visual relationship of the gamer to the game, with “eyes... fixed on the screen with what is a potentially almost disturbing level of concentration,”17 than that of a gaze, or even, as one critic wittily calls it, a “glaze.”18 In the remainder of this chapter, you’ll find a varied application and complication of classic feminist film theory with respect to the digital games of the present, an homage to the way work like Mulvey’s continues to inform audiences’ and gamers’ reception of popular culture. As the Dinosaur Comics t-rex suggests, video game protagonists have a substantially different relationship to visuality than characters on a cinematic screen, and the current deployment of feminist theories of visuality to assess feminine bodies in video games do not account for this difference.19 Virtual bodies exist beyond the visual scene and have many functions other than that of eye candy or other spectacle.