New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY 179
That terrain was, in fact, already implicit in the project of psychoanalytic
film theory from the start, specifically for two reasons. Because there is no
gender-neutral representation, the question of woman’s place within that
representation was immediately posed, and because the recognition of
sexual difference is the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory,
psychoanalysis automatically implies a consideration of femininity (not as a
content, but as a “position” which is produced). Feminist scholarship
around these issues can be considered from the standpoint of three general
areas—each posed in terms of female subjectivity and desire: Feminine
spectatorship, female enunciation and feminist textual practice.
Mulvey’s model had brought the issue of gender into spectatorship in
terms of a description of a masculine position of viewing, implicitly arguing
that the entire apparatus of classical cinema operated according to
masculine standards that objectified and dominated the woman. Thus the
question of the FEMALE SPECTATOR became the first line of
investigation for feminists. Gaylyn Studlar, for example, counters Mulvey
by arguing that the
cinematic apparatus and the masochistic aesthetic offer identificatory
positions for [both] male and female spectators that reintegrate
psychic bisexuality, offer the sensual pleasures of polymorphous
sexuality, and make the male and female one in their identification
with and desire for the pre-Oedipal mother.
(Studlar 1988:192)
Mulvey herself subsequently corrected her position in an essay on Duel in
the Sun, stating that while her earlier article determined that in dominant
cinema there is always “a ‘masculinisation’ of the spectator position
regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live
moviegoer” (Mulvey 1981:12), the possibilities for female spectatorship
must nevertheless be considered. Maintaining her argument that pleasure in
looking is associated with early libidinal experiences, she concludes that the
female spectator “temporarily accepts ‘masculinisation’ in memory of her
‘active’ phase” (ibid.: 15). The feminine position of viewing thus
necessarily involves identification with an alien masculine gaze—a psychic
borrowing of “transvestite clothes.”
Mary Ann Doane’s The Desire to Desire conceptualizes the FEMALE
GAZE (and the female spectator’s position) in films explicitly and
institutionally addressed to women. Taking as her object the “woman’s
film,” “in its obsessive attempt to circumscribe a place for the female
viewer,” (Doane 1987:37) Doane considers the way the address to a female
audience involves a contradictory pressure on the psychical mechanisms of
voyeurism and fetishism. She finds that