New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY 181
herself either too close (absorbed in her own image as the object of
narcissistic desire) or too far (assuming the alienated distance necessary to
identification with the male voyeur)—in relation to the classical text. Either
position involves the impediment of female subjectivity—for the woman, a
perpetual loss of sexual identity in the act of viewing. But although Doane
must conclude that in dominant cinema the woman possesses a gaze which
does not see, she stops short of asserting the total impossibility of woman
as subject of the gaze. There are still pleasures available to the female
viewer, pleasures, for example, in the masquerade’s “potential to
manufacture a distance from the image which is manipulable, producible,
and readable by the woman” (Doane 1982:87), pleasures to be gotten from
a liberating dislocation of the feminine gaze. Doane asserts that female
spectatorship is never entirely foreclosed, repressed or irretrievable; even in
its negation it is produced—as is femininity itself—as a position, a position
empowered (by the very activity which produces it) to suggest a radical
challenge to dominant modes of vision. In “Masquerade Reconsidered,”
she suggests other destabilizing options related to the masquerade such as
the “game,” the “joke” and “fantasy,” defining her entire project as a
reconceptualization of the gaze in its relation to a general theory of
feminine subjectivity.
One more point about the female spectator needs to be made. Both
Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of the unconscious establish the fact that
sexuality is never a given; in no way can it be automatically assumed. Both
masculinity and femininity are constituted in symbolic and discursive
processes, and this implies that sexuality itself is not a content, but a set of
positions that are reversible, changing, conflictual. Because of this, we can
never complacently assume or attribute a fixed sexual identity; for theories
of spectatorship, a more precise concept of the female viewer is needed to
incorporate this fact.
One possibility can be found in specifying the different levels on which
the female spectator is addressed. E.Ann Kaplan provides a useful
formulation along these lines by suggesting a distinction between three
types of female viewer: (1) the historical spectator—the actual person in the
audience at the time of the film’s release; (2) the hypothetical spectator—
the subject constructed by the film’s textual strategies, its modes of address
and its activation of psychoanalytic processes such as voyeurism and
identification; and (3) the contemporary female spectator—whose reading
of the film might be inflected by a feminist consciousness which suggests
alternate interpretations, meanings “against the grain” (Kaplan 1985: 40–
3). While psychoanalytic film theory addresses the second level, it can
never ignore the other two. At the same time, the film analyst must be able
to discern which forms of address actually engage psychoanalytic processes
in the construction of subjectivity and which work at a different level of
functioning (the distinction between “empathy” and “identification”