Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Women at the cinema 137
that it is made in an essay of fewer than thirteen pages, its influence has been enormous.
27 However, having acknowledged the essay’s power and influence, it should also
be noted that Mulvey’s ‘solution’ is somewhat less telling than her analysis of the ‘problem’.
As an alternative to popular cinema, she calls for an avant-garde cinema ‘which
is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions
of the mainstream film’ (7–8). Some feminists, including Lorraine Gamman and
Margaret Marshment (1988), have begun to doubt the ‘universal validity’ (5) of
Mulvey’s argument, questioning whether ‘the gaze is always male’, or whether it is
‘merely “dominant” ’ (ibid.) among a range of different ways of seeing, including the
female gaze. Moreover, as they insist,
It is not enough to dismiss popular culture as merely serving the complementary
systems of capitalism and patriarchy, peddling ‘false consciousness’ to the duped
masses. It can also be seen as a site where meanings are contested and where
dominant ideologies can be disturbed (1).
They advocate a cultural politics of intervention: ‘we cannot afford to dismiss the
popular by always positioning ourselves outside it’ (2). It is from popular culture
that most people in our society get their entertainment and their information. It is
here that women (and men) are offered the culture’s dominant definitions of
themselves. It would therefore seem crucial to explore the possibilities and pitfalls
of intervention in popular forms in order to find ways of making feminist meanings
a part of our pleasures (1).
Christine Gledhill (2009) makes a similar point: she advocates a feminist cultural
studies ‘which relates commonly derided popular forms to the condition of their consumption
in the lives of sociohistorical constituted audiences’ (98). ‘In this respect’,
she observes, ‘feminist analysis of the woman’s film and soap opera is beginning to
counter more negative cine-psychoanalytic . . . accounts of female spectatorship, suggesting
colonized, alienated or masochistic positions of identification’ (ibid.).
Jackie Stacey’s (1994) Star Gazing: Hollywood and Female Spectatorship presents a clear
rejection of the universalism and textual determinism of much psychoanalytic work on
female audiences. Her own analysis begins with the audience in the cinema rather than
the audience constructed by the text. Her approach takes her from the traditions of film
studies (as informed by Mulvey’s position) to the theoretical concerns of cultural studies.
Table 7.1 illustrates the differences marking out the two paradigms (24).
Stacey’s study is based on an analysis of responses she received from a group of
white British women, mostly aged over 60, and mostly working class, who had been
keen cinema-goers in the 1940s and 1950s. On the basis of letters and completed questionnaires,
she organized her analysis in terms of three discourses generated by the
responses themselves: escapism, identification and consumerism.
Escapism is one of the most frequently cited reasons given by the women for going
to the cinema. Seeking to avoid the pejorative connotations of escapism, Stacey uses