Audivisual Production Systems and Formats

The poststructural revolution (see Chapter 2) informed the growing criticism of deconstructive feminism. Michel Foucault critiqued psychoanalysis as a widespread discourse on sexuality carried out within social configurations of power and lacking a critique or redefinition of these. He also suggested that such critique and redefinition could and should stem from a discussion of the body and its figuration in different discourses. This inspired post-feminists like Luce Irigaray to look again at the female body in search of the possibility of instituting a different discourse on femininity.

Irigaray claimed that women have ‘sex organs more or less everywhere’.⁴⁸ According

to her, the multiple erogenous zones of the female body evoke a plurality of pleasures which are decentred and incoherent. This sexuality is also reflected in a non-male approach to language, a polysemic and shifting relation to it that constantly subverts the patriarchal notion of a stable, centred identity. While uncomfortable with Irigaray’s implied essentialism, Doane nevertheless suggested that using the body as clothes-hanger on which the discussion of the relation of the body to processes of signification can be hung allows for the development of a new definition of femininity within the power struggles among discourses on sexuality, without the need to resort to biological essentialism.⁴⁹ Irigaray’s and Doane’s evolving post-feminism shared the poststructural perception of the split subject that replaced the centred structuralist subject.

The post-feminist understanding of femininity as a fluid rather than fixed ident-ity opened the way or coalesced with queer theories that addressed in such manner all sexual and gender identities, particularly those of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people. As stated by Doty, ‘Queer theory shares with feminism an interest in non-straight normative expressions of gender and with lesbian, gay, and bisexual studies a concern with non-straight expressions of sexuality and gender.’⁵⁰ However, queer theory goes beyond these perspectives in that it focuses upon trans-gressions of established gender or sexual identities, be they straight, gay or lesbian.

Hence, rather than presuming a fixed or essentialist stable identity, even if this ident-ity is fixed-as-fluid the way post-feminists often characterized femininident-ity, queer theory presumes all sexual and gender identities to be hybrid and in a potential or actual fluid state.

Queer theory, however, critiqued the long-held binary opposition of male to female identities that still resonated in the writings of post-feminists. They argued that this binary opposition was designed to exclude varied sexual and social subjects assuming gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identities, since the latter, when viewed from the point of view of the male/female divide, were considered abnormal digressions.

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble⁵¹ expanded the post-feminist position on femin-inity as diverse, split, shifting and polysemic to characterize all sexual identities.

Butler’s queer theory argued that not only deconstructive feminism, in its exchange of biological essentialism with a no-less determining binary cultural determinism, but also the post-feminists’ return to the body as grounds for grouping women, ultimately led to a dead-end. Feminism was altogether wrong in its presumption that women or men are groups with clear gender attributes. In her mind, biological sexual differences do not determine gender characteristics or imply a desire for the other sex. While ‘bodies matter’, as she claimed, gender and sexual desire are seen by her as variables that may change in different contexts. She proposed to view gender

as something both assigned to and assumed by people, as a performance on their part rather than as an inextricably fixed, essential or inescapably culturally determined identity. As she put it: ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender;

. . . identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.’⁵² Moreover, Butler suggested that the dominant binary performance of male/female genders, which relegates to the periphery other performances labelled as queer, is a relational configuration of power that can and must be challenged politically and destabilized by the gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual groups it stigmatized and excluded. The latter, in turn, must also destabilize their own stabilizations and exclusions of gender identities so as to further democratize and mobilize these. In this respect queer theory seems to differ from post-feminist and established gay or lesbian approaches in that it emphasizes the constant potential or actual ‘bending’ or ‘queering’ of sexual and gender orientations, rather than being an umbrella term for non-straight and post-feminist approaches.

This trajectory can be traced in film studies starting from Doane’s notion of the masquerade, which informed the emergence of post-feminism. Contrary to Mulvey’s contention that woman’s visual presence is a dead-end for women spectators and her insistence that woman’s only viable yet poor venue for voyeuristic pleasure and identification can be found in the male-protagonist-dominated narrative trajectory, Doane’s masquerade, while still framed within Mulvey’s claim that women figure in films mostly to be looked at, focused attention nevertheless upon the possible pleasures that woman’s visual presence afforded women spectators. Moreover, as explained by Patricia White, ‘for some theorists, if the woman’s “visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line” . . . then it could be argued that spectacle itself could be understood as a weak link in the totalizing patriarchal regime Mulvey delineated and used as a way of interrupting narrative closure and its presumed confirmation of [male] spectatorial mastery’.⁵³ Hence, the growing post-feminist focus upon the spectacular aspect of film began to displace deconstructive feminist theories’ insistence upon the domination of narrative trajectories and the attendant need to deconstruct these, a project perceived by post-feminists as leading to a dead-end.

Doane’s post-feminist notion of the masquerade and the growing attention to film’s spectacular portions coalesced with Butler’s queer theory notion of perform-ativity and performance and with the different strategies used by non-straight viewers to derive voyeuristic pleasure from films, strategies whose shared focus was upon the spectacular aspect of films. As pointed out by Patricia White, ‘The musical genre’s subordination of narrative codes to performance and spectacle might resist ideological containment, and this is possibly one source of its appeal to female and gay audiences.’⁵⁴ Hence, the film’s narrative vectorial thrust was perceived as being

constantly dismantled by the voyeuristic pleasures derived by differently gendered spectators from the polysemic and multidirectional nature of the film spectacle.

This focus upon spectacle engendered the growing attention to the spectacular film-star figure described by Richard Dyer as, ‘unstable, never at a point of rest or equilibrium, constantly lurching from one formulation of what being human is to another’.⁵⁵ The multifaceted and polysemic phenomenon of film stars as complex con-figurations who operate beyond the confines of a film’s narrative trajectory through their various intertextual references, and who apparently transgress the film-textual universe into the film stars’ ‘real’ life, easily lends itself to a variety of voyeuristic pleasures for a variety of viewers’ gender, sexual and ideological sensibilities.

This approach also opened the way to ethnographic and historical audience re-search of the simultaneous yet different decoding of the same film spectacle by real spectators of differing mixes of gender, ethnic and national attributes. This trend converged with the growing critique of film-text or film-as-apparatus oriented theories that postulated an abstract generalized viewer. In this respect, Stuart Hall’s article ‘Encoding/Decoding’ offered the most powerful exposition of heterogeneous processes of textual decoding. In his analysis, the process whereby a message is produced or encoded in a text and the process whereby the text is decoded by the recipient are not univocal or complementary. In fact, ‘it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and the connotative inflection given by a discourse but to decode the message in a globally contrary way. He/she detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference.’⁵⁶

In line with this approach, queer film theory began viewing film spectacles as the

‘intersection or combination of more than one established “non-straight” sexuality or gender position in a spectator, a text, or a personality’.⁵⁷

The focus upon film as spectacle and the attendant diversification of film spectators within post-feminist and queer theories revealed a variety of often contradicting voyeuristic pleasures. Hence, the pleasure derived by Doane’s critical woman viewer’s masquerading strategy may arguably apply to heterosexual women (since it presumes that women cannot enjoy their own image as object of desire and therefore need the critical distance afforded by masquerading), but it certainly does not apply to lesbian viewers much of whose voyeuristic pleasure derives precisely from viewing women as objects of desire. As noted by White, ‘Lesbian spectatorship has posed a particularly revealing challenge to psychoanalytic theory’s seeming equation of “sexual difference”

with heterosexual complementarity – the presumption that women cannot desire the image because they are the image.’⁵⁸ Moreover, queer theory further detached voyeuristic pleasures from the long-held belief in a bond between the sexual or gender orientation of the viewer and that of the film protagonists in suggesting that

‘viewers, no matter what their stated gender and sexuality identities, often position themselves “queerly” – that is, position themselves within gender and sexuality spaces other than those with which they publicly identify.’⁵⁹

Queer theory found in film a major site of gender-performance propagation. The notion of gender as something unstable and fluid focused attention upon gender transgression or gender crises in films, while the notion of gender as performance drew attention to the film devices of irony, play and parody.⁶⁰