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Feminists, post-feminists and queer theorists strove to fill the major omissions im-plied in the Althusserian–Lacanian positioning of a generalized subject by studying the voyeuristic pleasures and displeasures offered by films to both genders (feminists) or to non-heterosexuals (queer theorists). Nevertheless, 1980s’ feminists, while exchanging capitalism and class struggle for patriarchy and the repression of women, tended to accept the Althusserian–Lacanian conception of the dominant continuity edited film as psychic-ideological manipulation and its deconstruction as an effective strategy to open the medium to the concerns of women. Post-feminists and queer theorists of the 1990s, on the other hand, attacked deconstructive feminism for its dead-end conception of film deconstruction and its binary conception of gender that neglected non-heterosexual sensibilities. They offered instead a poststructural conception of gender as a fluid rather than a fixed identity, focusing on how spectators bend any film, whether continuous or not, to serve their unstable and shifting identities.

2.1 FEMINIST DECONSTRUCTION OF FILM’S (MALE) VOYEURISTIC PLEASURES

The term feminism, denoting women’s social struggle surfaced by the end of the nineteenth century and gained currency through the writings of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. In the 1960s feminism became widespread as the social struggle for women rights and their emancipation, particularly in the USA, as part of the wider student revolution and the struggle for human rights. According to feminist historians, 1960s’ feminism was essentialist and largely derived the differ-ences between the sexes from biological differdiffer-ences. It claimed that in patriarchal societies the female essence is repressed. This repressed essence, characterized as receptive, passive, altruist, and striving for social equality and solidarity was opposed to a dominant male essence characterized by invasiveness, aggressiveness, competitiveness, egocentricity and individualism. Different feminist positions strove during the 1960s and early 1970s to find ways in which the female essence might better society. Thus liberal feminism joined the ranks of the human rights movement so as to better the situation of women as a repressed minority, to give women freedom of expression and to equalize their status with that of men in the workplace and in government. Marxist-oriented feminists defined the ideas of equality and solidarity as essentially female and capitalism as essentially male. They tried to overlap gender and class struggles, claiming that women, although spread across different social classes, form an exploited group within each class. Radical feminists, on the other hand, influenced by hippie culture, tried to develop alternative ways of life such as

female communities organized around the values stemming from the female essence.

While these early essentialist feminist positions lacked a serious film approach and focused on content analysis of gender representations, the mid-1970s’ emergence of a deconstructive anti-essentialist feminism, in its focus upon cultural constructs, generated an interesting body of film theory.

Deconstructive anti-essentialist feminism evolved from a criticism of the 1960s’

feminist biological determinism and essentialism. Rather than basing gender differences upon biology, deconstructive feminists conceived the differences between the sexes and the characteristics ascribed to each as institutionalized and structured by culture, particularly by language and other forms of communication. This approach led them to lay bare and deconstruct the cultural structuring of gender, presuming that this would lead to new conceptions of gender and to a re-evaluation and redefinition of ascribed values and functions. Psychoanalysis, conceived of as a theory stemming from patriarchy and focused on human sexuality, was taken to reveal the ‘patriarchal unconscious’ conception of women that informed the dominant cultural constructs discriminating against women and promoting their subjugation.

Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’³⁶ introduced a gendered split in the generalized spectator assumed by the Althusserian–

Lacanian paradigm. Mulvey’s major presumption was that films were a product of the ‘patriarchal unconscious’ and therefore served the patriarchal social order by replicating and reinforcing gender patterns that discriminated against women. Psycho-analysis, which she considered to reveal the patriarchal unconscious, was particularly apt for laying bare the ways by which films discriminate. Mulvey found the source of this discrimination in Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus complex. Freud placed the Oedipal phase during which boys and girls forge a defined sexual identity at the core of the unconscious. Mulvey claimed that Freud’s sloppy or partial description of the girl’s sexual identity formation and of what Freud termed the ‘positive’ case of the boy’s sexual formation³⁷ stemmed from Freud’s own patriarchal unconscious and revealed the source of discrimination of women in patriarchal society.

According to Freud, during the pre-Oedipal stage human infants feel fulfilled: the mother takes care of all their needs and is perceived by infants as their extension. This stage, as mentioned in the preceding section, conforms to Lacan’s imaginary order of cognition. At a certain point, claimed Freud, the infant realizes that his/her mother is not always present to cater to her/his needs. This enrages and frustrates her/him. The conclusion the infant reaches is that the reason for the mother’s absence is the father, a conclusion leading him/her to want to get rid of the father so as to reunite with the mother. Freud even presumed that the primeval father was actually murdered by his sons. The desire to get rid of the father engenders in the infant a great fear from what

the father might do to him/her for entertaining such thoughts. The infant finds the answer to what the father might do in the biological difference between male and female. (According to Freud, the realization of a difference between the sexes introduces the infant into language, which is based on the ability to conduct binary distinctions. Lacan termed this the symbolic order of cognition, which he claimed originated during the ‘mirror stage’ that pre-dates the Oedipus complex.) According to Freud, the infant interprets the difference between the sexes as a lack of penis in the mother. This leads to the perception of the mother as someone who has already been punished for a sin she committed in the past. Henceforth, the infant’s fear of being castrated by the father, as probably happened to the mother, leads the boy to identify with the authoritative, punitive figure of the father. The girl, in a symmetrical inversion, begins to suffer from a penis envy. This results in her identification with the mother and her developing an erotic love for the father stemming from her wish to find completion through his penis.

The boy’s process of identification out of fear internalizes in the boy’s mind the father figure as his superego, representing patriarchal law and ethics. The girl, on the other hand, due to social sanctions, transfers her completion-derived erotic love of the father towards real or symbolic substitutes. Giving birth to a boy and raising him into the patriarchal order is one such symbolic completion.

The Freudian patriarchal analysis of the Oedipus complex has dire consequences for women. According to it, women are perceived as having committed a primal sin evident in their ‘bleeding wound’, as Freud described it. Woman is also conceived as lacking the ability to fully internalize patriarchal societal ethics and law, relegating her to the function of non-male. This conception allows the social construction of the male as bearer of law and meaning, and of woman as bearer of children and their raising into the patriarchal order. Woman remains in man’s mind as a memory of pre-Oedipal fullness and hence his desire for her; or as post-Oedipal lack, and hence as symbolizing his fear of castration.

Mulvey, considering films to be a product of the patriarchal unconscious, searched in Freud’s interpretation of the Oedipus complex for an explanation of the way films reinforce and spread the patriarchal conception of the genders. She started by asking why people like to watch movies, a question that led her to enquire why people like to watch at all. This is because films, according to Mulvey, cater to people’s scopophilia or love of watching. It pleasures the viewer’s gaze while channelling it towards its needs. She found in Freud’s writings two different sources for scopophilia: erotic and narcissistic scopophilia. While erotic scopophilia stems from sexual desire towards another, in narcissistic scopophilia we gaze at others because they are like ourselves (narcissistic scopophilia corresponds to Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ when infants find in the anthropomorphic form of others a reinforcement of their sense of selfhood).

Mulvey found a contradiction between the two types of scopophilia. While erotic scopophilia is based upon a difference between the seeing and the seen, the narcissistic gaze looks for sameness. According to Mulvey, classical film developed two dominant modes of articulation, each catering to a different scopophilic urge.

Hence, in the spectacular portions of film, the human figure is there to be looked at erotically from another’s point of view. Spectacle is therefore static, and the human figure is restricted in its spatial movement, usually seen within a flattened image. The directionally evolving narrative, on the other hand, caters to our narcissistic urge. It revolves around a figure with which viewers identify. This identification is achieved by correlating the viewer’s point of view with that of a character who is placed at the centre of a three-dimensional space that it controls and whose actions drive the narrative development. The viewers’ sense of self is reinforced through the ident-ification of their point of view with that of this ‘larger than life’ protagonist (who nevertheless resembles the viewer).

Mulvey pointed out that since classical films express the patriarchal unconscious, women usually figure in the spectacular portion of films while men control the film’s narrative space. Hence women are positioned as erotic objects for the viewer’s gaze, lacking their own point of view and figured in an enclosed or flattened space which they inhabit passively and statically. Men, on the other hand, are there to be identified with. Through their point of view the viewer watches how they change the course of events while dynamically moving within their controlled three-dimensional narrative space. Often, said Mulvey, a tension develops between the two-dimensional static space of spectacle and the three-dimensional dynamic narrative space. One of film’s major strategies to overcome this spatial tension is through the overlap of the viewer’s and the male hero’s points of view upon the spectacle and the woman figured within it. Thus woman is figured as an erotic object for both the male protagonist and the viewer. According to Mulvey, these modes of articulation reproduce and reinforce the gender figurations and functions ascribed by patriarchal society.

Mulvey then turned to Freud’s contention that woman symbolizes for the male, in her sexual presence, his fear of castration. Filmmakers, claimed Mulvey, found ways to neutralize this fear within each mode of articulation. Hence, in the spectacle mode, catering to erotic scopophilia, the neutralization of the fear of castration is achieved by the fetishization of the woman’s figure. According to Freud, fetishism is a process whereby the desire for the forbidden and threatening sexual organ is transferred to substitutes. For instance, instead of raising the gaze towards the forbidden and threatening sex organ, the gaze is fixated upon the shoe, which becomes the desired fetish. Mulvey found in Von Sternberg’s spectacle-dominated films a fetishization of the figure of Marlene Dietrich (e.g. Morocco, 1930). Not only did he obsessively shoot Dietrich from overlapping angles and within static situations on account

of narrative development, but he used different filters or cloths over the camera lenses, as well as disjointing her body through close-ups of her different body parts, thereby attempting to neutralize her threatening sexuality. Thus, concluded Mulvey, Sternberg exchanged Dietrich’s threatening sexual presence for an exalted, lofty fetishized beauty, and fetishized parts of her body by disjointing her full image.

While Von Sternberg represented for Mulvey the spectacular strategy of fet-ishization, Hitchcock was taken by her to represent the use of a sadistic strategy in narrative dominated films to neutralize woman’s symbolization of the castration threat. Mulvey identified in Hitchcock an erotically driven sadistic attitude towards his female heroines.³⁸ Hitchcock deals in several of his films with a male protagonist who is on the side of the law, who gets into trouble because of a woman suspected of a crime or somehow tied to it. The male hero conducts a sadistic investigation of the woman, aimed at revealing the reasons for the crime she is tied to and save her once he establishes her innocence. Mulvey found Hitchcock’s films (e.g. Rear Window, 1954 and Marny, 1964) to follow a male protagonist who moved in a three-dimensional space and through whose point of view the suspected female was looked at in an erotic/scrutinizing way. She saw in the man’s following of the woman and in his investigation/interrogation of her a sadistic process aimed at revealing her primal sin and exposing her innocence or guilt, thus neutralizing the fear of castration she symbolized.

Mulvey’s conclusion was that the dominant type of filmmaking (mostly from Hollywood) mainly addressed the male spectator whose scopophilic gaze it pleasured. It allowed him to identify with the male protagonist controlling the narrative and reinforced his sense of identity. It also allowed him to gaze erotically at the female protagonist who inhabited the spectacle portions of the film. Mulvey