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Male Voyeurism and Female
Spectatorship:
John Berger and Feminist Theorists
 Starting
Questions: Why are women objects of gaze? How do women look
at men or women (e.g. Pre-Raphaelite
women or Images
of Women on the Ads)?
What
are the possible subject positions in a painting (or any text) and in
viewing a painting? --Foucault
Berger--Ways of Seeing--"Men
look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." --introduction
to the
chapter one of Ways of Seeing.
Laura Mulvey--active/male vs. passive/female
(psychoanalytic view)
Mary Ann Doane--Female Spectatorship. Other Ways of
Seeing --Lynne Pearce
Related Links
Foucault''s analysis of "Las
Meninas" --major arguments (from Representation pp. 58-60)
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The painting tells us something about how
representation and the subject work.
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Representation is not reflection.
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Although painting is "visible," its meaning is as
much constructed around what you can''t see as what you can.
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A number of substitution or displacement is
at work in this painting. (e.g. The King and the Queen).
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Our look ...follows the relationships of looking as
represented in the picture. ..So the spectator (who is also
''subjected'' to the discourse of the painting) is doing two
kinds of looking.
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Looking at the painting from the
position outside, in front of, the picture.
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looking out of the scene, by identifying with the
looking being done by the figures in the painting. Projecting
ourselves into the subjects of the painting help us as spectators to
see, to ''make sense'' of it.
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Meaning is therefore constructed in the
dialogue between the painting and the spectator.
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Different
subject positions in the paintings
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that of the spectator--identifying with
the Sovereign or the infant or the painter?
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of the painter inside the painting and
outside
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of the King and the Queen inside the painting and
outside
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Ways of Seeing by John Berger -- Major
Arguments in Chap 1:
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With the technologies of reproduction,
traditional oil paintings are deprived of their original "sacred"
contexts (e.g. church, museum).
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Massive reproduction of art work can lead to its re-contextualization.
Meaning thus can be transmitted and distorted.
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Paintings are open to manipulation and
re-interpretation especially because they are still and silent.
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contemporary "aura" of traditional art
work--its authenticity=its market value
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paintings, or art work in general, should be treated as
words (or signs), but not holy relics.
Major Arguments in Chap 2:
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nudity is a sign
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The nude in traditional oil paintings
either look at "us" (the spectator-owners in the past) or look at the
mirror
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The nude shows signs of submissiveness
(e.g. being languid, passive and thus available).
TOP
Lynne Pearce. Women/Image/Text. NY:
Harvester, 1991.
Reading Strategies
1: Feminist Critique: a
radical rereading of canonical and popular texts which exposed their
sexism, misogyny and pornography, and frequently laid explicit blame on
their authors/producers. (3)
Reading Strategies 2: Symptomatic Reading: The practice of reading texts according to their
''gaps'' and ''absences'' (9).
or reading for contradictions or the textual
unconscious.
(e.g. 1. Pierre Marcherey''s cracked mirror model--"The text...according to
Macherey''s metaphorical model is a cracked surface, discontinuous both
with the ''outside world'' and with itself; a site of ''contradictory
expressions,'' of eloquent faps and silences'' (10).)
(e.g. 2 Griselda Pollock on Rossetti:
love vs. fear and Othering of PR women
"she finds that the paintings betray a fear and anxiety
about women peculiar to the art of the late nineteenth
century: a castration complex that, in its effort to control the
''threat'', sought to make women increasingly non-specific,
two-dimensional, rhetorical: ''These were not faces, not portraits, but
fantasy''(p. 122). It is significant that in this analysis
Pollock has effectively broken through the rules of production
and consumption ..." (14) ... "''[Astarte Syriaca] raises to a
visible level the pressures that motivated and shaped the project of
''Rossetti''--the negotiation of masculine sexuality in an order
in which woman is the sign, not of woman, but of that Other
in whose mirror masculinity must define itself (153)''" (15).
Reading Strategies 3: Pleasurable Reading: viewers can take pleasure in images that are
ostensibly negative (''ideologically unsound'') (p. 16)
Why do women take pleasure in
images of themselves? --1. Transvestism (or
double identification), 2. Narcissism
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Where women viewers ought to feel alienated
and indignant, they are constantly seduced (18). --the female spectator
being seduced into viewing images of women through men''s eyes.
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Narcissism--According to
Simone de Beauvoir''s reading of Freud in The Second Sex,
narcissism, like lesbianism, is a psychic phase that all girls must
pass through on the road to womanhood. [For Beauvoir, narcissism
is dangerous and psychotic if it persists into adulthood.] ...recent
feminists have searched for a more positive and enabling interpretation
of narcissism.
e.g. Rosemary Betterton "How do women look?: The female nude in the
work of Suzanne Valadon"
the narcissistic reflex may be
celebrated as a positive sign of female difference; a different way of
looking....
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Women need and desire other women to compensate
for what they lack themselves. Women need and desire images
of other women for the same reasons.
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fascination between women
(Jackie Stacey)--something far more complex than either simple sexual
desire for, or narcissistic identification with, a female other.
"[Fascination] is a desire to see, to know and to become like an
idealized feminine other, in a context where the difference between the
two women is repeatedly re-established." (22)
TOP
The position of female spectator of traditional Hollywood
film:
passive/female + active/male,
masculinisation, masochism, marginality and what else?
Laura Mulvey the active/male vs. passive/female (1975
essay)
Men
consciously and unconsciously control the production and reception of
film, creating images that satisfy their needs and unconscious desires.
cinema uses the images of woman to dissipate male castration fears by
forms of voyeurism, containing aspects of sadism and fetishism.
"In their traditional exhibitionist role women are
simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for
strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote
to-be-looked-at-ness"
male
viewers in the audience identify with the male protagonist on the
screen, the character who controls both events and "the look"
1. voyeuristic-scopophilic pleasure (sadistic)
--using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight
2. fetishistic-scopophilic pleasure
the position of
the spectator in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their
exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the
performer.
Woman
as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or
fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat.
Female
Spectatorship-- Mary Ann Doane, et al.
Bellour
(as discussed by Stacey)--women as complete victim, taking a
masochistic position.
Jackie
Stacey --
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p. 391 use a detailed textual analysis to
demonstrate that different gendered spectator positions are
produced by the film text, contradicting the unified masculine model of
spectatorship.
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accept a theory of the masculinisation of the spectator
at a textual level, but argue that spectators being different
subjectivities to the film according to sexual difference, and
therefore respond differently to the visual pleasure offered in
the text.
Rich,
B. Ruby--She argued that women''s viewing experience under patriarchy
is always dialectical, a process of absorbing and reprocessing (often
resisting) what emanates from the screen.
Bergstrom--bisexual responses which would allow for
multiple identificatory positions, which could occur either
successively or simultaneously.
e.g. Psycho--male voyeurism is thematized.
audiences punished for their illicit voyeuristic desire
--not only women are objects of male voyeuristic gaze, they are
also recipients of most of the punishment. e.g. Marion''s sightless
eye; Marion''s sister confront the corpse, the focus on the eye sockets
of the female corpse, Mother is aware of being stared at --sexual
asymmetry in desire and its punishment
Mary Ann Doane --
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1982 women being
totally other to patriarchy;
Spectatorship revolves around questions of proximity and
distance. This is especially problematic for the female spectator as
she is the image, the
object to be viewed. Thus, women are given two options:
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they can masochistically overidentify with
female images on the screen (becoming overly involved--a frequent
female response to melodrama),
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or they can narcissistically become their
own image of desire.--in assuming the image in the most radical way.
(54)
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"the masquerade"
--excess
of femininity--
Joan Rivere "Womanliness ...could be assumed and worn
as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the
reprisals expected if she was found to possess it...The masquerade, in
flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance." The fact of this
distance in part solves the problem of women''s overidentification and
transvestism. The masquerade...enables viewers to critique the socially
constructed role of the feminine. In film, however, the masquerade
often brings its own punishment--e.g. femme fatale in film noir, or any
woman who attempts to take over the masculine activity of "looking."
Male
voyeurism
Spectatorial
desire, in contemporary film theory, is generally delineated as either
voyeurism or fetishism, as precisely a pleasure in seeing what is
prohibited in relation to the female body. The image orchestrates a
gaze, a limit, and its pleasurable transgression. The woman''s beauty,
her very desirability, becomes a function of certain practices of
imaging--framing, lighting, camera movement, angle. (43)
Female
spectator
...a tendency to view the female spectator as the site
of an oscillation between a feminine position and a masculine position,
invoking the metaphor of the transvestite. Given the structure of
cinematic narrative, the woman who identifies with the female character
must adopt a passive or masochistic position, while identification with
the active hero necessarily entails an acceptance of what Laura Mulvey
refers to as a certain "masculinization" of spectatorship. --masquerade
and transvestism
Masquerade doubles representation; it is constituted by
a hyperbolization of the accoutrements of femininity. ...By
destabilizing the image, the masquerade confounds this masculine
structure of the look. It effects a defamiliarization of female
iconography.
The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its
potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a
problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and
readable by the woman.
Female Look -- denied in tradition
e.g. Women who wear glasses--e.g. Betti Davis in Now
Voyager
removing her glasses, from spectator to spectacle
e.g.
Un Regard Oblique
(source;
remote)
"The feminine presence in the photograph, despite a
diegetic centering of the female subject of the gaze, is taken over by
the picture as object. . . .The spectator''s pleasure is thus
produced through the framing negation of the female gaze." (Doanne Film
Theory and Criticism 770)
Doane "Misrecognition and Identity"
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three
kinds of identification:
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identification with the representation of a person;
--secondary identification, presupposes a disavowal of the two
dimensionality of the image and an investment in the reality-status of
the diegesis.
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identification of particular objects,
persons, or actions
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primary identification (for Metz) -- identifying
himself as look.
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merging
of the primary and secondary identification
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(p. 16 Exploration in Film Theories)
Freud "''The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a
surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.'' In
this sense, it is not only the protagonist of a film who initiates the
mechanisms of identification, but any represented body on the
screen--offering . . .a reconfirmation of the spectator''s own
position and identity. "
Cindy
Sherman''s photographs "Untitled Film Still"
function
as mirror-masks that reflect back at the viewer his own desire (and the
spectator posited by this work is invariably male)--specifically , the
masculine desire is to fix the woman in a stable and stabilizing
identify. But this is precisely what Sherman''s work denies: for while
her photographs are always self-portraits, in them the artist never
appears to be the same...while Sherman may pose as a pin-up, she still
cannot be pinned down. (Anti-Aesthetics 75)
e.g.
Kruger--both the gaze and the art reify
the
gaze--objectifies and masters.
TOP
Related
Links
Notes on ''The Gaze''
by Daniel Chandler
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