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Male Voyeurism and Female
Spectatorship:
John Berger and Feminist
Theorists
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
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).
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)
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."
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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
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...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
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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.
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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.
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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.
Related Links
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Notes on 'The
Gaze' by Daniel Chandler
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