A digression into gender, sort of

Well put Jason. The collective film cannon has quite a bit of work ahead of it. It was particularly nice to read your post and Katie’s one after the other (although in reverse) because she starts doing the work you are calling for. I guess it is also important to point out that we have come quite a distance (!) in terms of going from questioning film as art, to accepting it as art and cultural object, and then determining it as a media worthy of study under a critical gaze. With the hindsight available through Queer Studies, I almost feel like Kaplan’s reading (and the entire Freudian reading in general) is a necessary step in the development of applying critical theory to film. You have to start with psychoanalysis in the same way we had to consider semiotics. The next steps will then attempt to destroy, deviate, and question every argument posited from the texts that came before—with the first steps being to question the very binary that is male/female. A female-centered reading may be available (there are, what, four waves of feminism?), but I would argue more for the “gender-neutral” type of consideration.

Butler, of course, is the main culprit (and a rather dense writer) in actualizing this sort of effort. She does a lot of the work that you are calling for—mainly attempting to expose gender as the outgrowth of repressive systems of discourse, thus calling for its devaluation and the study instead of repressive heteronormativity. Woo Hoo Butler!!!

I also think it is important to mention, although I may be getting ahead of myself (and I don’t think it applies to the film this week, per se, although you could make an argument), the Sedgwick argument that some of us are so familiar with that the female is often reduced to the role in which “signifier and signified have been elided into a sign that represents something in the male unconscious" (310). In Sedgwick’s argument, however, the female is reduced to a sign and in this repressive and misogynist gesture, the female becomes the object of desire between two men—with this triangular relationship serving as a template for Sedgwick to attack the binary of homosocial/homosexual male relationships. This was interesting for me to consider in terms of film, and in light of this week’s readings, because it raised two questions.

If the viewer is male (or aligned as male in this argument), could you apply Sedgwick’s case to the relationship between viewer and protagonist? Is the desire of the viewer to be aligned with the all-powerful gaze of the protagonist, or does it “blur the line” into a more dangerous sort of desire?

If we are looking at a film with overtly queer characters, does that force said character to inhabit an opposite gender role, or does it allow for a break-down of gender?