- "Does a women spectator of female images have any choice other than either identifying as female object of desire, or if subject of desire, then appropriating the male position? Can there be such a thing as a female subject of desire? Finally, if a female subject is watching images of lesbians, what can this mean to her?" (312)
A related question whose omission I find curious is, “If the female subject watching is a lesbian, how does this impact her viewing of the film?” or better, “How do we do a queer viewing/reading of the gaze in film?” Although I think that Kaplan would place a lesbian spectator under the category of “appropriating the male position,” I think that’s obviously a mistake in tactics at this theoretical juncture: alternate feminine sexuality far from depends upon identification with the male perspective.
Kaplan argues that psychoanalytic analysis of film remains necessary and useful precisely because “the processes of cinema mimic in many ways those of the unconscious,” and thus, would be illuminated effectively by those theories which deal primarily with the subconscious (314). However, it is worthwhile to note that lesbianism or alternate feminine sexuality has often found traditional psychoanalysis to be hostile to its development and understanding. Psychoanalysis inherently conceptualizes sexuality around some sort of psychological relationship with the phallus. Freud, et al. imagines that all women are desirous of, fearful of, identifying with, or despising the phallus: there is no outside of the spectrum of sexuality in which a woman’s sexuality might be constructed entirely without psychological reference to the phallus. I’d venture to say (and I think most people will agree) that at this juncture in our historical development it is impossible for a woman’s sexuality to develop culturally speaking without some relationship to the phallus and heteronormativity, however benign and distant that relationship might be. Kaplan confirms this when she writes, “we are inevitably and indelibly women raised in a historical period dominated by Oedipal structuring and discourse” (315). All of which is to assert that, since we live within the system, we must use the system to understand ourselves and our sexuality.
However, recent queer theory has attempted to overturn the behemoth of Freudian psychoanalysis in understanding queerness and its manifestations in individuals of any sex/gender alignment. Can’t we do the same here? (To be fair, I’m not criticizing Kaplan for her failure to do so per se, primarily because she’s writing in a period that’s really before the flourishing of queer studies and queer thinking I’m citing.) So what does it mean to have a queer film analysis? This is a question I certainly can’t analyze in the space I have on this blog, but I think I could take a stab at it. (Haha! Phallus joke!) Kaplan writes, “It is significant that in lesbian fantasies that Friday has collected women occupy both [dominant and submissive] positions” (317). I would suggest that it is more significant that we do not know the questions asked of these survey participants, or the extent / sample size of the survey (how many lesbians could you find and get together in 1980 to answer a question about what turns them on in mainstream film?). It seems to me that establishing the binary of submissive/dominant as the sole manifestations of sexual pleasure is excruciatingly limiting – moreover, it is a binary that queer studies have often found illogically limiting. (AN: More than that, Friday seems to have a questionable fascination with that “pleasure in anonymity,” so I doubt her objectivity in this study. But to be serious for a moment, her studies do focus primarily on heteronormative sexuality which is not particularly helpful and totally boring anyway.)
Women can certainly “own” desire, despite the psychoanalytic assertion otherwise. Queer sexuality does not depend upon the threat of castration, perhaps because of what the phallus inherently represents. The phallus represents power and strength because it is conceived of as virile, that is, the instigator of reproduction. The queer phallus does not (usually) function as a reproductive or life-giving organ – just ask Leo Bersani and he’ll tell you how much queer sexuality is all about death! We can also read this lack of reproductivity in someone like Lee Edelman, who posits that all queer sexuality is anti-futurity. Why would queer sexuality be developed around an anxiety over castration when castration does not contain the same deep threats to power, virility, masculinity, and control? Thus, can’t we posit that women do not need to be dominated, and men do not need to dominate, given that the root of all of these psychosexual relationships is that looming threat of loss, the wound that female genitalia represents, and the missing phallus? If we look at film in a queer way, I don’t think we need to structure our understanding of the gaze as something necessarily contingent upon these heteronormative psychologies.
So ultimately, what does it mean to articulate a queer gaze in film? Does a queer woman look at the woman on screen and necessarily identify with her and her lack of agency, or alternatively, with the male gazer and his control? Or is it possible that a queer woman looking at the screen can identify with the woman on screen in an empowering (by which I really mean not disenfranchising) way? Or can a heteronormatively aligned woman look at queer film and identify without submitting or dominating the female figures within? Can queer film subvert these psychosexual identifications? I think perhaps it's safe to say that there is no clear alignment with gender or sex for queer subjects (read Sedgewick's Epistemology of the Closet for a cool delineation of that whole topic), and thus, no clear identification with the phallic camera or the suppressed and powerless female lead. If we accept the premise that one must identify with the film apparatus or something in it in order for it to not be psychologically (however unconsciously) disturbing, then is queer film inherently disturbing? So many questions, so few answers. Holla at me, Matt Moses (you know you want to comment on this one).
I suppose we want to echo Kaplan when she asks, ““Is there any escape from the overdetermined, phallocentric sign?” (313) I would argue that queer film (or, rather, a queer analysis of film) provides that escape.
ReplyDeleteI suppose we want to echo Kaplan when she asks, ““Is there any escape from the overdetermined, phallocentric sign?” (313) I would argue that queer film (or, rather, a queer analysis of film) provides that escape.
I would agree with you.
I'm sympathetic to the project of feminist theorists using psychoanalysis for their own purposes, but the inherent heteronormativity is what I find to be the most frustrating thing about psychoanalytic theory in general. Admittedly, it is a product of a particular time before that would have been much of a concern - perhaps one more point for Kaplan's argument that psychonalysis is tied to a particular capitalist moment. Of course, she also ties it film in general and that linking of film, capitalism and psychoanalysis is the most compelling formulation I've seen so far of an argument as to why psychoanalysis is more relevant for film than for other art. I see where the arguments about the screen and the mirror are coming from, but that's always seemed like a stretch to me - perhaps that's because I usually don't find the mirror stage to be a particularly helpful framework to begin with, and perhaps that's because I find psychoanalytic theory so frustrating.
Like you, I found Kaplan's early questions " . . . if a female subject is watching images of lesbians what can this mean to her? How do such images inform women's actual physical relations with other women?" to be compelling, and I was disappointed when they weren't explored further. She seems to be questioning whether there is something innately queer about women identifying with the subject of desire (in a cinematic apparatus that is constructing the viewer as male)? If that's turned around, what happens to the male spectator "when the man steps out of his traditional role as the one who controls the whole action, and when he is set up as sex object, [and] the woman then take on the masculine role as bearer of the gaze . . ." (Kaplan 318). I would be curious, though, who the male spectator is supposed to be identifying with in that scenario.
Kaplan suggests, and I tend to agree, that there is no genuine suberversion in the above since the gender roles stay strictly defined, just reversed. Kaplan asks, "when women are in the dominant position, are they in the masculine position? Can we envisage a female dominant position that would differ qualitativiely from the male form of dominance? Or is there merely the possibility for both sex genders to occupy the positions we now know as masculine and feminine?" (Kaplan 318). On the one hand, it seems problematically essentialist to argue that the woman losing her "traditional" gender roles makes her "just like the men whose position she has usurped" (Kaplan 319). Gender and queer theory would assert that masculinity can be unlinked from the male body and that feminity can be unlinked from the female body. There is no reason why the answer to that third question can't be "yes." On the other hand, it's also problematic to assert that there is no way to dominant from a distincly feminine subject position. There is no reason why the answer to her second question can't also be "yes." In the way our culture (and our media in particular) currently operates, Kaplan may be right that "the gaze is not necessarily male (literally), but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the masculine position" (Kaplan 319), but that's descriptive, not prescriptive.
Not only do queer readings (operating outside the framework of heterosexuality), provide an escape, but so do genderqueer readings (operating from the margins of the male/female binary). These seem to be outside the boundaries of traditional psychoanalytic theory (though, of course, queer theory has built on and used that theory for its own purposes, just as feminist theory has).
Kaplan says, " . . . it will not do simply to enjoy our oppression unproblematically; to appropriate Hollywood images to ourselves, taking them out of the context of the total structure in which they appear, will not get us very far" (Kaplan 314). While I agree with the first part of that statement wholeheartedly, the second gives me pause. If there is space for the female or queer or otherwise not-dominant spectator to have agency - and I would always argue that there is, though psychoanalytic theory doesn't allow much - then that space exists where it is possible to reclaim those images through resistant readings.