Subjectivity and Gendered Spectatorship

http://nl.ijs.si/~damjan/lacan.html

This Lacanian term refers to the stage when, around the age of 6 to 18 months, the infant recognizes that he is an individual, separate from his surroundings. This recognition comes from an image, either reflected in a mirror or by individuals around him, that the infant sees and perceives as himself.The resulting self identification, the concept of subjectivity, thus, comes from the outside. Consequently subjectivity is not controlled by the subject (the "I") itself but by external things, and hence always at risk.

http://www.stanford.edu/~brooksie?Marlene/ANGEL.JPG
Masquerade: Marlene Dietrich as "a woman demonstrating the representation of a woman's body" (Bovenschen in Doane 66)

http://www.threemoviebuffs.com/review.php?movieID=riverofnoreturn

The River of No Return (1954, Otto Preminger) features the device of a show-girl, allowing the two looks (scopophilic and narcissistic) of the male gaze to be unified without breaking the story line.

http://hitchcock.tv/mov/rear_window/window.html

In Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock), the male protagonist, a photographer, portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator, simultaneously intensifying and parodying the scopophilic pleasure.

Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

Laura Mulvey relates the fact of the visual image as the originator of self identification with the pleasure of the cinema. She argues that film enables viewers to experience not only the pleasure of looking but also the moment when the idea of the self is conceived. This results in two different kind of pleasures: scopophilic (looking at another person as an object of sexual stimulation) and narcissistic (identification with the person seen).
However, this pleasure is mostly of the male gaze, both of the male character and the male viewer, projecting phantasy on to the female character. The male viewer does this directly (scopophilic) and through his identification with the male character. The identification is also helped by visual techniques of the camera, making it look "natural", and the experience of the theater's darkened room, blocking "the real world" from the viewer.

Doane's "Film and the Masquerade"

Mary Ann Doane proposes two ways in which the female viewer experience cinema, based on the possibilities available to her. "[T]he female viewer is given two options: the masochism of over-identification of the narcissism entailed in becoming one's own object of desire" (70). Analyzing a 1948 photograph by Robert Doisneau, Doane explains how the female gaze is not accounted for; although it is seemingly central to the picture, it is actually the male gaze which, although operated from the periphery, controls the meaning of the image.
Doane puts forth the theory of masquerade, the flaunting of femininity, as a way for the female viewer to distance herself from the image and acquire the ability to possess it.

"... the photograph appears to give a certain prominence to a woman's look. Yet, both the title of the photograph and its organization of space indicate that the real site of scopophilic power is on the margins of the frame. The man is not centered ... Nevertheless, it is his gaze which defines the problematic of the photograph ... Indeed, as subject of the gaze, the woman looks intently. But not only is the object of her look concealed from the spectator, her gaze is encased by the two poles defining masculine axis of vision. Fascinated by nothing visible ... the female gaze is left free-floating, vulnerable to subjection. ... On the other hand, the object of the male gaze is fully present, there for the spectator. The fetishistic representation of the nude female body ... insures a masculinization of the spectorial position." (Doane 68)

Model for Subjectivity and Gendered Spectatorship

This model is a combination of Mulvey's and Doane's theories of gendered spectatorship. In Mulvey, the male viewer sees the female character both directly and through the male character, while at the same time looking at him looking at her. For Doane, the female viewer can only either over-identify with the female character or to desire the female character as her own likeness. At the same time, these ways of looking are part of the construct of the viewer's subjectivity.
Admittedly, this is not the ideal situation and there is need for a more general theory of spectatorship that includes both genders and other variables such as class, race, age, cultural background, and sexual identity.

This tool is based on an original model developed by the Knowledge Media Lab of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
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