Here are my notes for the “Feminist Film Theory” article as well as the discussion questions for class:

• Deals with women and femininity, but also men and masculinity – deals with issues of representation and spectatorship
• Early fixed stereotypes of women considered to have a negative impact on the female spectator
• Positive images were not enough to change underlying structures in film – moved onto analyzing patriarchal imagery, multiple perspectives, and encoded sexual difference
• Claire Johnston:

1. The sign “woman” can be analyzed as a structure, code, or convention – represents ideological meaning she has for men
2. Means nothing by herself, only “not-man” (no “woman-as-woman”)
3. Cinema not reflecting reality but a particular ideological view of reality

• Laura Mulvey:

1. Fascination of woman comes from scopophilia
2. Cinema integrates structures of voyeurism and narcissism into the story and visuals
3. Gender binary correlates to activity and passivity (male as active and powerful, female as passive object of desire)
4. Male viewer takes narcissistic image of self to be better, ideal ego
5. Woman evokes both attraction and anxiety of castration (reminds male of her lack of penis)
6. Threat of castration “solved” by films through either narrative (finding female guilty through death or marriage, story demands sadism) or fetishization (displaces and eroticizes lack of penis, fails to represent woman outside of phallic norm)

• Feminist counter-cinema: rejection of fundamental structures due to their patriarchal roots, engage in experimental practice, dialectics and passionate detachment – destroy the visual pleasure of the spectator
• Counter-cinema took inspiration from avant-garde: montage, distanciation, and modernist aesthetic
• Example of counter-cinema: Potter’s Thriller: splitting of female protagonist into heroine and object, uses mirrors and shadows (and, ultimately, the two forms embracing) to symbolize female identity (they are not and should not be split), examines female exclusion from patriarchy and women’s roles in society – “foreign” female voice is dominant, speaks the discourse of theory and criticism
• Documentary counter-cinema: should manufacture and construct the “truth” of women’s oppression, not merely reflect it – need to deconstruct patriarchal images and establish their female subjectivity (must find out and redefine what it is to be a woman)
• Mulvey speculated that it might be possible for women to identify with slot of female passivity and enjoy adopting masculine point of view – held idea that a woman can only be feminine if she sheds omniscient masculine phallic fantasy and that female spectators take pleasure in rediscovering this lost aspect of their sexual identity
• Female masquerade: notion that women are more fluid in capacity to identify with other gender – both a masking and “unmasking” (can expose and critique) – Doane: women in a male position of authority can put on a mask of femininity that functions as compensation of masculine position (distances woman from image; normally, she cannot distance herself from image to be voyeuristic because she is the image)
• Female look: Kaplan: Women can make males the objects of their gaze but her desire holds no power since underlying structures of dominance and submission are intact – counterargument from Gertrude Koch: European concept of “vamp” provides female spectator with positive, homoerotic image of autonomous femininity (pleasure derived through ambiguity/not explicitly telegraphed as “for men”) – similar counterargument from Gaylyn Studlar: focus on pre-oedipal phase and on mother as love object and source of visual pleasure through use of performance and masquerade
• Female subjectivity: can be achieved through narrative (each film derives structure from its subject’s desire and inscription in societal/cultural codes) – stories are made to “seduce” women into femininity with or without their consent
• Two different processes of identification in cinema: oscillating (binary) or simultaneous (double identification with figure of narrative movement/image, taking both active and passive roles)
• de Lauretis: female subject cannot be subject, only “non-subject” – fundamentally unrepresentable as subject of desire, can only be represented as representation – female subject (through phallic fantasy) made to bear burden of lack to provide male subject with illusion of wholeness and unity
• Male voice is more frequently disembodied, female usually restricted to realm of body (cannot reach a signifying position in language)
• Role of mother in childhood: Negative Oedipal complex: Loss and separation through acquisition of language leads female child to desire mother – can only be after pre-oedipal stage, distance required from mother necessary for her to be seen as an erotic object – “positive oedipal phase” comes when she redirects her desire to her father – creates an irreconcilable contradiction in female desire – women can both identify with and desire their mothers; contributes to female narcissism
• Sexual difference: limits examining differences across gender (social construction) in favor of sex (anatomy) – opposed by lesbians due to heterosexual bias within psychoanalytic feminist film theory
• Gay and lesbian criticism: usually explicitly denied through the use of “other” side characters, hinted at but not addressed, or used to mark death and pathology in mainstream films
• Feminist theory and race: black feminists criticized focus on sexual difference for failure to analyze racial difference – often excluded and not dealt with in white patriarchy, seen as even greater threat to status quo than white female sexuality – black man’s sexual gaze seen as socially prohibited, historically penalized in literal reflections of oedipal myth – black female spectators do not necessarily identify with either male gaze or white womanhood as lack, but rather “construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation”
• Masculinity: since male spectatorship is implicit, the male body as an erotic object has undercurrents of homoeroticism; denial of homoeroticism involves themes of sadomasochism – phallus itself is a symbol and signifier, but no man can fully symbolize it (he will fall short of the phallic ideal) – male spectacle puts the male in a feminine position as the desired object – men’s reactions to early cinema reflected the elements of hysteria (they responded in ways people linked to femininity)
• Queer theory: offers camp readings of male spectacle (irony, parody, performance and gender transgressions), brings out cultural ambiguities and contradictions – queer readings (more recent) are a more self-assertive version of camp

1. What possible ways can women make films that avoid the trappings of Freud’s psychoanalysis and Oedipal stages?
2. How else can feminists deconstruct gender/race/sexuality norms in film?