THE FEMALE GAZE: ART, POP CULTURE, AND CINEMA by kylierichmond

THE FEMALE GAZE: ART, POP CULTURE, AND CINEMA

TABLE OF CONTENTS

editor’s note / introduction VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA / LAURA MULVEY

6 10

(EXCERPTS BY JOEY SOLOWAY)

GIRL ON GIRL / CHARLOTTE JANSEN

ANNA BILLER & THE NSFW FEMALE GAZE / BRITTANY STIGLER

RIOT GRRRL MANIFESTO / KATHLEEN HANNA

THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE: BLACK FEMALE SPECTATORS / BELL HOOKS

“MA CHERIE” / MISCHA HAIDER

FEELS BLIND / BIKINI KILL

credits

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EDITOR’S NOTE / INTRODUCTION

This compilation of text and image delineates what the female gaze looks like and how it manifests itself in terms of arts and popular culture. The book, split into two parts, opens with Section I: The Female Gaze Theory as Applied to Art, Film, and Popular Culture. Beginning with feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the book introduces the male and female gazes through the intial text in which Mulvey proposes both concepts. Academic texts throughout the book are coupled with relevant film stills and examples of related works that show the male and female gazes. Section I, which explores the female gaze through examples from film, art, and pop culture, culminates with an image gallery and a call-to-action by feminist singer and pioneer of the feminist punk riot grrrl movement, Kathleen Hanna. Section II: Marginalized Identities and Complications of the Female Gaze Theory explores how the female gaze theory applies to those of intersecting identities. Traditional explorations of female gaze theory have mainly focused on the white, cis female gaze, neglecting the complications that arise at the intersections of identity. This section explores how

EDITOR’S NOTE / INTRODUCTION

It must be disclosed that due to the constraints of this book, a very limited selection of text and image has been chosen. Therefore, the book is not intended to be a comprehensive examination into the female gaze, but rather a jumping off point for further investigation. As of now, a majority of existing research on this topic focuses on the white, cis female gaze. While this book does explore the female gaze through the lens of marginalized identity, it merely scratches the surface in terms of the experiences of these groups (and range of identities explored). New research on this topic (and representations of these identities in terms of art and popular culture) still being developed, focusing on how the female gaze intertwines with marginalized identities.

KYLIE RICHMOND

a one-fits-all theory of female gaze is not inclusive, and must account for intersectional identities. Bell Hooks’s “Oppositional Gaze” explores how Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” focuses on white womanhood and neglects to account for an oppositional gaze that does not identify with such experiences.

SECTION I:

THE FEMALE GAZE THEORY AS APPLIED TO ART, FILM, AND POPULAR CULTURE

VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA LAURA MULVEY I. INTRODUCTION A. A POLITICAL USE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have molded him. It takes as a starting point the way film reflects, reveals, and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while

attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating how the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form. The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pinto the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the

STILLS FROM DAISIES (1966), DIRECTED BY VERA CHYTILOVA. EXAMPLES OF AN AVANT-GARDE ALTERNATIVE CINEMA AND DESTRUCTION OF PLEASURE. teases the male gaze VIA VISUAL MANIPULATION OF IMAGERY.

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representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarize briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold, she first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory, which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud’s famous phrase). Woman’s desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound. She can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier of the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing

them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of the bleeding wound. She can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier of the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning. There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order. It gets us nearer to the root of our oppression, it brings an articulation of the problem closer, it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language while still caught within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the

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blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one. We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the female unconscious which are scarcely relevant to phallocentric theory: the sexing of the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman as non-mother, maternity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina. But, at this point, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught.

B. DESTRUCTION OF PLEASURE AS A RADICAL WEAPON As an advanced representation system, cinema poses questions of ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Cinema has changed over the last few decades. It is no longer the monolithic system based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Technological advances (16mm, etc.) have changed the economic conditions of cinematic production, which

can now be artisanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an alternative cinema to develop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always restricted itself to a formal miseen-scene reflecting the dominant ideological concept of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically, but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it, and, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions. A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint. The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developed Hollywood

STILLS FROM (top to bottom) jennifer’s body (2009), the wolf of wall street (2013), and star wars: episode vi – return of the jedi (1983). examples of objectification and scopophilia in modern film.

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the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in fantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions. This essay will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in film, its meaning, and in particular the central place of the image of woman. It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favor of a reconstructed new pleasure,which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intellectualized unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.

II. PLEASURE IN LOOKING/ FASCINATION WITH THE HUMAN FORM A. The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples center around the voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the private and the forbidden (curiosity about other people’s genital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of the penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further, attaching it initially to pre-genital antoeroticism, after which the pleasure of the look is transferred to others by

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analogy. There is a close working here of the relationship between the active instinct and its further development in a narcissistic form.) Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other. At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen on the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light

and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer.

B. The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognizes its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this analysis are relevant here. The mirror phase

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occurs at a time when the child’s physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition; the image recognized is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification with others. This mirror moment pre-dates language for the child. Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the I, of subjectivity. This is a moment when an older fascination with looking (at the mother’s face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/ despair between image and selfimage which has found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surroundings, for instance),

the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego. The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of the presubjective moment of image recognition. At the same time the cinema has distinguished itself in the production of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system, the stars centering both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary).

C. Section II. A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other

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demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and selfpreservation continues to be a dramatic polarization in terms of pleasure. Both are formative structures, mechanisms not meaning. In themselves they have no signification, they have to be attached to an idealization. Bothpursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the imagized, eroticized concept of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity. During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particular illusion of reality in which this contradition between libido and ego has found a beautifully complementary fantasy world. In reality the fantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it. Sexual instincts and identification processes have a meaning within the symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the

instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, though pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox.

III. WOMAN AS IMAGE, MAN AS BEARER OF THE LOOK A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/ male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. 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-belooked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical songand-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence

STILLS FROM portrait of a lady on fire (2019). scene depicts the female gaze by rejecting the concept of “dreaming” of an idealized female lover, as opposed to thinking of women as real, three-dimensional people.

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of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of the story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.” Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the

sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a noman’s-land outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe’s first appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall’s songs in To Have or Have Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen.

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B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralize the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of onmipotence. A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those

of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more completely, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror recognition, in which the alienated subject internalized his own representation of this imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisibile editing (demanded by realism), all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates action.

MEN DIVIDE US FOR THEIR STORYLINES. THEY DIVIDE US SO THEY CAN TELL STORIES ABOUT US TO OTHER MEN. SO THEY CALL US THE MADONNA AND THE WHORE. THEY SAY THE ONE I WANNA MARRY AND THE ONE I WANNA FUCK. WE DON’T WANT TO BE TURNED INTO SLICES THAT PUSH MEN TOWARDS THEIR OWN PLOT CLIMAXES, THEIR OWN RESCUES, THEIR OWN REVENGES. WE ARE NOT THE MADONNA OR THE WHORE, THE BETTY AND VERONICA, THE GINGER AND MARY ANN. SOMETIMES WE HAVE TO SLICE OURSELVES EVEN SMALLER, CHOOSE FROM THREE, PICK ONE – ARE YOU CARRIE, ARE YOU CHARLOTTE, ARE YOU MIRANDA, ARE YOU SAMANTHA… THE FEMALE GAZE INSPIRES A COLLECTIVE ROAR WE FILL WITH POWER AS WE CORROBORATE ONE ANOTHER, WE COLLABORATE, WE BLATANTLY ASK THE OBVIOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT THE DIVIDED FEMININE. – JOEY SOLOWAY

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C.1 Sections III. A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic fantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the iamge of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualized. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her showgirl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.) But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper

problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organization of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman, as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming

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it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. –

IV. SUMMARY The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this essay is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object), and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes)act as formations, mechanisms, which this cinema has played on. The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic form--illusionistic narrative film. The argument returns again to the psychoanalytic background in that woman as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat. None of these interacting layers is intrinsic to film, but it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction,thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different

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in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theater, shows, etc. Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged. To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the profilmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in

the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness, and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as a intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two look materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the erotic image on the screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishization,

FILMS LADYBIRD (2017, TOP) AND FRANCES HA (2012, BOTTOM) BY FEMALE FILMMAKER GRETA GERWIG. BOTH FILMS EXPLORE FEMALE IDENTITY AND COMING-OF-AGE.

STILLS FROM SEASON 1 OF EUPHORIA (2019). THE SHOW EXPLORES TOPICS SUCH AS LOVE AND SEXUALITY, LGBTQ+, TRANSGENDER IDENTITY, AND FEMALE FRIENDSHIP UNDER THE LENS OF THE FEMALE GAZE.

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concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator, and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him. This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate attachment. There’s no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the “invisible guest,” and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/ passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret.

character harley quinn in suicide squad (2016). film directed by a man. quinn is an object of the male gaze. she is “daddy’s little monster” – she does not belong to herself and is reduced to being the joker’s girlfriend and an attractive character to look at.

same character in birds of prey (2020). film directed by a woman. quinn is percieved through the female gaze. she is her own person now – she cuts her hair short and wears a shirt monogrammed with her own name – she belongs to herself, not “daddy.”

WHAT IF ONLY WOMEN WERE ALLOWED TO CRAFT OUR OWN STORYLINES ABOUT OUR BODIES, ABOUT CONSENT, FOR THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS?

COULD WE CHANGE LAWS WITH OUR GAZE AS WE WRITE AND DIRECT AND PRODUCE OUR OWN TRUTHS ABOUT THE VIOLENCE ON OUR BODIES? – JOEY SOLOWAY

Phebe Schmidt, Sweethearts, 2016

GIRL ON GIRL

Charlotte Jansen explores the power of the female gaze and looks at the new ways women are photographing themselves and each other. There is an undeniable pleasure in looking at a beautiful photograph of a woman: it’s visceral, but that response tends to complicate the role women have in art and visual culture. In the past, photographs of women were made by men to pander to a heteronormative, male gaze. Photographs of women fed female competitiveness – ideal for selling products in a capitalist world – and did little to represent the many other experiences women’s bodies go through. In recent years, that’s started to change. Through my book Girl On Girl, I wanted to explore what was going on. Over the last ten years, more of the photographs of women we see on a daily basis are made by women. That’s partly because photographers don’t have to wait to be seen; thanks to the internet, they can create, publish, and present their work independently. The introduction of the frontfacing camera to smartphones in 2010 helped explode this selfgenerating photography which

has influenced what we are seeing, with more women turning their cameras on themselves and the women around them. However, female visibility is, in a sense, still a fallacy: we see photographs of women everyday, on the covers of magazines, on ads on the tube, plastered on billboards, in miniature on our devices, and in porn. But the message we get from this mass of images is pretty much the same. It is largely aspirational: women are beautiful, or they are rebellious (against the assumed default patriarchy). Sometimes – and this group is a more recent phenomenon, and rare – they’re shown as both. Even more rarely do they appear as neither. This last group is usually the kind of photographs women take. Why does this matter? It matters because photography really affects how we see people. After years of seeing more of the images men wanted to see of women, we’re now getting a broader picture.

girl on girl

The dominant public opinion today perceives how and why women photograph women – and what these photographs have to offer - very narrowly. I know this because before I started this book, I felt the same way. Many of the photographers I interviewed for Girl On Girl have never described their own work as feminist: artists such as Jaimie Warren, Isabelle Wenzel, or Iiu Susiraja, for example, are using their bodies sculpturally, as form, something they can control totally, and something to have fun with.If you look at length, they reveal new nuances in the human shape; the way objects circumscribe identity, and how the human environment moulds us. I don’t doubt they’d all love for women to have an equal position in the world–and in their art, that world exists–but to only see their work as feminist would be too simplistic. Among the forty women I interviewed for Girl on Girl, it was clear that when not labelled as feminist (as now something that is commercially viable), this kind of work has been relegated or dismissed as vapid or shallow. This has been a particular problem for younger artists whose practice happens primarily online and includes selfies. Molly Soda, Monika Mogi, Mayan Toledano

and Alexandra Marzella, all of whom feature in Girl on Girl, touched on this in our conversations. The significant difference now is that they have much more control over their work and how it’s seen. They command a huge reach, much bigger than most of their critics. They have a power that women photographers didn’t have in the 70s, the era of the most radical photography of women by women, or during the 80s and 90s when women made satirical, postmodern photography of themselves. Women do photograph women differently. Speaking to women, I realised they feel a huge responsibility towards other women–the reason that many turn their lens on themselves instead. They see much more complexity in women than men do, and that comes out in the photographs. Artists such as Phebe Schmidt, or Maisie Cousins, working between art and advertising, are among the women photographers doing something I find really interesting in photography–creating images that are still aesthetic and seductive but can speak more truthfully about indulgence, gluttony, and vanity. Since its early widespread use, photography has played a part in figuring out who we are,

Isabelle Wenzel, Rotation 2, 2014

girl on girl

top: iu Susiraja, From Täydellinen arki/Perfect for everyday, 2012–13 bottom: izumi Miyazaki, The moment I become an object, 2015

in investigating self-image. Increasingly, it’s become about fantasy, rather than reality, about creating a world we want to see, rather than depicting the one we live in–but finding a greater truth in the invented. The photographs women take of themselves and other women are changing what we see of women and how we see it, and slowly we’re catching up. If we cannot see more than an expression of feminism or femininity in a photograph of a female figure, how can we expect to see more than this when we encounter women elsewhere in our lives? Through the process of writing Girl On Girl, I spent time talking to women from seventeen different countries, who came from all kinds of backgrounds, whose practices move from photojournalism to fashion and all the blurred areas between; artists of all ages and stages in life; the only thing they shared was a common subject of women in their work. What this highlights–for me, at least, and I hope it will for others too–is just how many possibilities there are in these photographs if we’re willing to look beyond the parameters we’re prescribed. As it turns out, what you get is not always what you see.

JULY 6TH 2017

BRITTANY STIGLER

ANNA BILLER &

THE NSFW FEMALE GAZE

Screening as a double feature in conjunction with the Museum of Sex’s exhibition, “NSFW: The Female Gaze,” Anna Biller’s films Viva and The Love Witch both take on the notion of female subjectivity, though in very different ways. In Viva, Biller exposes the dark side of the sexual revolution through the dangers its main character experiences. In The Love Witch, the film’s title character, also known as Elaine, searches for a perfect love by stroking up desire through potions and spells, only to meet a violent fallout. Both presented on 35mm, the films are a treat to behold on their own, and even more so when put into conversation with one another. Biller’s dedication to crafting an entire filmic universe for her characters—from the lighting to the procurement and placement of props—aids in filling out female narratives that are often left untold. To mark the occasion, we spoke with Anna Biller about her films, the female gaze, and desire.

Brittany Stigler: These films are screening as part of the Museum of Sex’s exhibition “NSFW: The Female Gaze,” so I just wanted to start off by asking you: what do you like to look at and what kind of films you find pleasurable to view?

Anna Biller: I mostly watch classic movies, and what I enjoy about the classic movies is, first of all, is that they’re so beautiful in terms of pure cinema. You know the sensuality of them, the lighting, the costumes, the makeup, the glamour. And also the fact that they had very good roles for women that were well written. Women were strong and funny and smart, and they were often subjects of the film, instead of just side characters. They’re just pleasurable for me in every way.

How do you translate that sort of visual pleasure that you experience from the classic movies into your own films?

One thing I do is I study the classic movies for all of those sensual things that I love in them— especially things like lighting and color. Costume and makeup. And one thing I really also love about those movies is how much interior

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decoration there was that was so good. So I study the interior decoration. And I see movies as kind of a complete sensual experience. We’re voyeurs when we go into a movie theater; it’s dark, and you’re having a personal experience with the images on the screen, and it’s a freudian erotic experience. I love it when objects are treated erotically. You know, when a glass has a beautiful sparkle on it. Or when just the color and the frame is treated in a special way. I think that’s what creates art. It’s not a replication of life. What creates cinema is putting a point of view on it. I know that nowadays the trend is to have a point of view be that what people consider more real or more raw is when films look like they’re not lit, and it’s as if they are translating something directly from themselves right into the movie, and they feel that is going to be the most real. But in my experience that’s not true. I think the way to create something real is to figure out how to translate your subjectivity into art in a certain way. And I think all the other arts do that. Painting, sculpture, music. All the other arts are about translating a kind of subjectivity into form. And somehow film has lost that. That sense of wanting to create subjectivity through

form. Take lighting for example. Let’s say see you someone and you find that person really, really exciting. When you look at that person, your eye is going to go to that person, and you’re going to focus on that person in a special way, and they’re going to appear to be brighter than anyone around them—like a halo effect. That’s what lighting used to do in classic movies. They used to separate out things with framing and lighting so that you would experience those things witha kind of intense subjectivity. It wouldn’t be specially considered if it wasn’t supposed to be important, and if things were lit in a certain way. If there were close ups of them, then you would know that they were more important to characters that were looking at them. So that’s how you develop the film language. You cue the viewers into the subjectivity of the characters and the subjectivity of the filmmaker by how you lit and filmed and edited. But that’s no longer the case in filmmaking. You know, people try to do almost everything like in a documentary style so there is no subjectivity, and they allow the viewer to insert their own subjectivity. And that’s one kind of filmmaking, and what has

still from the love witch, 2016

props from the love witch, 2016

anna biller & the nsfw female gaze

surprised me is that it has become the only kind of filmmaking. It’s one option, and it’s an interesting option, but it’s not the only option. So, if you’re talking about a female gaze and female desire and female pleasure, for me: I love color, I love interior decorating, I love objects, I love faces. And so for me a female gaze is about gazing at the things that I find interesting. And maybe for a man, you know when you’re trying to create desire on the screen, one of the most powerful images for a man on the screen is a naked woman. And for me it’s not. It’s a lot of other things that are just as interesting or more interesting than a naked women, and that’s how I make my films. So you see that there might be nudity in my films, but the nudity isn’t treated differently than everything else.

For me personally, I know when I was looking at Elaine, I really didn’t desire her in a physical way, but just the way everything was put together on her and the way she interacted with the world was very desirable. It was just a very tactile experience, and I was wondering, how do you go about that?

It’s interesting because I do think about, what do I want to see. What is my fantasy? What do I want to see on the screen? And I try to be honest with myself. So I create pink tea room, and I think, OK, I designed this set, this pink tea room, so what should the women wear in this tea room? And I start doing the costumes, and I found all these pink and peach dresses at a thrift store, which was a huge windfall for me, because I didn’t

anna biller & the nsfw female gaze

have to make a lot of the background costumes. Do I want to go that far, do I want to put people in big flower hats? Do I want to go there, and I think, yes, I do want to go there. Do I want Elaine to be in a big flowered hat? Do I, do I not; I didn’t decide until last minute. Ok, I have a hat for her, we’ll put it on, we’ll see how it looks. I love it, I love the hat on her. So I keep thinking what I’d like to see. And I start buying tea sets, and it’s like I want all of the tea sets to be these perfect, cute, adorable tea sets. And what do I want on the table? Well, it’s high tea. I keep working on it until it feels like it’s right, and I guess when I feel it’s right, it’s more over the top than what other people would put in a movie.

But I think it’s because so much of the time, the objects in the sets are afterthoughts. People hire a prop master the last minute, and they don’t have enough time and scramble things together at the last minute, and they’re not important. But for me, they’re characters in the movie, so I think women, or most women, have a fantasy about a perfect world they can live in. Most people don’t think they go out in the world and think they look perfect. That they have the perfect outfit. That they have the perfect accessories. Sometimes we all want that. We all want to fantasize about living in this kind of world of aesthetic pleasure. So I like to create that in a movie sometimes. I think it’s fun, I think it’s nice. But not to make it fake or

anna biller & the nsfw female gaze

pictured: the love witch, 2016

silly. But to kind of contrast that with the interior world of a woman that’s really untidy.

How manicured Elaine’s life is really makes her realize that her life isn’t perfect, and that she can’t make it perfect with witchcraft, all the more devastating. There is so much pleasure in the movie, but in the back half of the movie, there is a ton of fear. What’s the role of fear and how does it contrast or even work in tandem with pleasure and love?

I felt it was really important to have the character experience a lot of fear and terror in that scene where she’s attacked in the bar, but also in the scene where she has kind of a sexual encounter that’s pretty unwanted. You know in the coven, where she’s terrified of it. It’s something she’s probably consented to, and she’s regretting it, but she doesn’t pull out. It’s like, I just want to show reality. So again, we’re talking about styles of filmmaking earlier and how people want to show what things are really like, and I want to show how things are really like, too. And

I feel like being a woman is an experience of fear: you’re afraid of men, you’re afraid of rapists. You’re afraid of being attacked, you’re afraid of speaking up, and you’re afraid of having a voice. And I just don’t really know if that is examined much in movies. This idea that even a woman that seems so strong, she seems so together, she’s still a woman, and she lives in a world with men and predators. And a world in which people are always trying to silence her. And I just want to kind of create a feeling of reality in her world. So she does try to create her own desire and

her own pleasure and she tries to make her world perfect around her, but she lives in a society. That scene in that bar, where the men all attacked her. That’s not that far-fetched. Those things happen to women all the time. I guess that fear is something that I wanted to explore and express. Because all you have to do is be a woman that men either feel attracted to or feel threatened by. The idea was that those men turn on her and they want to rape her not out of sexual desire but hatred. They hate her because she thinks she’s a witch. I think rape is a form

of control, not a form of desire. It’s a form of violence and a form of control. And I like show how it’s the men in their hatred and their fear of her that want to rape her. It is nothing to do with desire. Her raw palpable fear there. I don’t want to show a movie where a woman is killing men or ostensibly causing men’s death and make it feel like that’s really the reality— that’s the balance of power in the world; that women are the destroyers—but to show it in context of the real world. And the dynamics of the real world are really more like that bar. I felt

like I had to include that to show that this is the actual context that we live in. It’s not a fantasy world where women control anything.

pictured: the love witch, 2016

anna biller & the nsfw female gaze

Thinking about the opposite of that, something going on in cultural right now is that people are really grasping to the idea of the coven and the sisterhood and witchcraft, and I wanted to talk to you about friendship and sisterhood in your movies and what role they play:

pictured: the love witch, 2016

I’ve noticed what you’ve talking about as well, there’s a new type of solidarity among women, and I have to tell you that didn’t feel like that was happening when I was younger, so I think that’s pretty exciting. And I think when I was younger, especially a teenager and in my early twenties, I really felt that women didn’t feel safe just bonding with other women. There was a sense in which if you wanted to make it in the world you had to attach yourself to men. And I feel that that’s changing. I think that’s quite amazing. And I think it’s because it’s more women are in positions to help other women. So you don’t actually have to have a male partner or a male business partner or anything to rise in the world. You can actually help women help each other. But when I made Viva, I wasn’t experiencing that shift yet. The friendships in the two movies are a little bit different, because I feel that the friendship in Viva was a little bit about how Sheila had white privilege and Barbi didn’t. And so their relationship was strained by that. So because Sheila had white privilege, she knew a lot of things from her upbringing and being part of a culture that Barbi didn’t know. And I feel that a lot of Barbi’s experiences of trauma had to do with the fact she was an

anna biller & the nsfw female gaze

outsider. And it’s never explicitly mentioned in the script that she’s the only person of color in white suburbia, but I think it’s implicit. So, I think that it was like their friendship was marred by that difference. They were still able to be friends but Sheila had a certain callousness about her because of not understanding the difference between her and Barbi. And she was the one that drew Barbi into this really dangerous world and then she herself didn’t become scathed by the world. So Sheila wasn’t the best friend in the world.

pictured: viva, 2007

But it isn’t like I wouldn’t imagine that there couldn’t be a utopian friendship between women. I also think that Trish would have been a great friend, was a great friend, and she was betrayed by Elaine, because Elaine was a flawed character. Elaine was back in the old mentality of having to use men to rise in the world, and only men have the power, and she didn’t really trust in female friendships. But she had more of a real friendship with Barbara, but Barbara, the high priestess, but the high priestess also was kind of in a weird relationship with her own husband, where her husband is doing sexual initiations with other women right in front of her and she just doesn’t mind. And she’s smiling, even if those other

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women are hurt by it, and I think that’s sort of messed up. I guess in my movies, there’s a sense of women living in this sort of ghetto, where they keep trying to get out of it, but they can’t really get out of it. So, the women are fabulous, and they’re trying to be empowered, and they’re trying to make the right choices, but it’s hard to have a real friendship if there are all of these social forces opposing that.

It’s very sad.

It’s sad, right? But it’s not some sort of outlandish, dark world I’m painting that isn’t reality.

No, your film has felt the most real to me of any film that I’ve watched in such a long time, and I think a lot of different people feel that way.

It’s interesting because I think for a lot of women, it feels very real. But you’ll see the reviews and comments from a lot of men, who are like: this film’s about nothing, this film is so boring, it has no subject matter, it’s all it is is pretty visual design. Like, wow, the author should really have a less muddled message, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. So women’s lives have no content, and there’s no such thing as a women’s subjectivity, and a film that a female filmmaker makes is stupid. It’s sad, right? It’s depressing.

anna biller & the nsfw female gaze

It is, and it just makes me wonder about you: I get the sense that there is a certain kind of reduction of the female filmmaker to just a female filmmaker, and not kind of including her in a broader term. And obviously you star in Viva, and as for The Love Witch, I can’t see how anyone could separate you from that film. Do you feel objectification from that or as a female a filmmaker?

Very much with Viva, I felt objectified because men were commenting on my body. And when I would go to film festivals, they would try to get me to pose in sexy ways and lay down on the floor and take all these pictures. And I was much more passive back then, I was kind of like the character. It’s so funny, because the character in Viva is very passive, and she lets herself get photographed, and she does whatever she’s told. And so I went out to this film festival, and I was actually doing the same thing. Photographers kept asking me to pose and do this and do that, and I would just do it. After a while, I started to become kind of upset by it. I made a movie where I was complaining about women being treated like this, and now because I made that movie, I’m now been treated like this, and I hadn’t been treated like that since I was much younger, in college or something, and now it’s like OK. It’s really, really strange. So I became very upset by that actually. And it ruined acting for me. I wouldn’t have acted in the next film anyway, but it sort of ruined acting for me. I just never wanted to be in front of a camera anymore at all, not even to be photographed. I still feel that way, because the level of objectification was so outrageous. And now I feel that they’re

anna biller & the nsfw female gaze

objectifying my star [of The Love Witch] in a way that feels personal to me. But I don’t feel ghettoized in the sense of being called a female filmmaker, because I think that because there still aren’t that many female filmmakers, it feels more like a boost. You can have articles written, and you’re included in lists and things, I think it just wouldn’t be as much press. It’s just a way of giving people a boost that otherwise maybe would have been just ignored. But there isn’t really a common thread necessarily between films women make, but there are certain films made by certain women that definitely could have only been made by women, that they’re very, very subjective in terms of female experience. I think that it’s interesting to highlight and showcase those films and talk about how they’re different and what that difference says, and have a discussion about it, and I think that I like to do that. I like to kind of look at other work by female directors and try to find common themes.

In terms of touring The Love Witch, is it hard to find theaters to play the 35mm version?

Not really, because the kinds of theaters that would want my film, a lot of them still project 35. In fact a lot of theaters really wanted

anna biller & the nsfw female gaze

35 and couldn’t get it because they only made four prints. So it was only select theaters that could screen the 35. Now that the theatrical run is over, those prints are just sitting around, so if anyone wants to program them on 35mm it’s available.

I wonder, are more filmmakers going back to film?

I think people understand the beauty of film. And when you’re making a professional film, it’s actually really not much more expensive, but that’s something people don’t really understand. Because when you have to do a professional color toning process, the machines and technicians are extremely expensive. The color toning in post is so much cheaper on film in that sense. The camera’s also much cheaper. So the only thing that is more expensive is stock, and the processing. But if you don’t go crazy and shoot a lot of footage, I think it pretty much evens out on a professional movie. If your budget is at least a million dollars, the cost is pretty negligible.

I’m assuming on your next project you’ll probably shoot on film, right?

Absolutely. Unless overnight the whole system collapses and Kodak announces it’s not making film anymore, then yeah I’ll be shooting on film as long as I can.

SECTION Ii:

marginalized identities and complications of the female gaze theory

THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE: BLACK FEMALE SPECTATORS BELL HOOKS When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being punished as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks children would give grown-ups, looks that were seen as confrontational, as gestures of resistance, challenges to authority. The “gaze” has always been political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one’s gaze can be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the other way when necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, “Look at me when I talk to you.” Only, the child is afraid to

look. Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in looking. Amazed the first time I read in history classes that white slaveowners (men, women, and children) punished enslaved black people for looking, I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black parenting and black spectatorship. The politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze. Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute difference

collage pieces by mickalene thomas. exploring black female identity and its portrayal throughout art history. thomas rose to prominence by appropriating historical works by male artists such as Courbet, Manet and Picasso, replacing the white female nude with images of black women.

collage piece by mickalene thomas. exploring black female identity and “the Gaze”.

THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE

between whites who had oppressed black people and ourselves. Years later, reading Michel Foucault, I thought again about these connections, about the ways power as domination reproduces itself in different locations employing similar apparatuses, strategies, and mechanisms of control. Since I knew as a child that the dominating power adults exercised over me and over my gaze was never so absolute that I did not dare to look, to sneak a peep, to stare dangerously, I knew that the slaves had looked. That all attempts to repress our/ black peoples’ right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: “Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.” Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency. In much of his work, Michel Foucault insists on describing domination in terms of “relations of power” as part of an effort to challenge the assumption that “power is a system of domination which controls everything and which leaves no room for freedom. ” Emphatically stating that in all

relations of power, “there is necessarily the possibility of resistance,” he invites the critical thinker to search those margins, gaps, and locations on and through the body where agency can be found. – Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. The “gaze” has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that “looks” to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating “awareness” politicizes “looking” relations— one learns to look a certain way in order to resist. When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images,

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was to engage its negation of black representation. It was the oppositional black gaze that responded to these looking relations by developing independent black cinema. Black viewers of mainstream cinema and television could chart the progress of political movements for racial equality via the construction of images, and did so. Within my family’s southern black workingclass home, located in a racially segregated neighborhood, watching television was one way to develop critical spectatorship. Unless you went to work in the white world, across the tracks, you learned to look at white people by staring at them on the screen. Black looks, as they were constituted in the context of social movements for racial uplift, were interrogating gazes. We laughed at television shows like Our Gang and Amos ’n ’ Andy, at these white representations of blackness, but we also looked at them critically. Before racial integration, black viewers of movies and television experienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about contestation and confrontation. Writing about black looking relations in “Black British Cinema: Spectatorship and Identity Formation in Territories,” Manthia

Diawara identifies the power of the spectator: “Every narration places the spectator in a position of agency; and race, class and sexual relations influence the way in which this subjecthood is filled by the spectator.” Of particular concern for him are moments of “rupture” when the spectator resists “complete identification with the film’s discourse.” These ruptures define the relation between black spectators and dominant cinema prior to racial integration. Then, one’s enjoyment of a film wherein representations of blackness were stereotypically degrading and dehumanizing coexisted with a critical practice that restored presence where it was negated. Critical discussion of the film while it was in progress or at its conclusion maintained the distance between spectator and the image. Black films were also subject to critical interrogation. Since they came into being in part as a response to the failure of white-dominated cinema to represent blackness in a manner that did not reinforce white su premacy, they too were critiqued to see if images were seen as complicit with dominant cinematic practices. Critical, interrogating black looks were mainly concerned with issues of race and racism,

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the way racial domination of blacks by whites overdetermined representation. They were rarely concerned with gender. As spectators, black men could repudiate the reproduction of racism in cinema and television, the negation of black presence, even as they could feel as though they were rebelling against white supremacy by daring to look, by engaging phallocentric politics of spectatorship. Given the real life public circumstances wherein black men were murdered/ lynched for looking at white womanhood, where the black male gaze was always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white Other, the private realm of television screens or dark theaters could unleash the repressed gaze. There they could “look” at white womanhood without a structure of domination overseeing the gaze, interpreting, and punishing. That white supremacist structure that had murdered Emmet Till after interpreting his look as violation, as “rape” of white womanhood, could not control black male responses to screen images. In their role as spectators, black men could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation. This gendered relation to looking made the experience of the black

male spectator radically different from that of the black female spectator. Major early black male independent filmmakers represented black women in their films as objects of male gaze. Whether looking through the camera or as spectators watching films, whether mainstream cinema or “race” movies, the black male gaze had a different scope from that of the black female. Black women have written little about black female spectatorship, about our moviegoing practices. A growing body of film theory and criticism by black women has only begun to emerge. The prolonged silence of black women as spectators and critics was a response to absence, to cinematic negation. In “The Technology of Gender,” Teresa de Lauretis, drawing on the work of Monique Wittig, calls attention to “the power of discourses to ‘do violence’ to people, a violence which is material and physical, although produced by abstract and scientific discourses as well as the discourses of the mass media.” With the possible exception of early race movies, black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence, that denies the “body” of the black

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female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is “white.” (Recent movies do not conform to this paradigm but I am turning to the past with the intent to chart the development of black female spectatorship.) Talking with black women of all ages and classes, in different areas of the United States, about their filmic looking relations, I hear again and again ambivalent responses to cinema. Only a few of the black women I talked with remembered the pleasure of race movies, and even those who did, felt that pleasure interrupted and usurped by Hollywood. Most of the black women I talked with were adamant that they never went to movies expecting to see compelling representations of black femaleness. They were all acutely aware of cinematic racism—its violent erasure of black womanhood. In Anne Friedberg’s essay “A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification” she stresses that “identification can only be made through recognition, and all recognition is itself an implicit confirmation of the ideology of the status quo. ” Even when representations of black women were present in film, our bodies

and being were there to serve— to enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze. Commenting on Hollywood’s characterization of black women in Girls on Film, Julie Burchill describes this absent presence: “Black women have been mothers without children (Mammies— who can ever forget the sickening spectacle of Hattie MacDaniels waiting on the simpering Vivien Leigh hand and foot and enquiring like a ninny, “What’s ma lamb gonna wear?”)...Lena Horne, the first black performer signed to a long term contract with a major (MGM), looked gutless but was actually quite spirited. She seethed when Tallulah Bankhead complimented her on the paleness of her skin and the non-Negroidness of her features. When black women actresses like Lena Horne appeared in mainstream cinema most white viewers were not aware that they were looking at black females unless the film was specifically coded as being about blacks. Burchill is one of the few white women film critics who has dared to examine the intersection of race and gender in relation to the construction

TOP: STILL FROM GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), HATTIE MCDANIELS AND VIVIEN LEIGH PICTURED. BOTTOM: PHOTO OF ACTRESS LENA HORNE, THE FIRST BLACK PERFORMER SIGNED TO A LONG TERM CONTRACT WITH MGM.

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of the category “woman” in film as object of the phallocentric gaze. With characteristic wit she asserts: “What does it say about racial purity that the best blondes have all been brunettes (Harlow, Monroe, Bardot)? I think it says that we are not as white as we think.” Burchill could easily have said “we are not as white as we want to be,” for clearly the obsession to have white women film stars be ultra-white was a cinematic practice that sought to maintain a distance, a separation between that image and the black female Other; it was a way to perpetuate white supremacy. Politics of race and gender were inscribed into mainstream cinematic narrative from Birth of A Nation on. As a seminal work, this film identified what the place and functionof white womanhood would be in cinema. There was clearly no place for black women. – Conventional representations of black women have done violence to the image. Responding to this assault, many black women spectators shut out the image, looked the other way, accorded cinema no importance in their lives. Then there were those spectators whose gaze was that of desire and complicity. Assuming a posture of

subordination, they submitted to cinema’s capacity to seduce and betray. They were cinematically “gaslighted.” Every black woman I spoke with who was/is an ardent moviegoer, a lover of the Hollywood film, testified that to experience fully the pleasure of that cinema they had to close down critique, analysis; they had to forget racism. And mostly they did not think about sexism. What was the nature then of this adoring black female gaze—this look that could bring pleasure in the midst of negation? – We come home to ourselves. Not all black women spectators submitted to that spectacle of regression through identification. Most of the women I talked with felt that they consciously resisted identification with films—that this tension made moviegoing less than pleasurable; at times it caused pain. As one black woman put, “I could always get pleasure from movies as long as I did not look too deep.” For black female spectators who have “looked too deep” the encounter with the screen hurt. That some of us chose to stop looking was a gesture of resistance, turning away was one way to protest, to reject negation.

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– When I returned to films as a young woman, after a long period of silence, I had developed an oppositional gaze. Not only would I not be hurt by the absence of black female presence, or the insertion of violating representation, I interrogated the work, cultivated a way to look past race and gender for aspects of content, form, language. Foreign films and U.S. independent cinema were the primary locations of my filmic looking relations, even though I also watched Hollywood films. From “jump,” black female spectators have gone to films with awareness of the way in which race and racism determined the visual construction of gender. Whether it was Birth of A Nation or Shirley Temple shows, we knew that white womanhood was the racialized sexual difference occupying the place of stardom in mainstream narrative film. We assumed white women knew it to. Reading Laura Mulvey’s provocative essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” from a standpoint that acknowledges race, one sees clearly why black women spectators not duped by mainstream cinema would develop an oppositional gaze. Placing ourselves outside that pleasure

in looking, Mulvey argues, was determined by a “split between active/male and passive/female.” Black female spectators actively chose not to identify with the film’s imaginary subject because such identification was disenabling. Looking at films with an oppositional gaze, black women were able to critically assess the cinema’s construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator. Black female spectators, who refused to identify with white womanhood, who would not take on the phallocentric gaze of desire and possession, created a critical space where the binary opposition Mulvey posits of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look” was continually deconstructed. As critical spectators, black women looked from a location that disrupted, one akin to that described by Annette Kuhn in The Power of The Image: “...the acts of analysis, of deconstruction and of reading “against the grain” offer an additional pleasure—the pleasure of resistance, of saying “no”: not to “unsophisticated” enjoyment, by ourselves and others, of culturally dominant images, but to the

textile collage pieces by billie zangewa. exploring black female identity and motherhood.

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structures of power which ask us to consume them uncritically and in highly circumscribed ways.” Mainstream feminist film criticism in no way acknowledges black female spectatorship. It does not even consider the possibility that women can construct an oppositional gaze via an understanding and awareness of the politics of race and racism Feminist film theory rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework that privileges sexual difference actively suppresses recognition of race, reenacting and mirroring the erasure of black womanhood that occurs in films, silencing any discussion of racial difference —of racialized sexual difference. Despite feminist critical interventions aimed at deconstructing the category “woman” which highlight the significance of race, many feminist film critics continue to structure their discourse as though it speaks about “women” when in actuality it speaks only about white women. It seems ironic that the cover of the recent anthology Feminism and Film Theory edited by Constance Penley has a graphic that is a reproduction of the photo of white actresses Rosalind Russell and Dorothy Arzner on the 1936 set of the film Craig’s Wife yet there is no acknowledgment in any

essay in this collection that the woman “subject” under discussion is always white. Even though there are photos of black women from films reproduced in the text, there is no acknowledgment of racial difference.” – Constructing feminist film theory along these lines enables the production of a discursive practice that need never theorize any aspect of black female representation or spectatorship. Yet the existence of black women within white supremacist culture problematizes, and makes complex, the overall issue of female identity, representation, and spectatorship. If, as Friedberg suggests, “identification is a process which commands the subject to be displaced by an other; it is a procedure which breeches the separation between self and other, and, in this way, replicates the very structure of patriarchy.” If identification “demands sameness, necessitates similarity, disallow difference”—must we then surmise that many feminist film critics who are “overidentified” with the mainstream cinematic apparatus produce theories that replicate its totalizing agenda? Why is it that feminist film criticism, which has most claimed the terrain of

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woman’s identity, representation, and subjectivity as its field of analysis, remains aggressively silent on the subject of blackness and specifically representations of black womanhood? Just as mainstream cinema has historically forced aware black female spectators not to look, much feminist film criticism disallows the possibility of a theoretical dialogue that might include black women’s voices. It is difficult to talk when you feel no one is listening, when you feel as though a special jargon or narrative has been created that only the chosen can understand. No wonder then that black women have for the most part confined our critical commentary on film to conversations. And it must be reiterated that this gesture is a strategy that protects us from the violence perpetuated and advocated by discourses of mass media. A new focus on issues of race and representation in the field of film theory could critically intervene on the historical repression reproduced in some arenas of contemporary critical practice, making a discursive space for discussion of black female spectatorship possible. When I asked a black woman in her twenties, an obsessive moviegoer, why she thought we had not written about black female spectatorship, she

commented: “We are afraid to talk about ourselves as spectators because we have been so abused by ‘the gaze’.” An aspect of that abuse was the imposition of the assumption that black female looking relations were not important enough to theorize. Film theory as a critical “turf ’ in the United States has been and continues to be influenced by and reflective of white racial domination. Since feminist film criticism was initially rooted in a women’s liberation movement informed by racist practices, it did not open up the discursive terrain and make it more inclusive. – Given the context of class exploitation, and racist and sexist domination, it has only been through resistance, struggle, reading, and looking “against the grain,” that black women have been able to value our process of looking enough to publicly name it. Centrally, those black female spectators who attest to the oppositionality of their gaze deconstruct theories of female spectatorship that have relied heavily on the assumption that, as Doane suggests in her essay, “Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body,” “woman can only mimic man’s relation to language,

mixed media collage piece by Tschabalala Self. exploring black female identity and representation.

FILM STILLS FROM SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT (1986). THE FILM SHOWS A BLACK WOMAN AS THE OBJECT OF THE PHALLOCENTRIC GAZE AND HOW SHE RESISTS BEING “OWNED” BY A SINGLE PARTNER.

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that is assume a position defined by the penis-phallus as supreme arbiter of lack. ” Identifying with neither the phallocentric gaze nor the construction of white womanhood as lack, critical black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation. Every black woman spectator I talked to, with rare exception, spoke of being “on guard” at the movies. Talking of the way being a critical spectator of Hollywood films influenced her, black woman filmmaker Julie Dash exclaims, “I make films because I was such a spectator!” Looking at Hollywood cinema from a distance, from that critical politicized standpoint that did not want to be seduced by narratives reproducing her negation, Dash watched mainstream movies over and over again for the pleasure of deconstructing them. And of course there is that added delight if one happens, in the process of interrogation, to come across a narrative thatinvites the black female spectator to engage the text with no threat of violation.

Significantly, I began to write film criticism in response to the first Spike Lee movie, She’s Gotta Have It, contesting Lee’s replication of mainstream patriarchal cinematic

practices that explicitly represents woman (in this instance black woman) as the object of a phallocentric gaze. Lee’s investment in patriarchal filmic practices that mirror dominant patterns makes him the perfect black candidate for entrance to the Hollywood canon. His work mimics the cinematic construction of white womanhood as object, replacing her body as text on which to write male desire with the black female body. It is transference without transformation. Entering the discourse of film criticism from the politicized location of resistance, of not wanting, as a working-class black woman I interviewed stated, “to see black women in the position white women have occupied in film forever,” I began to think critically about black female spectatorship. For years I went to independent and/or foreign films where I was the only black female present in the theater. I often imagined that in every theater in the United States there was another black woman watching the same film wondering why she was the only visible black female spectator. I remember trying to share with one of my five sisters the cinema I liked so much. She was “enraged” that I brought her to a theater where she would have

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to read subtitles. To her it was a violation of Hollywood notions of spectatorship, of coming to the movies to be entertained. When I interviewed her to ask what had changed her mind over the years, led her to embrace this cinema, she connected it to coming to critical consciousness, saying, “I learned that there was more to looking than I had been exposed to in ordinary (Hollywood) movies.” I shared that though most of the films I loved were all white, I could engage them because they did not have in their deep structure a subtext reproducing the narrative of white supremacy. Her response was to say that these films demystified “whiteness,” since the lives they depicted seemed less rooted in fantasies of escape. They were, she suggested, more like “what we knew life to be, the deeper side of life as well. ” Always more seduced and enchanted with Hollywood cinema than me, she stressed that unaware black female spectators must “break out,” no longer be imprisoned by images that enact a drama of our negation. Though she still sees Hollywood films, because “they are a major influence in the culture”—she no longer feels duped or victimized. Talking with black female spectators, looking at written discussions either in fiction or academic essays

about black women, I noted the connection made between the realm of representation in mass media and the capacity of black women to construct ourselves as subjects in daily life. The extent to which black women feel devalued, objectified, dehumanized in this society determines the scope and texture of their looking relations. Those black women whose identities were constructed in resistance, by practices that oppose the dominant order, were most inclined to develop an oppositional gaze. Now that there is a growing interest in films produced by black women and those films have become more accessible to viewers, it is possible to talk about black female spectatorship in relation to that work. So far, most discussions of black spectatorship that I have come across focus on men. In “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance” Manthia Diawara suggests that “the components of ‘difference’” among elements of sex, gender, and sexuality give rise to different readings of the same material, adding that these conditions produce a “resisting” spectator. He focuses his critical discussion on black masculinity. The recent publication of the anthology The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture excited me, especially

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as it included an essay, “Black Looks,” by Jacqui Roach and Petal Felix that attempts to address black female spectatorship. The essay posed provocative questions that were not answered: Is there a black female gaze? How do black women relate to the gender politics of representation? Concluding, the authors assert that black females have “our own reality, our own history, our own gaze—one which the sees the world rather differently from ‘anyone else.’ ” Yet, they do not name/describe this experience of seeing “rather differently.” The absence of definition and explanation suggests they are assuming an essentialist stance wherein it is presumed that black women, as victims of race and gender oppression, have an inherently different field of vision. Many black women do not “see differently” precisely because their perceptions of reality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing. As Trinh T. Minh-ha points out in “Outside In, Inside Out”: “Subjectivity does not merely consist of talking about oneself... be this talking indulgent or critical.” Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the

imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze. When it did, individual black women consciously named the process. Manthia Diawara’s “resisting spectatorship” is a term that does not adequately describe the terrain of black female spectatorship. We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions. As critical spectators, black women participate in a broad range of looking relations, contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels. Certainly when I watch the work of black women filmmakers Camille Billops, Kathleen Collins, Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, Zeinabu Davis, I do not need to “resist” the images even as I still choose to watch their work with a critical eye. – In this sense they make explicit a critical practice that provides us with different ways to think about black female subjectivity and black female spectatorship. Cinematically, they provide new points of recognition, embodying Stuart Hall’s vision of a critical

collage piece by mickalene thomas. exploring black female identity and “the Gaze”.

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practice that acknowledges that identity is constituted “not outside but within representation,” and invites us to see film “not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover who we are.” It is this critical practice that enables production of feminist film theory that theorizes black female spectatorship. Looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future.

FIL M STI L LS FROM “ Ma Chérie ”, 2016

“MA CHÉRIE”

A Perspective On Trans Womanhood In The Male Gaze . BY mischa haider , a TransGENDER researcher, mother, writer , and activist. “Ma Chérie” is a short film depicting moments in the life of a trans woman seen through the eyes of a straight, cisgender man. He speaks to the audience about his transgender girlfriend, providing a glimpse into their relationship. In the film, I play the role of the transgender girlfriend. It was a penetrating experience for me, especially since I am myself a straight transgender woman. The film reveals a tender male gaze directed at transgender womanhood, much like that of the men who have loved me, the men who love me. Yet, I know too well that this male gaze is often laden with anguish and grief, brutal violence and murder, rejection and humiliation; from the cisgender male aggressor towards his transgender female victim. Sadly, in the regime of fragile masculinity, with every man there are misgivings. Is he ashamed of being seen with me? Does his attraction to me trigger insecurities about his manhood? I see those who are ashamed, and I sense those who are insecure. They do not see, perhaps, that they

dehumanize me. They exorcise my soul and expose me to violence and desecration. The normative straight male gaze imprisons all women. In this gaze a transgender woman, in particular, inhabits a very tenuous realm. The worth and value of womanhood is circumscribed by society to her physical body, as a composite object of male sexual fantasies, initiated early on through childhood exposure to sexualized cartoon princesses and brought to fruition through teenage masturbation to pornographic portrayals of the woman object. This woman object has worth not for her person, but for the curves and dimensions of the flesh adorning her figure, the orifices she possesses to be fucked, the pussy, the ass, and the mouth. A transgender woman disrupts this, with orifices unknown. Fragile masculinity is drawn yet ashamed, and often violence ensues. A trans woman may ‘pass,’ prompting repudiation only upon discovery of her genital anatomy. The discovery

“ Sadly, in the regime of fragile masculinity, with every man there are misgivings. Is he ashamed of being seen with me? Does his attraction to me trigger insecurities about his manhood?

I see those who are ashamed, and I sense those who are insecure. They do not see, perhaps, that they dehumanize me. They exorcise my soul and expose me to violence and desecration. ”

“MA CHERIE”

may lead to her murder at the hand of a horny American marine who picks her up in a nightclub, murder by drowning in the toilet bowl of a hotel bathroom. Another trans woman may not quite ‘pass,’ and be beaten to death till her head is split open on the streets of Manhattan by a man who catcalls her and then realizes she is trans.

“Ma Chérie” presents us with a male gaze that sees a transgender woman as a person and introduces us to her womanhood. This is of fundamental importance, because acknowledging transgender womanhood is granting womanhood the validation of personhood free of the trappings of flesh; a validation primarily reserved for manhood in the misogynistic matrix. In this benighted reality, the identity and worth of a man is deemed to lie in his person, while the identity and worth of a woman is deemed to lie in her body. Transgender womanhood poses an existential threat to this regime, and consequently elicits the wrath of the misogynistic enforcers. However, until we disentangle our identity and worth as women from our physical bodies, we will not have genuine and real equality. Can the annihilating and oppressive male gaze be recalibrated, refashioned, reclaimed, into and as one that beholds yet does not defile? In the words of the narrator of the film, “J’espère - I hope so.”

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TEXT: Bikini Kill. “Feels Blind.” Haider, Mischa. “‘Ma Chérie’ - a Perspective on Trans Womanhood in the Male Gaze.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 5 Aug. 2016, www.huffpost.com/entry/mach%C3%A9rie-a-perspectiveon-trans-womanhood-inthe_b_5 7a492fbe4b0ccb023721dc7. Hanna, Kathleen. “Riot Grrrl Manifesto.” Bikini Kill Zine, 1991. Hooks, Bell. Black Looks : Race and Representation. Routledge, 2015. Jansen, Charlotte. “Girl on Girl.” Riposte, www.ripostemagazine. com/girl-on-girl. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 1975. Soloway, Joey. “[Joey] Soloway on the Female Gaze.” www.youtube. com/watch?v=pnBvppooD9I. Y outube, 11 Sept. 2016. Stigler, Brittany. “Interview: Anna Biller & the NSFW Female Gaze.” Screen Slate, 6 July 2017, www.screenslate.com/articles/ interview-anna-biller-nsfwfemale-gaze.

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IMAGE: Page 10: Collage sources: Petra Collins, Georgia O’Keeffe, stock images Page 12 + 15–17: Chytilova, Vera. Daisies Stills. 1966. Page 18: Kusama, Karyn. Jennifer’s Body Still. 2009. Marquand, Richard. Star Wars: Episode Vi – Return of the Jedi Still. 1983. Scorsese, Martin. The Wolf of Wall Street Still. 2013. Page 23: Sciamma, Céline. Portrait of a Lady on Fire Still. 2019. Page 26: Collage sources: stock image, Edwards, Blake. Breakfast at Tiffany’s Still. 1961. Gondry, Michel. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Still. 2004. Lee, Spike. She’s Gotta Have It Stills. 1986. Marquand, Richard. Star Wars: Episode Vi – Return of the Jedi Still. 1983. Webb, Marc. 500 Days of Summer Still. 2009. Wright, Edgar. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Still. 2010. Page 31: Gerwig, Greta. Frances Ha Stills. 2012. Gerwig, Greta. Ladybird Stills. 2017.

Page 32: Levinson, Sam. Euphoria Stills. 2019. Page 34–35: Ayer, David. Suicide Squad Still. 2016. Yan, Cathy. Birds of Prey Still. 2020. Page 38–39: Collage sources: Scorsese, Martin. The Wolf of Wall Street Still. 2013. Sirani, Elisabetta. Timoclea Killing Her Rapist. 1659. Steenberg, Simone. Untitled. Page 40: Schmidt, Phebe. Sweethearts. 2016. Page 43: Wenzel, Isabelle. Rotation 2. 2014. Page 44: Miyazaki, Izumi. The moment I become an object, 2015. Susiraja, Iu. Täydellinen arki/Perfect for Everyday. 2012–13. Page 46–65: Biller, Anna. The Love Witch Stills. 2016. Biller, Anna. Viva Stills. 2016. Photos of Kathleen Hanna on Stage. Unknown. Page 70–71: Photo of Kathleen Hanna on Stage. Unknown.

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Page 73: Thomas, Mickalene. Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe les Trois Femme Noires #5. 2017. Thomas, Mickalene. Qusuquzah Lounging with Pink + Black Flower. 2016. Page 74: Thomas, Mickalene. Portrait of Din #4. 2016. Page 79: Fleming, Victor. Gone With the Wind Stills. 1939. Springer, John. Photo of Lena Horne. Page 82: Zangewa, Billie. ma vie en rose. 2015. Zangewa, Billie. Mother and Child. 2015. Page 85: Self, Tschabalala. Sapphire. 2015. Page 86: Lee, Spike. She’s Gotta Have It Stills. 1986. Page 90: Thomas, Mickalene. Portrait of Sidra 2. 2015. Page 92: Association Nationale Transgenre. Ma Chérie Stills. 2016. Page 96: Collage sources: stock image, PornHub, American Apparel ads, & Levinson, Sam. Euphoria Still. 2019.

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Cover: Biller, Anna. The Love Witch Stills. 2016. Gentileschi, Artemisia. Judith Beheading Holofernes. 1620.