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From: rshapiro@arris.com (Richard Shapiro)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Female human aesthetics
Message-ID: <1990Nov25.190001.3870@arris.com>
Date: 29 Nov 90 21:00:43 GMT
References: <8654@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <658245246@lear.cs.duke.edu> <1990Nov11.171709.25842@arris.com> <1990Nov22.003657.14371@informix.com>
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In article <1990Nov22.003657.14371@informix.com> uunet!infmx!robert@ncar.ucar.EDU (robert coleman) writes:
>In article <1990Nov11.171709.25842@arris.com> rshapiro@arris.com (Richard Shapiro) writes:
>....  The earliest articles, especially Laura Mulvey's
>-highly influential "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", make this
>...
>-cinema, is "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse", by Kaja Silverman
>-(in STUDIES IN ENTERTAINMENT, ed by Tania Modleski).

>    Unfortunately, this article teasingly hands out only some
>conclusions from the sources without any explanation of the arguments
>used to justify these conclusions. 

Actually, I did give a summary of the arguments. For the details,
you'll have to read the originals. Both of these writers employ a very
lean style -- no waste. I couldn't cover their arguments in full
without replicating the articles in toto.

>Perhaps you could expand on the reasoning used, because some of the
>conclusions seem as if they could only be reached by taking a very
>biased viewpoint.

I'll expand a bit more by replying to specific points:

>For instance, the cinema is all about being a spectacle; going to the
>movies is all about being a spectator.

No, it's only in small part about being a spectator. Movies are as
much about identification and the imaginary as they are about
spectacle, at least movies in the realistic style (ie nearly all
mainstream movies). The simple fact that you're watching the movies
doesn't mean that your relationship with every character must be one
of spectator/spectacle. Many other relationships are possible.

>What a perfect test case for the theory that women primarily are
>spectacles and men primarily observe!  If this were true, we would
>expect to see mostly women on the screen, and mostly men in the
>audience. 

This is because you're ignoring identification. In fact, what we
should expect to see are (1) relatively active male protagonists,
photographed and presented in a neutral, naturalistic way and (2)
relatively passive (or helpless) female protagonists photographed and
presented (costume, etc) in a very "spectacular" way. And this is what
we do see, much more often than not (in mainstream cinema).

In other words, men are typically depicted as subjects and women as
objects. Any viewing perspective would, by definition, have to
identify with the subject and gaze at the object. Thus, the viewing
perspective favored by conventional movies is a masculine one (which
can of course be adopted either by men or women).

>Yet, this is not the case. Audiences do not appear to me to be
>gender-biased (more men than women); and there are actually *more*
>male star roles, and more *primary* roles, in the movies than there
>are for women.

Exactly. A "primary" role is precisely one in which the character has
relatively full subjectivity.

The make-up of the audience is another issue entirely, since going to
the movies is something frequently done by couples. This is one reason
why you see a gender balance in the audience.


>In more general terms, if my fundamental role is to observe, and
>women's fundamental role is to be observed, why do they seem to be so
>much better at it than I am? This is obviously personal experience,
>and there will of course be exceptions, but I run into the following
>situation all the time: I am talking to woman one about woman two, who
>she met through me once in a group situation, , and woman one asks,
>"Oh, is that the one who was wearing the blue jumpsuit with the red
>sneakers?" 

This is a good observation, but it shows exactly the opposite of what
you want it to show. As I pointed out before, this spectator/spectacle
issue has as much to do with women's self-image as with actions taken
by men against women. What you show here is precisely that women are
"on display" in a way that men aren't -- to men, to other women, and
to themselves.

>The whole point of making this incorrect division seems to be to
>allow it to be used in conjunction with another bad assumption: that
>the role of spectator is "clearly the more powerful one". This
>statement was just tossed off in the posting as if it were universally
>known, but the fact is that the role of spectacle is actually the more
>powerful of the two.

I have to disagree, and for a very simple reason: the spectator is a
full, complete *subject*, a mensch (as my grandmother would say); the
spectacle is an *object*, like clothes on a mannequin.

In "Discipline and Punish" (Foucault), there's a long discussion of
the panopticon and related forms of power: a system in which the
powerful observe the powerless with a one-way gaze. Foucault isn't
interested in gender in this case, but the situation is analagous.
Prisons were designed on this basis, precisely because the observer
has power over the observed.

From the world of the movies, consider "Blue Velvet".  The very
powerful bad guy Frank objectifies the powerless Dorothy by refusing
to allow her to look at him, even while he takes pleasure in looking
at her.  Dorothy's even more powerless husband has an ear cut off by
Frank (that is, he's unable to be an aural "spectator"). The semi-hero
Jeffery hides in a closet watching Dorothy undress, and eventually
kills Frank from the same closet (the same perspective of unseen
see-er); and when Dorothy catches Jeffery in the closet, she attempts
(unsuccessfully) to gain power over him by the same means that Frank
uses over her (not allowing him to look at her). Much of the force of
this very forceful movie comes precisely from showing power
relationships between see-er and seen.

>I have one precious memory of the moment in my life when I had the
>most power over others that I will ever have. I was in community
>theatre, and was playing the role of an insane murderer. At one point
>I said something that allowed the audience to discern my true nature,
>and I heard the audience, as one, gasp. I can't begin to express the
>incredible feeling of power that came over me at that moment. 

In what sense is this about "spectacle"?  Were you wearing a
glamourous evening gown? Was the lighting softened to make you look
slightly ethereal? Did you strike poses of sexual availability, or of
child-like helplessness?  Was this what caused the gasps?

People gasp at revelations about characters when they read novels, for
reasons that have nothing to do with spectatorship. The fact that you
could get the same kind of gasp makes you an effective actor, and it
gives you an emotional power of sorts over the audience. But this has
nothing to do with spectacle.

It isn't simply being on stage, or on-screen that makes a spectacle;
it's how you are depicted or how you depict yourself, on stage or off.