Doane Film and The Masquerade
Doane Film and The Masquerade
THEORISING THE
Watkins, New
follows: York,New
Direction Books,
o solve me lhe riddle of bje, 1951, P 77.
j
78 (two times the width of the image)-a point in space from which the 79
II Noel Burch,
possess iI any more (han she can possess herself.' I~ Or, in the case offemzle
filmic discourse is most accessible. 11 14 l.uce Irigmay,
Theory of Film madness or delirium, ' ... women do not manage to articulate their mad- 'Tbis Sex Wbich
Practice, trans But the most explicit representation ofthis opposition between proxim- ness: they suffer it directly in their body ... '.1; The distance necessary to Is Not One', New
Helen R Lane, French Feminisms,
ity and distance is contained in Christian Merz's analysis of voyeuristic detach the signifiers of madness from the body in the construction of
New York and ed Elaine Marks
Washington, desire in terms of a kind of social hierarchy of the senses: 'It is no acci- even a discourse which exceeds the boundaries of sense is lacking. In the and Isabelle de
Praegcr dent that the main socially acceptable arts are based on the senses at a words of Helene Cixous, 'More so than men who are coaxed toward C{l\lrtivron,
Publishers, 1973, Amherst, The
p 35.
distance, and that those which depend on the senses of COntact are often social success, toward sublimation, women are body.' II>
University of
regarded as "minor" arts (=cuJinary arts, art of perfumes, etc.).' 12 The This theme of the overwhelming presence-to-itselfofthe female body Massachusetts
12 Chrislian Metz, voyeur, according to Metz, must maintain a distance between himself is elaborated by Sarah Kofman and Michele Montrelay as well. Kofman Press, 1980, pp
'The Imaginary and the image - the cinephile needs the gap which represents for him the describes how Freudian psychoanalysis outlines a scenario whereby the 104-105.
Signifier', Screm, very distance between desire and its object. In this sense, voyeurism is subject's passage from the morher to the father is simultaneous with a
Summer 1975, vol theorised as a type of meta-desire: l~Irigaray,
16no2,p60. passage from the senses to reason, nostalgia for the mother henceforth
'\X!omen's Exile',
signifying a longing for ,1 different positioning in relation to the sensory !Jto!,'gy <Iud
If il is lrue of all desire lhaL il depends on lhe infinile pursuil of its absem or the somatic, and the degree of civilization measured by the very C,ms<"i,'lIslffH, no I
11 ibid, P 61.
obj~Cl, voyeurisl.ic ~esire, a~ong with certain forms of sadism, is lhe only distance from the body. I; Similarly, Montrela)' argues that while the (May 1977), p 7-L
desIre whose prInCIple of dlSlance symbolically and spatially evokes lhis male has the pOSSibility of displacing the first object of desire (the
fundamemal rem. I J !(>Helene Cixous,
mother), the female muSt become that object of desire:
'The l.augh of the
Yet even this Status as meta-desire does not fully characterise the cinema Mcdusa', N,7!,1
RecoveriNg herself as maumal body (and also as pha//us), thc woman can 110 Frflldl FOllilli.,ms,
for it is a feature shared by other arts as well (paiming, theatre, opera, r 157.
longer repress, 'lose,' (he first stake of representaIion. ... From now 011,
etc.)_ Metz thus adds another reinscription of this necessary distance. anxieIy, (ied 10 the presence of this body, can only be insisrem, COmill11ous.
What specifies the cinema is a further re-duplication of the lack which This body, so close, which she has to occupy, is an object in excess which mllst n Sarah Kofmnn,
prompts desire. The cinema is characterised by an illusory sensory pleni- be 'lost, ' thal is to say, repressed, in order to be symbolised. HI 'Ex: The Womnn's
tude (there is 'so much to see') and yet haunted by the absence of those Enigma', Endirif,
vol IV no 2 (Fall
very objects which are there to be seen. Absence is an absolute and This body so close, so excessive, prevents the woman from assuming a 1980), p 20.
irrecoverable distance. In other words, Noel Burch is quite right in position similar to the man's in relation to signifying systems. For she is
aligning spectatorial desire with a certain spatial configuration. The haunted by the loss of a loss, the lack oftha! lack so essential for the re,ll+ III Michele
viewer must not sit either too close or too far from the screen. The result isation of the ideals of semiotic systems. l\"\omrehly,
of both would be the same - he would lose the image of his desire. Female specificity is thus theorised in terms of spatial proximity. In 'Inquiry inw
Ir is precisely this opposition between proximity and distance, control Femininity', mlf,
opposition to this 'closeness' to the body, a spatial distance in the male's no I (1978), pp
of the image and its loss, which locates the possibilities of spectatorship relation to his body rapidly becomes a temporal distance in the service of 91·92.
within the problematic of sexual difference. For the female spectator knowledge. This is presented quite explicitly in Freud's analysis of the
there is a certain over-presence of the image - she is the image. Given the constrUCtion of the 'subject supposed to know'. The knowledge involved
I" Freud, 'Somc
closeness of this relationship, the female spectator's desire can be here is a knowledge of sexual difference as it is organised in rdation to Psychological
described only in terms of a kind of narcissism - the female look the strUCture of the look, turning on the visibility of the penis. For the Consequences of
demands a becoming. It thus appears to ncgmc the very distance or gap little girl in Freud's description seeing and knowing are simultaneous- the Anmomic'll
Dislinl"1ion
specified by Metz and Burch as the essential precondition for voyeurism. there is no temporal gap between them. In 'Some Psychological Conse- Betwccn !hc
From this perspective, it is important to note the conStant recurrence of quences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes', Freud claims Sexes', Sexuality
the motifofproximity in feminist theories (especially those labelled 'new that the girl, upon seeing the penis for the first time, 'makes her judge- <Iud tht Psydl"I,;~y
af l.m'l:, cd Philip
French fcminisms') which purport to describe a feminine specificity. ment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is RicH', New Ymk,
For Luce Trigaray, female anatomy is readable as a constant relation of without it and wants to hrlVe it.' I" In the lecture on 'Femininity' Freud Collier Honks,
the self to itself, as an autoeroticism based On the embrace of the two lips 1963, pp 187-188.
repeats this gesture, merging perception and intellection: 'They (girls] at
which allow the woman to touch herself without mediation. Funher- once notice the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance
more, the very notion of propeny, and hence possession of something too.'·'o 211 Freud,
which can be constituted as other, is antithetical to the woman: 'Nearness 'Femininity',op
The little boy, on the other hand, does not share this immediacy of cit, p 125.
however, is not foreign to woman, a nearness so close that any identifi- understanding. When he first sees the woman's genitals he 'begins by
cation of one or the other, and thcrcfl)re any form of property, is impos+ \ showing irresolution and lack of interest; he sees nOlhing or disowns
sible. Woman enjoys a closeness with the other that i~ so nca/" she cannot wh'H he hns seen, he softens it down or looks about for expedients for
I
80 bringing it into line with his expectations'.2 1 A second event, the threat The transvestite wears clothes which signify a different sexuality, a 81
21 Freud, 'Some
of castration, is necessary to prompt a rereading of the image, endowing sexuality which, for the woman, .allows a mastery over the image and the
Psychological
Consequences .. _ it with a meaning in relation to the boy's own subjectivity. It is in the very possibility ofattaching the gaze to desire. Clothes make the man, as
op'cit, p 187, distance between the look and the threat that the boy's relation to know- they say. Perhaps this explains the ease with which women can slip into
ledge of sexual difference is formulated. The boy, unlike the girl in male clothing. As both Freud and Cixous point out, the woman seems to
22 Molly Haskell, Freud's description, is capable of a re-vision of earlier events, a retro~ be more bisexual than the man. A scene from Cukor's Adam's Rib graph-
From Reverence {(l spective understanding which invests the events with a significance ically demonstrates this ease of female transvestism. As Katherine Hep-
Rape, Baltimore, which is in no way linked ro an immediacy of sight. This gap between burn asks the jury to imagine the sex role reversal of the three major
Penguin Books,
1974, p 154. the visible and the knowable, the very possibility of disowning what is characters involved in the case, there are three dissolves linking each of
seen, prepares the ground for fetishism. In a sense, the male spectator is the characters successively to shots in which they are dressed in the
2\ Irigaray, destined to be a fetishist, balancing knowledge and belief. clothes of the opposite sex. What characterises the sequence is the
'Women's Exile', The female, on the other hand, must find it extremely difficult, if not marked facility of the transformation of the two women into men in
op ell, p 65. impossible, to assume the position of fetishist. That body which is so contradistinction to a certain resistance in the case of the man. The
close continually reminds her of the castration which cannot be 'fetish- acceptability of the female reversal is quite distinctly opposed to the
24 Mulvey, ised away'. The lack of a distance between seeing and understanding, the male reversal which seems capable of representation only in terms of
'Afterthoughts. mode of judging 'in a flash', is conducive to what might be termed as farce. Male transvestism is an occasion for laughter; female transvestism
inspired by Duel
in the Sun', 'over-identification' with the image. The association of tears and 'wet only another occasion for desire.
Framework, wasted afternoons' (in Molly Haskell's words) n with genres specified as Thus, while the male is locked into sexual identity, the female can at
(Summer 1981), P 2S Joan Riviere,
feminine (the soap opera, the 'woman's picture') points very precisely to least pretend that she is other - in fact, sexual mobility would seem to be
13. 'Womantiness as a
this type of over-identification, this abolition of a distance, in short, this a distinguishing feature offemininity in its cultural construction. Hence, Masquerade',
inability to fetishise. The woman is constructed differently in relation to transvestism would be fully recuperable. The idea seems to be this: it is Psychoanalysis alld
processes oflooking. For Irigaray, this dichoromy between distance and understandable that women would want to be men, for everyone wants Female Sexllaliry,
ed Hendrik M
proximity is described as the fact that: to be elsewhere than in the feminine position. What is not understand- Ruitenbeek, New
able within the given terms is why a woman might flaunt her femininity, Haven, College
The masculine can partly look at itselj, speculate aboul itselj, represent itself produce herself as an excess of femininity, in other words, foreground and University
Press, 1966, p 213.
and describe itselffor what it is, whilst the feminine can try to speak to itself the masquerade. Masquerade is not a~ recuperable as transvestism My amllysis Qfthe
through a new language, but cannot describe itselffrom outside or in formal precisely because it constitutes an acknowledgement that it is femininity concept of
terms, except by identifying itself with the masculine, thus by losing itself. 23 itself which is constructed as mask-as the decorative layer which masquerade differs
markedly from
conceals a non-identity. For Joan Riviere, the first to theorise the Ih3t of Luce
Irigaray goes even further: the woman always has a problematic relation concept, the masquerade of femininity is a kind of reaction-formation Irig3f;}y. See Ce
to the visible, to form, to structures ofseeing. She is much more comfort- against the woman's trans-sex identification, her transvestism. After sexe qui 1/ 'en est pas
able with, closer to, the sense of touch. (Paris: Les
/11/
assuming the position of the subject of discourse rather than its object, Editions de
The pervasiveness, in theories of the feminine, of descriptions of such
the intellectual woman whom Riviere analyses felt compelled to Minuit, 1977), pp
a claustrophobic closeness, a deficiency in relation to structures of seeing 131-132. It also
compensate for this theft of maSCUlinity by over-doing the gestures of
and the visible, must clearly have consequences for attempts to theorise diwrges fO a gre3t
feminine flirtation. extent from the
female spectatorship. And, in fact, the result is a tendency to view the very imponam
female spectator as the site of an oscillation between a feminine position analysis of
Womanliness rherefore could be assumed and wom as a mask, both ((J hide
and a masculine position, invoking the metaphor of the transvestite. masquerade
rhe possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was presented by
Given the structures of cinematic narrative, the woman who identifies found to possess it - much as a thief willlllnl out his pockets al1d ask to be Claire Johnston in
with a female character must adopt a passive or masochistic position, searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods. The reader may now ask 'Femininity 3nd
while identification with the active hero necessarily entails an acceptance how I define womanliness or where I draw the line berween genuine womanli- the Masquemde:
Anne of the
of what Laura Mulvey refers to as a certain 'masculinismion' ofspecta- ness and the masquerade. My suggestion is nor, however, that there is any
Indies', .7acquc5
torship. such dIfference; whether radical or superjici,ll, they are the same thing. 2~ TOlimeNr London,
British Film
Institute, 1975, pp
... as desire is given cultural materiality in a text, for women (from child- The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Woman- 36·44. I am
hood onwards) trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily becomes indebted to her for
liness is a mask which can be worn or removed. The masquerade's resist·
second Nature. However, this Nature does nor sit easily and shifts rest- the reference to
ance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in irs denial of the Riviere's 3nicle.
lessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes. 24
production offcmininity as closeness, as presence-to·itself, as, precisely,
imagistic. The transvestite adopts the sexuality of the other - the woman which, it seems, must almost always be shown and which is itselflinked 83
26 Moustafa Safou:m, becomes a man in order to attain the necessary distance from the image. with a certain sensual quality), she is transformed into spectacle, the very 10 Linda Williams,
'Is the Oedipus
Masquerade, on the other hand, involves a realignment of femininity, 'When the Woman
Complex picture ofdesire. Now, it must be remembered that the cliche is a heavily Looks ... ', in Re·
Univcrsal?',lI/lf, the recovery, or more accurately, simulation, of the missing gap or loaded moment of signification, a social knot of meaning. It is character- vision: Femil/is!
nos 5·6 (1981), pp distance. To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form ofa certain ised· by an effect of ease and naturalness. Yet, the cliche has a binding Essays il/ Film
84-85.
distance between oneself and one's image. If, as Moustafa Safouan Analysis, ed Mary
power so strong that it indicates a precise moment of ideological danger Ann Doane, Pat
points our, ' ... to wish to include in oneselfas an object the cause of the or threat - in this case, the woman's appropriation of the gaze. Glasses Mellencamp and
21 Montrday, op cit,
p93. desire of the Other is a formula for the structure of hysteria' , II' then mas- worn by a woman in the cinema do not generally signify a deficiency in Linda Williams,
querade is anri-hysterical for it works [0 effect a separation between the forthcoming.
seeing but an active looking, or even simply the fact ofseeing as opposed
cause of desire and oneself. In Monrrclay's words, 'the woman uses her to being seen. The intellectual woman looks and analyses, and in usurp-
211 Silvia Bovensdlen,
'Is There a own body as a disguise.' n ing the gaze she poses a threat to an entire system of representation. It is
Feminine The very fact that we can speak ofa woman 'using' her sex or 'using' as if the woman had forcefully moved to the other side of the specular.
Aesthelic?', New her body for particular gains is highly significanr - it is not that a man
Germ<ll/ Critique, The overdetermination of the image ofthe woman with glasses, its status
no 10 (Wimer cannot use his body in this way bur that he doesn't have to. The as a cliche, is a crucial aspect of the cinematic alignment ofStructures of
1977), p 129. masquerade doubles represenration; it is constituted by a hyperbolisa- seeing and being seen with sexual difference. The cliche, in assuming an
tion ofthe accoU[rements offemininity. A propos ofa recent performance immediacy of understanding, acts as a mechanism for the naturalisation
29 Monlrelay, op cit, by Madene Dietrich, Sylvia Bovenschen claims, ' ... we are watching a of sexual difference.
P 93. woman demonstrate the representation of a woman's body.' 211This type But the figure ofthe woman with glasses is only an extreme moment of
of masquerade, an excess of femininity, is aligned with the femme fatale a more generalised logic. There is always a certain excessiveness, a diffi~
and, as Montrelay explains, is necessarily regarded by men as evil culty associated with women who appropriate the gaze, who insist upon
incarnate: 'It is this evil which scandalises whenever woman plays our looking. Linda Williams has demonstrated how, in the genre of the
her sex in order to evade the word and the law. Each time she subverts a horror film, the woman's active looking is ultimately punished. And
law or a word which relies on the predominantly masculine srr.ucture of what she sees, the monster, is only a mirror ofherself-borh woman and
the look.' 29 By destabilising the image, the masquerade confounds this
masculine structure of the look. It effects a defamiliarisation of female
iconography. Nevertheless, the preceding account simply specifies
monster are freakish in their difference - defined by either 'too much' or
'too little'. 30 Just as the dominant narrative cinema repetitively inscribes
i
scenarios of voyeurism, internalising or narrativising the film-spectator
masquerade as a type of representation which carries a threat, dis-
articulating male systems of viewing. Yet, it specifies nothing with
respect to female spectatorship. What might it mean to masquerade as
spectator? To assume the mask in order to see in a different way?
relationship (in films like Psycho, Rear Window, Peeping Tom), taboos in
seeing are insistently formulated in relation to the female spectator as
well. The man with binoculars is countered by the woman with glasses.
The gaze must be dissociated from mastery. In Leave Her to Heaven
j
I~
(John Stahl, 1945), the female protagonist's (Gene Tierney's) excessive
desire and over-possessiveness are signalled from the very beginning of
III. 'Men Seldom Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses' the film by her intense and sustained stare at the major male character, a I
1;
stranger she first encounters on a train. The discomfort her look causes is .p.
The first scene in Now Voyager depicts the Berte Davis character as graphically depicted. The Gene Tierney character is ultimately revealed ;:
H
repressed, unattractive and undesirable or, in her own words, as the to be the epitome of evil- killing her husband's crippled younger ;
spinster aunt of the family. ('Every family has one.') She has heavy eye- brother, her unborn child and ultimately herself in an attempt to brand
brows, keeps her hair bound tightly in a bun, and wears glasses, a drab her cousin as a murderess in order to insure her husband's future fidel-
dress and heavy shoes. By the time of the shot discussed earlier, signal- ity. In Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946), Joan Crawford's problem-
ling her transformation into beauty, the glasses have disappeared, along atic status is a result of her continual attempts to assume the positiol1 of
with the other signifiers of unattractiveness. Between these two spectator - fixing John Garfield with her gaze. Her transformation from
moments there is a scene in which the doctor who cures her actually spectator to spectacle is signified repetitively by the gesture of removing
confiscates her glasses (as a part of the cure). The woman who wears her glasses. Rosa, the character played by Bette Davis in Beyond lhe
glasses constitutes one of the most intense visual cliches of the cinema. Foresl (King Vidor, 1949) walks to the station every day simply to walch
The image is a heavily marked condensation of motifs concerned with the train departing for Chicago. Her fascination with the train is a fasci-
repressed sexuality, knowledge, visability and vision, intellectuality, and nation with its phallic power to transport her to 'another place'. This
desire. The woman with glasses signifies simultaneously intellectuality character is also specified as having a 'good eye' -she can shoot, both
and undcsirahility; hut the moment she removes her glasses (<1 moment pool and guns. In all three films the woman is construcred ;lS the site of
..
31 JohnstoIl, op cit, p
40.
an excessive and dangerous desire. This desire mobilises extreme efforts
of containment and unveils the sadistic aspect of narrativ~. In all three
films the woman dies. As Claire Johnston points out, death is the 'loca-
tion of aU impossible signs', 31 and the films demonstrate that the woman
! which defines the problematic of the photograph; it is his gaze which
effectively erases that of the woman. Indeed, as subject of the gaze, the
woman looks intently. Bur not only is the object of her look concealed
from the spectator, her gaze is encased by the two poles defining the
85
as subject of the gaze is clearly an impossible sign. There is a perverse re- masculine axis of vision. Fascinated by nothing visible-a blankness or
writing of this logic of the gaze in Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, void for the spectator - unanchored by a 'sight' (there is nothing 'proper'
1939), where the woman's story achieves heroic and tragic proportions to her vision -save, perhaps, the mirror), the female gaze is left free-
not only in blindness, but in a blindness which mimes sight - when the floating, vulnerable to subjection. The faint reflection in the shop
woman pretends to be able to see. window of only the frame of the picture at which she is looking serves
merely to reaniculate, en ah)Jme, the emptiness of her gaze, the absence
of her desire in representation.
IV. Out of the Cinema and into the Streets: The Censorship On the other hand, the object ofthe male gaze is fully present, there for
of the Female Gaze the spectator. The fetishistic representation of the nude female body,
fuHy in view, insures a masculinisation of the spectatorial position. The
woman's look is literally outside the triangle which traces a complicity
between the man, the nude, and the spectator. The feminine presence in
the photograph, despite a diegetic centring of the female subject of the
gaze, is taken over by the picture as object. And, as if to doubly 'frame'
her in the act oflooking, the painting situates its female figure as a spec-
tator (although it is nOt clear whether she is looking at herselfin a mirror
or peering through a door or window). While this drama of seeing is
played out at the surface of the photograph, its deep space is activated by
several young boys, out-of-focus, in front of a belt shop. The opposition (
out-of-focus/in-focus reinforces the supposed clarity accorded to the
representation of the woman's 'non~vision'. Furthermore, since this out·
'l
of-focus area constitutes the precise literal centre of the image, it also
demonstrates how the photograph makes figurative the opef<ltion of
centring-draining the actual centre point of significance in order to
deposit meaning on the margins. The male gaze is centred, in contro!-
l.1
although it is exercised from the periphery. 11
The spectator's pleasure is thus produced through the framing/negation
of the female gaze. The woman is there as the butt of a joke - a 'dirty '.1.;1
joke' which, as Freud has demonstrated, is always constructed at the
11
expense of a woman. In order for a dirty joke to emerge in its specificity
in Freud's description, the object ofdesire - the woman - muSt be absent I
and a third person (another man) must be present as witness to the joke-
'so that gradually, in place of the woman, the onlooker, now the listener,
'Un Regard Oblique': a dirty joke at the expense orthe woman's look. becomes the person to whom the smut is addressed ... '.12 The terms of
This process of narrativising the negation ofthe female gaze in the classi~
the photograph's address as joke once again insure a masculinisation of
the place of the spectator. The operation of the dirty joke is also inextric-
12 Freud, Jokes alld
Their Relation to
I
rhe UIICOlIScioIlS,
cal Hollywood cinema finds its perfect encapsulation in a still photo-
graph taken in 1948 by Robert Doisneau, 'Un Regard Oblique'. Just as
the Hollywood narratives discussed above purport to centre a female
ably linked by Freud to scopophilia and the exposure of the female body:
gaze. There is a 'voice-off' of the photographic discourse, however-a arus, the cinema, produce a position for the female spectator - a position New York:
and the Pantheon Books,
Metropolitan component of the image which is beyond the frame ofrhis Ertle scenario which is ulrimately umenable because it lacks the attribute ofdistance so 1978.
Museum of Art, of voyeurism. On the far left-hand side of the photogruph, behind the necessary for an adequate reading of the image. The entire elaboration of
1982, pp 48-49. wall holding the painting ofthe nude, is the barely detectable painting of femininity as a closeness, a nearness, as present-to~itse!fis not the defini-
a woman imaged differently, in darkness-our of sight for the male, tion of an essence but the delineation ofa place culturally assigned to the
J~ ibid. blocked by his fetish. Yet, to point to this almost invisible alternative in woman. Above and beyond a simple adoption of the masculine position
imaging is also only to reveal once again the analyst's own perpetual in relation to the cinematic sign, the female spectator is given two
desire to find a not-seen that might break the hold of representation. Or options: the masochism of over-identification or the narcissism entailed
to laugh last. in becoming one's own object of desire, in assuming the image in the
There is a sense in which the photograph's delineation of a sexual most radical way. The effectivity of masquerade lie,s precisely in its
politics oflooking is almost uncanny. But) to counteract the very possi- potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a prob~
bility of such a perception, the language of the an critic effects a natural- lematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and read-
isation of this joke on the woman. The art-critical reception of the able by the woman. Doisneau's photograph is not readable by the female
picture emphasizes a natural but at the same time 'imaginative' relation spectator-it can give her pleasure only in masochism. In order to 'get'
between photography and life, ultimately subordinating any formal rela- the joke, she must once again assume the position of transvestite.
tions to a referential ground: 'Doisneau's lines move from right to left, It is quite tempting to foreclose entirely the possibility offemale spec-
directed by the man's glance; the woman's gaze creates a line of energy tatorship, to repeat at the level of theory the gesture of the photograph,
like a hole in space.... The creation of these relationships from life itself given the history of a cinema which relies so heavily on voyeurism,
is imagination in photography.' J-l 'Life itself', then, presents the fetishism, and identification with an ego ideal conceivable only in
material for an 'artistic' organisation of vision along the lines of sexual masculine terms. And, in fact, there has been a tendency to theorise
difference. Furthermore, the critic would have us believe that chance femininity and hence the feminine gaze as repressed, and in its
events and arbitrary clicks of the shuner cannot be the agents of a gener- repression somehow irretrievable, the enigma constituted by Freud's
alised sexism because they are particular, unique - 'Keitesz and Dois- question. Yet, as Michel Foucault has demonstrated, the repressive
neau depend entirely upon our recognition that they were present at the hypothesis on its own entails a very limited and simplistic notion of the
instant of the unique intersection of events.' l~ Realism seems always to working of power. 16 The 'no' of the father, the prohibition, is its only
reside in the streets and, indeed, the out-of-focus boy across the street, at technique. In theories of repression there is no sense of the productive~ ,
I
the centre of the photograph, appears to act as a guarantee of the 'chance' ness and positivity of power. Femininity is produced very precisely as a
nature of the event, its arbitrariness, in short - its realism. Thus, in the position within a network ofpower relations. And the growing insistence
discourse of the an critic the photograph, in capturing a moment, does upon the elaboration of a theory of female spectatorship is indicative of
not construct it; the camera finds a naturally given series of subject and the crucial necessity of understanding that position in order to dislocate
object positions. What the critic does nOt consider are the conditions of it.
reception of photography as an art form, its situation within a much
larger network of representation. What is it that makes the photograph This article is an expanded \'ersion of a paper preseOled at a symposium on recent film
not only readable but pleasurable - at the expense of the woman? The theory at Yale University, February 1982, organised by Miri;'lln Hansen and Donald
critic does not ask what makes the photograph a negotiable item in a Crafton.
market of signification.