FILM AND THE MASQUERADE:THEORISING THE

FEMALE SPECTATOR

Screen.74

1 Sigmund Freud,'Femininity', TheStandard Edition ofthe CompletePsychological Words0/ Sigmund Freud,cd James SH3chey,Lundon, Th..:Hogarth Press andthe Institute ofPsycho-analysis,1964, p I13.

2 This is thell'ans1<uion given ina footnote in TheStandard Edition, p113.

Volume 25, Number 3-4 (September~Octobe

MARY ANN DOANE ON THEWOMAN'S GAZE

I. Heads in Hieroglyphic Bonnets

IN HIS LECTURE on 'Femininity', Freud forcefully inscribes theabsence of the female spectator of theory in his notorious statement,

. to those of you who are women this will not apply -you are your·selves the problem ... '.1 Simultaneous with this exclusion operatedupon I he lCmnlc members orhis audience, he invokes, as a rather stf<lngcprop, a poem by Heine. Introduced by Freud's claim concerning theimporlance and elusiveness of his ropic-'Throughoul hisrory peoplehave knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of feminin·ity .. , ' - are four lines of Heine's poem:

!leads in hieroglyphic bonnas,Heads in turbans and black birettas,Heads in wigs and thousand olherWretched, sweating heads of humans ..

The eHeets of the :'lppcal to this poem arc subjcct to the work ofovcr­determination Freud isolated in ,the text orthe dream. The sheer protif·eration of heads and hats (and hence, through a

imetonymic slippage,

minds), which are presumed to have confronted this intimidating riddlebefore Freud, confers on his discourse the weight of an intellectualhisrory, ofa tradition of interrogation. Furthermore, the image ofhiero'glyphics strengthens the association made between femininity and theenigmatic, the undecipherable, that which is 'other'. And yet Freudpractices a slight deception here, concealing what is elided by removingthe lines from their context, castrating, as it were, the st<lnza. For thequestion over which Heine's heads brood is not the same as Freud's-itis not 'Wh:lI is WOIl1:.m?', but inslcad, ' ... what signifies Man?' The

1982).quote is taken from the seventh section (entitled 'Questions') of thesecond cycle of The Norch Sea. The full stanza, presented as the words of'a young man,1 His breast full ofsorrow, his head full ofdoubt', ceads as

follows:

o solve me lhe riddle of bje,The leasillg~y timc~old riddle,Over which many heads already have brooded,Heads in hats of hierog~yp!u'cs,Turbaned heads and heads i1/ black skul/~caps,

Heads in perrukes and a thousand otherPoor, perspiring !tuman heads-Tell me, what sigmfies Man?Whence does Ite come? Wltither does he go?Who lives up there upon golden stats? 1

The question in Freud's text is thus a disguise and a.di~placement of~ha[

other question, which in the pre-text is both humamstlc and rheologlcal.The claim to investigate an otherness is a pretense, haunted by themirror-effect by means of which the question of the woman renec~s onl?the man's own ontological doubts. Yet what interests me most 10 thlSintertextual mis-representation is that the riddle offemininity is initiatedfrom the beginning in Freud's text as a question in masquerade. But Iwill return to the issue of masquerade later.

More pertinently, as far as the cinema is concerned, it is not acciden,talthat Freud's eviction of the female spectator/auditor is co-present wtthrhe invocation ofa hieroglyphic language. The woman, the enigma, thehieroglyphic, the picture, thc image - the metonYll1i~ ,(h;l.in .connectswith another: the cinema, the theatre of pictures, a wntmg m lmages ofthe woman but norfor her. For she is the problem. The semantic vale~ce

attributed to a hieroglyphic language is two-edged. In fact, there lS asense in which the term is inhabited by a contradiction. On the one hund,the hicroglyphic is summoned, particularly when it merges Wi.th .'1discourse on the woman, to connote an indecipherable language, a Sl~01'

fying system which denies its own function by failing to sign~fy anythlOgto the uninitiated, to those who do not hold the key. In thIS sense,.thehicroglyphk', like the woman, harbours a mystcry, an in'lc.cc~Slblc

though dcsirable otherness. On the other hand, the hieroglyphIC IS themost readable of languages. Its immediacy, its accessibility are functionsof its status as <1 picfOriall:.lOgmlge, a writing in images. For the image istheorised in terms of a certain closeness, the lack of a distance or gapbetween sign and referent. Given its iconic characteristics, the ~elatio?ship between signifier and signified is understood as less arbmary 10

imagistic systems of representation than in language 'proper'. T~e inti·macy of signifier and signified in the iconic sign negates the. dlStan.cewhich defines phonetic langUl.lge. And it is the absence of thlS cruCIaldistance or gap which also, simultaneously, specifies both the hiero­glyphic and the female. This is precisely why Freud evicted the \~oman

from his leCturc on femininity. Too close to herself, em.mgled 10 her

3 Heinrich Heine,The North Sea,trans VernonWatkins, NewYork,NewDirection Books,1951, P 77.

75

764 In other words, the

woman can neverask her ownomologka!question. Theabsurdity of such asituation withintraditionaldiscursiveconvcmiolls can hedemOnstr:lled bysubstituting a'young woman' fnrthe 'young man' ofHeine's poem.

'5 As Oswald DucrOIand TzvelanTodarov poim outin EncyclopedicDice/anary of theSciences ofLanguage, transCatherine Porter,Ballimore andLondon, JohnsHopkins UnivcrsityPress, 1979, p 195,the potentiallyuniversalunderstandability ofthe hieroglyphic ishighly theoreticaland can only bethought as theunattainable idealof an imagisticsystem; 'It isimportant of coursenOl to exaggerateeither theresemblance ortheimage with theobject -the designis stylized veryrapidly-or the"natural" 3nd"universal"character of thesigns: Sumerian,Chinese, Egyptianand Hiuitehieroglyphics forthe same objecthave nothing incommon.'

(, ibid, P 194.Emphasis mine.

own enigma, she could not step back, could not achieve the necessarydistance ofa second look.4'

Thus, while the hieroglyphic is an indecipherable or at least enigmaticlanguage, it is also and at the same time potentially the most universallyunderstandable, comprehensible, appropriable of signs, ~ And theWoman shares this contradictory status. But it is here that the analogyslips. For hieroglyphic languages are nO( perfectly iconic. They wouldnot achieve the status oflanguages if they were-due to what Todorovand Ducrot refer to as a cenain non-generalisability of the iconic sign:

Now it is .the impossibility .ofgeneralizing this principle of representationthat has tntroduced even mto fundamentally morphemographic writings;:stems suc~ as Chinese, Egyptian, and Sumerian, the phonographic prin~clple. We 1'mghl.almosl conclude thar every logography [the graphic system of~angu.age notatIOn] grows OUt of the impossibility of a generalized~com~ represent~tion;proper nouns and abstract notions (includingmflecclOns) are then the ones that will be noted phonetically. 6

The iconic system of representation is inherently deficient - it cannotdisengage itself from the 'real', from the concrete; it lacks the gap neces~

sary for generalisability (for Saussure, this is the idea that, 'Signs whichare arbitrary realise bener than orhers the ideal of the semiotic process. ').The woman, too, is defined by such an insuffiCiency. My insistenceupon the congruence between certain theories of the image and theoriesof femininity is an attempt to dissect the episteme which assigns to thewoman a special place in cinematic representation while denying heraccess to that system.

The cinematic apparatus inherits a theory of the image which is norconceived outside of sexual specifications. And historically, there hasalways been a certain imbrication of the cinematic image and the repre~

sentation of the woman. The woman's relation to the Camera and thescopic regime is quite different from that of the male. As Noel Burchpoints out, the early silent cinema, through its insistent inscription ofscenarios of voyeurism, conceives of its spectator's viewing pleasure interms of that of the Peeping Tom, behind the screen, reduplicating thespectator's position in relation to the woman <IS screen."i Specratorialdesire, in contemporary film theory, is generally delineated as eithervoyeurism or fetishism, as precisely a pleasure in seeing what is prohib~

i~e~ in relation to the female body. The image orchestrates a gaze, ahma, and its pleasurable transgression. The woman's beauty, her very~esir.ability, becomes a function ofcertain practices of imaging - framing,ltg.htlOg, camera movement, angle. She is thus, as Laura Mulvey has~)O'.ntcd out, more closely associated with the surface of the image thanHS l!1usory depths, its constructed 3--ditnellsional space which the man isdestined to inhabit and hence cantraLl! In Now Voyager, !\.lr instance, asingle image signals the momentous transformation of the Bette Davischaracter from ugly spinster aunt to glamorolls single woman. Charles

•I

j

AtTron describes the specifically cinematic aspect of this operation as a'stroke of genius':

The radical shadow bisecting the face in white/dark/white strata creates avisual phenomenon quite distinct from the makeup transformation of lip­stick and plucked eyebrows. ... This shot does not reveal what we commonlycall acting, especially after the most recent exhibition of that activity, but thesense of face belongs to a plastique pertillelll to the camera. The viewer isallowed a dlfferent perceptual referent, a chance to come down from thenerve-jarring, first sequence and to use his eyes anew. 'J

A 'plastique pertinent to the camera' constitutes the woman not onlyas the image ofdesire but as the desirous image - one which the devotedcinephile can cherish and embrace. To 'have' the cinema is, in somesense, to 'have' the woman. But Now Voyager is, in Affron's terms, a'tear-jerker', in others, a 'woman's picture', i.e. a film purportedlyproduced for a female audience. What, then, of the female spectator?What can one say about her desire in relation to this process ofimaging?It would seem that what the cinematic institution has in common withFreud's gesture is the eviction of the female spectator from a discoursepurportedly about her (the cinema, psychoanalysis)-one which, in fact,narrativises her again and again.

II. A Lass But Not a Lack

Theories of female spectatorship are thus rare, and when they areproduced, seem inevitably to confront certain blockages in conceptualis~

ation. The difficulties in thinking female spectatorship demand consid­eration. After all, even if it is admitted that the woman is frequently theobject ofthe voyeuristi~ or fetishistic gaze in the cinema, what is there toprevent her from reversing the relation and appropriating the gaze forher own pleasure? Precisely the fact that the reversal itself remainslocked within the same logic. The male striptease, the gigolo - both inev­itably signify the mechanism ofreversal itself, constituting themselves asaberrations whose acknowledgment simply reinforces the dominantsystem of aligning sexual difference with a subject/object dichotomy.And an essential attribute of that dominant system is the matching ofmale subjectivity with the agency of the look.

The supportive binary opposition at work here is not only thal utilisedby Laura Mulvey-an opposition between passivity and activity, butperhaps more importantly, an opposition between proximity anddistance in relation to the image. W It is in this sense that the very logicbehind the structure of the gaze demands a sexual division. While thedistance between image and signified (or even refereor) is theorised asminimal, if not non-existent, that between the film and the spectatormust be maintained, even measured. One need only think of NoelBurch's mapping of spectatorship as a perfect distance from the screen

7 See Noel Burch'sfilm, CorrectionPlease, or How WeGot Into Pictures.

8 Laura Mulvey,'Visual P!e;lsurcand NarrativeCinema', Screen,Autumn 1975, vol16n03,ppIZ-13.

9 Charles AlTron,Star ACling: Gish,GarbrJ, Davis, NewYork, E P DUHon,1977, pp 281-282.

I{\ This argumentfocuses on theimage!o theexcusion of anyconsidewtion of.he soundtrackprimarily becauseit is the process ofimaging whichseems to constitutethe majordifficulty intheorising femalespecta!orship. Theimage is alsopopularlyunderstood asmetonymicsignifier for thecinema as a wholeand for goodreason:historically, soundhas beensubordinate !O theimage within thedominant classicalsystem. For moreon the image!sound distinctionin relation tosexual differencesee my article,'The Voice in IheCinema: TheAniculation ofBody and Space',Yare FrC>l<·hStudies, no 60, pp33·50.

77

78II Noel Burch,

Theory of FilmPractice, transHelen R Lane,New York andWashington,PraegcrPublishers, 1973,p 35.

12 Chrislian Metz,'The ImaginarySignifier', Screm,Summer 1975, vol16no2,p60.

11 ibid, P 61.

(two times the width of the image)-a point in space from which thefilmic discourse is most accessible. 11

But the most explicit representation ofthis opposition between proxim­ity and distance is contained in Christian Merz's analysis of voyeuristicdesire in terms of a kind of social hierarchy of the senses: 'It is no acci­dent that the main socially acceptable arts are based on the senses at adistance, and that those which depend on the senses of COntact are oftenregarded as "minor" arts (=cuJinary arts, art of perfumes, etc.).' 12 Thevoyeur, according to Metz, must maintain a distance between himselfand the image - the cinephile needs the gap which represents for him thevery distance between desire and its object. In this sense, voyeurism istheorised as a type of meta-desire:

If il is lrue of all desire lhaL il depends on lhe infinile pursuil of its absemobj~Cl, voyeurisl.ic ~esire, a~ong with certain forms of sadism, is lhe onlydesIre whose prInCIple of dlSlance symbolically and spatially evokes lhisfundamemal rem. I J

Yet even this Status as meta-desire does not fully characterise the cinemafor it is a feature shared by other arts as well (paiming, theatre, opera,etc.)_ Metz thus adds another reinscription of this necessary distance.What specifies the cinema is a further re-duplication of the lack whichprompts desire. The cinema is characterised by an illusory sensory pleni­tude (there is 'so much to see') and yet haunted by the absence of thosevery objects which are there to be seen. Absence is an absolute andirrecoverable distance. In other words, Noel Burch is quite right inaligning spectatorial desire with a certain spatial configuration. Theviewer must not sit either too close or too far from the screen. The resultof both would be the same - he would lose the image of his desire.

Ir is precisely this opposition between proximity and distance, controlof the image and its loss, which locates the possibilities ofspectatorshipwithin the problematic of sexual difference. For the female spectatorthere is a certain over-presence of the image - she is the image. Given thecloseness of this relationship, the female spectator's desire can bedescribed only in terms of a kind of narcissism - the female lookdemands a becoming. It thus appears to ncgmc the very distance or gapspecified by Metz and Burch as the essential precondition for voyeurism.From this perspective, it is important to note the conStant recurrence ofthe motifofproximity in feminist theories (especially those labelled 'newFrench fcminisms') which purport to describe a feminine specificity.For Luce Trigaray, female anatomy is readable as a constant relation ofthe self to itself, as an autoeroticism based On the embrace of the two lipswhich allow the woman to touch herself without mediation. Funher­more, the very notion of propeny, and hence possession of somethingwhich can be constituted as other, is antithetical to the woman: 'Nearnesshowever, is not foreign to woman, a nearness so close that any identifi­cation of one or the other, and thcrcfl)re any form of property, is impos+sible. Woman enjoys a closeness with the other that i~ so nca/" she cannot

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I

possess iI any more (han she can possess herself.' I~ Or, in the case offemzlemadness or delirium, ' ... women do not manage to articulate their mad­ness: they suffer it directly in their body ... '.1; The distance necessary todetach the signifiers of madness from the body in the construction ofeven a discourse which exceeds the boundaries ofsense is lacking. In thewords of Helene Cixous, 'More so than men who are coaxed towardsocial success, toward sublimation, women are body.' II>

This theme of the overwhelming presence-to-itselfofthe female bodyis elaborated by Sarah Kofman and Michele Montrelay as well. Kofmandescribes how Freudian psychoanalysis outlines a scenario whereby thesubject's passage from the morher to the father is simultaneous with apassage from the senses to reason, nostalgia for the mother henceforthsignifying a longing for ,1 different positioning in relation to the sensoryor the somatic, and the degree of civilization measured by the verydistance from the body. I; Similarly, Montrela)' argues that while themale has the pOSSibility of displacing the first object of desire (themother), the female muSt become that object of desire:

RecoveriNg herselfas maumal body (and also as pha//us), thc woman can 110

longer repress, 'lose,' (he first stake of representaIion. ... From now 011,

anxieIy, (ied 10 the presence of this body, can only be insisrem, COmill11ous.This body, so close, which she has to occupy, is an object in excess which mllstbe 'lost, ' thal is to say, repressed, in order to be symbolised. HI

This body so close, so excessive, prevents the woman from assuming aposition similar to the man's in relation to signifying systems. For she ishaunted by the loss ofa loss, the lack oftha! lack so essential for the re,ll+isation of the ideals of semiotic systems.

Female specificity is thus theorised in terms of spatial proximity. Inopposition to this 'closeness' to the body, a spatial distance in the male'srelation to his body rapidly becomes a temporal distance in the service ofknowledge. This is presented quite explicitly in Freud's analysis of theconstrUCtion of the 'subject supposed to know'. The knowledge involvedhere is a knowledge of sexual difference as it is organised in rdation tothe strUCture of the look, turning on the visibility of the penis. For thelittle girl in Freud's description seeing and knowing are simultaneous­there is no temporal gap between them. In 'Some Psychological Conse­quences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes', Freud claimsthat the girl, upon seeing the penis for the first time, 'makes her judge­ment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she iswithout it and wants to hrlVe it.' I" In the lecture on 'Femininity' Freudrepeats this gesture, merging perception and intellection: 'They (girls] atonce notice the difference and, it must be admitted, its significancetoo.'·'o

The little boy, on the other hand, does not share this immediacy ofunderstanding. When he first sees the woman's genitals he 'begins byshowing irresolution and lack of interest; he sees nOlhing or disownswh'H he hns seen, he softens it down or looks about for expedients for

14 l.uce Irigmay,'Tbis Sex WbichIs Not One', NewFrench Feminisms,ed Elaine Marksand Isabelle deC{l\lrtivron,Amherst, TheUniversity ofMassachusettsPress, 1980, pp104-105.

l~Irigaray,

'\X!omen's Exile',!Jto!,'gy <IudC,ms<"i,'lIslffH, no I(May 1977), p 7-L

!(>Helene Cixous,'The l.augh of theMcdusa', N,7!,1Frflldl FOllilli.,ms,r 157.

n Sarah Kofmnn,'Ex: The Womnn'sEnigma', Endirif,vol IV no 2 (Fall1980), p 20.

III Michelel\"\omrehly,'Inquiry inwFemininity', mlf,no I (1978), pp91·92.

I" Freud, 'SomcPsychologicalConsequences ofthe Anmomic'llDislinl"1ionBetwccn !hcSexes', Sexuality<Iud tht Psydl"I,;~y

af l.m'l:, cd PhilipRicH', New Ymk,Collier Honks,1963, pp 187-188.

211 Freud,'Femininity',opcit, p 125.

79

8021 Freud, 'Some

PsychologicalConsequences .. _op'cit, p 187,

22 Molly Haskell,From Reverence {(l

Rape, Baltimore,Penguin Books,1974, p 154.

2\ Irigaray,'Women's Exile',op ell, p 65.

24 Mulvey,'Afterthoughts.inspired by Duelin the Sun',Framework,(Summer 1981), P13.

bringing it into line with his expectations'.21 A second event, the threatof castration, is necessary to prompt a rereading of the image, endowingit with a meaning in relation to the boy's own subjectivity. It is in thedistance between the look and the threat that the boy's relation to know­ledge of sexual difference is formulated. The boy, unlike the girl inFreud's description, is capable of a re-vision of earlier events, a retro~

spective understanding which invests the events with a significancewhich is in no way linked ro an immediacy of sight. This gap betweenthe visible and the knowable, the very possibility of disowning what isseen, prepares the ground for fetishism. In a sense, the male spectator isdestined to be a fetishist, balancing knowledge and belief.

The female, on the other hand, must find it extremely difficult, if notimpossible, to assume the position of fetishist. That body which is soclose continually reminds her of the castration which cannot be 'fetish­ised away'. The lack ofa distance between seeing and understanding, themode of judging 'in a flash', is conducive to what might be termed as'over-identification' with the image. The association of tears and 'wetwasted afternoons' (in Molly Haskell's words) n with genres specified asfeminine (the soap opera, the 'woman's picture') points very precisely tothis type ofover-identification, this abolition of a distance, in short, thisinability to fetishise. The woman is constructed differently in relation toprocesses oflooking. For Irigaray, this dichoromy between distance andproximity is described as the fact that:

The masculine can partly look at itselj, speculate aboul itselj, represent itselfand describe itselffor what it is, whilst the feminine can try to speak to itselfthrough a new language, but cannot describe itselffrom outside or in formalterms, except by identifying itself with the masculine, thus by losing itself. 23

Irigaray goes even further: the woman always has a problematic relationto the visible, to form, to structures ofseeing. She is much more comfort­able with, closer to, the sense of touch.

The pervasiveness, in theories of the feminine, ofdescriptions ofsucha claustrophobic closeness, a deficiency in relation to structures ofseeingand the visible, must clearly have consequences for attempts to theorisefemale spectatorship. And, in fact, the result is a tendency to view thefemale spectator as the site of an oscillation between a feminine positionand a masculine position, invoking the metaphor of the transvestite.Given the structures of cinematic narrative, the woman who identifieswith a female character must adopt a passive or masochistic position,while identification with the active hero necessarily entails an acceptanceof what Laura Mulvey refers to as a certain 'masculinismion' ofspecta­torship.

... as desire is given cultural materiality in a text, for women (from child­hood onwards) trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily becomessecond Nature. However, this Nature does nor sit easily and shifts rest­lessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes. 24

The transvestite wears clothes which signify a different sexuality, asexuality which, for the woman, .allows a mastery over the image and thevery possibility ofattaching the gaze to desire. Clothes make the man, asthey say. Perhaps this explains the ease with which women can slip intomale clothing. As both Freud and Cixous point out, the woman seems tobe more bisexual than the man. A scene from Cukor's Adam's Rib graph­ically demonstrates this ease of female transvestism. As Katherine Hep­burn asks the jury to imagine the sex role reversal of the three majorcharacters involved in the case, there are three dissolves linking each ofthe characters successively to shots in which they are dressed in theclothes of the opposite sex. What characterises the sequence is themarked facility of the transformation of the two women into men incontradistinction to a certain resistance in the case of the man. Theacceptability of the female reversal is quite distinctly opposed to themale reversal which seems capable of representation only in terms offarce. Male transvestism is an occasion for laughter; female transvestismonly another occasion for desire.

Thus, while the male is locked into sexual identity, the female can at

least pretend that she is other - in fact, sexual mobility would seem to bea distinguishing feature offemininity in its cultural construction. Hence,transvestism would be fully recuperable. The idea seems to be this: it isunderstandable that women would want to be men, for everyone wantsto be elsewhere than in the feminine position. What is not understand­able within the given terms is why a woman might flaunt her femininity,produce herself as an excess of femininity, in other words, foregroundthe masquerade. Masquerade is not a~ recuperable as transvestismprecisely because it constitutes an acknowledgement that it is femininityitself which is constructed as mask-as the decorative layer whichconceals a non-identity. For Joan Riviere, the first to theorise theconcept, the masquerade of femininity is a kind of reaction-formationagainst the woman's trans-sex identification, her transvestism. Afterassuming the position of the subject of discourse rather than its object,the intellectual woman whom Riviere analyses felt compelled tocompensate for this theft of maSCUlinity by over-doing the gestures offeminine flirtation.

Womanliness rherefore could be assumed and wom as a mask, both ((J hiderhe possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she wasfound to possess it - much as a thief willlllnl out his pockets al1d ask to besearched to prove that he has not the stolen goods. The reader may now askhow I define womanliness or where I draw the line berween genuine womanli­ness and the masquerade. My suggestion is nor, however, that there is anysuch dIfference; whether radical or superjici,ll, they are the same thing. 2~

The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Woman­liness is a mask which can be worn or removed. The masquerade's resist·ance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in irs denial of theproduction offcmininity as closeness, as presence-to·itself, as, precisely,

2S Joan Riviere,'Womantiness as aMasquerade',Psychoanalysis alldFemale Sexllaliry,ed Hendrik MRuitenbeek, NewHaven, Collegeand UniversityPress, 1966, p 213.My amllysis Qftheconcept ofmasquerade differsmarkedly fromIh3t of LuceIrig3f;}y. See Cesexe qui 1/ 'en est pas/11/ (Paris: LesEditions deMinuit, 1977), pp131-132. It alsodiwrges fO a gre3textent from thevery imponamanalysis ofmasqueradepresented byClaire Johnston in'Femininity 3ndthe Masquemde:Anne of theIndies', .7acquc5TOlimeNr London,British FilmInstitute, 1975, pp36·44. I amindebted to her forthe reference toRiviere's 3nicle.

81

26 Moustafa Safou:m,'Is the OedipusComplexUnivcrsal?',lI/lf,nos 5·6 (1981), pp84-85.

21 Montrday, op cit,p93.

211 Silvia Bovensdlen,'Is There aFeminineAesthelic?', NewGerm<ll/ Critique,no 10 (Wimer1977), p 129.

29 Monlrelay, op cit,P 93.

imagistic. The transvestite adopts the sexuality of the other - the womanbecomes a man in order to attain the necessary distance from the image.Masquerade, on the other hand, involves a realignment of femininity,the recovery, or more accurately, simulation, of the missing gap ordistance. To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form ofa certaindistance between oneself and one's image. If, as Moustafa Safouanpoints our, ' ... to wish to include in oneselfas an object the cause of thedesire of the Other is a formula for the structure of hysteria' ,II' then mas­querade is anri-hysterical for it works [0 effect a separation between thecause of desire and oneself. In Monrrclay's words, 'the woman uses herown body as a disguise.' n

The very fact that we can speak ofa woman 'using' her sex or 'using'her body for particular gains is highly significanr - it is not that a mancannot use his body in this way bur that he doesn't have to. Themasquerade doubles represenration; it is constituted by a hyperbolisa­tion ofthe accoU[rements offemininity. A propos ofa recent performanceby Madene Dietrich, Sylvia Bovenschen claims, ' ... we are watching awoman demonstrate the representation of a woman's body.' 211This typeof masquerade, an excess of femininity, is aligned with the femme fataleand, as Montrelay explains, is necessarily regarded by men as evilincarnate: 'It is this evil which scandalises whenever woman plays ourher sex in order to evade the word and the law. Each time she subverts alaw or a word which relies on the predominantly masculine srr.ucture ofthe look.' 29 By destabilising the image, the masquerade confounds thismasculine structure of the look. It effects a defamiliarisation of femaleiconography. Nevertheless, the preceding account simply specifiesmasquerade as a type of representation which carries a threat, dis­articulating male systems of viewing. Yet, it specifies nothing withrespect to female spectatorship. What might it mean to masquerade asspectator? To assume the mask in order to see in a different way?

III. 'Men Seldom Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses'

The first scene in Now Voyager depicts the Berte Davis character asrepressed, unattractive and undesirable or, in her own words, as thespinster aunt of the family. ('Every family has one.') She has heavy eye­brows, keeps her hair bound tightly in a bun, and wears glasses, a drabdress and heavy shoes. By the time of the shot discussed earlier, signal­ling her transformation into beauty, the glasses have disappeared, alongwith the other signifiers of unattractiveness. Between these twomoments there is a scene in which the doctor who cures her actuallyconfiscates her glasses (as a part of the cure). The woman who wearsglasses constitutes one of the most intense visual cliches of the cinema.The image is a heavily marked condensation of motifs concerned withrepressed sexuality, knowledge, visability and vision, intellectuality, anddesire. The woman with glasses signifies simultaneously intellectualityand undcsirahility; hut the moment she removes her glasses (<1 moment

which, it seems, must almost always be shown and which is itselflinkedwith a certain sensual quality), she is transformed into spectacle, the verypicture ofdesire. Now, it must be remembered that the cliche is a heavilyloaded moment ofsignification, a social knot ofmeaning. It is character­ised· by an effect of ease and naturalness. Yet, the cliche has a bindingpower so strong that it indicates a precise moment of ideological dangeror threat - in this case, the woman's appropriation of the gaze. Glassesworn by a woman in the cinema do not generally signify a deficiency inseeing but an active looking, or even simply the fact ofseeing as opposedto being seen. The intellectual woman looks and analyses, and in usurp­ing the gaze she poses a threat to an entire system of representation. It isas if the woman had forcefully moved to the other side of the specular.The overdetermination of the image ofthe woman with glasses, its statusas a cliche, is a crucial aspect of the cinematic alignment ofStructures ofseeing and being seen with sexual difference. The cliche, in assuming animmediacy of understanding, acts as a mechanism for the naturalisationof sexual difference.

But the figure ofthe woman with glasses is only an extreme moment ofa more generalised logic. There is always a certain excessiveness, a diffi~

culty associated with women who appropriate the gaze, who insist uponlooking. Linda Williams has demonstrated how, in the genre of thehorror film, the woman's active looking is ultimately punished. Andwhat she sees, the monster, is only a mirror ofherself-borh woman andmonster are freakish in their difference - defined by either 'too much' or'too little'. 30 Just as the dominant narrative cinema repetitively inscribesscenarios of voyeurism, internalising or narrativising the film-spectatorrelationship (in films like Psycho, Rear Window, Peeping Tom), taboos inseeing are insistently formulated in relation to the female spectator aswell. The man with binoculars is countered by the woman with glasses.The gaze must be dissociated from mastery. In Leave Her to Heaven(John Stahl, 1945), the female protagonist's (Gene Tierney's) excessivedesire and over-possessiveness are signalled from the very beginning ofthe film by her intense and sustained stare at the major male character, astranger she first encounters on a train. The discomfort her look causes isgraphically depicted. The Gene Tierney character is ultimately revealedto be the epitome of evil- killing her husband's crippled youngerbrother, her unborn child and ultimately herself in an attempt to brandher cousin as a murderess in order to insure her husband's future fidel­ity. In Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946), Joan Crawford's problem­atic status is a result of her continual attempts to assume the positiol1 ofspectator - fixing John Garfield with her gaze. Her transformation fromspectator to spectacle is signified repetitively by the gesture of removingher glasses. Rosa, the character played by Bette Davis in Beyond lheForesl (King Vidor, 1949) walks to the station every day simply to walchthe train departing for Chicago. Her fascination with the train is a fasci­nation with its phallic power to transport her to 'another place'. Thischaracter is also specified as having a 'good eye' -she can shoot, bothpool and guns. In all three films the woman is construcred ;lS the site of

10 Linda Williams,'When the WomanLooks ... ', in Re·vision: Femil/is!Essays il/ FilmAnalysis, ed MaryAnn Doane, PatMellencamp andLinda Williams,forthcoming.

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'Un Regard Oblique': a dirty joke at the expense orthe woman's look.

31 JohnstoIl, op cit, p40.

an excessive and dangerous desire. This desire mobilises extreme effortsof containment and unveils the sadistic aspect of narrativ~. In all threefilms the woman dies. As Claire Johnston points out, death is the 'loca­tion ofaU impossible signs',31 and the films demonstrate that the womanas subject of the gaze is clearly an impossible sign. There is a perverse re­writing of this logic of the gaze in Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding,1939), where the woman's story achieves heroic and tragic proportionsnot only in blindness, but in a blindness which mimes sight - when thewoman pretends to be able to see.

IV. Out of the Cinema and into the Streets: The Censorshipof the Female Gaze

This process ofnarrativising the negation ofthe female gaze in the classi~

cal Hollywood cinema finds its perfect encapsulation in a still photo­graph taken in 1948 by Robert Doisneau, 'Un Regard Oblique'. Just asthe Hollywood narratives discussed above purport to centre a femaleprotagonist, the photograph appears to give a certain prominence to awoman's look. Yet, both the title of the photograph and its organisationofspace indicate that the real site ofscopophiliac power is on the marginsof the frame. The man is not centred; in fact, he occupies a very narrowspace on the extreme right of the picture. Nevertheless, it is his gaze

! which defines the problematic of the photograph; it is his gaze whicheffectively erases that of the woman. Indeed, as subject of the gaze, thewoman looks intently. Bur not only is the object of her look concealedfrom the spectator, her gaze is encased by the two poles defining themasculine axis of vision. Fascinated by nothing visible-a blankness orvoid for the spectator - unanchored by a 'sight' (there is nothing 'proper'to her vision -save, perhaps, the mirror), the female gaze is left free­floating, vulnerable to subjection. The faint reflection in the shopwindow of only the frame of the picture at which she is looking servesmerely to reaniculate, en ah)Jme, the emptiness of her gaze, the absenceof her desire in representation.

On the other hand, the object ofthe male gaze is fully present, there forthe spectator. The fetishistic representation of the nude female body,fuHy in view, insures a masculinisation of the spectatorial position. Thewoman's look is literally outside the triangle which traces a complicitybetween the man, the nude, and the spectator. The feminine presence inthe photograph, despite a diegetic centring of the female subject of thegaze, 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 spec­tator (although it is nOt clear whether she is looking at herselfin a mirroror peering through a door or window). While this drama of seeing isplayed out at the surface of the photograph, its deep space is activated byseveral young boys, out-of-focus, in front ofa belt shop. The oppositionout-of-focus/in-focus reinforces the supposed clarity accorded to therepresentation of the woman's 'non~vision'. Furthermore, since this out·of-focus area constitutes the precise literal centre of the image, it alsodemonstrates how the photograph makes figurative the opef<ltion ofcentring-draining the actual centre point of significance in order todeposit meaning on the margins. The male gaze is centred, in contro!­although it is exercised from the periphery.

The spectator's pleasure is thus produced through the framing/negationof the female gaze. The woman is there as the butt of a joke - a 'dirtyjoke' which, as Freud has demonstrated, is always constructed at theexpense of a woman. In order for a dirty joke to emerge in its specificityin Freud's description, the object ofdesire - the woman - muSt be absentand 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,becomes the person to whom the smut is addressed ... '.12 The terms ofthe photograph's address as joke once again insure a masculinisation ofthe place of the spectator. The operation of the dirty joke is also inextric­ably linked by Freud to scopophilia and the exposure of the female body:

Smut is like an exposure ofthe sexual{vdlfferem persOll£0 whom it is dircered.By the ullerance of the obscene words it compels the person who is assailed toimagine the part of the body or the procedure in question and shows her thatthe assailam is himself imagining it. It cannot he doubled char the desire tosee what is sexual exposed is lhe original motive of smUl. JJ

12 Freud, Jokes alldTheir Relation torhe UIICOlIScioIlS,trans JamesStrachey, NewYork, W WNorton &Company, Inc,1960, p 99.

1J ibid, P 98.

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IIi.!

86J,! Weston J Nacf,

COUllfcrpaTfS: f,mll

and Ell/alion illPhotographs, NewYork, E P Duttonand theMetropolitanMuseum of Art,1982, pp 48-49.

J~ ibid.

From thiS perspective, dlC photograph lays bmc the very mechanics ofthe joke through its depiction of sexual exposure and a surreptitious actof seeing (and desiring). Freud's description of the joke-work appears [Q

constitute a perfect analysis of the photograph's orchestration of thegaze. There is a 'voice-off' of the photographic discourse, however-acomponent of the image which is beyond the frame ofrhis Ertle scenarioof voyeurism. On the far left-hand side of the photogruph, behind thewall holding the painting ofthe nude, is the barely detectable painting ofa woman imaged differently, in darkness-our of sight for the male,blocked by his fetish. Yet, to point to this almost invisible alternative inimaging is also only to reveal once again the analyst's own perpetualdesire to find a not-seen that might break the hold of representation. Orto laugh last.

There is a sense in which the photograph's delineation of a sexualpolitics oflooking is almost uncanny. But) to counteract the very possi­bility ofsuch a perception, the language of the an critic effects a natural­isation of this joke on the woman. The art-critical reception of thepicture emphasizes a natural but at the same time 'imaginative' relationbetween photography and life, ultimately subordinating any formal rela­tions to a referential ground: 'Doisneau's lines move from right to left,directed by the man's glance; the woman's gaze creates a line of energylike a hole in space.... The creation of these relationships from life itselfis imagination in photography.' J-l 'Life itself', then, presents thematerial for an 'artistic' organisation of vision along the lines of sexualdifference. Furthermore, the critic would have us believe that chanceevents and arbitrary clicks of the shuner cannot be the agents of a gener­alised sexism because they are particular, unique - 'Keitesz and Dois­neau depend entirely upon our recognition that they were present at theinstant of the unique intersection of events.' l~ Realism seems always toreside in the streets and, indeed, the out-of-focus boy across the street, atthe centre of the photograph, appears to act as a guarantee of the 'chance'nature of the event, its arbitrariness, in short - its realism. Thus, in thediscourse of the an critic the photograph, in capturing a moment, doesnot construct it; the camera finds a naturally given series ofsubject andobject positions. What the critic does nOt consider are the conditions ofreception of photography as an art form, its situation within a muchlarger network of representation. What is it that makes the photographnot only readable but pleasurable - at the expense of the woman? Thecritic does not ask what makes the photograph a negotiable item in amarket of signification.

V. The Missing Look

The photograph displays insistently, in microcosm, the structure of thecinematic inscription ofa sexual differentiation in modes oflooking. Itsprocess of framing the female gaze repeats that of the cinematic narrat~

ives described above, from Lcm'c flo- to Ilc£l1!c}/ to Dark ViaOly. Films

I play out scenarios of looking in order to outline the terms of their ownunderstanding. And given the divergence between masculine and femin­ine scenarios, those terms would seem to be explicitly negotiated asmarkers ofsexual difference. Both the theory of the image and its appar~

arus, the cinema, produce a position for the female spectator - a positionwhich is ulrimately umenable because it lacks the attribute ofdistance sonecessary for an adequate reading of the image. The entire elaboration offemininity as a closeness, a nearness, as present-to~itse!fis not the defini­tion of an essence but the delineation ofa place culturally assigned to thewoman. Above and beyond a simple adoption of the masculine positionin relation to the cinematic sign, the female spectator is given twooptions: the masochism of over-identification or the narcissism entailedin becoming one's own object of desire, in assuming the image in themost radical way. The effectivity of masquerade lie,s precisely in itspotential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a prob~

lematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and read­able by the woman. Doisneau's photograph is not readable by the femalespectator-it can give her pleasure only in masochism. In order to 'get'the joke, she must once again assume the position of transvestite.

It is quite tempting to foreclose entirely the possibility offemale spec­tatorship, to repeat at the level of theory the gesture of the photograph,given the history of a cinema which relies so heavily on voyeurism,fetishism, and identification with an ego ideal conceivable only inmasculine terms. And, in fact, there has been a tendency to theorisefemininity and hence the feminine gaze as repressed, and in itsrepression somehow irretrievable, the enigma constituted by Freud'squestion. Yet, as Michel Foucault has demonstrated, the repressivehypothesis on its own entails a very limited and simplistic notion of theworking of power. 16 The 'no' of the father, the prohibition, is its onlytechnique. In theories of repression there is no sense of the productive~

ness and positivity of power. Femininity is produced very precisely as aposition within a network ofpower relations. And the growing insistenceupon the elaboration of a theory of female spectatorship is indicative ofthe crucial necessity of understanding that position in order to dislocateit.

This article is an expanded \'ersion of a paper preseOled at a symposium on recent filmtheory at Yale University, February 1982, organised by Miri;'lln Hansen and DonaldCrafton.

36 Michel Foucault,The History "/Sexualiry, transRobert Hurley,New York:Pantheon Books,1978.

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