GWSS 3307

Midterm

On the Unbearable Messiness of (Feminist) Film Analysis

Although feminists rightfully point out that social relationships are gendered and power

inequalities persist, feminist film theory, especially in its psychoanalytic manifestations, proves

to be largely inadequate for complex readings of film. Such theory dogmatically interprets

representations and denies active and differentiated spectatorship, pleasures associated with

cinematic experience, and materialities of bodies beyond gender. Film theory should not interpret

cinema as a static, finished product but rather as a social relationship. In this paper I will draw on

a range of theorists and the films, The Piano and Set it Off, to argue that a feminist analysis of

gender, if not attentive to class, race, and sexuality, merely reproduces power relations and

reinforces gender binaries.

Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is widely considered a

cornerstone work in feminist film theory. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory she argues that

classic Hollywood films are structured according to a rigid gender binary – “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” (Mulvey 39). According to Mulvey, the films are phallocentric and structured

around the male gaze which allows the spectator to identify only with the sadistic male or

masochistic female. The male gaze refers to the visual pleasure, power, and assertion of male

subjectivity while the female remains someone to be looked at, possessed, and objectified.

The Piano has been interpreted by some theorists (e.g. hooks 1994, Saco 1994) as an

illustration of Mulvey’s points: the female character Ada, is an object of male desire and control;

she is literally voiceless (mute). According to hooks (1994), The Piano “betrays feminist visions

1
of female actualization, celebrates and eroticizes male dominance.” The issue should not be

whether The Piano is a feminist film, but how it simultaneously reinforces and transgresses

gender itself as well as in relation to other axes of identity. Criticism that attempts to fit films

into “correct” side of the ideological spectrum, as feminist or anti-feminist, inevitably reproduces

problematic binary philosophical dogmas of Western thought. Although feminist theory attempts

to escape and challenge binaries such as male/female, nature/culture, psychoanalytic feminist

theory instead of challenging them, reinscribes them. If everything in film can fit into

male/female power relations, if a spectator can only identify with one or the other, it implies that

any transgression and pleasure is based on either dominant subject position or false

consciousness. Mulvey hints that although transgression/alteration happens, simultaneously it is

impossible and inherently conservative – “the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough

to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing it” (38).

Sexuality/Cinesexuality

“We can ask ‘what is it you have sex with?’ The answer ‘male’ or ‘female’ is imagined as a stable enough
term to explain sexuality. But if we answer ‘cinema,’ questions proliferate beyond, rather than refer back
to, a pre-established system of desire.” (McCormack 2).

Flora: Tell me about my real father. How did you speak to him?
Ada: (subtitled) I didn't need to speak, I could lay thoughts out in his mind like they were a sheet.

In contrast with Mulvey’s interpretation of cinema, Patricia McCormack (2008) uses the

term “cinesexuality” – the intense and intimate act of viewing and becoming through pleasure

and desire – “that knows no gender, no sexuality, no form, and no function” (1). Such

formulation is radically different from Mulvey, whose analytical weaknesses were widely

criticized and revised in her later work. Some obvious issues with the psychoanalytical model

that based itself on the idea of sexual difference and formulas of gendered psyche are that it does

not take into account the diversity of spectators and their experiences. If analysis is based only

2
on a male-female model of the psychic-cinematic world, then race, class, sexuality, ability,

space, history, etc are rendered irrelevant.

Gaines (1995) argues that psychoanalytic feminist film theory is inadequate in theorizing

racial, class, and sexual difference. What does it mean when certain subjects, for example Black

women and men, are pushed into existence of “non-being” (78)? How do histories of

institutional control over bodies and their abilities to look/gaze impact the subjectivities of

spectatorship? Can discourse analysis of universalist psychoanalytic models be compatible with

historical materialism? Although neither Marxists nor psychoanalytical models are sufficient in

themselves and they both overlook sexuality, race and other identity markers, Gaines implies that

there are potentially productive possibilities in blending theories.

Mulvey’s psychoanalytical theory does not allow explanation why films are enjoyed by

diverse audiences without stripping them of agency. Do all women, for example, watch films

masochistically or identify with men and watch it sadistically? Teresa de Lauretis (1999) states

that “for a film to work, to be effective it has to please” (85). Gaines (1986) also points out that

“subcultural groups can interpret popular forms to their advantage, even without ‘invitation’

from the text” (74). Although some sort of identification must be part of the cinematic

experience, it clearly does not have to correlate with the social identity of the viewer and the

object of identification in the film. Evans and Gamman (1995), for example, suggest “that there

are many more visual clues and ‘cultural competences’ which generate interpellation,

identification and voyeurism in the cinema” and that spectatorship and gaze cannot be pinpointed

to discrete identities (36).

Visual pleasure allows much more transgression then Mulvey suggests. This does not

mean that certain films are not constructed to please certain audiences more than others or that it

does not have intentional or unintentional ideological objectives and effects. Feminist critics of

3
The Piano analyze the film as oppressive, conservative, and anti-feminist, although it could be

argued that if properly historicized the film transgresses gender and sexuality as much as it

reinscribes it. Critics’ ahistoricism obscures specificities of time and space, creating an illusion

of the universality of a contemporary liberal (feminist) subjecthood. It assumes that there could

be no value in attempting to identify or relocate in time and space in order to

understand/experience a “non-feminist” positionality. Taken in the context of colonial 19th

century life, the portrayal of desire does not fit neatly into assumed gender order and subjugated

sexuality. Instead, itpaints complex picture of domesticity, colonialism, class, family, and

aesthetics among other intersectional elements constituting desire that is by no means simply

rational or one dimensional.

Materialities of Class, Space, and Race

“Like so much of American society itself, [films] remain depoliticized to the extent their artistic insurgency
is hardly ever translated into a political radicalism” (Boggs and Pollard 100).

Luther: Get to work, ladies... and gentlemen!

Film has the ability to rethink, reimagine, and, potentially, inspire the reworking of social

reality. Whether it is drama, science fiction, documentary or any other film genre, in order to

make sense to us, films are telling something about our past, present, and future. They are neither

pure reflections of reality nor mere fantasies. So when it comes to representations of the

materiality of social order or its economic organization, film inevitably is forced to make some

commentary on it by its very nature of representation. However,films might be critiquing or

obscuring ideological constructions of space, class society, and uneven resource distribution.

Boggs and Pollard, discussing postmodern condition, state that “media culture embraces

constituent elements of the liberal-capitalist order: hierarchy mixed with unbridled

individualism, commodification mixed with diversity, an urban industrialism fused with social

atomization and psychological alienation” (104). Like questions of gender and sexuality,
4
question of spectatorship, identification, and interpretation remain important while discussing

issues of class and economic order.

Gaines (1986), discussing feminist psychoanalytic theories, states “since this theory has

focused on sexual difference, class and racial differences have remained outside its problematic,

divorced from textual concerns by the very split in the social totality that the incompatibility of

these discourses misrepresents” (60). Gaines argues that the theoretical segmentation of identities

obscures an intersectional nature of oppression and therefore “functions ideologically” (61). Set

it Off, for example, cannot be analyzed simply along one axis of identity. It is emblematic of a

postmodern collage of conflicting values and meanings, as discussed in the quote by Boggs and

Pollard above. What makes Set it Off appealing is that its protagonists posses/perform identities

usually reserved for someone else in the Outlaw or the Hood films. Representations of

poor/working-class, Black, urban, queer women create the impression of a clearly counter-

hegemonic film. However, films represented as “Black” and marketed for diverse

audiences, while having the appearance of counter-hegemony and transgression, might reinscribe

essentialized social meanings of Black bodies and Black city space. Massod (2003), for example,

argues that for 1970s Blaxploitation and 1990s Hood film directors “black city spaces existed

within limited historical parameters in which the city had always existed in its present form” (2).

Such representations have concrete political ramifications – if the Black city space (“the ghetto”)

is a permanent, unchanging, ahistorical phenomenon, there is no need or responsibility to

intervene and challenge its political, economic, and social problems. Set it Off does make

spectators sympathize with its protagonists, who experience hardships of racism and

social/spatial segregation through the images and references to the Hood. However, the film falls

into a trap by representing Black city space as isolated and frozen in time. The only solution

becomes an individualistic escape, which is allowed to only one character – an outcome that

5
could be read as conservative rather than liberatory trajectory. According to DeVere Brody

(2005) “that the sole survivor is reluctant to continue as a career criminal; that she dreams of a

future, that she accepts the rights afforded by the rights of private property; in short, that she

desires to live the liberal romance of bourgeois subjectivity, allows her to live in a New World

Economy” (363). This is accompanied by the obviously problematic fact that Stony is let go by

the “good” white cop.

Such analysis, of course, should not negate pleasures associated with the spectatorship

and empowerment associated with seeing underrepresented identities. The challenge remains in

how to simultaneously recognize transgression and experience pleasure without succumbing to a

trap wherein difference and transgression become disattached commodities that are concealing

ideological constructions of difference and its material consequences. Massad states that

“ultimately, the films and the spatiotemporal tropes that define them help us to understand the

pressures and the constraints that context brings to representation and its analysis. Yet they also

remind us that the world presented onscreen by their diegesis should never be mistaken for the

real world” (7).

Frankie: So, what's the procedure when you have a gun to your head? What's the fucking procedure when
you have a gun to your head?

“And yet what determines the effect of realness is the ability to compel belief, to produce the naturalized
effect. This effect is itself a result of an embodiment of norms, reiteration of norms, an impersonation of
racial and class norm, a norm which is at once a figure, a figure of body, which is no particular body, but
a morphological ideal that remains the standard which regulates the performance, but which no
performance fully approximates.” (Butler 341).

Stony: Well talk is cheap…Nigga!

The films Set it Off and The Piano could be analyzed as quite different examples of

racial representation. Set it Off , while attempting to portray diverse African-American

characters in terms of gender, class, and sexuality, in the end barely challenges the imaginary and

social expectations of race. Space (discussed earlier), violence, and class are few of the elements
6
that naturalize race and certain racialized bodies as occupying particular positions in a social

order. Keith, the banker, and the female Black cop serve to show diversity of Black characters,

but both of them occupy problematic positions within the larger order. In different ways both are

representatives of the status quo. Keith, represented as a positive and sensitive character, is the

potential “high-end” escape from the ghetto for Stony. Although Stony refuses to accept the offer

(choosing female friendship and solidarity instead) explicit connections are not made between

banks, as symbols of capitalism, and urban poverty, as intimately intertwined. DeVere Brody

(2005) talking about the televised scene of police chase argues that:

“these televisual scenes place the film in the context of America’s spectacle of (racial)
death bearing unwitting witness (it is never deliberate) to Los Angeles as the home of the
televised trial of the century and the war zone of the Uprisings of the late 1960s and early
1990s. Such a space is by no means natural – although it is portrayed as the outcome of
‘nigga [sic] authenticity’” (374).

According to Kristen Whissel (2007), in the traditional cinema “‘racial difference’

becomes visible through spectacle: an excess of visual signifiers of ‘race’ that contrast with a

relatively non-spectacular representation of” European whiteness (125). The Piano, although

centrally placed at the heart of colonialism and inevitably deeply intertwined with questions of

race, racism, and racialization, is seen as a film primarily as an exploration of gender and

sexuality (Dyson 1995: 267). Arguably, the questions of race are rarely engaged with because the

main characters are white, therefore unmarked and “non-spectacular.” Set It Off, on the contrary,

while portraying intersectionality of identities, places race in excess to create a particularly

racialized spectacle. The Piano trivializes colonialism, for example, by casually representing land

“purchase” from Maori and the concept that land is being wasted (uncultivated) by the Natives

(269). Although there are a few instances of Maori resistance, their overall presence serves as a

signification of the nature/savage - culture/civilized binary (268). Ada’s bourgeois sexuality is

constructed and made desirable through the combination of whiteness, gender, and class, while

7
Maori women are desexualized in the film (270-271). According to Doane (1991), “The nature

of white woman’s racial identity as it is socially constructed is simultaneously material,

economic and…subject to intense work at the level of representation, mobilizing all the psychic

reverberations attached to (white) female sexuality in order to safeguard racial hierarchy”

(quoted in Dyson 270). The Piano allows us to analyze complex intersections of gender and

sexuality and to see how they do not necessarily fit into certain analytical models. However,

focusing solely on gender and sexuality as the only terrain of oppression/liberation without

paying attention how class, colonialism, race and numerous other identity elements and social

relations effect/shape them only serves as reinforcement/continuation of Eurocentric power.

Post Scriptum

What becomes evident from these messy pieces of theory, analysis, and impressions is

that there are numerous ways to interpret films. There are always incomplete, situational,

political, ethical, unethical ways that films can be looked at, thought of, gazed, engaged, enjoyed,

used and abused. Neither one single analysis can ever be fully “right.” Films will never be

viewed and interpreted the same. The point, however, should not be to retreat from analysis into

complete relativism but to try to do intersectional analysis with different audiences in mind. It is

not sufficient to claim that film as pleasure is the evidence of liberatory practice/potential. Films

do work ideologically and do have material implications, but so are all other social and political

practices. What ideologies do films reproduce, channel through bodies of spectators, what

meanings are accepted or resisted should be continuously interrogated.

Works cited:

Boggs, Carl and Tom Pollard. “Postmodern Cinema and Hollywood Culture in an Age of
Corporate Colonization.” Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema, ed. Julie F. Codell. Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2007. 100.

8
Butler, Judith. “Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion.” Feminist Film
Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham. NYC: NYU Press, 1999. 341.

De Lauretis, Theresa. “Oedipus Interruptus.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue
Thornham. NYC: NYU Press, 1999. 85.

DeVere Brody, Jennifer. “Moving Violations: Performing Globalization and Feminism in Set it
Off.” Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, eds.
Harry Justin Elam and Kennell A. Jackson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Dyson, Lynda. “The Return of the Repressed? Whiteness, Femininity and Colonialism in The
Piano.” Screen, 36.1. 3, (1995).

Evans, Caroline and Lorraine Gamman. “The Gaze Revisited, Or Reviewing Queer Viewing.”
A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, eds. Paul Burston and Colin
Richardson. New York: Routledge, 1995. 36.

Gaines, Jaine. “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film
theory.” Cultural Critique, 4, (1986).

hooks, bell. “Mysogyny, Gangsta Rap, and The Piano.” Z Magazine. February 1994.

Massod, Paula J. Black City Cinema: African American Experiences in Film. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press, 2003. 2-7.

Saco, Diana. “Feminist Film Criticism: The Piano and the Female Gaze”. Guest presentation for
the Minnesota Humanities Commission’s Teacher Institute. Seminar on “Screening Society:
Film as Art and Culture.” Chaska, MN. 13-18 November, 1994.

Whissel, Kristen. “Racialized Spectacle, Exchange Relations and the Western in Joanna d’Arc of
Mongolia.” Queer Screen: A Screen Reader, eds. Jackie Stacey and Sarah Street. New York:
Routledge, 2007. 125.