Male Gaze and Racism — Page 2:
6 At the same time the female image in narrative cinema of Hollywood bears in itself a threat to male viewers, which Mulvey equates with castration anxiety. Against castration anxiety, the only remaining antidotes are the inspection of the woman and her demystification, or the defense that transforms woman into a fetish. Expressing this fetishization is, for example, the female Hollywood star system in which the actual attention of the audience is focused on the female stars. Scopophilia thereby is the power which determines the camera perspective of the film. According to Mulvey, all spectators would be forced to assume a male gaze perspective through a male camera perspective, because the cinematic apparatus or the cinematic dispositive is not gender neutral. In the context of Mulvey’s analysis the gaze regime of the cinema was principally equated with the male gaze, whose voyeurism was fed by mainstream narrative cinema, turning the woman into an object of its scopophilia.
7 Mulvey had found that the patriarchal unconscious in Hollywood cinema activated a series of binary sexual oppositions, thus contrasting the male|female, the active|passive, the sadistic|masochistic and the narrative|contemplative. (History
The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness (Visual 203).
The woman in Hollywood represents the castration phobia of male viewers, to be revoked only in a voyeuristic investigation of the female body. Mulvey herself summed up her approach as follows: The film audience has a voyeuristic relationship with the female eroticized picture.
This look, I claimed, is transmuted into that of the male protagonist looking at the eroticized women within the fictional world of the narrative. I also argued that the very perfection of his image was a defense against castration anxiety that the body of the woman may generate. (Some Thoughts 16)
8 Mulvey’s approach has gained great importance for feminist research and feminist historiography. The "male gaze" approach haunts both literary and historiographical research, often without a consideration of the specific criteria and conditions of Mulvey’s theory. David Sorfa has pointed out that Mulvey’s essay was primarily a political manifesto, and Mulvey herself declared in 1996 in hindsight: "Film theory of the 70s was political and polemical, and, in this spirit, argued that cinematic illusion worked as a total belief system at the expense of its ability to balance belief with knowledge" (Fetishism 9).
9 Mulvey’s theses have undergone a critical revision in the following years, in which the film theoretician herself participated actively. In 1993 she published an essay in which she explicitly pointed at the liberating power of an investigation, which postulated a difference between the image and the object, which it claimed to represent. Thus, images were unstable and their meaning was no longer locked or permanently inscribed. Semiotics and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis were used as a reference point for film theory. Semiotics could show that signifier and signified did not stand in a fixed relationship to each other. In analogy to the sign, the picture, therefore, had a signifier, but the signifier is not automatically synonymous with the iconic signified. (Some Thoughts 3)
10 The decoupling of the picture and its alleged content finds a correlation in the post-fordist economy. Unlike in the era of industrial capitalism, in which added value was created in the first line through the exploitation of labor performed by dependent employees, the post-modern economy evolved into a system in which the increasingly rapid circulation of capital itself seems to generate new capital. Money, which hitherto had served as a symbolic representation of value, is now tied into an economic exchange process in which money does not necessarily represent commodities or objectified labor time. (Some Thoughts 4) Thus fails the old form of representation or referentiality and the relationship between signifier and signified identifier destabilizes further. If history is constructed from representations, then the question arises whether these representations can be relocated to the social forces, which have generated them.