Male Gaze and Racism — Page 3:
11 In relation to film theory, Mulvey suggests that the dissolution of a seemingly understandable reality as it is achieved by the Hollywood studio system, with its stars and its narrative storytelling tradition, also discharges within new forms of cinema, in which the spectator is relocated from the darkness of the cinema palace into the brightness of the living room, where videos and DVDs have replaced the movie theater.
12 At the same time, Hollywood cinema has become self-referential. Citations, intertextuality and ironic references to other films, books and media are on the agenda, according to Mulvey. Thus popular culture becomes postmodern culture, in which a game with cause and effect takes place, a joyful interchange between text and allusion, thus making a linear narrative plot impossible to develop — as Dana Polan observes. Polan explains the effect of a quotation of a text by Michel Foucault in an episode of the US soap opera "West Wing" with the term "Savvy TV."
Savvy television often operates at the self-delighted expense of the very audience it is setting out to captivate. It dares one to spot the reference, to solve the puzzle. Its tactics often seem particularly tricky for the academic television analyst who can find his/her best insights turned into amusing fodder for mockery, deconstruction, and ironic reversal in the shows themselves. (Foucault TV)
13 Feminist film analysis has developed in the light of radically changed conditions of production and consumption of film. The idea of fetish, to which women were deduced in Hollywood cinema of the 50s, 60s and 70s, was taken to another level within postmodern cinema. In a psychoanalytic perspective, fetishization is based on the endowment of an object with self-sufficient power. The fetish depends on the ability of the defense of the real subject and its transformation into an object, presumed to have the same properties as the defended subject.
14 The typical sentence of a fetishist accordingly goes: "I know all this very well, nevertheless. . . " (Mannoni 9-33). Accordingly, the process of fetishization is fragile and prone to malfunctions because it is culturally and historically changeable. This critique puts into question the dichotomization of male activity and female passivity of many film theorists. A female spectator would not appear in Mulvey’s work at all. Mulvey’s apparent essentialism in her early essay was also criticized: According to these critics, audience and masculinity would be treated as immutable, trans-historic entities, thereby tunneling the analysis to a white, heterosexual male spectatorship.
15 In 1983 E. Ann Kaplan asked "Is the gaze male". Both Kaplan (Women; Looking) as well as Kaja Silverman (Masochism) argued that the gaze could be taken by both, women and men. The man was not always in control, the woman is not always passive. Teresa de Lauretis insisted that one could read the male gaze also read against the grain. (Alice) The female spectator does not simply assume a male reading, but operates always in a double identification with the active and passive subject positions. Jackie Stacey doubted the automatic combination of femininity and masculinity with female and male viewers’ positions: "Do women necessarily take up a feminine and men masculine Spectator position?" (245). And why should there exist only one female and one male spectator position? What about gay and lesbian viewers?