Drawing on Freud's theory of the libido and the female Oedipal trajectory, feminists extended Mulvey's application of the theory to argue for a bisexual gaze. Perhaps the spectator did not identify in a monolithic, rigid manner with his or her gender counterpart, but actually alternated between masculine-active and feminine-passive positions, depending on the codes of identification at work in the film text.
In a reading of Hitchcock's Rebecca (USA, 1940), Tania Modleski (1982) argued that when the daughter goes through the Oedipus complex - although she gives up her original desire for her mother, whom she blames for not giving her a penis, and turns to the father as her love object - she never fully relinquishes her first love. Freud also argued that the girl child, unlike the boy, is predisposed towards bisexuality. The girl's love for the mother, although repressed, still exists. In Rebecca the unnamed heroine experiences great difficulty in moulding herself to appeal to the man's desire. When she most imagines she has achieved this aim, the narrative reveals that she is 'still attached to the "mother", still acting out the desire for the mother's approbation' (1982: 38). Recently, the notion of the female Oedipal trajectory has been invoked in a series of articles published in Screen (1995) on Jane Campion's The Piano (New Zealand, 1993), which suggests that these debates are still of great relevance to film theory.
Other work raised related issues. In The Desire to Desire (1987), Mary Ann Doane turned her attention to the 'woman's film' and the issue of female spectatorship. Janet Bergstrom, in 'Enunciation and Sexual Difference' (1979), questioned the premise that the spectator was male, while Annette Kuhn, in The Power of the Image (1985), explored cross-dressing, bisexuality, and the spectator in relation to the film Some Like it Hot (USA, 1959).
Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998
No comments:
Post a Comment