INTRODUCTION At an earlier point in this book, it was established that cultural studies, and in particular debates around representation, provided a focal point for the coalescing of a number of debates including feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism and post-colonialism. Popular cultural forms especially were identified as useful for framing debates around identity, sexuality, ethnicity and image. […]

Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment, in The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture (1988), maintain that feminist theorists argue that the concept of ‘the female gaze’ as mockery of machismo offers spectators the possibility of identifying with the ‘pleasures’ of activity without the sort of voyeurism associated with the ‘male gaze’ position of […]

Star argues that for the heterosexual audience the issue is sex (and masculinity): the principal object of the television ‘gaze’ in telerugby is male bodies. She notes one of the few explicit women’s accounts of pleasures in watching ‘Aussie Rules football’ on television: What attracted my interest were the images of male bodies. Here were […]

The ambiguity in the term ‘female spectatorship’ can be seen in many of the debates outlined, and is addressed by Christine Gledhill in her article ‘Pleasurable Negotiations’ (1988). Gledhill (1988:67) contends that ‘Female spectatorship elides conceptually distinct notions: the “feminine spectator”, constructed by the text, and the female audience, constructed by the socio­historical categories of […]

Popular cultural forms such as film have frequently served as vehicles to represent issues around race and ethnicity and to confirm representations of racial stereotypes. Modleski (1993:78) maintains that popular film is also used to explore ‘the highly charged taboo relationship between black men and white women’. In this context Modleski uses the film Gorillas […]

Female spectatorial pleasure has been theorised outside the framework of psychoanalytic film theory. Some feminist film theorists and cultural theorists have claimed that female spectatorial pleasures can be found in particular genres and filmic texts. Modleski (1984:104) maintains that feminists ‘can look for clues to women’s pleasure which are already present in existing forms even […]

The limitations of psychoanalytic theory for addressing issues raised by women of colour and lesbian feminists within debates in the area of feminist film theory became increasingly articulated around the issue of female spectatorship, particularly the pleasures gained from contesting dominant readings of text. Gaines (1994:179) shows how the fragmentation of a unified feminist response […]

One of the most thoroughgoing critiques of psychoanalytic theory in terms of its white middle-class binary (female/male) frame of reference is provided by Jane Gaines in an essay titled ‘White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory’ (1994).8 Gaines considers the problems inherent in psychoanalytic theory for explaining race and ethnicity […]

Both Mulvey’s and Doane’s perspective of pleasurable female spectatorship is essentially negative, and the concept of unmediated pleasure for the female spectator is inconceivable within the psychoanalytic framework. The types of critiques which have emerged on the use of psychoanalytic theory by Mulvey and Doane have come from a number of directions—from feminist and non­feminist […]

The emerging feminist film criticism of the 1960s and 1970s was confronted by the Marxist critique of realism1 and by developments in film theory such as semiology and psychoanalysis. Feminist film criticism shifted in emphasis from an earlier sociological emphasis on ‘content’ to an emphasis on the production of meaning, where stress was put on […]