The Body and the Screen

Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema

Kate Ince

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781623565206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Book Prize 2018 Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries; in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnès Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the "Thinking Cinema" series draws on feminist philosophers and theorists from Simone de Beauvoir on to offer readings of a range of the most important and memorable of these films from the 1990s and 2000s, focusing as it does so on how the films convey women's lives and identities. Mainstream entertainment cinema traditionally distorts the representation of women, objectifying their bodies, minimizing their agency, and avoiding the most important questions about how cinema can "do justice" to female subjectivity. Kate Ince suggests that the films of independent women directors are progressively redressing the balance, reinvigorating both the narratives and the formal ambitions of European cinema. Ince uses feminist philosophers to interpret such films as Sex Is Comedy, Morvern Callar, White Material, and Fish Tank anew, suggesting that a philosophical understanding of female subjectivity as embodied and ethical should underpin future feminist film study.

1

Female Subjectivity in Philosophy and Theory

If there is no such thing today as femininity, it is because there never was. (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 4)

My criticism of Western philosophy above all has concerned the forgetting of the existence of a subjectivity which is different from masculine subjectivity: a subjectivity in the feminine. (Luce Irigaray, Key Writings, p. vii)

The ‘female’ subject-position is linked to fleshy continuity, rather than to an autonomous and individualized ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ that merely inhabits the flesh. (Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman, p. 10)

Amid the campaigns about women’s and feminist film to which so-called second-wave feminism gave birth in the 1970s, direct attention to the issue of female subjectivity was first drawn by Teresa de Lauretis in her book Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema in 1984. Responding to the hugely influential argument of Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Mulvey 1989a), de Lauretis proposed that ‘the present task of women’s cinema may be not the destruction of narrative and visual pleasure, but rather the construction of another frame of reference, one in which the measure of desire is no longer just the male subject’ (de Lauretis 1984: 8). In this opening chapter of this book I shall concentrate on the issue highlighted by de Lauretis, the construction of a ‘frame of reference […] in which the measure of desire is no longer just the male subject’. This issue will also be central to the six chapters that follow the first two – Body, Look, Speech, Performance, Desire and Freedom – whose close readings of a selection of films directed by French and British women in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s (a time period chosen deliberately to post-date second-wave feminism) examine core elements of (female) subjectivity. The second chapter of this book will address the question of what has become of feminist film theory over forty years after the publication of seminal essays such as Mulvey’s and Claire Johnston’s ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’ (Johnston 1999), assessing whether it can be said still to exist, how it has both developed with and diverged from trends in film theory more generally, and – crucially – what kinds of theories have assumed the mantle borne by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in its undisputed heyday of the 1970s and 1980s. By focusing in this first chapter on what leading feminist philosophers have written about the ‘problem’ of the female subject, I shall introduce the parameters of the readings of films undertaken in Chapters 3–8.

When de Lauretis proposed that women film-makers might do well to shift their attention from the reformulation of film form to ‘the construction of another frame of reference’, she was in fact reposing a question that had preoccupied feminist philosophers and critics of art forms other than film since well before the 1980s, namely, how should female subjectivity be theorized? The notion of subjectivity established in the seventeenth century and reinforced by Enlightenment philosophy, particularly that of Immanuel Kant, was of a supposedly gender-neutral unitary and universal subject that turned out ‘to be implicitly a male subject whose “neutrality” is conceptually dependent on the “shadow” conception of the female subject’ (Gatens 1991: 5). While the male subject was constructed ‘as self-contained and as an owner of his person and capacities’ (Gatens 1991: 5), as able ‘to separate itself from and dominate nature’ (Gatens 1991: 5) and as possessed of a sexually neutral mind that merely inhabited its body without being connected to it in any explicable way, the female subject is constructed as follows:

[constructed as] prone to disorder and passion, as economically and politically dependent on men, and these constructions are justified by reference to women’s nature. She ‘makes no sense by herself’ and her subjectivity assumes a lack which males complete. She is indistinguishable from a wife/mother. (Gatens 1991: 5)

Gatens’ summary of the two kinds of human subjects enfolded within the supposedly unitary Enlightenment concept of subjectivity shows that women’s identity was conceived entirely on the basis of its complementarity with men’s: female subjectivity was dependent on male subjectivity for its definition. It was also considered to be stable and fixed (women’s ‘nature’) and to be disembodied – because no philosophical account of embodied subjectivity existed. All these presumptions have been challenged by feminist philosophy and theory of the mid- and late-twentieth century, and I shall set out the form these challenges have taken and suggest that certain elements have come to the fore in contemporary thinking about the subjectivity of women. The writers and thinkers who have challenged the Enlightenment model of female subjectivity most forcefully are Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, but I shall draw too on the work of Christine Battersby, Sonia Kruks, Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young.

In constructing this overview of recent theories of female subjectivity, I shall not draw on the Freudian and Lacanian accounts of femininity that have been so influential in psychoanalytically oriented feminism and feminist film theory. This is no casual omission, my reasons for it lying (as intimated above) in the arguments I shall develop in Chapter 2 about the failure of psychoanalytic feminist film theory to offer a satisfactory account of female subjectivity – one that integrates embodiment and is sufficiently historically flexible to take account of non-white and other-than-heterosexual female identities. I shall suggest in Chapter 2 that a strand of feminist film-philosophical writing that arose in the early 1990s, just as feminist cine-psychoanalysis began to wane, offers the best prospects for future feminist approaches to film, its rejection of the Cartesian mind/body dualism and openness to minority identities making ‘it’ (actually a range of approaches) superior to cine-psychoanalytic theorizing of screen women. First, however, I shall set out the understandings of female subjectivity offered by Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray and Christine Battersby.

Simone de Beauvoir and the embodied, situated female subject

In The Second Sex, published in French in 1949, Beauvoir set out her existentialist version of the Enlightenment construction of female subjectivity: ‘She is determined and differentiated with reference to man, and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other’ (Beauvoir 1988: 16).¹ In introducing the topic of The Second Sex in these terms, Beauvoir was of course setting out the problem rather than condoning the status of woman as Other to man – although her groundbreaking book did not attempt to dismantle the conceptual framework that rendered women Other as secondary to the male norm, its extensive anthropological, historical, biological and sociological investigations into women’s lived experience shifted her existentialist thinking onto more materialist ground than Jean-Paul Sartre’s. While the second part of the first volume of The Second Sex reviews women’s history from prehistoric times up to the decade in which Beauvoir was writing, the second volume examines the stages of a woman’s life in turn, paying attention to sexuality, education, sexual initiation, sexual orientation, marriage, motherhood and old age. By detailing bodily experiences specific to women such as menstruation, the female experience of sexual relations, gestation, childbirth and the menopause, Beauvoir literally ‘fleshed out’ a study of female subjectivity that had until then seen only insufficiency in women’s social roles as wives and mothers. Her accounts of female bodily experience were rarely positive, with a woman’s experience of her body during menstruation described as that of ‘an obscure alien thing’ (Beauvoir 1988: 61), the implantation of the egg in the uterus at gestation referred to as ‘a more profound alienation’ (Beauvoir 1988: 62), childbirth considered ‘painful and dangerous’ (Beauvoir 1988: 62) and nursing ‘a tiring service’ (all quoted in own translations by Moi 1994: 165). But by co-existing in a single compendious volume these accounts constituted something no woman philosopher had previously achieved, the description of ‘subjectivity and women’s experience as lived and felt in the flesh’ (Young 2005: 7). These are the words with which Iris Marion Young glosses the term ‘body experience’ in the title of her book On Female Body Experience, distinguishing her mode of enquiry (also Beauvoir’s) from the social-scientific approach which ‘takes bodies as objects or things to observe, study or explain’.² In The Second Sex Beauvoir had placed the female body at the centre of her investigation of sexually differentiated existence by asserting that the body ‘is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects’ (Beauvoir 2009: 46). She described this position simply as ‘that of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’ (Beauvoir 2009: 46) without highlighting or even acknowledging that her focus was on the female body, an original departure in political philosophy. But the framework of human identity she employed in The Second Sex did follow the readmission to philosophical thought of the notion of lived bodily experience proposed by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, early in the twentieth century, and shared a great deal with the phenomenology of perception recently published by her and Sartre’s friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a different development of Husserl’s work from Sartre’s in Being and Nothingness, published two years earlier. Since this framework is essential to understanding Beauvoir’s ‘theory’ of embodied female subjectivity, I shall make a short digression at this point to explain what it was, via the work of feminist political philosopher Sonia Kruks.

In Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society (Kruks 1990), Kruks expounds the notion of situated, social human existence that underpins the 1940s work of Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. She states of Beauvoir:

Her work implied that the notion of subjectivity must be rethought in terms of the significance of the body and the weight of social institutions for human situation. Beauvoir herself never explicitly developed the reformulations that her analysis implied. But Merleau-Ponty, whose work I next examine, did. In Merleau-Ponty’s writings of the 1940s we find a radical reformulation of the notion of the subject. The subject is no longer the possessor of private, individual consciousness, but is an ‘impure’ subject. The situated subject is an opening, through the body and perceptual experience, on to a common being and is always an intersubjectivity. (Kruks 1990: 17)

Enlarging on situated subjectivity, Kruks traces the profoundly social, intersubjective nature of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about subjectivity to the concept of ‘incarnation’ developed by French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the 1930s, noting that incarnation (embodiment) was for Merleau-Ponty the reason why ‘the philosopher is always a situated participant in reality rather than a detached “spectator” of it’ (Kruks 1990: 116). The notion of the ‘impure’ subject Kruks finds in Merleau-Ponty overcame (deconstructed, perhaps), Sartre’s distinction between the in-itself and the for-itself, replacing the mind/body dualism that had dominated philosophy since Descartes with an understanding of consciousness as embodied, and envisaging ‘man’ (sic) as a body-subject rather than a pure, individual consciousness. The body, Merleau-Ponty stated, ‘forms between the pure subject and the object a third genus of being’ in which ‘the subject loses its purity and its transparency’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 408, quoted in Kruks 1990: 117): for Kruks, Merleau-Ponty ‘never abandons the notion of the subject as the centre of effective action, but overcomes Cartesian/Sartrian individualism by elaborating this notion of an “impure” subject’ (Kruks 1990: 117).³ In Kruks’s view, the publication of Phenomenology of Perception in 1945 established Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body and embodiment, but what she insists is often overlooked (I would say perhaps because his philosophical writings contain few examples from everyday life of the kind often plucked from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness to illustrate the latter’s existential phenomenological thought) is that the body-subject he discusses is thoroughly socially situated. Beauvoir reviewed Phenomenology of Perception for the first issue of Les Temps modernes in 1945, and her review (Beauvoir 2004: 159–164) endorses its framework of human identity every bit as much as it does Sartre’s very different, dualist and (arguably) predominantly metaphysical understanding of socially situated subjectivity.

Crucial to Kruks’s purpose in Situation and Human Existence, which deals with the thought of Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir and Sartre in the same volume, is to demonstrate how Beauvoir’s 1940s thought owed at least as much to Merleau-Ponty as to Sartre, contrary to the picture painted by historians of existentialism up to the 1980s. How aware Beauvoir was of this commonality is hard to estimate, since she always declared herself an adherent of Sartre’s framework of human identity, and would side – seemingly for reasons of personal loyalty than on philosophical grounds – with Sartre rather than Merleau-Ponty in the querelle that broke out between the two philosophers in the early 1950s. What Kruks’s work has led the way in exposing is that Beauvoir’s philosophical writings of the 1940s – Pyrrhus and Cineas, The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, along with her novels She Came to Stay and The Blood of Others – evince an understanding of situatedness and embodiment that is closer to Merleau-Ponty than to Sartre. In turning to the subject of ‘woman’ for The Second Sex, Beauvoir continued to use her own version of the existential-phenomenological framework of human identity developed by Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and others, but underestimated in so doing the originality of her focus on women’s social situation(s) and female embodiment. It was by means of this move that she was inaugurating the branch of political philosophy now known as feminist phenomenology, and although returning from Kruks’s work to Beauvoir has closed the digression signalled above, the introduction of feminist phenomenology necessitates a second one, in order to situate the recently born interdisciplinary field of feminist phenomenology and explain its relevance to this book.

Although Beauvoir should be considered the founder of feminist phenomenology as a discrete branch of philosophical enquiry, it is only with the writings of scholars such as Iris Young, whose essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality’ first appeared in 1980, that the sub-field has come to be recognized as one. The first book on it in English was Linda Fisher and Lester Embree’s co-edited Feminist Phenomenology, which was based on a symposium held in 1994, and the 2000s and 2010s have seen a steady growth of publication in the area and the formation of a Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology at the University of Oregon. Feminist phenomenology is probably better regarded as an interdisciplinary field of enquiry close to feminist theory than as a branch of political philosophy, despite relying to a considerable extent on the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and this is so because of one key element of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in his Phenomenology of Perception – that the perceiving body theorized there is a universally human body with an apparently unsexed (ungendered or ‘neutral’) status. In other words, Merleau-Ponty does not take sexual and other forms of embodied difference into account, whereas feminist commentators have argued and continue to argue that there has never been such a thing as a neutral, universal, ‘unmarked’ body. Beauvoir’s extensive discussions of female embodiment in The Second Sex depart from, supplement and implicitly question Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of embodied subjectivity rather than directly critiquing it, and it was only in 1981, with Judith Butler’s essay ‘Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’, that the ideological universality and neutrality of the perceiving body according to Merleau-Ponty was first criticized. In this essay Butler focuses on the part that sexuality (rather than gender or sexuate identity) plays in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of embodiment, according to which sexuality is coextensive with existence. This, Butler notes, ‘appears to offer feminist theory a view of sexuality freed of naturalistic ideology … [and to open] the way for a fuller description of sexuality and sexual diversity’ (Butler 1989: 85). But these are possibilities Merleau-Ponty himself fails to develop: Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of sexuality ‘turn out to contain tacit normative assumptions about the heterosexual character of sexuality’ (Butler 1989: 86). ‘Viewed as an expression of sexual ideology’, says Butler, ‘The Phenomenology of Perception reveals the cultural construction of the masculine subject as a strangely disembodied voyeur whose sexuality is strangely non-corporeal’ (Butler 1989: 93); in other words, the ideological character of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology arises, in Butler’s reading, precisely from the attempt to describe concrete, lived experience while maintaining a subject unqualified by sex, race, age or other specificities.

Since Beauvoir and her existentialist contemporaries did not anticipate the future fruitfulness of her investigation of female embodiment for feminist philosophy, its importance went unnoticed for some considerable time. Another, subsequent reason for this delay was the co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• 1. Female Subjectivity in Philosophy and Theory
• 2. Feminist Film Studies and Women’s Cinema after Psychoanalysis
• 3. Body
• 4. Look
• 5. Speech
• 6. Performance
• 7. Desire
• 8. Freedom
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Imprint