Film Bodies

Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema

Katharina Lindner

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781838608545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The representation of gender and sexuality is well-explored territory in film studies. In Film Bodies, Katharina Lindner takes existing debates into a new direction and integrates queer and feminist theory with film phenomenology. Drawing on a broad range of sources, Lindner explores the female body's presence in a range of genres including the dance film, the sports film and queer cinema. Moving across mainstream and independent cinema, Lindner provides detailed 'textural' analyses of Black Swan, The Tango Lesson, 2 Seconds, Offside, Tomboy and Girlhood and discusses the queer feminist encounters these films can give rise to. This provocative book is of vital interest to students and researchers of queer cinema, queer/feminist theory, embodiment and affect and offers a unique new way of understanding the relationship between queerness, feminism, the body and cinema.

1

Gender and the Body in Feminist and Queer Film Criticism

Feminism and Film: What Body?

The orientations of this book, and the cinematic encounters it makes graspable, are situated in relation to the broader historical trajectory of feminist film criticism, especially with regard to the kinds of bodies that have, often implicitly, underpinned these debates. I want to briefly trace this rather twisted and certainly not straightforward trajectory – we might think of it as a tentative turn towards corporeality – in order to make sense of the kinds of bodies that surface in this book. This is not a matter of providing a simplistic account of feminist film criticism’s teleological progress towards greater insight. Rather, the aim here is to map a number of critical tendencies and their alignments, tensions and synergies in relation to wider social, political and cinematic shifts and drifts, in order to contextualise the broadly phenomenological approach employed here.

It might be tempting to draw on established models of ‘waves’ of feminism, and other ‘movements’ for that matter, in order to account for contemporary (theoretical, cinematic, political) tendencies in terms of how previous concerns have ‘lined up’ what’s next ‘in line’.¹ However, as Freeman argues so eloquently, the notion of waves, and associated understandings of history and temporality, are useful only if we consider that the relation between waves is ‘neither one of continuity nor one of complete repudiation but instead a story of disjunctive, sticky entanglements and dissociations.’² As Meryl Altman puts it, ‘every wave has its undertow.’³

Freeman suggests we should consider the ‘gravitational pull’, or ‘deadweight effect’, that certain moments, stances or styles have on others – even, or perhaps especially, if they appear anachronistic. This includes, for instance, ‘the gravitational pull that “lesbian”, or even more so “lesbian feminist”, sometimes seems to exert on “queer” ’ – and it is precisely the continuing pushing, pulling, brushing up against each other and colliding of lesbian, feminist and queer critical and filmic tendencies that have shaped the directions and orientations of this book.⁴ Freeman has similar concerns around the notion of ‘generations’ of feminists, because it draws on ‘repronormative’ (heteronormative and reproductive) teleologies, or on what she calls ‘chrononormativity, the interlocking temporal schemes necessary for genealogies of descent.’⁵ The engagement with the historical tendencies of feminist film criticism that follows is therefore not meant to (re)affirm the repronormative line of feminist film criticism, but to invoke a sense of preparedness for the push and pull between feminist and queer habits that re-surfaces throughout.

It is also worth pointing to Freeman’s notion of ‘temporal drag’ here, which links ‘the queenier kind’ of drag ‘celebrated in an early 1990s influenced by deconstruction’ with the more specifically temporal dimensions of the term, especially ‘the associations the word “drag” has with retrogression, delay and the pull of the past on the present.’⁶ We might additionally think of the corporeal and kinaesthetic implications of drag and the ways in which they are linked (metaphorically and phenomenologically) to intentionality: when we ‘drag our feet’ or when we are ‘dragged along’ we embody a hesitant and resistant directionality as we move towards what we do not want to ‘face’.⁷ And, of course, we can also ‘drag someone with us’. It is the temporal drag that feminist (film/criticism) and queer (film/criticism) mutually exert on each other, in all of these senses, that underpins the ways in which the conceptual and analytical dynamics of this project take shape. While I explore the sticky entanglements and dissociations between ‘feminist’ and ‘queer’ as well as ‘lesbian’ in more detail below, they are usefully flagged here in order to foreshadow the uneasy, and at times volatile, entanglements of feminist, queer and lesbian approaches to film and the pull they exert on each other (and) across time.

Critiques of stereotypes and of women’s roles in film in the early 1970s are often used as a starting point for considerations of feminist film criticism’s history.⁸ Feminist concerns with film emerged very specifically from the activist context of the Women’s Liberation Movement and the stereotypes or ‘images of…’ approach reflected what is now perceived to be a simplistic understanding of the relationship between representation and social reality. Within the larger context of theoretical shifts in film studies towards psychoanalysis, semiotics and apparatus theory, an additional, psychoanalytically informed body of work, with Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ as its cornerstone, emerged and pushed questions of ideology, spectatorship and the unconscious to the fore.⁹ Mulvey argued that the patriarchal unconscious structures cinema and inscribes to-be-looked-at-ness onto the female body in order to satisfy the needs of the male psyche. This work was primarily concerned with classical Hollywood cinema. It identified Woman as an effect of the apparatus, as signifying lack and passivity (via representations of an abstracted, objectified body) and as central to the scopophilic pleasures on offer for a spectator that was addressed as, and assumed to be, male (and, of course, heterosexual).

This broadly psychoanalytic approach, based on ‘Freudian and Lacanian concepts of the constitution of the subject, the entry into language, and sexual difference,’¹⁰ has subsequently been criticised for relying on an inherently patriarchal paradigm, essentially reinforcing what it aims to critique, namely the equation of ‘women = lack = cinematic image’.¹¹ For Mary Ann Doane, this was problematic in that early feminist film theory ‘mimicked this cinematic construction [of generalised, abstracted and idealised femininity] and reinscribed the abstraction of woman through its use of the apparatus of cinema as its frame of reference.’¹² Feminist film criticism appeared to be ‘in strange complicity with its object.’¹³

Accounting for cinema via a Freudian/Lacanian constitution of the subject (as Mulvey and others have done) means that spectatorial engagements with cinema are conceived of as occurring along a binary split of identification and desire, of narcissism and voyeurism, of wanting to be and wanting to have. This split is mapped onto, and reasserts, the binary of sexual difference that underpins psychoanalysis, which, while rooted in physiology (having or not having a penis), posits a model of gender, and of spectatorship, that fails to account for the specific, lived materiality of the body (on and off-screen). The foundational binarisms (including male/female, subject/object, identification/desire), as well as the disembodied and universalising tendencies of psychoanalytic and semiotic feminist film criticism, have been addressed from a range of theoretical and conceptual angles, some of which I trace here. It is precisely in relation to this larger (winding and twisted rather than straightforward) historical trajectory, away from essentialising understandings of sexual difference yet towards the body, that the motivations for and concerns emerging from this book can be situated.

Mulvey’s initial polemic was of course developed and reworked in more or less immediate responses to some of the key questions it raised, especially around female spectatorship. However, the problematic binaries underpinning a broadly psychoanalytic frame remained in place and largely unchallenged throughout the 1970s, 80s and most of the 90s – although Linda Williams’ work on body genres, Jackie Stacey’s work combining theories of spectatorship with ethnographic research, as well as Barbara Creed’s and Carol Clover’s explorations of the horror genre, while variously grounded in psychoanalysis, began to move beyond the confines of spectatorship theory’s narrow conceptual underpinnings.¹⁴

In general, however, ‘feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s was marked by a deep suspicion of the female body as source of aesthetic and erotic pleasure,’ as feminists employed theoretical models in which ‘the body is not so much a material entity in itself as it is a written and spoken sign.’¹⁵ Elena del Rio usefully contextualises the abstraction of the female body in early feminist film theory that we might perceive as restrictive and short-sighted from the vantage point of contemporary critical concerns. Feminist critics were drawn to psychoanalysis and semiotics because the realms of language and the unconscious were perceived as central to women’s oppression – as well as to potential strategies for liberation. ‘The notion of the body as linguistic or symbolic sign accorded well with the feminist efforts to revalorize woman’s speech and to promote her integration within symbolic social and cultural systems,’ while also countering binary equations of female/body – male/mind.¹⁶

The reliance on psychoanalytic and semiotic frameworks and the resultant ‘strategic erasure of the body’ in feminist film criticism made sense, within the larger, social, political and theoretical contexts of its time.¹⁷ It was born of ‘urgent necessity’, argues del Rio – a necessity that ‘relegate[d] the sensual and bodily aspects of female subjectivity to a practically irrelevant status’ due to a failure to ‘sufficiently account for the differences between the fetishized body (the product of a specific form of patriarchal representation) and the lived-body.’¹⁸ For the purposes of this book, one of the key questions emerging here concerns the ‘urgent necessities’ of the contemporary context: What are they? And what are the implications of addressing these with a particular ‘analytic stress’?

The lived-body has made a (re)appearance in some of the more recent feminist film scholarship, giving materiality and substance to the ‘speechless and thoughtless’ body examined in earlier feminist work. For del Rio, this is linked to the realisation that ‘the antidote to the male equation of woman with body may not so much lie in the repression/omission of the body, as, perhaps, in the construction of a different one.’¹⁹ One of the key objectives here is therefore to allow for such a different kind of body to appear. Specifically, what takes shape throughout is a kind of body with graspably sensuous, tactile, muscular and kinaesthetic capacities and dimensions; one that is capable of embodying variously twisted habits, tendencies, orientations, directions, leanings and possibilities.

Women’s Cinema? Countering Dominant Habits

These overarching tendencies are also reflected in feminist debates about the need for, and significance of, a women’s cinema – an oppositional, counter or minor cinema – as well as in related concerns about authorship and spectatorial address. These debates constitute an important initial reference point, especially in terms of how questions about ‘women’s cinema’ intersect with those about ‘lesbian’ or ‘queer cinema’ – labels variously applicable to the films discussed in this book – as well as with larger ontological and epistemological questions about gender, sexuality and cinema. I hope to show that a broadly phenomenological approach (to gender, sexuality and cinema), along with a focus on corporeality, sensuousness and affect, provides a particularly fruitful framework given the contemporary ‘necessities’ that emerge from the intersections of theoretical, political and aesthetic concerns – especially with regard to the frictions between, and conflicting demands and expectations around, identity (politics), (in)visibility, feminism and queerness (including trans). What is foregrounded in what follows, therefore, are the limitations of conventional conceptions of ‘women’s cinema’, in particular their inability to fully grasp the queer feminist orientations that take shape in, through and around the films discussed in this book, in order to highlight how a phenomenologically grounded approach might emerge from this critique.

Alison Butler observes important historical shifts in how a women’s cinema has been conceived of: away from the kind of avant-garde and constructivist feminist aesthetics advocated (and put into practice) by Laura Mulvey, which was characterised by a decidedly negative stance and the negation of visual and narrative pleasure, and towards discursive conceptions of a counter-cinema that might be articulated from within the mainstream (for instance in Claire Johnston’s work on Dorothy Arzner).²⁰ This is, broadly, a shift from negation to affirmation. As Teresa de Lauretis wrote in 1984:

The present task of women’s cinema may not be the destruction of narrative and visual pleasure, but rather t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Library of Gender and Popular Culture
• Published and forthcoming titles:
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Foreword to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction: Starting Points, Directions, Tendencies
• 1. Gender and the Body in Feminist and Queer Film Criticism
• 2. Film and Embodiment: Queer-ing Film Phenomenology
• 3. Queer Encounters with Feminist Politics: Dancing Bodies in The Tango Lesson and Black Swan
• 4. Queering the Sports Film: Failure and Gender (Tres)Passing in 2 Seconds and Offside
• 5. Céline Sciamma’s ‘Queer’ Cinema: Affirming Gestures of Refusal in Tomboy and Girlhood
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright