Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze has been
received by feminists and queer theorists as highly influential in the fields
of both cinema and photography, and has been used by feminists as a starting
point to female body disturbance caused by men and advertising representation.
Mulvey’s theory from Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, however,
focuses on strictly the heterosexual role in visual pleasure, scopophilia, not
looking into the homosexual male gaze at all. It is then necessary to use
Mulvey’s work, along with Judith Butler’s gender conformativity theory, to
analyze how homosexual males view heterosexual, homosexual, and transsexual
films. I argue that looking at
films from the homosexual male view with the lens of Mulvey and Butler can we
see that the homosexual male gaze is quite different from its straight
counterpart. Using Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Judith
Butler’s gender performance and conformativity theories, the homosexual male
role in watching the films XXX, Latter Days, and Hedwig and the
Angry Inch objectifies the men in
heterosexual target audience films because of the male character’s desire for
the female, while in the homosexual films, desire is mixed with empathy
because of the coming out process.
Mulvey and Visual Pleasure
Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure essay describes
a theory in which the male gaze of women removes their human identity and views
her as a sexual object. This is in part because of a Freudian viewpoint
that because women do not have a phallus, men are afraid of the castrated human
form and must objectify her in order to compensate for her lack of a
phallus. “Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of
sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At
this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects,
subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze (Mulvey, 3.)” Scopophilia is the “love of looking” that
creates sexual objects of those human forms that we are looking at.
Her essay further states that the male gaze is so overpowering, that women cannot be represented in movies as
anything more than foils for these scopophilic tendency male viewers
have. So the women, mentally
to watch the movie, must become a man in order to view films. This
already becomes a gender displacement in that she must objectify another woman,
whom she may have no sexual desire for, because of the overwhelming pressure and presence the male gaze holds.
Her compliance with this dominant male gaze creates a situation where she can no longer watch a movie as a sexual
woman, but become a man in order to associate her in male dominated cinema.
Q. So what
if you are a homosexual man?
Gender Conformativity
It is necessary when analyzing Mulvey’s theory to
think how roles in homosexual culture are referred and applied to a theory that
is largely heterosexually dominant. To do this we must understand the
gender roles homosexual men must reside on, and Judith Butler’s Imitation
and Gender Insubordination essay outlines her theory that gender is all performative, resulting
from constant repetition of what is masculine and what is feminine is society’s
eyes in order to solidify these roles. It becomes a binary, where men and
women are polarized to opposite ends of what defines a man and a woman.
When it comes to gender identity of gays and lesbians, Butler states “[c]compulsory
heterosexuality sets itself as the original, the true, the authentic; the norm
that determines the real and implies that ‘being’ a lesbian is always a kind of
miming, a vain effort to participate in the phantasmatic plenitude of
naturalized heterosexuality which will always and only fail (Butler,
312.)” Butler is arguing that
homosexuality imitates heterosexuality’s defining gender roles. That a
butch lesbian is imitating a man because of her masculine qualities that only
belong to a man, so she must be a fake in order be in the gender realm.
The same goes for feminine gay men and even butch gay men whose hyper
masculinity is a play on heterosexual masculinity pushed to the edges.
So gender must be a societal construct that constantly emulates the
heterosexual definitions of masculinity and femininity in order to
differentiate between the sexes. When homosexual people enter the gender
binary, they must imitate these norms in
their relationship, but will always fail. Butler goes on to state
that drag is the only way to show the
performativity of gender, but more on that later.
Q. How does
this apply to ‘Gay Culture’ films like Brokeback Mountain and Priscilla Queen
of the Desert?
The Homosexual Male Gaze
Utilizing these two theories can we form a theory on
how homosexual men view cinema. Now two theories can apply when looking
at cinema through the homosexual perspective. The first is a direct reflection
of Butler’s gender conformativity applied to Mulvey’s theory. It would
state that homosexuals must either align
themselves with straight women in their viewing of cinema. To do so, homosexual men must become transsexuals
themselves, becoming a woman and
being subjugated to a dominant
heterosexual, scopophilic gaze that a woman undergoes. The homosexual
gaze then must have another sex change and undergo the woman’s transsexualism
in their mind as well. This seems to have too many transitions, so we can
simplify it to a homosexual converting
to a heterosexual male. Homosexuals would lose all their desire for the same sex and view women in a
degrading way. One would, as straight men do, objectify and strip the woman of identity, regarding her as nothing
more than a commodity; a body designed
to fulfill that scolophilic gaze.
Q. But how
does this relate to female film characters that Gay Culture celebrates? Where
is the alignment/identification if they are merely reduced to hetero sex
objects?
This theory seems to rely too much on the power of
the heterosexual male gaze and ignores the desires of the homosexual
male. I propose that an entirely
new gaze is created when a gay man looks at film. First, in
accordance with Judith Butler’s gender performativity, he still retains scopophilic tendencies, especially when looking at
another man. When in a film geared toward a heterosexual male
audience writer Derek P. Rucas writes in his essay The Male Gaze,
Homosexualization, and James Bond Films:
“In Goldfinger, the audience never takes on the gaze
or the [point of view] of a female spectator. We notice that characters
such as Pussy Galore and Miss Moneypenny are attracted to Bond, but different
conventions are used to articulate this sense of attraction. For
instance, the change of intonation in both the voices of Galore and Moneypenny
signify an interest in Bond while Bond’s active gaze is the signifier of his
female interest. Sociologically
speaking, the reason for the subdued female gaze could be a result of prominent
ideologies present in the early 1960s. Since the male figure was the
dominant of the two sexes, his gaze will be active over the passive one of the
female.
Although the female gaze is present in Goldfinger,
there is also a gaze cast upon Bond from the male spectator. This is not
necessarily a homosexual gaze, nor a heterosexual gaze. It is a gaze that
could potentially meet both standards in the sense that both homosexual and heterosexual audiences can identify with the Bond
character. For instance, males will tend to idolize Bond because of
his smooth McIveresque nature, whereas
females will find sexual appeal in Bond. When Bond is tied to the
table with the threat of laser castration, the focus is on Bond’s groin
area. As we can see, according to Mulvey, Freud’s analysis of the threat
of castration is a literal obstacle that Bond must overcome. Although
perhaps not consciously intended to be a homosexualized focal point, a gay
audience who reads into the Bond films could interpret this scene from a
fetishistic standpoint. …[T]he Bond
crotch shot has the potential to appeal to both a female and gay audience,
sexualizing the Bond character.”
Rucas is claiming that the homosexual male gaze can only come through the female perspective
in cinema that our gaze, because it is a male one, overpowers her and her
desire becomes our desire. The homosexual gaze is not transsvestivism, but
rather a channeling through an outlet of the female desire for the male
character, thus objectifying him while he is objectifying her. Because
the homosexual gaze overpowers the female gaze, we are essentially turning her
into a commodity to look at heterosexual men with. A kaleidoscope, if you
will, that alters the perception of the film in our favour to turn a sexual
being whose gaze is stronger than the female counterpart and meeting that gaze
with an equally strong gaze through the woman.
I feel this is channeling through a woman’s
perspective to, while it does have its merit, be a bit of a copout in that Rucas
is searching for a way to channel his desire for Bond through a way he can get
away with. Women are indeed needed to bring out the sexuality in men, but
I propose we are not using them as a
lens that we can see through, but when the heterosexual man looks at her
with desire, we only see his desire and do not use the woman in the film to
express our own. The character’s gaze and desire are enough to elicit a
strong enough response so that the homosexual audience or viewer can objectify
him through his own sexuality. Our gaze is as strong as a heterosexual
man’s that it will be met equally when we look upon him alone or when he is
transplanting his own desire onto a woman. I wouldn’t say that we are
homosexualizing him, as Rucas would say, because he is being objectified by his
own sex appeal and sexuality. The woman then becomes a foil, which we being to sympathize with through
her femininity, and not just a sexual object that we objectify. Using
Ricas’s own argument, in Goldfinger when Bond first meets Pussy Galore,
he immediately beings to try to charm her and stares at her assistance butt as
if he were taking in the sights of the women. The gay audience would want James Bond to look at them like that and
try to charm them. So far this is following Rucas’s proposal, but
when Galore shoots Bond down, we secretly cheer her on and retain a small
delusion that he ultimately would charm us. His sex appeal and charm are
what we desire, so when he stares at a woman, we stare at his appeal, but as an audience and not through the lens
of a woman’s gaze, with equal strength, though he cannot see it. It
is complicated by the fact that there is a woman present, but Rucas’s argument
is not pushed far enough to show our own scopophilia in the presence of such a
man. It is not channeled; it is
imposed through our own gaze as an audience member and does not require the
commoditization of a woman to make him a sexual object. Bond already
is.
We are also
attracted to Bond’s “machoness” because we secretly idealize partners to be
like him: sexy, charming, courageous, suave, and intelligent. His character traits are what turn us on to him,
even when alone, so we continue our scopophilia even when women are not present
at all. We sexualize him through
out the movie and not just when a woman is present, though it is much more
subdued when she is not there. His actions and words are enough to
have this response come from the homosexual male perspective.
But when the film is designed for a gay male
audience, the situation becomes even more complex is our view of the
characters. In this case, the scopophilia and objectifying nature of the
male gaze is met with empathy from a common ground. Laura Mulvey’s
argument, that, when a woman is looked at by a man, her human identity is cast
off and a purely commodifiable identity, where she needs no personality because
of her lack of a phallus, is necessary to the male ego to compensate for the
lack of the penis, cannot be applied to gay characters because they have a
phallus, but are still the object of desire from the audience. Through
their desire and sexual encounters do we objectify them into the identity
lacking sexual object. But, since most gay films are about the coming out
process, the characters can retain their humanity by way of a common experience
that binds all out gay men together: the coming out process. The
depression, the denial, the family reaction, the church’s reaction, the suicide
attempts; all of these experiences come rushing back to the forefront of memory
in the gay audience because it has happened to them. This creates an empathetic and sympathetic connection to the
characters, giving back their own humanity while still desiring them. It
creates a middle ground between objectification and seeing them as a person,
which creates both tension and an ability to keep the audience’s attention so a
larger message can be conveyed to them.
The heterosexual gaze cannot do this in the same effectiveness as the
homosexual gaze can.
Q. What
aspects would the Gay community empathise with from their experiences that may
develop identification and alignment?
Q. How then is the Queer Gaze not merely a sexual
reversal of the Male Gaze?
Conclusion
Using Mulvey and Butler’s two theories can we see how
the homosexual gaze is both similar and different in heterosexual, homosexual,
and transsexual films. Through a
different emotional capacity, the homosexual gaze is not transformed into
either a heterosexual male gaze that objectifies women or a heterosexual woman
gaze that becomes overpowered by the heterosexual male gaze, but something
entirely new with different desires and
complications that emerges from reliability or pure desire an combines them
into a new gaze entirely. While
true there is a similarity between certain points of the heterosexual and
homosexual gaze, it becomes imperative to see how the heterosexual male gaze
overlaps with the homosexual gaze when viewing homosexual target audience
films. Do they hold to Mulvey and Butler’s theory that they are
repulsed because of clear gender deviancy from heteronormative practices?
Or does the fact that neither person is castrated negate the necessary need to
objectify a woman? Does the liberal heterosexual gaze match up with the more
conservative? What complications arise in the lesbian or bisexual
gaze? I can only theorize and cannot truly say, but it does open up
another goal to see how all of the gazes interact, overlap, and deviate from
each other in our viewing of cinematic narrative.
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