Gender in Film Studies

Introduction/A Short History

            Gender in film studies means the representation of women in cinema.  Such studies came into existence along with the raise of feminism.  In 1970s, along with the rise of second wave feminism, the patriarchal bias of the society was slowly diminishing and the female stereotypes were stopped and women protested for a realistic portrayal.  The following books laid the foundations for gender studies in cinema:

1)      Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics

2)      Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venuses: Women, Movies and the American Dream

3)      Joan Mellen’s Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film

4)      Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

            All these works talk about the role of women in cinema.  These feminist views of cinema were highly criticized for demonstrating a naive understanding of social reality and of the operations of films.  They were also said to lack psychological study.  In spite of all these negative criticisms women changed their ideologies and registered their thoughts in more powerful ways.

Theories of Spectratix

            In 1989, a special issue of film journal Camera Obscura appeared under the title The Spectratrix.  This term means how feminist film critics came increasingly to regard the female spectators’ situation as a locus of both theoretical inquiry and political intervention.  Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is the most influential essay.

            Mulvey presents a pessimistic note about portrayal of women in narrative cinema.  She talks about ‘3 looks’ in cinema about women:

        i.            The characters’ look at each other during the narrative

      ii.            The camera’s look at the screen

    iii.            The spectator’s look at the screen

            Though these 3 looks are interdependent and they vary accordingly, they are very different from one another.

            Mulvey, while talking about the characters’ look at each other, distinguishes the male gaze and the female reaction.  In all films the male characters gaze at women and they are free to do it.  On the other hand, the women are denied of that free gaze or look.  Men are considered as active spectators and women are passive “to-be-looked-atness”.  Men dominate with their gaze and women allow to do it.  The male’s gaze, though a pleasure for him, creates panic in the women.  The worst case is, where these characters look at.  Mulvey concludes this gaze into two terms – voyeurism and fetishtic scopophilia.  Mulvey analyses Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Vertigo and Marnie for the pleasures of male gaze and the perils it gave women.  Many critics were against Mulvey’s view point.  She, however, criticizes main stream cinema and the need to break away from it and create new forms of cinema.

            Later a critic named Mary Ann Doane, concentrated on the performance quality of women in cinema and not with her biological rootedness.  She compared women’s role and acting with the male counterparts.

Problems of Psychoanalytic Feminism

            Flo Leibowitz, a film critic, argues that feministic film critics spoil the view of a cinema.  According to Flo, a cinema bypasses gender and race and audience watch a movie as a whole.  Gendering cinema concentrates on one aspect of a movie and this brings out the unconscious into conscious level, which would lead to confusion and misunderstanding.  A cinema is an open and common medium, which must be seen only from an open perspective and not with a biased attitude.  Jacquline Bobo, a feminist critic, studies about the responses of common audience for the movie The Colour Purple (1985) by Spielberg.  Every audience did not see the deviation from the novel, neither they termed the movie as feministic  instead they found the moves as uplifting and motivating.  All these are works against the feministic approach of cinema and they show the limitations of psychoanalytic feminism.

Masculinities in Film

Image of ‘man’ as shown in cinema – their physical and muscular strength – their roles could be acted by women also – their morality – being the iconic ‘male’