Race, gender and genre

The western genre has been viewed by literary historians (Fiedler, 1949; Smith, 1950) as the popular cultural form in and through which America moulded and popularised its imperialistic myth of 'white destiny.' This myth, to which white Americans looked to justify European expansion and the expropriation of native Americans, was based on concepts of linear progress and a Darwinian hierarchy. The mythology of the frontier set the tone of American popular democracy (Fiedler, 1949; Smith, 1950; see also Cawelti, 1971; Wright, 1975; Buscombe, 1989; Shohat and Stam, 1994). In this mythology, Native Americans were identified with the trope of 'virgin land,' as innocently childlike, pure and natural — and inevitably destined to be obliterated by the march of 'progress.' The western genre thus reworked the political, economic, and cultural conflicts of the historical USA into a mythic struggle between nature and civilisation.

In the 1970s, structuralist and post-structuralist film theorists saw this dichotomy as the fundamental structural antithesis of the genre (Cawelti, 1971; Wright, 1975; see also Fiedler, 1949; Smith, 1950; Buscombe, 1989; Shohat and Stam, 1994 : 114-119 and 141-143). Cawelti (1971) outlined three basic western plots, the simplest being the story of a hero protecting the townspeople against Indians or outlaws. The wilderness' population of heroes, outlaws and 'savages' are men but the town is dominated by women.

This sexual division frequently embodies the antithesis of civilisation and savagery ... Women are primary symbols of civilisation in the western. (Cawelti, 1971 : 47)

In the classic western, women represented the moral values of socialised domesticity, and society is thus seen as feminised and weak. The individualistic hero is strong, but must live out a wandering exile from feminising domestic comfort. The ambivalence in the hero's desire for, but rejection of, society provided the male spectator with an imaginary resolution of a perceived conflict between individual and society (Wright, 1975 : 131-5). Buscombe (1991) saw the figure of the tomboy as having a normalising function in this cultural narrative. Gender boundaries had become confused as the East (identified with the feminine values of cultured society) crossed the boundary into the West (identified with phallic self-reliance). The tomboy figure represented an effort to re-establish those boundaries:

[I]t's unusual for the woman who starts out wearing pants, carrying a gun and riding a horse to be still doing so at the end of the movie. Suitably reclad in dress or skirt, she prepares to take her place in the family, leaving adventure to the men. (Buscombe, 1991 : 241)

Although (white) femininity symbolised civilisation, female sexuality was also associated with the trope of a 'dark continent' via conceptualisations of civilisation and sexuality owing much to Freud.

Interestingly, there is an affiliation between the Otherness of the 'primitive' and the Otherness of 'woman' and in Freud's work it is possible to detect the conflation of [white] female sexuality ... with that of the unknowable and fathomless sexuality of the primitive ...

Freud observes that the sexuality of children in societies at "a low level of civilisation ... seems to be given free rein." He notes that although this may result in communities free of neuroses, he speculates that this advantage may "involve an extraordinary loss of the aptitude for cultural achievement." (Young, 1996: 23 citing Freud, 1986: 318)).

Freud thus mapped 'the primitive' over his model of the pre-Oedipal (pre-gendered) phase of character development by associating the "mental life" of "the primitive" with that of children (Freud, 1914 : 5). Cawelti speculated that the nostalgic mood of the western genre opened out a phantasmic evocation of Oedipal right-of-passage or initiation into manhood; a working through of the psychological tensions between individualistic (phallic) drives and integration with social controls (repression). The 'dark girl' (or male 'savage') thus metaphorically locates in a pre-Oedipal (pre-social, and thus pre-gendered) space within this significatory system. Gender codings are thus often unstable in this genre. For this reason, the gender or race of iconic characters can become interchangeable. Perspective nevertheless remained organised along racialising lines in an encirclement perspective:

The point-of-view conventions consistently favor the Euro-American protagonists; they are centred in the frame, their desires drive the narrative; the camera pans, tracks and cranes to accompany their regard. (Shohat and Stam, 1994 : 120)

Hooks challenged this model of exclusion with a discussion of African American identification with Native American history and culture, and of the presence of black cowboys in frontier society (1992 : 184). The genre appeared to be popular with black audiences since several black-cast films of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as blaxploitation movies, were westerns (listed in Bogle, 1991, see also "Black America's Rich Film History," Ebony, February 1993, pp.156-160 : 158). This would also seem to indicate some diversity of reading strategy. Furthermore, Stam did not mention that the IMR institutionalises what is specifically a (white) male perspective. Female protagonism received no comment in his analysis of Soldier Blue (Ibid : 119) and there is no recognition of a possible diversity of reading practices along sex-gender lines.

Representation of gender and sexuality was also subject to diachronic shifts in the genre's significatory system. Duel in the Sun (1946) is associated with a cycle of adult 'Freudian' westerns made in the 1940s following the trail of Hughes' salacious epic, The Outlaw (1943) (Buscombe, 1991 : 44). In the run-up to the PCA test-case presentation of lesbianism in The Children's Hour (1961), it was already becoming easier to deal with adult themes. In 1959, Warlock "came closer than anything seen before to suggesting homosexuality" (Buscombe, 1991 : 45). Issues of Civil Rights and, later, of US involvement in Vietnam also produced a correlative tendency in westerns from the 1950s onwards to re-evaluate the role of Native Americans in US history. The battle of "good versus evil" transferred to the TV cop-show genre. Self-parody and revisionism appeared in the western genre which tended increasingly towards self-reflexivity (Shohat and Stam, 1994 : 119; Films, 3 :9, 1983 : 16-17). Wright's more structuralist approach (1975 : 74) identified a narrative form associated with the cultural dominance of a professional elite towards the end of the 1950s in which society attacks a strong, 'expert' hero and expels him. A strong female character often fights alongside him. Johnny Guitar (1954) is a transitional example in which the strong female character actually takes the place of the hero (Wright, 1975 : 78) — this was extremely popular with lesbians and gays (Russo, 1981 : 103; Olson, 1994 : 58). This popularity may be partly due to the parodic self-reflexivity of its presentation of the crossdressed protagonist (reflecting the tendency to self-parody in this era).

Kuhn argued that a transgressive pleasure in representations of crossdressing in the musical or theatrical genres opens out precisely through a parodic emphasis on a divergence between sexed body and gendered performance (1985 : 58). Whilst this may explain a camp element in lesbian pleasure in the western genre's tomboy, Mulvey's account of heterosexual feminine pleasure in this figure relies, instead, on the post-structuralist construct of the spectator's regressive, nostalgic, flight to the western's fantasy setting in the manufactured innocence of America's 'childhood.' It is this regression which opens out a troubling of gender-boundaries and it may be this nostalgic function which is primarily productive of lesbian (as well as heterosexual male) pleasures in the iconic western tomboy.

Tomboys (and the very idea of lesbianism) emerged as an exotic and often fascinating extension of the male myth, serving as a proving ground for its maintenance ... In the popular arts especially, such women were simply perceived to be 'like men,' and they conjured up a far more appealing androgyny than did male sissies. The tomboy image was amusingly daring and aspired to strength and authority, while the sissy image discredited those values. (Russo, 1981 : 6)

The crossdressing adult tomboy could not be represented as the innocent child of the wilderness, however, and Vienna's crossdressing protagonism signifies her rather unmistakably as a lesbian figure (Graham, 1995 : 178). This necessitates a 'splitting' of protagonism enabling displacement of pathology onto the co-protagonistic character of Emma. A similar manoeuvre characterises treatment of the professionalised, crossdressing, protagonist of Seven Women (1966). Far from being dispelled, however, a subtextual lesbian-eroticism tends to dissipate into paranoia which, in a Freudian context, merely emphasises it (see White, 1991). The figure of the tomboy here almost converges with the homoeroticisation of the dark girl's relationship with the outlaw, but remains distinctively tomboyish in Vienna's protagonistic degree of narrative control and independence.

Feminist film theory and the western genre

Mulvey's (1981) analysis of the significance of the western tomboy was based on structural and post-structural analyses of the western (Kitses, 1969; Cawelti, 1971; Wright, 1975), as well as on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic perspectives used in theories of film spectatorship (Stam, 1992 : 146-1582). The questions of female protagonism and spectatorship were addressed as an afterthought to Mulvey's seminal (1975) essay in which she had argued that the relay of the gaze set up by Hollywood's IMR enforces the masculinisation of any spectatorial position offered by popular film. Criticised for focusing on the male spectator and proposing an apparently impossible, or passive and over-present, identification for women spectators (Mulvey, 1981 : 69), she revisited her earlier theorisation to examine how the female spectator might identify with female protagonism. In respect of the former, she intended, specifically, to address the question of the female spectator who ". . . may find herself secretly, unconsciously almost, enjoying the freedom of action and control over the diegetic world that identification with a hero provides" (Mulvey, 1981 : 70). As regards the latter, she concentrated on films "in which a woman central protagonist is shown to be unable to achieve a stable sexual identity, torn between the deep blue sea of passive femininity and the devil of regressive masculinity" (70).

Although Mulvey (1981) acknowledged that sexual orientation may be a factor in female identifications (69) she nevertheless focused exclusively on the (normalising) feminisation process, noting that Freud's inability to treat 'the woman' as a discrete entity but only as 'the-same' (pre-Oedipal) or 'not-the-same' (post-Oedipal) leaves 'the woman' oscillating between active and passive positions in the relay:

Three elements can thus be drawn together: Freud's concept of 'masculinity' in women, the identification triggered by the logic of a narrative grammar, and the ego's desire to phantasize itself in a certain, active manner. All three suggest that, as desire is given cultural materiality in a text, for women (from childhood onwards) trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily becomes second Nature. However, this Nature does not sit easily and shifts restlessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes. (Mulvey, 1981 : 72 – emphasis hers)

In Mulvey's Proppean analysis of narrative structure it is the hero's marriage which effects narrative closure, phantasmically reiterating for the male spectator the resolution of the Oedipal struggle towards social integration. Mulvey pointed out that the Western's treatment of this structure opens out the disruptive possibility of a refusal of marriage at the culmination of the tale; personified by the hero riding lonesome (unmarried) into the sunset. Mulvey argued that the resultant tension between the poles of integration and refusal eventually led to the splitting of the western hero, citing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as a prime example. This is one of the many westerns dealing with the transition from the lawless frontier or unfettered range to settled townships and social regulation in which the man who marries signifies this settlement and regulation. He is often actually a lawyer or sheriff. The hero who refuses marriage signifies the frontier or open range and resistance to the coming of the (symbolic) law. The western narrative can thus be seen as a kind of national 'coming of age' tale, forging a national identity for America in the register of historical myth, whilst also registering a personal nostalgia for a juvenile phallic eroticism and freedom from (the 'white man's burden' of) social responsibility. These personal and interpersonal structures are thus metonymically related.

According to Mulvey, in Duel in the Sun, female identification with the protagonist, Pearl, is masculine in the sense that it is based in a regressive, gender-undifferentiated, phallic narcissism. Prior to the stage of Oedipal conflict, Freud did not differentiate between the libidinal drives of girls and boys. His identification of the libido with the masculine was, as Mulvey pointed out, merely conventional. For Freud, the libido is neither male nor female, but has a 'masculine' character insofar as the active principle is always culturally characterised as masculine. In women, a degree of active or masculine drive survives the massive repression which Freud argued was necessary to effect a feminine resolution of the Oedipal scenario.

The correct road, femininity, leads to an increasing repression of 'the active' (the 'phallic phase' in Freud's terms). In this sense Hollywood genre films, structured around masculine pleasure, offering an identification with the active point of view, allow a female spectator to rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity, the never-fully-repressed bed-rock of feminine neurosis. (Mulvey, 1981 : 71 - emphasis hers.)

The western tomboy thus personifies the conflicts of a feminisation process which must 'repress' active drives; thus signifying a feminine nostalgia for the pre-Oedipal period of phallic activity. According to Mulvey, this is always an element of female pleasure in any cinematic representation organised by the gendered relay of the gaze. The female spectator's 'masculinised' position in the relay, emphasised by the 'masculinisation' of the female protagonist, engenders in the heterosexual female spectator a 'restless' tension between phallic nostalgia and socially correct feminine passivity.

"Duel in the Sun"

In the Hollywood narrative, as in the visual structure, women signify the erotic. In melodrama, Mulvey argued, the centrality of a female protagonist shifts the narrative focus overtly to sexuality. Pearl's protagonism in Duel in the Sun thus effects a generic shift to melodrama by the foregrounding of sexuality. The opening scene in Duel shows Pearl's mother dancing hollywood-exotica-style. She is surrounded, diegetically, by male spectators. Her exoticism is displayed for the consumption of white men and is also treated as symbolic of phallic-feminine depravity. At the same time, and to the same music, Pearl is dancing outside on the steps of the saloon. Her dance is framed as a more childlike and spontaneous response representing a primitive sexuality — the girl's got rhythm. The opening monologue voiced over the image of 'Sqaw Rock' near which a single desert flower commemorates Pearl's violent death confirms her association with the primitive. Pearl's innocent mimicking of her mother's erotic dance signifies an association with the dark continent of adult femininity as well as the primitive wilderness of America's childhood. Pearl's father punishes her mother's lewd performance and, to protect Pearl from the degenerative tendencies which he perceives in her mixed race origins, he sends her to his genteel former love (symbolising white-feminising domesticity) who is now married to a westerner known as the Senator. Here she meets the split hero personified in the outlaw Lewt and his lawyer brother, Jesse.

The conflict unfolding through the film reflects the classic Western genre theme of a struggle between primitive desires and social responsibility. Mulvey suggested that this conflict here locates within Pearl because her presence as (female) protagonist shifts the narrative to melodrama. But this figure of the dark girl is not uncharacteristic of the Western which is "haunted by the fear of miscegenation . . ." (Buscombe, 1988 : 242). Women of mixed race, or white women married to Native American characters, are classically seen as "contaminated by the primitive" (242) and often personify the male hero's phallic nostalgia. Cawelti's Freudian account of the "dark girl" seems worth quoting at length:

The hero's destruction of the savage in order to protect the chastity of the schoolmarm symbolises the repression of his own spontaneous sexual urges and his acceptance of the monogamous pattern of modern, middle-class life ... In the contemporary western, ... feminine duality shows up in the contrast between the schoolmarm and the dance-hall girl, or between the hero's Mexican or Indian mistress and the WASP girl he may ultimately marry. The dark girl is a feminine embodiment of the hero's savage, spontaneous side. She understands his deep passions, his savage code of honor and his need to use personal violence. The schoolmarm's civilised code of behaviour rejects the passionate urges and the freedom of aggression which mark this side of the hero's character. When the hero becomes involved with the schoolmarm, the dark lady must be destroyed or abandoned. . . The savage symbolises ... brutality [but also] ... the freedom and spontaneity of wilderness life, the sense of personal honour and individual mastery, and the deep camaraderie of men untrammelled by domestic ties ... the role of savage can be played interchangeably by Indians or outlaws. (Cawelti, 1971: 48-53)

Although the male characters are somewhat marginalised in this film, as functions of Pearl's inner conflict, the visual organisation spectacularises her femininity in ways which are typical neither of female-addressed genres, nor of the western-generic tomboy. Pearl is, rather, the classic type of the 'dark-girl' — the emphatically spectacularised phallic-feminine.

It would seem useful to introduce a comparison here with a more classic tomboy figure. The tomboy typically opens a narrative competing with men, passes through a period of sexual confusion, and then closes the story by succumbing to marriage with the hero (Buscombe, 1989: 242). She is usually too sympathetic and innocent a character to be killed off and is characteristically normalised by marriage to the male hero — although this re-naturalisation is often equivocal (Merck, 1980). 

Initially, Pearl's narrative does seem to conform to the tomboy mould. Her relationship with Lewt is initially organised around athletic pursuits. He repeatedly humiliates her through athletic competition, however. Firstly, he puts her on a horse which she cannot master and, in a later scene, he prevents her from leaving a swimming hole by exploiting conventions of feminine modesty and an implied threat of rape. Peal's image is increasingly feminine-eroticised as the narrative proceeds whilst Lewt's characterisation builds an overtly phallic domination and the heterosexualising scopic structure takes over. 

In the scene in which Lewt visits her room after murdering her fiancé, Pearl is half-lying on a bed pointing a gun at him whilst he is standing. As he approaches her with his back to the extradiagetic spectator Pearl's gun is held level with his crotch. She slowly raises it towards his chest while he tells her she is 'his' girl. This positioning of the gun serves to draw attention to his crotch (which is, classically, visually unavailable, or 'veiled,' by the character having his back to the camera). This foregrounds castration anxiety somewhat more overtly than is customary! He touches her and she half-swoons in erotic surrender as he takes away her gun. The equation of gun with the phallus which is capable of sadistically controlling and disarming the castrating threat of the feminine erotic could not be made clearer. She ends the scene being dragged along the floor with her arms clasped around Lewt's leg as he walks out on her, her feminising degradation complete.

A phallic-controlling, voyeuristic, pleasure is clearly offered to the male spectator in this scene and throughout the film. Eyeline match shots giving Pearl's point of view on Lewt are always from a very low angle, further phallicising Lewt's image and feminising Pearl's. Pearl's self-sacrifice for Jesse's sake (or rather to preserve the 'civilised' order represented by Jesse to which she, herself, can never belong) confirms her classic coding as iconic 'dark girl' who can never be 'civlised' rather than the tomboy whose marriage resolves narrative (and psychological) conflict. 

Jesse's socialisation in Duel enervates his ability to use direct violence and he is unable to defend himself from Lewt's physical violence. In classic dark-girl style, Pearl takes on the phallic nobility of the western hero and sacrifices herself to facilitate resolution of the narrative by the hero's marriage to the civilising (white) wife. Abandoning the struggle for feminine social integration, she again becomes a powerful phallic force. She goes after Lewt with a shotgun against his revolver, shooting him first in the groin before also being shot by him. As they die together their narcissistic bond is fully realised.

The hero's (masculinity's) inner struggle played out in the Western is between the primitive pleasures of a phallic-erotic omnipotence and an authoritative integration to the white, male-dominated, order of civilisation (represented by the family). Pearl's 'darkness' outlaws any civil alliance (marriage) and enables her narcissistic bond with Lewt. Her female-coded body, however, effectively disavows the homoeroticism implied in this phallic-narcissistic bond. Pearl effectively stands in for the (split) western hero(outlaw)'s 'native' sidekick:

Leslie Fiedler has pointed out how the theme of good companionship between outcast white and men of darker skin plays a complex role in American literature ... this relationship "symbolically joins the white man to nature and his own unconscious ... and binds him in life-long loyalty to a help-meet, without the sacrifice of his freedom." ... The "code of the West" is in every respect a male ethic and its values and prescriptions relate primarily to the relationships of men ... the presence of women invariably threatens the primacy of the masculine group. In many westerns an interesting resolution of this conflict is worked out. The woman in effect takes over the role of the masculine comrades and becomes the hero's true companion ... " (Cawelti, 1971: 65; quoting Fiedler, 1949)

It is not merely the feminising presence of white women which threatens the masculine group in action films, however. Neale's (1983) analysis of male identification in the genre pointed out that the relay of the phallic gaze is often troubled in action films by the taboo on men looking at the male body — on spectacularising and thus effectively feminising the male figure. Men act, women appear — the male protagonist is meant to disappear as the spatial distance between the spectator and the protagonist is cancelled in the processes of suture. In action movies, the male spectator's look is often disseminated, instead, across the screen space in exchanges of looks between characters in rituals such as the gunfight. As the male spectator looks at the image, his controlling gaze also frames the male body as object of the look implying a fetishistic moment in the male-on-male gaze. 

The forbidden pleasure of this gaze onto the image of the male body must be disguised. It could be argued that the substitution of the dark girl for the Native-American male sidekick offers a disavowal of a potential homoeroticisation of the relay in representations of male conflict or intimacy. In much the same way as the male gaze disseminates across the visual space in the Western with homoeroticising results, representation of the conflict between Vienna and Emma in Johnny Guitar, for example, produces a similarly lesbianising effect. Calamity Jane also looks at Adelaide/Kate in one of the performative interludes in the film (by which Calamity Jane also taps into the camp mode of 'temporary transvestism'). In Duel, Lewt's gaze is relayed onto Pearl, a phallic-feminine spectacle, which constantly reiterates a re-heterosexualisation of any instability in the gendering of the relay. 

Pearl's presentation also differs fundamentally from the classic iconography of the Western tomboy. Tomboys are not only boyishly athletic but earn an independent living through 'masculine' economic activities such as hunting, trading, gunfighting or driving. They are characteristically presented as brash but a-sexual; often rejecting romance vociferously — until their boyish identity is disturbed by an unwilling attraction towards the hero. They wear highly utilitarian clothing such as jeans, buckskins or military garb. A crucial scene in the classic tomboy narrative is one in which the boy-girl first puts on a dress, leading to a crisis in her androgyne identity. Pearl, on the contrary, is not shown in any economic activity and does not wear male attire at any point in the narrative. Her clothing signifies as feminine and 'ethnic'. It is soft, revealing, flowing and impractical. Her stylisation is highly exoticised which further emphasises her re-feminisation in the visual order. Much is made of the extreme femininity of her body shape both visually and in the dialogue.

The tomboy is not characteristically an outlaw and usually ends the narrative married to the hero. Dark girls, on the other hand, are social outcasts and cannot be integrated. Dark girls and tomboys are both associated with the primitive wilderness, sometimes by a sexual association with outlaws (Johnny Guitar), or by a connection with native Americans: marriage (Soldier Blue); birth (Duel in the Sun); or adoption (The Rose of Cimarron). Dark girls are usually played by brunettes. The typical tomboy is white, however, and usually played by blonde comediennes (Doris Day, Jean Arthur) who symbolise chaste, childlike, wholesomeness. Pearl is played by Jennifer Jones, a brunette with an established star persona as a siren.

Pearl is not, then, the type of the tomboy but actually the type of the phallic-feminine, or 'dark girl.' This may explain why hard-living, crossdressing, tomboy characters such as Vienna, Annie Oakley, Belle Starr, and Calamity Jane are frequently mentioned in lesbian and gay texts (Bell-Metereau, 1993: 83, 87; Sheldon, 1984: 17; Dickens, 1982: 213, 217; Whitaker, 1985: 110; Olson, 1994: 69; Merck, 1980; Modleski, 1995/6: 7) whilst there seems to be no evidence in lesbian or gay secondary texts that Pearl is regarded either as an example of a tomboy or of a crossdresser; nor that she has ever been associated with lesbian audiences.

In terms of Mulvey's psychoanalytic analysis, Duel in the Sun situates Pearl's character in a regressive, Oedipal phallic-narcissism. The narrative concerns her failed efforts to resolve her active desires with, passive, white, heterosexual, femininity. For the white, heterosexual, female spectator, the phallicisation of Pearl's image represents the troublesome 'return of the repressed' which constantly threatens to destabilise heterosexual feminine adjustment. As Mulvey was concerned with finding a positive feminine spectatorial position (or in demonstrating that it cannot be done), she interpreted the instability of Pearl's 'transvestite' feminine representation as of negative value. Mulvey had argued (1975) that the implicitly male spectator of popular film is typically offered a choice between the phallic strategy of controlling voyeurism, or a regressive, fetishistic, pleasure. The female spectator accesses such phallic pleasures by occupying an institutionally masculinised position thus re-living the feminine-foundational struggle between phallic narcissism and feminine passivity. Pearl's struggle represents nothing more than the 'normal' weakness and instability resulting from the repression of active drives which, in Freudian terms, constitutes the heterosexual-feminine character.

If the regression necessary to access the nostalgic pleasures offered by the western leaves the heterosexual female spectator troubled by a residual "masculinity complex" (Mulvey, 1981) and the heterosexual male spectator similarly troubled by a "repressed homosexual voyeurism" (which male gays may, of course, take pleasure in – Neale, 1983: 8), where does it leave the lesbian spectator?

Dykes and tomboys

Some of Whitaker's respondents did report occupying the masculinised spectatorial position in the relay as a location from which to appropriate the erotic spectacle of the female star

FANNIE: I (identified with) Gordon MacRae in The Desert Song, who seduced a woman by singing to her. (Whitaker, 1985: 112)

GLADYS: I was probably the most sexist [sic] person in the audience looking at almost naked Marlene Dietrich on the silver screen ... I can't say I identified with her. (Whitaker, 1985: 115)

In terms of Mulvey's analysis, these remarks would figure lesbian spectatorship in classically inversionary terms. Most lesbians would probably be reluctant to objectify the female image in such a straightforwardly masculinist way, however. Articulations of desire for the female star through the diegetic perspective of the male protagonist were not only far rarer than identification with (male or female) protagonists but also tended to cite highly glamorised and fetishised (see Mulvey, 1975; Studlar, 1991) representations of the female star in which the artifices of femininity are foregrounded, such as that of Dietrich or Grayson in exotic musicals. Those interviewees who did articulate masculinised identifications in the western genre, on the other hand, tended to emphasise not a sexual desire for the spectacle of the woman, but pleasure in a fantasy of "being strong and independent ... (b)eing free . . ." and having "buddies to ride off into the sunset with" (Whitaker, 1985: 110). Levitin's (1982) overview of female protagonism in westerns unequivocally articulated her own identification with tomboys in terms of a fantasy of action, mobility and the wearing of less restrictive clothing:

I had just seen Annie Oakley emerge from a saloon, leap onto her horse and gallop away, guns waving, and I was inspired. I loved westerns dearly, but they also posed a problem. I identified with the adventurous roles of the heroes, but I knew I was a girl. Annie's magic leap was my rescue. The image of the active Annie offered new possibilities for a girl. A girl could wear buckskin skirts to chase Indians around the back yard. (Levitin, 1982: 95)

Olson similarly articulated her pleasure in Anne Bancroft's image in Seven Women in terms of the qualities of strength, courage and insubordination:

She's tough, bold, intelligent, and doesn't take shit from anyone ... (Olson, 1994: 69)

Sheldon related lesbian pleasure in the tomboy image to the World War II context of a relative economic independence for women (Sheldon, 1994: 17) and described a lesbian 'recognition' in these films as locating in representations of female resilience, strength, and independence:

There is a real need for lesbians to see and know about women who define themselves in their own terms. In the strength of actresses often playing parts in which they are comparatively independent of domestic expectations and of men is found a far greater affirmation than in the kind of "lesbian films" that have been produced. (Sheldon, 1984: 17)

Lesbian spectators may, in fact, recognise a lesbian lifestyle and iconography encoded in tomboy iconography. Tomboys wear male clothing partly for the hell of it and partly for the practical reason that they need to fend for themselves. Their clothes signify masculine occupations, rather than athletic hobbies. Jean Arthur's Calamity Jane in The Plainsman (1936) drives a stage-coach wearing leather trousers, cavalry thigh-boots, a soldier's jacket and cap and toting a horse-whip. In Caught (1931), Calamity wears a man's shirt and neckerchief, spurred boots, and smokes cigars. Doris Day's Calamity wears buckskins and a military cap. In West of the Pecos (1934), the tomboy passes as a male cowboy. The Rose of Cimarron (1952) lives a Native American lifestyle in buckskins, as does the anti-heroine of Soldier Blue. The Woman They Almost Lynched (1953) dresses as a cowboy. Vienna in Johnny Guitar (1954) manages a saloon in jeans and shirts. Anne of the Indies (1951) captains a pirate ship in sailor's attire with a commanding swagger. Montana Belle (1952) robs banks in a man's suit, hat and neckerchief — and all are contemptuous of men, marriage and 'civilised values.'

There are also more entirely fantastic modes of autonomous activity. The Rose of the Rancho (1935) passes, masked, for a swashbuckling hero. Linda Sterling passes as her brother, Zorro, in Zorro's Black Whip (1944). The Wicked Lady (1945) passes for a male highwayman. The Masked Cavalier in The Sword of Monte Christo (1951) is the girls-own tomboy with her political fervour, masked swordplay, impressive horsewomanship and minimal heterosexuality. Claire stands in for her brother in Sons of the Musketeers (1952). All wear weapons and compete more than successfully with men in work skills and the use of weapons. Unlike "performative" transvestites such as Viktor Und Viktoria (1933) and Sylvia Scarlett (1935), whose bodies represent the feminine 'truth' of their crossdressed identity (Kuhn, 1985), western tomboys do not flinch from a fight. The tomboy's masculine clothing signifies a willingness to take on the (male) world in an assertion of social equality based in the development of practical or professional skills.

The iconography which identifies these tomboys is remarkably similar to the codes which publically identified butch lesbians in the bar sub-cultures of the 1950s and 1960s — the wearing of male clothing and use of mannerisms signifying self-reliance and capability. This was clearly not lost on the makers of Calamity Jane who appear to have been making game of the PCA by involving Doris Day's arch tomboy in a comedy of errors (see Merck's analysis, 1980). In this sense, lesbian pleasure is clearly often identificatory — although suture into a male point of view is unlikely to be effected, not least because of the parodic style often associated with the tomboy figure (even in serious dramas), which would disrupt the process of suture. In any event, the ironising effect of the re-coding process mobilised by the lesbian spectator in order to relate to mainstream cinema at all would inevitably disrupt suture. Many of Whitaker's (1985) interviewees articulated feelings of confusion or 'lack of fit' in relation to heterosexual identifications (both male and female) offered by popular films. Moreover, those lesbians who articulated pleasure in the tomboy image by no means all identified as butch (in a subcultural sense) — in fact butch self-identification is only specified in one of the anecdotal lesbian sources in which cinematic masculinised-identifications are cited.

Mulvey's account of female pleasure in the image of the tomboy is based in feminine nostalgia. Levitin's account of dressing up in childhood falls, perhaps unconsciously, into the same wistful retreat into an 'age of innocence' in individuals' own psychical lives (with its mythical analogue in the historical life of America) when heterosexual gender ('civilisation') is not, yet, fully enforced. An exploration of Mulvey's feminine nostalgia in more detail may offer insights in theorising the specific mode of lesbian engagement with the tomboy icon. Freud's theorisations of female adjustment and female homosexuality upon which Mulvey relied are too complex to go into fully here. However, in summary, mannishness figures as amounting to a refusal to accept feminine subordination (symbolised by lack of the phallus) which, in Freudian terms, is pathological. This is because feminine subordination is the real state of affairs and so a failure to adjust to that state of affairs is a disavowal &mdahs; a flight from reality (for a full exposition, see Freud, 1905; 1925; 1933). Female masculinity is thus defined by a refusal of the cultural inscription of genital difference as subordination or, in Freudian language, a female's refusal to accept that she does not have a penis. That is, she refuses to accept that she cannot represent any externalisable sign of proactivity or authority.

Lesbian accounts of lesbian identity (including those of Ruston, 1986; Newton, 1984; Penelope, 1986; Nestle, 1987; Faderman, 1991), as I have argued in my previous chapter, tended to interpret lesbianism, including butch identification, as a rebellion against this masculinist state of affairs rather than as an appropriation of male dominance. This form of lesbian rebellion is classically re-signified in the dominant culture in pathologising terms — as the will to become a man. Lesbian-feminist such as Jeffreys (1985: 74) argue that butch identity appropriates male dominance to itself and thus tends to uphold a classical construct of penis envy. There remains, however, an inevitable (if unwelcome) resemblance between Mulvey's Freudian model of female masculinity and the general tendency of lesbian-feminist models of the figure of the butch which emerged in the 1980s (Strega, 1985; Penelope, 1986; Ruston et al, 1986; Faderman, 1991). In terms of these lesbian theorisations the lesbian is not concerned with becoming or mimicking a man, but with refusing to comply with the restrictive requirements of feminine-passivity. Because dominant discourses discipline individuals into gendered identifications by excluding from discourse the possibility of any subject position which does not refer itself to heterosexual gender (in terms of which femininity is defined as subordinate and passive), the impossibility of representing female autonomy produces the masculinised figure of the butch. The assumption by a woman of an authoritative position which is phallic by definition is, by definition, unfeminine. In short, as Mulvey (1981) argued, the female spectator's fantasies of active independence can only be expressed by reference to the trope of the phallus. "Reference to" is not the same as "identification with," however, and Mulvey's heterosexual-feminine spectator is "troubled" and "restless" because she resists suture into the institutionally masculinised position in the relay (as, evidently, does the lesbian spectator).

De Lauretis (1991) criticised Mulvey's assertion of feminine discomfort in the effectively transvestite appropriation of masculinised subject positions on the basis that such discomfort could only be assumed on the basis of a prior, natural, femininity with which it does not "sit." Whilst Lacanian discourse has long been criticised for failing to exit fully from essentialism (Heath, 1978) and Mulvey's conceptualisation clearly does not escape from the naturalising effects of her deployment of psychoanalytic constructs, this would still seem an overstatement of Mulvey's naturalisation of femininity. Mulvey argued, in Freudian terms, that pre-gendered (but conventionally masculinised) phallic-narcissistic identifications did not sit comfortably with the conventional social requirements (not a purported essence) of feminine passivity. In Freudian terms, the girl's pre-Oedipal 'nature' is not feminine-passive but gender-neutral, because libido is undifferentiated and only conventionally (contingently) gendered as masculine. Mulvey merely described a heterosexual-feminine unease with the socially illicit pleasures of the assumption by women of an active, desiring, position.

Feminist theorists have often also been critical towards the psychoanalytic account of narcissism as rooted in a single libido, conventionally designated masculine, which was deployed by Mulvey (1981) precisely because it tends towards the representation of all female autonomy and activity as phallic. Following French feminists such as Kristeva, Montrelay, and Irigaray, Doane (1981a) and Copjec (1981) both suggested the substitution of Freud's account of anaclitic drives for the Lacanian account of narcissistic drives upon which constructs of cinematic pleasure (including Mulvey's) are based. However, any such appeals to bodily motivations, whether anaclitic or narcissistic, "seem to contradict other of their arguments, particularly those in which subjectivity is presented in terms of a linguistic or symbolic construction" (Penley, 1989: 73).

"The risk of essence" unabashedly taken by these alternative theories of the feminine typically involves, however, ignoring the important psychoanalytic emphasis on the way that sexual identity is imposed from the "outside." (Penley, 1989: 76 quoting Doane's (1981a) use of Heath's phrase, 1978)

New perspectives on gender in the visual order

Mulvey's formulation left the heterosexual feminist "restless," and the lesbian inarticulable except as identification with an institutionally masculine position offered in the relay. Desubjectivising models such Case's (1988/9) and de Lauretis' (1991) theorised a deconstructive lesbian refusal of any stable gender-position and a dissemination of subjectivity in a lesbian performative and exhibition context — but this obviously cannot be applied to lesbian reading of mainstream film. Furthermore, the quotidian importance of female pro-activity to the lesbian agenda can be marginalised by a discourse of purely textually deconstructive desires. But how is such an agenda to be signified without binding the lesbian over to an inversionary phallicism on the one hand or to a feminine 'nature' on the other? How is the lesbian critic to take account both of the need to trouble and exceed heterosexual gender categories and yet to avoid a depoliticisisation or degendering of modes of lesbian resistance to female subordination and enforced passivity?

De Lauretis proposed, a feminist rewriting of the Freudian account of "penis envy:"

But if, to the female subject of perverse desire, castration means first and foremost a lack of being in her body-ego consequent upon the narcissistic wound [castration], and only secondarily the lack of a penis, then it is the former - the lack of a libidinally invested body-image, a feminine body that can be narcissistically loved - that threatens the subject most deeply. And it is against this threat that the mechanism of disavowal intervenes to defend the ego by producing the compromise fantasy 'I don't have it but I can/will have it' ... (de Lauretis, 1994: 262)

De Lauretis' argument, which retains a model of the drives but emphasises the contingency of their organisation in culture, still articulates lesbianism as a wish to have (what) the phallus (signifies in western culture), however. A rearticulation of Lacan's psychoanalytic account of the processes of narcissism and ego formation as discourse may be more helpful in superseding these contradictions.

Narcissism, which is argued to effect a primary male identification with male morphology in the cinematic image, has a crucial function for Lacan in the production of male subjectivity itself. His formulation of the mirror stage through which the (male) child is first able to exteriorise his own (imaginary) image, links motor activity to the development of an egotistical projection of self into the world and thus the development of a nascent sense of mastery over space (see Lacan's exposition, 1966: 2-7). The processes by which motor activity is translated into an effective engagement with the world (control of environment) depends on the establishment of a coherent (if illusionary) image of self-in-the-world. Located in the fictive space of the mirror image in which the boy orients himself by matching his motor activity to his own projection of visual surface the materialised surface of self-in-the-world takes on a unitary (phallic) morphology. It is therefore dependent not only on a visual projection reserved to male authority but on the very physicality whose restraint is a constitutive factor in the production of femininity.

Foucault's (1982) analytic postulation of the potential for the discursive production of oppositional subjectivities makes new feminist arguments available. Bartky (1988) analysed Foucault's (1979) failure to address the gendering of the body in his account of the disciplinary practices which produce the "docile" body. She identified the aims of three categories of feminine-coercive practice:

Those that aim to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration; those that bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures, and movements; and those that are directed toward the display of this body as an ornamented surface ... (which) must be understood in the light of the modernization of patriarchal domination (Bartky, 1988:

Bartky went on to discuss a certain bodily attitude to space:

[A] space seems to surround women in imagination that they are hesitant to move beyond: this manifests itself both in a reluctance to reach, stretch, and extend the body to meet resistances of matter in motion - as in sport or in the performance of physical tasks - and in a typically constricted posture and general style of movement. Woman's space is not a field in which her bodily intentionality can be freely realized but an enclosure in which she feels herself positioned and by which she is confined. The "loose woman" violates these norms: her looseness is manifest not only in her morals, but in her manner of speech and quite literally in the free and easy way she moves. (Bartky, 1988: 66)

This restrictive space is generated by physically constraining clothing and footwear, as well as by personal boundaries instituted by rules about touching in public space which ensure that women take up very little space and yet remain within that limiting space. The training begins young in the mother's attitude towards the girl-child which discourages and often physically restrains expansive outward movements. This is contrary to attitudes to boy-children who are encouraged endlessly to use and control their environment with their bodies.

These physical restraints which constitute heterosexual femininity also weaken the process of spatial orientation described by Lacan in which motor activity is projected and translated into effective engagement of a coherently imagined self with a coherently imagined world. As the woman takes up an adult heterosexual-feminine position in the western cultural narrative, this spatial configuration is effectively broken altogether. It is feminine overpresence with the image that obviates not only control over her own representation (in discourse) but also the use and control of space through physical engagement with the world (as well as the physical pleasures associated with motor excitement). The presence of women in public (male) domains, such as professional hierarchies, may open access to a phallicising (masculinising) status but it does not, in itself, alter the spatial 'force-field' and the enforced receptivity (to the male) which encloses the heterosexual woman's constrained body and cuts off her pleasure in engagement with the physical world, as well as with other women.

In Foucauldian terms, the ever-present networks of restraint and coercion which foreclose girls' outward movement must analytically infer, and thus may discursively produce, resistance — in the materialisable form of a capacity for expansive action on the girl's part. That is, the techniques by which the patriarchal order disciplines and produces passive, feminised, bodies simultaneously open out the possibility for refusal and for the production of reverse-discursive spaces and counter-identifications. Whilst Penelope (1986) did not claim a Foucauldian method or position, this kind of reverse-discursive space is, in effect, where she located her feminist construct of the 'dyke' when she argued that the constructs 'real woman' or 'real man' posit an 'unreal' gender-alignment. This is the discursive space in which resistant possibilities such as lesbianism open out (see Penelope, 1986: 60).

Butler's Foucauldian (1993: 73-4) argument repositions Lacan's account of the acquisition of the bodily imago upon which the ego is articulated as an account of the materialisation of "a sedimented history of imaginary relations" (74) and not as an account of the given function of the body in process of the acquisition of phallic identity. She thus refigured the 'lesbian phallus' as a contradictory signifier which calls into question the privileged status of the phallus as origin and controller of meanings. A lesbian will to establish or extend a coherent self into the world via an imaginary primary narcissism need not, then, be read as necessarily either an essentialising or a phallicising drive:

If this analysis invites the charge of penis envy, it also forces a reconsideration of the unstable status of identification in any envious act: there is in the very structure of envy the possibility of an imaginary identification, a crossing over into a "having" of the phallus that is both acknowledged and blocked. And if there is a law that must compel a feminine identification with a position of castration, it appears that this law "knows" that identification could function differently, that a feminine effort to identify with "having" the phallus could resist its demand, and that this possibility must be renounced ... that vain striving to approximate and possess what no one ever can have, but anyone sometimes can have in the transient domain of the imaginary. (Butler, 1993: 104-5)

Butler's analysis problematises essentialising lesbian-feminist accounts of butch identity such as Ruston's (1986). We may figure a gender-undifferentiated infancy, as posited by Freud and Lacan, but any assumption that this is co-extensive with the socialised activity or identity of the adult male can be rejected. Masculine proactive use of space is, in terms of a Foucauldian discursive model, as much a product of processes of discipline as the passivity of the feminised body. That is, the male body is not free from discursive productivity; it is produced in and through exhortation to active engagement with, and extension into, its environment through the repetition of gestures which signify spatial control and physical strength. For Butler, the lesbian phallus signifies not the inevitability of an association of proactivity with masculinity, but rather the undoing of such an association.

But precisely because it is an idealization, one which no body can adequately approximate, the phallus is a transferable phantasm, and its naturalized link to masculine morphology can be called into question through an aggressive reterritorialization ... It also means that there is not necessarily one imaginary schema for the bodily ego, and that cultural conflicts over the idealization and degradation of specific masculine and feminine morphologies will be played out at the site of the morphological imaginary in complex and conflicted ways. (Butler, 1993: 87)

Identificatory attitudes on the part of lesbians towards the phallically-coded tomboy cannot, in such terms, be assumed to represent a will on the part of those lesbians to occupy the position of men in a mimetic reproduction of the hetero-masculine order. On the contrary, they might be seen as signifying resistance to the disciplines of the feminisation process and a resultant shift in the lesbian imaginary — a new "schema" for the lesbian bodily ego and a lesbian proactivity. As one might then expect, lesbian pleasure in the tomboy image does not appear, from either anecdotal or literary evidence which I have previously cited, to be confined to those lesbian individuals who take on a butch persona.

Motor efficiency and the spatial orientation of a coherent self-image are prerequisites of any effective agency in western culture — an agency traditionally denied to (or by) heterosexual women. Insofar as purposeful movement and the extension of the self into physical space are (contingently) designated masculine in culture, the lesbian will to autonomy, freedom of movement, and motor pleasure, signifies as phallic. The medieval charge of 'looseness' and the modern charge of 'mannishness' function simply as the limits of permitted feminine use of language, bodily action, and the development of an effective spatial orientation, as prerequisites of competent subjective agency. Rather than participating nostalgically in the phallic-narcissistic pleasures offered in the Western film-text, the lesbian spectator of the cinematic tomboy might be said to be bringing to the text a more radical practice of resistance which exceeds the binary terms in which Mulvey problematised the relation of the (heterosexual) feminine spectator to the masculinised image of the female protagonist.

In short, the conflict between desire for pro-activity and the requirements of correct femininity (which, for Mulvey, constitute the struggle instituted by the image of the tomboy for the heterosexual feminine spectator) simultaneously references a mode of lesbian resistance. The social presentation (sedimented into an identification) of Mulvey's heterosexual female spectator is challenged and potentially radically destabilised by this image and this is why she experiences a restless discomfort. She risks exclusion from the dominant heterosexual culture if she cannot successfully re-naturalise her disrupted feminine identification. It seems rather glaringly obvious, on the other hand, that few lesbians would have much investment in preserving a heterosexual-feminine social adjustment. On the contrary, lesbian resistance to the feminisation process has been coded, narrated and materialised (lived as cultural practice) in many different ways — one of which was by the publicised choice of utilitarian clothing and the display of mannerisms of competence. Lesbians (whether identifying as butch, femme, or feminist) have frequently articulated, and materialised, a lesbian identity precisely in and through refusals of the discursive construct of heterosexual-feminine passivity.

This is not to say that lesbians are necessarily 'unfeminine,' or would signify themselves always and everywhere by phallic coding or masculine stylisation. It is actually Mulvey's heterosexual-feminist formulation which problematises the inclusion of lesbianism in the category of femininity here. Whilst lesbians are hardly immune from the cultural unease described by Mulvey, they are at least able and willing to support one another in resisting its controlling effects. Dealing with the discomfort engendered by the reactionary pathologisation by the dominant culture of lesbian modes of resistance is an ongoing process for lesbians and one which is reflected in lesbian literatures. For the lesbian spectator, the reverie of forbidden physicality evoked by the tomboy seems to have been re-deployed to reinforce lesbian resistances to prohibitions on female physicality in general.

J A MARQUIS: From film I got a sense of the roles women didn't play. Strong women are aberrant in this society and it's a conflict society hasn't worked out as well as I have. Women were supposed to be goody-two-shoes, beautiful and stereotypically flawless. Being a lesbian was coming to terms with that and it was quite a release. It was like a whole bunch of chains fell off. (Whitaker, 1985: 114)

The lesbian, who is already excluded from the heterosexual order, has little to lose and much to gain as the spatial configuration necessary to facilitate a female-morphological imago of an active relation to environment is, for once, effectively completed in the fantasy space of the relay. For many lesbians, there is a sheer pleasure in the tomboy's facility in managing 'ornery horses, riding, shooting, yelling, and cursing, which they refuse to disavow. Indeed, both the character of Calamity Jane and Merck's analysis of her image end up "back on the buckboard where she first began" (Merck, 1980: 25).