Diffusing difference: feminist film theory

Feminist film theory attempted to exit from the inversion model in the context of queer theory and yet to retain a (psychoanalytic) account of gender processes. Psychoanalytic models narrate femininity as an insubstantial category produced in language as the negation of the category of masculinity. Desire (lack of satisfaction) is signified by the phallus which positions 'the woman' as its object. A non-phallic model of (lesbian) desire is thus rendered inarticulable. De Lauretis' (1988) noted this dependence placed on 'man' as the dominant term in sexual difference (gender) and argued that a lesbian-feminist politics based on this concept fails to escape from a heterosexualising (inversionary) frame. The structural paradox of identity politics could be re-stated in slightly different terms:

It thus appears that 'sexual difference' is the term of a conceptual paradox corresponding to what is in effect a real contradiction in women's lives: the term, at once, of a sexual difference (women are, or want, something different from men) and of a sexual indifference (women are, or want, the same as men). And it seems to me that the racist and class-based practices legitimated in the notion of 'separate but equal' reveal a very similar paradox in the liberal ideology of pluralism where social difference is also, at the same time, social indifference. (De Lauretis, 1988a: 142)

De Lauretis effected a realignment of lesbianism by drawing a distinction between 'hom(m)o-sexuality' (or 'sexual indifference') and 'homosexuality' (signifying a lesbian sexual difference from heterosexuality). In this way, lesbian desire can be refigured not as an appropriation of 'the phallus' but as a refusal of (hetero)sexuality by which gender is articulated as a (differentiating) relation to the (same) phallus.

Case hybridised a psychoanalytic model of 'desire' with a gay model of 'camp' in order to 'denaturalise' the inversionary model, resituating the butch-femme relationship in the performative context of lesbian theatre. A lesbian performance utilises deconstructive readings of popular culture to underscore the fictional nature of gender:

The identification with movie idols is part of the camp assimilation of dominant culture. It serves multiple purposes: (1) they do not identify these butch-femme roles with 'real' people, or literal images of gender, but with fictionalized ones, thus underscoring the masquerade; (2) the history of their desire, or their search for a sexual partner becomes a series of masks, or identities that stand for sexual attraction in the culture, thus distancing them from the 'play' of seduction as it is outlined by social mores; (3) the association with movies makes narrative fiction part of the strategy as well as characters [...] they are fictional at their core in the camp style and through the butch-femme roles. (Case, 1988: 302)

This lesbian subject comes into being as she foregrounds the fictional nature of the heterosexual role-models which she incorporates to a performance which is re-referred to a lesbian context. Thus, whether 'the lesbian' speaks as butch or femme, she speaks from an undifferentiated subject position — that of 'the lesbian.' In this way, Case articulated a modality of lesbian desire without fixed poles of gendered identification. However, besides considerations of the multiple discourses potentially at work in the production of lesbian subjectivity, Case effectively relied on a presumed universality of the butch/femme diad to lesbian cultures.

[B]utch/femme may be a widely recognized set of conventions within lesbian culture, but it must not be assumed to be a constitutive or obligatory identification. (Lamos, 1994: 97)

Studlar (1991) used an updated Freudian conceptualisation of the masochistic scenario to explore lesbian pleasure in the popular cinematic text but, again, in a desubjectivising mode. Rather than directly addressing an elusive location for the lesbian in the visual relay, she argued that ultra-feminine codings or transvestite dress in Dietrich's films does not function fetishistically to cover for the missing phallus for the male spectator as suggested by Mulvey (1975). Instead, Dietrich represents a pre-Oedipal fantasy figure, signifying a disavowal of the father's phallic power and its redistribution onto the authoritative pre-Oedipal (phallic) mother, in a playful, multiple, sensuality. Dietrich's cross-dressing thus undermines the naturalisation of sexual difference and of heterosexual desire.

Studlar went on to suggest that the relay of the gaze is changed by the frequent absence of the diegetic male protagonist in Dietrich's films. According to Mulvey (1975), in the absence of a diegetic protagonist, the male spectator is brought into direct erotic rapport with the fetishised spectacle of the female star. Studlar pointed out that the lesbian spectator might also experience a direct erotic rapport with the image. In contrast to the separation of the voyeuristic and objectifying moment of the look from the narcissistic and identificatory, there is a 'subversive' female-to-female looking in which identification is disseminated between desire for, and identification with, the authoritative and eroticised image of the woman. In Freudian terms, such pleasure is 'perverse' (non-object-oriented) rather than expressing an inverted object choice.

De Lauretis (1991) developed her (1988a) position in a reading of the lesbian-made film She Must Be Seeing Things (1987) in which neither diegetic character emerges as singular protagonist, and each represents 'the lesbian.' The function of voyeurism is re-articulated through an unstable shifting of subject-object configurations between lesbianised intra-diegetic and extra-diegetic spaces. These shifts take place in the diegetic relationship between the lesbian characters, in which the gaze of the lesbian spectator is also implicated. The diegetic femme is identified with the filmmaker (and thus with the controlling phallic gaze of the camera and the extra-diegetic investigator-narrator). Diegetically, the butch occupies the position of protagonistic investigator, with whom the enunciative position appears complicit. The subjectivity of the spectator is thus distributed across contradictory diegetic subject-object positions, and intra- and extra-diegetic enunciative positions (the investigator investigates the investigator). Thus both can be seen as occupying the subject position of 'the lesbian' together in a way which is ultimately gender-undifferentiated, but different from heterosexual desire.

This dissemination also forms a connection between the lesbian as spectator and the diegetic scenario of lesbian fantasy. This process itself is re-contextualised and rendered self-conscious in the film-within-a-film (the 'Catalina' story). In its most basic (primal) form, the subject of a fantasy is present in the syntactical organisation of the scenario rather than 'present' in the sense of occupying a specified position in the fantasy narrative. She Must be Seeing Things represents a lesbian fantasy scenario in this film-within-a-film. The autoerotic fantasy (the 'Catalina' story) is framed by the symbolic (representation of the process of cinematic articulation of the fantasy). Thus, She Must Be Seeing Things uncovers the structure of lesbian spectatorial identification and involvement in the film fantasy, mediated by the involvement of the two lesbian subjects, Agatha and Jo. The denaturalising effect of the use of masquerade in She Must be Seeing Things assists the self-reflexivity of lesbian spectatorship:

It is in that space between the fantasy scenario and the self-critical, ironic lesbian gaze — a space the film constructs evidently and purposefully — that I am addressed as spectator and that a subject-position is figured out and made available in terms of a sexual difference that is not a difference between woman and man, between female and male sexuality, but a difference between heterosexual and lesbian sexuality [...] (De Lauretis, 1991: 251)

De Lauretis [1988a] had objected to an extra-textual lesbian spectator being brought into the fray as putative controller or guarantor of lesbian-specific readings of popular culture. This lesbian spectator herself would inescapably remain the subject of identificatory fixity in the relay as an identificatory subject of 'sexual indifference.' The involvement of the lesbian spectator in this scenario of desire, therefore, implicitly depends on regarding lesbian strategy for reading film along the same lines as she had proposed elsewhere (1988b) for women's film. That is, on a mobilisation of oppositional (lesbian) readings in collusion with a feminist (lesbian) filmmaking practice. The conventional relay of popular cinema's IMR would render such a 'pact' between feminist practitioner, reader, and text, impossible, or at least incomplete.

Traub (1991) pointed out the diversity of lesbianisms "in relation to the shifting fortunes of gender ideologies and conflicts, erotic techniques and disciplines, movement politics, fashion and consumer trends, media representations, and paradigms of mental illnesses [...] to name just a very few" (305), but yet immediately reconstituted this diversity within the ubiquitous terms of the psychoanalytic paradigm.

Yet, despite the subsequent deligitimization of the psychoanalytic paradigm by the feminist and gay liberation movements [...] [I]n novels and films, mainstream and alternative - and more importantly in our reactions to them — 'lesbian' continues to be thought through and within a psychoanalytic nexus of signification [...] [and lesbians are] unwitting reproducers of it. (Traub, 1991: 306 – emphasis hers)

Although, for Traub, the extra-textual (historicised) lesbian spectator might effect "a refusal of those gender dichotomies that organise erotic desire" (Traub, 1991: 316) 'the lesbian' nevertheless continues to signify homogeneously by/as "desire" and not as the unstable and differentiated product of discursive contestations.

These revisions of the psychoanalytic model of spectatorship were intended to open out and supersede the difficulties of locating a lesbian subject position in the heterosexualising relay. Furthermore, lesbian practices could be figured as different from dominant practices (as actively 'subversive' in their denaturalising effects) rather than as being entirely overdetermined by them as in Mulvey's (1975) model. On the other hand, whilst lesbian diversity has been acknowledged, the issues have been evaded rather than addressed. If desire is refigured as multiplicitous, it nevertheless remains the universal referent of its diverse modalities. Indeed, this model remains dichotomous rather than diverse since it refigures lesbianism as that which is (homogeneously) different from heterosexuality.

In effect, Traub (1991: 305) rapidly reabsorbed an acknowledged lesbian diversity to the universalising construct of 'desire.' De Lauretis' (1993: 152) argument that lesbianism cannot be treated as a universal category breaks off at the point of observing that, nevertheless, "the discourses, demands, and counter-demands that inform lesbian representation are still unwittingly caught in the paradox of socio-sexual (in)difference . . ." (1993: 155). It would seem that queer theory's mobilisation of 'sexuality' as key referent of its resistance needs to be decentred and reframed in all the specificities of its agendas and articulations. If, indeed, it is the centrality of techniques of 'sexuality' in the production and control of everyday life in the 20th century which has produced and prioritised 'perverse' strategies of resistance, then a discourse of 'sexuality' is always-already assimilated. Grosz thus cited Foucault's (1976: 157) recommendation that "[t]he rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures" (Grosz: 155). A queer project of aligning lesbianism with a contradictory or 'perverse' content of desire (whether linked to identity or not) can only be seen, in feminist as well as Foucauldian terms, as a depoliticising move which reinscribes lesbianism within the controlling discourse of 'sexuality' where it can be 'disciplined,' commodified, and re-circulated in media not as politicised resistance but as an alternative content of desire. In order not only to resist the disciplines of 'sexuality' and the evacuation of gender from its discourse, but also to take account of lesbian diversity rather than (a singular) lesbian difference from heterosexuality, discursive constructs of 'the lesbian' need to be adequately historicised.

To have and to hold: a body of lesbianism

For radical feminism, the lesbian body represented not only an ontological basis for woman-identification, but also a source for a sexual practice which would not be overdetermined by the phallus as signifier for the very possibility of desire. But the all-conquering success of the critique of essentialism within queer discourse meant that lesbians could no longer so easily mobilise 'the body' as a purposely enigmatic trope — as had been the practice of lesbian feminisms in the 1970s and into the 1980s (see Ch. 3). In Foucauldian terms, on the contrary, the body is produced as an effect of the deployment of historically specific techniques of power. The body has nevertheless been re-invoked by feminists as constitutive ground of a post-Foucauldian feminism in a body-based 'strategic essentialism' which also attempts to address the issue of diversity.

In response to readings of her (1990) critique of 'identity' as counter-intuitive, and possibly anti-feminist, Butler (1993) set out to construct a 'body' of lesbianism which need not cite nature or ontology but which might serve as a reference for political struggle by and for lesbians. In her initial formulation, she had argued that the naturalisation of categories of identity originally narrativised as opposition, such as feminism, can effect further exclusions:

The feminist 'we' is always and only a phantasmic construction [...] which constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent. . . The loss of gender norms [through revealing discursive apparata] would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilising substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: 'man' and 'woman.' (Butler, 1990: 142-145)

Butler has also widely accused of "subjectifying" power as an effect of this model (as have Foucauldian approaches in general). For Jeffreys, it is not only 'power' but its specific form of "heterosexuality" which has been hypostased here, with a resultant deletion of agency in the substantial form of male persons. Noting that "heterosexuality" frequently occupies the grammatical position of articulating subject in Butler's complex syntax, Jeffreys tartly commented that:

This is a "heterosexuality" with a postgraduate degree! A feminist analysis might generally ask in whose interests these regimes were set up and operate, a cui bono question might not seem out of place. Then men might pop into the picture. (Jeffreys, 1994: 99)

Butler responded to such criticism by arguing that it is because 'power' occupies the position of the subject, as producer of subjectivity itself as its own discursive object, that it is misunderstood to have been subjectivised. Power, or construction should be seen, instead, as a process of "reiteration by which both 'subjects' and 'acts' come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, but only a reiterative acting that is power in its persistence and instability" (Butler, 1993: 9). This formulation perpetually recirculates questions of origin: 'power' = acts which '(en)act' power. Ultimately, however, in order to enable a feminist discussion to continue to be pursued, Butler (1993) recommended the tactical deployment of a 'subject' of feminism — but one who must always be accompanied by an interrogative critique of her own positionality and of her exclusionary effects.

In Butler (1993) revision, 'performativity,' as discursive contestation, is nevertheless related to a temporal process of 'materialisation.' The medium of this relationship is the materiality of the body which is produced in regulatory practices which are concretised through repetitions over time. This construct of 'repetition' seems to recall psychoanalytic accounts of the reproduction and regulation of desire by ideological apparata such as that of cinema (see Baudry, 1974-5; 1976). It also seems close to the Marxist construct of 'reification,' now transplanted to a discursive setting, and extended from a misplaced concreteness of ideology realised in economic and social institutions to the whole scope of quotidian experience.

Butler suggested that the 'surfaces' which we take for reality or 'the world' are the materialised phenomena of a discursive 'power.' This power, however, is not to be taken as the subject of history. Discourse produces historically contingent modes of being as subjects of its formations. Nonetheless, resistant subjectivities are defined by exclusions effected through a process of abjection. Subjectivities produced in abjection struggle to shift the discursive boundaries which produce them as abject and, through this struggle, such contingent materialities (re)configure discourses. This process produces diverse and historically contingent modes of being.

"[S]ex" is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. In other words, "sex" is an ideal construct which has been forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize "sex" and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms. (Butler, 1993: 2)

A 'pure' (sexed) body outside of discourse thus cannot be referred to without producing yet another discursively formative effect.

The very reiterations required in order to 'sediment' (reify) a materialised sexuality are, nonetheless, open to deconstruction through an incoherence in reiterations predicated on the instabilities of discursive constructs themselves. The domain of abjection, created as the 'outside' which guarantees the boundary of normative subjective identity, is occupied by 'dis-identifications' whose articulations are "crucial to the re-articulation of democratic contestation" (4). Boundaries between what is (socially) acceptable and what is not (socially) acceptable are renegotiated by taking up the space of 'the abject' and, from this position, mobilising a critique of the dominant. In this way, Butler posited an 'inside' and 'outside' of discursively produced 'reality' without appealing to nature or ontology. But Marxist and post-structuralist constructs such as 'reification' and 'counter-identification' thus appear to have shifted modality from a radical, or systemic, confrontation to a pluralistic, democratic, negotiation.

Grosz argued that Foucault's own focus on bodies and pleasures may reveal a subtextual assumption of a prediscursive body — or perhaps a lacuna in the discursive order of 'sexuality' (155). Foucault was extremely slippery about the relation of discourse to history and of discourse to the material body. If, however, "sex and sexuality are the results of the inscription of particular kinds of power, on what are these inscriptions articulated?" (Grosz, 1994: 155). Grosz delineated a 'strategic' body located across materiality and discourse:

In the face of social constructionism, the body's tangibility, its matter, its (quasi) nature may be invoked; but in opposition to essentialism, biologism, and naturalism, it is the body as cultural product that must be stressed. This indeterminable position enables it to be used as a particularly powerful strategic term to upset the frameworks by which these binary pairs are considered. (Grosz, 1994: 23-4)

This (quasi) nature thus appears as in some sense noumenal in that it is not reducible to discourse but neither is its 'reality' fully accessible to a consciousness produced in discourse. Such a strategy figures 'nature' and 'culture' as mutually productive and argues for an irreducibility of sexual difference which is marked by the body. Indeed it is this difference which enables the articulation of identity, not in difference from an originary plenitude but, on the contrary, an originary difference which is the condition of assignation of linguistic values in a Saussureian sense (although the Saussureian model itself denies any material referent to linguistic difference). Grosz saw a feminist solution to the problem of gendered hierarchy in "the generation of a new productivity between and of the two sexes" (Grosz, 1994: 210). This is not a solution likely to appeal widely to lesbians, however!

De Lauretis (1994) invoked foundational somatic drives to effect a 'bridge' between dislocated (universalised) somatic forces and (contingent) cultural/social forces. In Freudian constructs of gender identification, it is a symbolic abstraction of genital morphology rather than a biologically-determined (gender) difference in sexual 'instinct' by which the formation of gender identity is effected. Normative formations of gender/sexual identity have thus been predicated upon this genital morphology (11). De Lauretis argued that a variety of 'perversions' nevertheless presuppose "an organization dominated by the genital zone. This surely suggests that the norm should be sought elsewhere [...]" (de Lauretis: 11-12, citing Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973: 308). Accordingly, de Lauretis looked, instead, to 'discourse' for the articulation of 'the norm.'

Where Freud fixes the creation of the fetish to a single specific moment in the subject's developmental history [...] I would use his own notion of retroactivity to argue that the lesbian fetish is often constructed retroactively and by a kind of reverse discourse in which the subject makes use of the very categories, male/female and masculinity/femininity, by which sexuality is socially constructed and subjectively apprehended. (De Lauretis, 1994: 264)

This manoeuvre permits some historicisation and diversification of the conditions which produce the specificity of lesbian individuals, but appears to retain a dichotomy between 'psychic' and 'cultural' forces (as do psychoanalytic models themselves). De Lauretis seems to be eliding together a psychoanalytic account of 'culture' with a Foucauldian account of 'discourse:'

At the subjective, intrapsychic, and most concrete bodily level, this psychoanalytic view [Laplanche, 1976] corresponds to Foucault's historical view of sexuality as "an implantation of perversions" in the subject by the discursive and institutional practices (familiar and more broadly social) that constitute the technology of sex [...] For my study of perverse desire, although concerned more with intrapsychic than with institutional mechanisms, is premised on a conception of the sexual that is actually closer to Foucault than to Freud; namely, that individual sexual structuring is both an effect and a condition of the social construction of sexuality [...] (De Lauretis, 1994: 310)

But:

However, the fundamental role of fantasy in sexuality as the ground from which the socio-psycho-sexual subject is constituted through the semiosic process that assigns objects to instincts is certainly not limited to the subject of perverse desire [...] the importance of theorizing fantasy as the semiosic ground of sexuality lies in that fantasy itself, as sociopsychic process, exceeds its historically contingent configurations, the Oedipus included [...] [Freud] intimated and opened the critical path to understanding the semiosic nature of fantasy as that which links the subject to the social through sexuality. (De Lauretis, 1994: 308 – emphasis mine)

This is not, therefore, a discursive model since Foucauldian method would not recognise any such distinction. In a discursive account, the individual is not configured to the social through sexuality, but produced in the discursive formation of sexuality. De Lauretis' model does, perhaps, provide a 'ground' for resistant formations which seems rather less abstractly reactive (and counter-intuitive) than do many discursive articulations. It also permits the specification of gendered (as well as other modes of) oppositional identification in relating them to the contingency of cultural formations. The ontological status of society, history, or culture, seems very unclear, however. De Lauretis seems to use the terms 'society,' 'socio-history,' and 'discourse,' more or less interchangeably. What does seem clear is that 'history' figures here as external to the subject of 'sexuality' (for a 'bridge' is required between these interior and exterior spaces) and that it is fantasy which links universally experienced bodily impulses to the temporal and spatial contingencies of a 'history' which thus seems present in an externalisable (substantive) way. Such a separation is in fundamental contradiction with a Foucauldian method.

Whilst the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality describes the discursive practices and institutional mechanisms that implant sexuality in the social subject, Freudian psychoanalytic theory describes the subjective mechanisms through which the implantation takes, as it were, producing the subject as sexual subject. (De Lauretis, 1994: 309)

This might present a question as to which (or whose) account(s) of this 'history' should be treated as external to subjectivity — as substantive, or as 'the real.'

Material specificities

Black feminists have frequently objected to the ethnocentricity of the universalising construct of 'sexuality.' Butler, following Foucault, had argued that 'power' is inadvertently productive as well as prohibitive and thus produces a diversity of subjectivities:

Hence, the sexuality that emerges within the matrix of power relations is not a simple replication or copy of the law itself, a uniform repetition of a masculinist economy of identity. The productions swerve from their original purposes and inadvertently mobilize possibilities of 'subjects' that do not merely exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in fact, culturally intelligible. (Butler, 1990: 29)

Butler saw this instability in the production of subjectivity as, nevertheless, most marked in the area of sexuality because it is through 'sexuality' that the naturalisation of 'subjectivity' is effected. It is the centrality of this focus on 'sexuality' in queer feminism which has been argued to reveal the very ethnocentricity which, among other things, it sets out to deconstruct.

Inasmuch as work on sexuality [...] insistently draws attention to sexuality as process, produced by discursive sites of power, it erases the ways in which racist discourses work through the cultural imaginary continuously to produce the all-too-visible stigmata of race that may be taken for granted and overlooked. (Dhairyam, 1994: 31)

Whilst queer-lesbians celebrate the liberatory possibilities of transcending the containing force of categories of identity in an indefinite significatory openness, others feel robbed of an enabling frame of reference. It has often been argued, particularly by black lesbians, that it remains strategically necessary to claim (counter-)identifications if minorities are to avoid being "homogenized and censored." Pérez (1994) noted that it would seem that the problematisation of the concept of 'subjectivity' coincided with the historical moment when so many 'subjects' of previously occluded subaltern or sub-cultures began to speak out. Citing the specificity of collectivising historical narratives is thus perhaps now becoming still more crucial. Pérez, as have many white feminists, argued that subaltern identities thus might cite a 'strategic essentialism:'

Strategic essentialism is a type of caucusing with each new caucus making its own rules, agreeing upon its demands, restrictions, freedoms. The process is not permanent or fixed but instead somewhat dialectical, acknowledging irreducible differences within separate sitios y lenguas where the resolution of differences is neither desirable nor necessary [...] essentialising ourselves within countersites thwarts cultural and political suicide [...] (Pérez, 1994: 105)

Pérez' strategy of 'counter-naturalisation' or 'strategic essentialism' does not refer for substantiation to "the (racialised or sexualised) body" but mobilises, instead, a (more Foucauldian) process of recalling collectivising experiences to enable the production and (re)citation of collectivising historical narratives. Such strategies are, nevertheless, routinely dismissed as misguided or outmoded forms of 'subjectivisation' (Pérez, 1994).

Queer's prioritisation of concepts of denaturalisation has also been reframed as despecifying. Pérez noted that, in a repositioning of Irigaray's (1985) argument in "When Our Lips Speak Together" as 'biologistic,' Jardine (1989) omitted sections of Irigaray's original argument (graphically describing female masturbation) because the language "deliberately discountenances" men and "we, too, have always felt a certain uncomfortableness with it" (Jardine, 1989: 66-67). Pérez questioned the falsely inclusory authority of this implicitly heterosexual-feminine 'we' who speak of 'discomfort' with imagery of female genitalia and autonomous female sexual pleasure. Pérez argued that Irigaray herself had demonstrated an awareness of the contingency of her strategic intervention into the Lacanian discourse of 'sexual indifference' on behalf of "the woman." Critique of the "essentialising" tendencies of her work perhaps masks an equally strategic critical occlusion of Irigaray's opening out of a 'female imaginary' and lesbian eroticism in her writing.

Readings of lesbian theorists as 'merely' essentialist are not only heterosexist, but "reduce the experiences to univocality" (Pérez, 1994: 113). Power differences between diverse groups — for example between white women and women of colour — cannot be "reduced by a dream of a common language." It is only through "a political, historical and regional analysis of race and gender relations" that the totalising tendencies of discourse can be circumvented (Pérez, 1994: 112).

Lesbians have also articulated more general anxieties about what seems to be a "loss of memory and location" in desubjectivising models (Creet, 1995: 183). Whilst many recognise a necessity to supersede the exclusionary aspects of identity politics, there is an accompanying unease about the political, or psychic, effects of its loss on those whose identity and status remains fragile.

[T]he insistence on the distinctness of homosexual identity functions politically as a defense against re-incorporation into heterosexuality or into the categorization of what more accurately might be bisexuality. (Creet, 1995: 186)

More recently, bisexuality has, of course, claimed precisely this confusion as the post-modern edge of its bisexual (refusal of) choice (of object) (Hemmings, 1993). The privileging of a degendered construct of 'sexuality' may be motivated by a disavowal of privileged sites of enunciation. 'Sexuality' might appear as the primary referent more readily to white queers and bisexuals.

[I]n privileging the parodic aspects of sexuality through drag, she [Butler] implies that, unlike sexuality, other identities of race or class have more at stake in foundationalist identity politics and are therefore less able to mobilize subversive drag. (Dhairyam, 1994: 29)

Race and class identities are far more likely, although not exclusively, to be mobilised as resistant subjectivities by reference to a shared history of oppression. Like Pérez, Creet effected a Foucauldian transit route from discourse to history via memory: "recollection, contextualised historically, is what gives repetition memory" (196). This is at odds with Butler's privileging of 'performative' counter-identities which are less amenable to being sustained over time in order to "safeguard the openness of the signifier" (Dhairyam, 1994: 29). Finally, an author's own 'performance' as such, as a product of power relations, may also be disavowed in the process of 'desubjectivisation.'

Re-contextualising performance: 'Paris Is Burning'

In Livingstone's (1988/9) documentary Paris is Burning, Latino gay male-to-female transvestites and transsexuals seek a chimerical cultural 'authenticity' by re-circulating cultural codes of dominance in a queer context. These black gay performers also mimic normalising codes of 'blackness,' foregrounding the mutually productive relation of these codes to the sex-gender system. They are, perhaps, most unsettling to identifications of gender and race when their mimicry achieves maximum 'realness.' It seems worth noting that 'realness' is defined by the performers as a mimicry of heterosexual identities by a homosexual person so seamlessly carried off as to enable the performer to "get home with no blood on her." [as defined by Venus Xtravaganza in Paris is BurningThus 'realness' is articulated not by reference to idealised constructs of sex-gender, but to the violence which borders their world, re-fixing the limits of fantasy transformation.

Livingstone's own context is that of a Jewish American lesbian with an ivy-league education. Her film, and the 'high-art' media culture which commercialised and consumed it, was criticised for an appropriative attitude towards black cultural forms. Hooks (1992) argued that "Livingstone approaches her subject matter as an outsider looking in" (151) and asked why it was that "whites [could] so outspokenly make their pleasure in this film heard and the many black viewers who express discontent [...] [have] not named their displeasure publicly?" (153). Butler agreed that "the ethnographic conceit of a neutral gaze will always be a white gaze, an unmarked white gaze, which passes its own perspective off as the omniscient" (136). Unless sufficient 'ambivalence' is opened out in the performances themselves, the audience will effectively "absent itself" from the process of taking its fetishised pleasure. On the whole, Butler did not read such ambivalence in the 'children's' performances. The case that the film naively reproduces a conventional use of ethnographic documentary form is perhaps overstated, however. Livingstone's film is strongly marked by a parody of this form which re-refers (white, middle-class?) spectators' interpretations to a postmodern re-articulation of urban-ethnography. That is, it is marked by a textually deconstructive mode of high-cultural practice — access to which is hardly less privileged, nevertheless. The culturally and economically privileged location of the film's enunciative mode thus appears to remain more or less untroubled by its self-ironising, post-modern, style.

Butler argued that she has been misunderstood as implying that cross-dressed performance is necessarily subversive and that a purely discursive approach may idealise both 'power' and 'resistance.' "[T]he rearticulation of kinship in Paris is Burning might be understood as repetitions of hegemonic forms of power which fail to repeat loyally and, in that failure, open possibilities for resignifying the terms of violation against their violating aims" (Butler, 1993: 124). But there are, of course, forms of drag which heterosexuality produces for its own consumption such as cross-dressing in popular comedy (see Russo, 1981; Kuhn, 1985; Straayer, 1992). Drag is thus an ambivalent form which may also 'reidealize' heterosexual gender-norms (Butler, 1993: 124).

As much as there is defiance and affirmation, the creation of kinship and of glory in that film, there is also the kind of reiteration of norms which cannot be called subversive, but which lead to the death of Venus Xtravaganza [...] To what set of interpellating calls does Venus Xtravaganza respond, and how is the reiteration of the law to be read in the manner of her response? (Butler, 1993: 125)

Butler saw the performances at the balls in Paris is Burning as motivated by phantasy rather than political strategy (though some might feel this boundary is itself hard to establish!). She noted that "feminizing" configurations in the gender hegemony precede 'The Children's' reiterations of them. 'The Children's' aspirational fantasy merely fails, in Butler's terms, to "displace" such norms (133).

For hooks, black male drag performances do articulate a positive resistance to the compulsion to enact black masculinity as "hyper-phallic:"

Many heterosexual black men in white supremacist patriarchal culture have acted as though the primary "evil" of racism has been the refusal of the dominant culture to allow them full access to patriarchal power, so that in sexist terms they are compelled to inhabit a sphere of powerlessness, deemed 'feminine,' hence they have perceived themselves as emasculated. To the extent that black men accept a white supremacist sexist representation of themselves as castrated, without phallic power, and therefore pseudo-females, they will need to overly assert a phallic misogynist masculinity [...] For black males to take appearing in drag seriously, be they gay or straight, is to oppose a heterosexist representation of black manhood. (hooks, 1992: 147)

Hooks (1992) nevertheless read of a loss of "memory and location" in the children's performances; and a resignification of black resistances for white audiences in Livingstone's film:

What viewers witness is not black men longing to impersonate or even become like 'real' black women but their obsession with an idealized fetishized vision of femininity that is white. (148)

What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now and make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited, black folks are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power, and pleasure. (149)

Hooks' comments make (working-class) black femininity appear as 'real,' whilst the yoking of white femininity to privileged class locations in 'The Children's' performances renders it as pure idealisation. For Butler:

[I]t would not be enough to claim that for Venus Xtravaganza gender is marked by race and class, for gender is not the substance or primary substrate and race and class the qualifying attributes. In this instance, gender is the vehicle for the phantasmatic transformation of that nexus of race and class, the site of its articulation. (Butler, 1993: 130 - emphasis hers)

Venus Xtravaganza seeks "a certain transubstantiation of gender in order to find an imaginary man who will designate a class and race privilege that promises a permanent shelter from racism, homophobia, and poverty" (Butler, 1993: 130). But for Butler, 'The Children's' idealising narrativisation and envious mimicry of forms of black femininity also effect "a full-scale phantasmatic transfiguration not only of the plight of poor black and Latino gay men, but of poor black women and Latinas, who are the figures for the abjection that the drag ball scene elevates as a site of idealized identification" (Butler, 1993: 133) — an "idealization which of course works to deny the situation of the great numbers of poor black women [...]" (132). However, 'The Children' themselves originate (and were displaced) from the same working-class, subaltern context as the heterosexual black women whom they parody and who hardly seem poorer or more oppressed than the culturally displaced and economically destitute 'Children' themselves.

Radical feminism characterised M-F drag practices as (undifferentiatedly) appropriative towards an (undifferentiated) category of femininity. M-F performativity thus universally figured as an oppressive 'colonisation' of femininity (Raymond, 1980). Butler (1993) rejected this model as homophobic since it effectively reinscribed heterosexual relations at the heart of homosexuality (127). Butler seemed to be suggesting, instead, that it is not the (undecidable) performativity of drag in itself, but the re-idealisation of (all) femininities effected by the aspirational mode of 'The Children's' performativity which occludes (all) women's oppression in this instance. But Hooks seemed primarily concerned that it is white rather than black femininity which 'The Children' aspire to (their mimicry of local women, indeed, seems more affectionately satirical in tone). Butler's argument thus seems primarily concerned with competing narrativisations of power relations between heterosexual women and homosexual men in (white) queer and feminist discourses. But the implications of this performative imbrication of gender/race/sex discourses may very well prove undecidable in terms of a discursive model without reference to specific locations.

Goldsby (1993) stressed that readings of Paris is Burning needed to be re-situated in an analysis of the materiality of the power-relations amongst which it was produced:

The ball world recycles commodity culture, much as rap music samples from the musical gene pool. In their respective recombinations, both insist upon a sense and system of referentiality that mitigates the ahistoricism of much poststructuralist aesthetic theory. As we ask of rap, What is that riff — who performed it first, and when? so we should ask of the balls, Who is that personality; what are its social origins; [..] [and] what does it mean that the ball never ends [...] It means that Madonna can convert vogueing into excess [...] into a cultural cash crop, banking on the ball world's invisibility and its inability to publicly claim vogueing as its own. (Goldsby, 1993: 111-112)

Butler argued that Venus Xtravaganza "misread the map" of the locations which permit the relatively masculinised Willi Ninja to translate his performance remuneratively to the mainstream context cited by Goldsby. But on what grounds is Venus Xtravaganza's reading held to be inferior in its accuracy? In its divergence from the historicised memory (discursive map) of (white, middle-class) feminists? For Butler, even white heterosexual (middle-class) women's performance of white femininity is inevitably destined for 'disappointment,' since discursive ideals do not make themselves available to perfect renditions. In terms of Butler's own account of materiality, however, heterosexual identifications, materialised through relatively consistent reiterations of its ideal gender-types, must surely effect privilege and are quite unambiguously complicit with power even if inevitably not fully realising its ideal types. 'The Children's' performative idealisations of white femininity may not 'ring true' to a (white, middle-class) feminist historical 'memory' of the nitty gritty of female oppression but, according to Hooks' reading, 'The Children' are by no means in error as to the mode of power's deployment in the fields of class and race:

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself — its way of life — as the only meaningful life there is. (149 – emphasis mine)

It is, then, 'The Children's' complicit strategy rather than their reading of modes of oppression with which hooks took issue.

For Butler, both the limit and confirmation of Venus Xtravaganza's 'realness' as feminine are articulated by male violence and Butler argued that she would have achieved 'transubstantiation' of her poverty more easily by 'doing' masculinity instead. It is thus on this specific terrain of gender that she is argued to have "misread the map."

. . . Willi Ninja can pass as straight; [...] it is [...] no accident that Willi Ninja ascends and Venus Xtravaganza dies. (Butler, 1993: 130)

However, this generalising statement does not seem fully to take into account the specificities of the material locations at which Willi Ninja's performance of masculinity was effected and assimilated.

Masculinised forms of homosexuality seem, indeed, more assimilable to the materialisation of (male) authority in white, heterosexual professional institutions (such as universities) insofar as they effect some denial of a 'feminising' homosexual identification figured as inversion. In other words, homosexual masculinity is a performance which is 'truer' to the (authoritative) norm than that of a drag queen and is thus able to 'pass.' In the context of popular culture, it would seem to be the figure of the effeminate homosexual which is generally more assimilable for circulation and consumption — that is, for the purposes of a (feminising) commodification:

Camp also exerts a unique appeal in popular music [...] Music video, a performative form that, by its very nature, exposes identities as necessary fictions, is already imbued with camp. (Drukman, 1995: 88)

Willi Ninja is, after all, hardly being invited to run the BBC or lecture in post-colonial studies. In any other context but that of 'The Children's' excesses (such as, say, a university), Willi Ninja's performance of masculinity would actually register as highly effeminate. It also seems worth noting, apropos passing, that Venus Xtravaganza's much lighter complexion signifies in her aspiration to transform her abjected identity and pass as (feminine) and white. Willi Ninja, on the other hand, could not pass as white.

A 'post-feminist' heterosexual femininity, moreover, may not attempt a 'true' representation of femininity. Female stars, in particular, may foreground the fetishisation of femininity in its production as spectacle (as in Madonna's mode of performativity). The availability of Willi Ninja's performance for commodification is clearly not, in this context, predicated on any kind of mimesis of (authoritative) heterosexual (white) masculinity. Willi Ninja's queer performance of an ambiguous black sexuality seems to materialise the discursive production of ambiguities in the contradictory 'feminising' and 'hyper-virilising' coding of black masculinity. The foregrounding of these inconsistencies renders Willi Ninja's body commodifiable as postmodern art(ifice). Willi Ninja, in fact, makes no discernible effort to pass as heterosexual. Venus Xtravaganza's mimesis of an idealised white femininity is, on the other hand, all too 'true.' Her feminine masquerade is disrupted only by the physical literality of her covert possession of 'the phallus' and by her ethnicity which signify as the contradictory 'truth' of her body, troubling her mimesis of white femininity and resignifying her performance as pathos "by a certain failure to pass completely" (129). In effect, she is just not playing the (postmodern) game. Willi Ninja's comlex ambiguity, on the other hand, offers a perfect post-modern commodity.

Hooks (1992) went on to assess Madonna's complicity with racist constructions of black masculinity in her crotch-grabbing, postmodern, pop performance:

She [Madonna] longs to assert phallic power, and like every other group in this white supremacist society, she clearly sees black men as embodying a quality of maleness that eludes white men. Hence, they are often the group of men she most seeks to imitate, taunting white males with her own version of 'black masculinity.' When it comes to entertainment rivals, Madonna clearly perceives black male stars like Prince and Michael Jackson to be the standard against which she must measure herself and that she ultimately hopes to transcend. (hooks, 1992: 161)

These two stars referred to as epitomising this racialised, sexist, hyper-virilised representation of black masculinity are also cited by Terence Trent D'Arblay (Garber, 1992: 274) as, on the contrary, epitomising the feminisation (emasculation) mapped over light-complexion (via the association of feminine-desirability with whiteness) which D'Arblay argued to be a precondition of crossover success for African-American male pop stars. What has rendered these accounts of the gender-coding of the black male performers so contradictory here? That the one critique articulates a black, heterosexual male enunciative position and the other a black, heterosexual, female one? Or does it merely cite the ambiguities inherent to the discursive production of black masculinity?

In discursive terms, any mode of counter-identification (indeed any discursive formation at all) is inevitably incoherent and contradictory. It is not so much the consistency of Willi Ninja's performance with an idealised (unified) masculinity as a particular configuration of discursively produced ambiguities at a particular location which makes Willi Ninja available, as a figure, to Madonna's mode of performativity. This figure is strategically appropriated to counterpoint the production of Madonna's post(modern)feminist masquerade - by highlighting its artifice (as well as its whiteness). What renders the performances in Paris is Burning politically ambivalent for hooks is the "racialized fictional construction of the 'feminine' that suddenly makes the representation of whiteness as crucial to the experience of female impersonation as gender [...] a sexist idealization of white womanhood" (hooks, 1992: 147). The inconsistent recirculation of codings of fetishised black hyper-virility along with an equally fetishised white femininity foregrounds the formerly covert strategy of the (white) feminine masquerade in Madonna's performance. It is this ironic foregrounding of a formerly covert female appropriation of the phallus which signifies Madonna's performance as 'post-feminist.' The enhancement of this technique, by associating it with Willi Ninja's dark complexion and gender-ambiguous performance, might very well 'come undone' if it had been counterpointed, instead, to Venus Xtravaganza's light complexion and hyper(phallic)feminine masquerade.

The production and reproduction of sex-gender coding is strongly inflected by the multiplicity of inter-textual locations of repeatable performance and cannot be assigned 'correct' or 'incorrect' readings.

Re-contextualising spectatorship

In terms of film textuality, resistant spectatorship is constituted not only in the production of an ironised 'space' through a spectator's sense of 'lack of fit' with the visual-spatial or narrative coding offered by dominant cinema, nor only in the consistency or inconsistency of diegetic performances. Resistant spectators do not read films seamlessly in accord with preferred meanings however much they may go along, more or less, with the pleasures of its fantasy scenario during the performance. Some locally (or sub-culturally) reflexive re-narrativisation also takes place. As Young (1996) pointed out, the full implications of anti-essentialist positions in accounts of the cultural specificity of spectatorship are often not fully appreciated:

For example, they [Stam and Spence, 1985: 641] write of how a North American spectator taking a different reading from the text's preferred meaning is deemed to have misread the scene from a Brazilian film, rather than to have made sense of the scene in terms of their own cultural context. This is inconsistent with their use of the more favourable, more academic term 'aberrant reading' to refer to Latin American audiences' interpretations of a Hollywood text. (Young, 1996: 9-10)

At the same time, Young doubted whether, for example, white audiences are always successfully and seamlessly sutured into the colonialist perspective which 'hails' them as such through the form of the dominant text. It must also be open to spectators to "consciously choose" (10) a dissident identification. If 'consciousness' (the discursive organisation of subjectivity) — and its 'repetition' in the processes of spectatorship — are not given but are sites of discursive struggle, this must be the case.

The multiplicity of locations (in institutionalised relations of power) cited by the production, distribution, and consumption of a text or performance also need to be taken into account. At the same time as conflicts and incoherences in practices and locations of 'performance' and 'spectatorship' are recognised, it needs also to be taken into account that the discourses and practices of postmodernity have reconstituted the productive contexts and strategies of popular and marginal cinemas. That is, the cinematic text itself may be seen as increasingly diversified. Moreover, in a postmodern ethos, the conventional coding of popular film-narratives, and of the scopic regime itself, is becoming increasingly ironised.

This 'undecidability' in the post-modern text and the ever-increasing agility of its diverse readers made 'aberrant' discourses assimilable in an unprecedented way. The next chapter looks at the recirculation of 'PoMo Homo' discourse in the segmented mainstream media culture in the 1990s.