Chapter 1: Feminist Theory and the Lesbian Spectator

Very little work has been done specifically on lesbians and film — either concerning representation of lesbians or lesbian spectatorship. Much of the work done by feminists concerns representation of heterosexual femininity and male spectatorship. This discussion has been shaped by psychoanalysis — particularly the work of Laura Mulvey in the 1970s. According to Mulvey's theory, the sight of the eroticised female arouses castration fear in the male spectator. In order to disarm this anxiety, the woman must either be fetishised to cover the 'absence' of the penis, or controlled and punished. Dietrich's diagetic transvestism would then be seen as part of a fetishistic 'phallicising' in order to render her acceptable as erotic object for the male spectator. The female spectator is offered only the possibility of narcissistic over-identification with the eroticised spectacle, or unstable movement between 'transvestite' identification with the male position and passive female identification.

Mulvey's theorisation seemed to bar the possibility of female subjective identifications per se. 'The woman' could only identify herself as passive object of the controlling male gaze or 'oscillate' between 'phallic' and 'passive' positions. Although Mulvey recognised the lesbian implications of the 'transvestism' of such 'phallic' identification, lesbian identification as such was more or less inconceivable. Much of the ensuing discussion revolved around the image of Marlene Dietrich in the Von Sternberg films constructed around her, in which the male protagonist is absent from the relay bringing the male spectator into direct rapport with the woman as spectacle. (It is paradoxical that lesbian spectatorship was effectively written out, because Dietrich has been a lesbian icon since the 1930s; partly because of the gossip surrounding her own sexuality, and partly because her 'androgyny' appealed to lesbian audiences).

Feminist and lesbian critics have worked within the parameters of psychoanalytic theory trying to insert the lesbian subject into a framework which excludes the possibility even of full, adult female subjectivity. In order to be a subject at all, the lesbian (or woman) must take on a male subject position. The only course open to feminism was seen as the subversion of the phallocentrism of the patriarchal symbolic order. A 'non-phallic' lesbian identity was seen as subversive in these terms, but such non-phallic lesbian pleasure was situated pre-Oedipally and could not, therefore, constitute a powerful female agency. Much recent theory has begun to break down the either/or-ness of psychoanalytic theory of gender identifications and to theorise gendered subjective experience as far less stable than has been assumed by film theory in the past.

The main strategy for imagining a specifically female (or lesbian) subjectivity within the terms of psychoanalysis was the concept of femininity as 'masquerade'. Following Riviere's conceptualisation of the female masquerade, it was theorised that the female spectator could develop a distance from over-identification with the passive female as erotic object through the feminine excess of, for example, Dietrich's image. A capable, active woman may be punished by men for, supposedly, adopting a 'phallic' social position. In order to conceal 'possession' of the phallus, such a woman might adopt a 'masquerade' of excessive femininity to fool the males around her and thus escape punishment for being successful in male terms. This separation creates the necessary distance to provide a spectatorial position for the woman which is not phallic.

It has been pointed out that there is some positional confusion here — Dietrich is on-screen and it would be hard for the female spectator to manifest a feminine masquerade in a darkened cinema. However, what is crucially being suggested is that the excess of femininity points to an objectification of femininity as representation by, of, and for the woman. Feminist commentaries on the femme fatale of the noir cycle draw further attention to the way in which the deployment of the erotic spectacle of femininity, covering the self-interested hidden agenda of the fatal 'femme-phallic subject', indicates (with Irigaray's ironic distance) an 'elsewhere', or necessary distance, by which 'the female' can represent herself.

Critics such as Silverman deployed Deleuze's analysis of masochism to posit masculine subjectivity as much less fixed at a position of phallic identification. The feminist view that the masculine subject invariably subjects The Woman to a controlling, phallic gaze is now questioned. Clover [1992] challenged the view that in the mythological structure of the horror genre there are two basic and fixed subject positions: that of a (phallic) mobile, heroic being who 'penetrates' closed spaces, and that of an immobile (feminine) being who personifies the damp dark space constituting that which is to be overcome. She argues that forms of horror and science fiction recall an older 'single-sex' construction of gender in which gender identifications were more plastic and reversible.

Clover argues that the scopic regime of the classic narrative is disrupted in horror as the 'phallic-sadistic' gaze of the killer is genre-coded as doomed and ultimately powerless (the feminisation of the 'psychopath' is a further sign of this disempowerment). The male spectator is aligned with the 'reactive', (i.e. feminine) moment of looking — of being suspended in horrorful anticipation. The 1970s phenomenon of 'the final girl' (of the 'slasher' genre) takes the form of the crucial male fantasy of overcoming through suffering — recalling the Oedipal conflict and resolution. The girl-victim is repeatedly subjected to suspenseful fear of dismemberment before overcoming the killer. Clover suggests that the extremity of this anxiety can only be controlled by 'running it through' a woman. That is, the male spectator is able to rehearse his masculine anxiety and yet displace and disown it — 'it's not me, it's a female body'.

Studlar also deploys a theory of masochism to explore female spectatorship. She argues that fetishised ultra-feminine or transvestite dress — the masquerade — in Dietrich's films does not function to cover for the missing phallus. Male identification with Dietrich is pre-Oedipal involving a disavowal of the father's phallic power and its redistribution onto the authoritative pre-Oedipal mother and a playful, multiple sensuality. Dietrich's cross-dressing undermines the naturalisation of sexual difference and heterosexual desire.

Studlar further argues that the 'relay of the gaze' is changed by the absence of the diagetic male protagonist in Dietrich's films. According to Mulvey in the absence of a diagetic protagonist, the male spectator is brought into direct erotic rapport with the fetishised female. Studlar points out that this would also bring the female/lesbian spectator into direct erotic rapport with the image. There is thus a 'subversive' female-to-female looking in which identification is disseminated between desire for and identification with the authoritative, eroticised woman.

De Lauretis [1991] takes the Deleuzian reading of the dissemination of subjectivity through the 'child is being beaten' scenario further in the search for a non-heterosexual theory of lesbian spectatorship. In her analysis of She Must Be Seing Things, de Lauretis sees a constant shifting in subject-object configurations in the diagetic relationship between the women, in which the gaze of the lesbian spectator is implicated. The diagetic 'femme' is identified with the filmmaker (the controlling 'phallic' gaze of the camera and the extra-diagetic investigator-narrator). Diagetically, the 'butch' occupies the position of investigator and protagonist, with whom the enunciative position appears complicit.

The subjectivity of the spectator is thus distributed between diagetic subject-object, and intra- and extra-diagetic enunciative positions (the investigator investigages the investigator). Such films as Desert Hearts represent fixed diagetic 'butch/femme' positions, omniscient realism effaces narrative production, and thus heterosexual identifications are reproduced. She Must Be Seing Things, however, effects a radical departure and provides a non-heterosexual structure for lesbian subjectivity. This conceptualisation of lesbian subjectivity — that it is necessarily disseminated through subject-object positions — is becoming the dominant paradigm of psychoanalytic lesbian theory.

On the one hand, there is a pleasurable feeling running through much recent critical commentary on film and lesbian/gay photographic art that gender distinctions are in crisis. Critics such as Straayer [1990] argue that '[no] longer feared, female sexuality is envied' and that gender polarity has, at least to some extent, collapsed into post-modern confusion, in part through the success of feminism. On the other hand, there is growing concern amongst many feminists that the continuing oppression of women is becoming elided by the very instability of gendered representation provoked in part by feminism. The female subjective position has perhaps slipped through our fingers yet again and melted into an ideal androgynous (or bisexual) subjectivity, unable to grasp and engage with the real conditions of a gendered social order and the negative effects for women of its representational regimes.

Gay Film Criticism, 'Queer' Politics
and Sub-Cultural Identifications

Gay critical perspectives on representation do not draw so heavily (if at all) on psychoanalysis. Formative work in gay film (and literary) criticism relied heavily on the related concepts of 'gay sensibility' (product of an unstable and alienated gay subjectivity), 'camp', and Barthesian semiotics. Where 1970s lesbian/ feminist critics yearned for an 'authentic' lesbian/ female subject, gay critics always revelled in the artificiality of camp, 'making strange', and blatantly 'performative' identities. The extra-textual reader/spectator has been foregrounded to a much greater extent in gay criticism through analysis of the role of media in constructing gay/lesbian identities: the development and constant redeployment of a 'gay sensibility' in reading 'against the grain'. Semiotics is seen as a development of gay subcultural reading strategies.

There are considerable problems with the theory of 'the gay sensibility' which is often theorised as a-historical. It is assumed, in much the same way as some feminist theory of lesbianism assumes, that there is a continuity of 'gay' experience which is neither historically nor culturally specific, and that there are reading strategies common to gay people as a whole. Whilst I do not believe that any such culturally non-specific concept can be valid, nevertheless, it seems that psychoanalytic theory makes no less unacceptable universal claims.

Psychoanalysis is not the explanation of gender organisation, but a contemporary form of its reproduction as an exercise of power; as well as a site of feminist resistance. Representations of 'the female' (including lesbianism) are products of gender struggle. Although women's discourses have been systematically suppressed, the effects of women's resistance in heterosexual male experience must condition mainstream representations of 'the female', albeit in the form of male perception and priorities. We may have had limited access to women's discourses in the past, but this does not mean that women have had no part in structuring dominant discourses of gender: traces of women's resistance must and do resonate through male discourses (just as traces of gay self-representation do). Furthermore, conflicts within feminist, gay and 'queer' politics are not products of pure disagreement, but of the discontinuous and relatively incoherent exercise of patriarchal power, the different positions which it offers, different strategies for resistance, and different oppositional identities.

Any critical concepts must be situated by what Foucault [1982] calls '[...] the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualisation [...] [and] [...] the type of reality with which we are dealing.' Lesbianisms are forms of resistance to specific forms of power. It is in the subcultural discourses of white lesbianism that this (particular) critique of the dominant patriarchal discourse of gender originates (there are many other sites of resistance to gender). Without granting any particular ontological status to lesbianisms, I do not want, on the other hand, to treat the lesbian spectator as (a) universal, and (b) nothing more than a position offered by a text. The discursive spaces of lesbianism are occupied by lesbian subjects, who bring to reading oppositional interpretative strategies motivated by specific 'conceptual needs'.

Popular Cinema and its Discontents

Much of the arguments around popular culture in lesbian, gay and queer politics are structured by concepts of 'positive images'. At present, queer politics is marked by an incoherent conceptualisation of 'queerness', in which homosexuality is simultaneously an authentic existential condition on the basis of which liberatory claims can be made; and also radically subversive of fixed identities. It is accordingly never clear whether a 'positive image' is one which tends to represent lesbianism or homosexuality as deserving of incorporation into the dominant order, or as deconstructive of that order. Within feminism, there was a parallel dispute about phallicisation/ feminisation. That is, whether to valorise characteristics designated 'male' (such as power, initiative, combatativeness) as enabling for women; or whether such characteristics were in fact the problem of patriarchy which could be overcome only by valorising characteristics designated 'female' (such as nurturing, sensitivity, etc.) This debate was effectively transposed into the 1980s dispute as to whether the female subject occupied a 'phallic' position or whether feminine excess could provide a more subversive and critical distance from patriarchal language.

There has been much lesbian, gay and feminist anger directed at films such as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instincts because they portray strong, independent women 'negatively', as psychopathic and evil. Reaction to films such as The Silence of the Lambs was ambivalent — on the one hand, the figure of Agent Starling, strong female protagonist, subverts the scopic regime of the horror-thriller and yet, on the other, the feminised (homosexual) male is demonised. Feminist critics tend to focus on one or other axis of gender in 1980s fantasy/horror/action films — either on the phallicised female or on the demonised feminine (except where these coincide as in Fatal Attraction and Basic Instincts). Although feminist analysis of the horror genre tends to focus on masculine spectatorial identifications and anxieties, Williams [1984] suggests that women (and, perhaps, particularly lesbians) may identify with 'the monstrous-female'. Lesbians often do identify with images such as the lesbian vampire. In approaching films such as Alien, feminist critics tend to focus either on the (phallicised) female protagonist or, following a Kristevan line, on the 'monstrous mother' and male anxiety about 'abjection' and 'reabsorbtion'.

It appears to me that implications for feminism and the lesbian spectator can be read more clearly by attending rather to the ways in which these axes are combined in fantasy genres during the last decade or so. Why does the 'phallic' female subject always seem to be represented in relation to (or in combination with) a monstrous-femininity? What happens when both poles of lesbian sub-cultural identification — female-victim-hero and monstrous-feminine — are combined, but from an enunciative position solely complicit with the masculine? Why is such a combination appearing so regularly in contemporary horror/sci-fi?

Alien, Aliens and Terminator II were popular with many lesbians because their central protagonist is seen as a 'strong', and also relatively unfeminised, woman. Ripley is only represented as sexually vulnerable in one (much discussed) scene at the end of the film. She wears army fatigues and is in control in a male universe, if not from the beginning, at least by the end of the narrative. Lesbian identification appears on the face of it to be simply narcissistic identification with a 'more complete' ego — that is, that lesbians are denying their 'lack' (as the Freudians would have it) and identifying with the male position. However, each of these films is actually profoundly different in the ways in which they represent the 'Amazon' and, perhaps, exemplify the diversity of possible lesbian identifications.

I would seem that, in practice, subjective identification can no longer be coherently systematised in the ways suggested by psychoanalysis (if it every could). Lesbian identifications in these films may not have an invariable structure — a foundational form. Lesbian eroticism may also take diverse forms. The incoherences are, of course, meaningful only in the context of the relative coherence of (psychoanalytic) theory.

I have chosen the films Red Sonja, Aliens, and Terminator II because many lesbians are attracted to and identify with the representation of combatative, masculinised women which they foreground. Academic feminist (psychoanalytic) criticism, on the other hand, has attended more to the demonisation of the feminine. To me, these films appear to exemplify mainstream appropriations of feminism into male discourses during the 1980s. They show 'positive' images of 'strong' female protagonists, yet struggle to reassert mastery over 'the feminine' in the patriarchal order. This may seem just an exercise in adding to the 'undecidability' of these film texts, but, nevertheless, it is good lesbian policy to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. I want to look at what is being articulated or read in these films, by whom, for whom, and in what context. I will look at films featuring female warriors both in the light of existing theories of lesbian subjectivity and identification, and also in their specific contexts. Most of the films which I will be looking at exemplify the 'progressive' end of the horror-genre, but it is important that lesbians and feminists remain critically aware of hidden reactionary gender-politics by which we may also be being 'hailed'.

Chapter 2: The horror of feminism

Monstrous feminism and the avenging Amazon

On the whole, feminists and lesbians tend to treat the figure of the Amazon as a positive trope for lesbianism and/or feminism. On the one hand, she has the 'masculine' characteristics of strength, physicality and activity and, on the other, she is female-oriented. Her combination of male and female characteristics apparently undermines the exclusivity of gender categories. Her 'chastity' combined with her 'phallic' physicality has obvious lesbian implications. She is perceived by many lesbians and feminists as both 'positive' and 'subversive'.

Representations of the Amazon or female warrior in patriarchal culture, however, may acknowledge a perceived 'threat' of female aggression and seek to neutralise it. Narratives of female militancy tend to enjoy a resurgence in Western patriarchal cultures precisely at historical moments in which there has been an exceptional opening out of gender categories under pressure of social change and political contestation. As patriarchy struggles to restructure, the Amazon classically signifies male anxiety about gender disorder and efforts at containment of that anxiety. From classical times in the West, the warrior-maid has been constituted as sexual spectacle for the male onlooker, and her 'chastity' represented as passive sexuality — as loyalty to heterosexual values. Alternatively, and sometimes as 'alter-ego' of the 'good' Amazon, often in the same text, the sexualised Amazon, who subjects men to feminine rule, is pathologised, ridiculed, and violently destroyed.

Representation of the masculinised female body in contemporary horror/sci-fi seems to be the site of lesbian subcultural identification; as much as the occupation of the phallic subject position of protagonist by a female-sexed body. This is partly because it recalls the homosexualised representation of the male body as object of desire in the same genre (gladiatorial 'beefcake'). It is also because such gender-confused representation fits easily into the current preoccupations of 'queer' politics. A further element of appeal is that lesbians have always been particularly concerned with the practical expression of an autonomous lesbian/female agency, and, historically, cross-dressing has been a means of achieving either a practical autonomy not available to women or of expressing and signifying a forbidden, active sexuality. The masculinised bodies of the female warrior-protagonist reproduce the desired effects of cross-dressing for lesbians (in a more socially acceptable form which can also appeal to heterosexual feminists). Lesbians may also make the connection to the historically documented incidences of lesbians 'passing' as male soldiers.

Contemporary representations of militant women do not necessarily denote a positive male response to feminism, nor an increasing respect for women's demands for autonomy. They are more likely to represent an effort at amelioration of male anxieties and a struggle to redefine the challenged boundaries of gender categories in order to prevent their collapse. But this does not mean that their pleasures are necessarily 'bad' for lesbians, or feminists. Read through a lesbian subcultural context (this does not refer to the 'biographical' status of the lesbian reader, but the context in which she finds herself) the film-text may become instrumental in the continuous project of 'securing [oppositional] sexual political [...] identifications'. Such a reading would not have universal validity but is 'particular to the needs of a specific readership'. [Bristow, 1990]

I am paraphrasing conceptualisations of reading strategies for 'gay' texts — that is texts 'authored' by gay people in which the subcultural context is seen as enabling gay writing and informing gay reading. However, for many lesbians and gays, popular culture is a major site of such specific reading and 'securing of identifications'. It seems important, therefore, to bring a similar kind of analysis to popular texts which have acquired lesbian subcultural importance. I want to explore why/how many lesbians find pleasure in certain mainstream films which, at best, deny or suppress lesbian identifications and, at worst, demonise and condemn lesbianism.

The Independent Woman Goes To Hollywood

The question of female independence became a predominant theme of popular US cinema by the end of the 1970s. Besides a number of films concerning 'female buddies' and the single-working-woman towards the end of the 1970s, the female protagonist began to appear in the traditionally male genre of the thriller. The most self-consciously pro-feminist of these pit the heroine against a corporate conspiracy involving the misuse of technology. Alien has been described as a 'sci-fi-thriller', and these thrillers have technology as a major theme. Such films as Coma (1978), China Syndrome (1979), Alien (1979) and Silkwood (1983), express the dystopian vision of technology typical of the 1970s — fed by revelations of the full horrors of the nuclear age, combined with cold-war paranoia, and anxiety about the increasing 'corporatisation' of American life. Feminist militancy is represented relatively positively in these films, as justifiable concern.

For the male spectator, however, the alienation of 'the woman' in patriarchal culture becomes a metaphor for the alienation of male individuals in the modern world signified by the thriller protagonist's conventional mystification and lack of control over the events which drive the narrative. In other words, the feminist protagonist here signifies the feelings of loss of control of the part of the male spectator — his 'feminisation' by the evil corporation. The physical vulnerability of the female protagonist's body intensifies the suspenseful pleasure of the thriller.

By the mid-1980s, the female protagonist-heroine was becoming more incorporated as explicitly sexual spectacle in the fantasy-comic tradition, in films such as Night of the Comet (1984), Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (1984), Supergirl (1984), Red Sonja (1985) and Aliens (1986). Whilst these heroines are clearly offered as 'positive images', they are basically 'exploitation flicks' aimed at bringing female audiences into an area of the market traditionally restricted to young male audiences. By the end of the 1980s, the independent 'single-working-woman' was being sexually pathologised in such films as Black Widow (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987), Fatal Beauty (1987).

Feminism, Militancy, Motherhood, and Monstrosity in Science Fiction

The science-fiction films which I will be looking at bring an Amazon into conflict with a monstrous 'mother' (animal or mineral) protecting a 'genus'. The Amazon is a 'good' mother. Her body has been increasingly masculined and laden with military hardware, but the heroine is militant on behalf of her offspring. Feminist psychoanalytic readings of 'monstrous motherhood' in horror/ science fiction, whether they include extra-textual reference or not, attribute such apparitions to rehearsing of 'the primal scene', or to anxiety about 'abjection', and/or the 'archaic mother'. These anxieties are read as male, and the subversive potential of horror is interpreted in terms of its power to unsettle the normalising construct of gender. Williams [1984] and Creed [1990] both conclude, by different routes, that there is a subversive representation of a potent, non-phallic sexuality in the monstrous-female. Clover's [1992] analysis, which works to undermine the inevitability of the male's controlling phallic gaze in horror, focusses on male identification with 'the final girl'. The heterosexual exclusion of same-sex eroticism remains substantially unchallenged.

Images of non-biological generation in science fiction are products of its most central preoccupation: the perpetual renegotiation of what it means to be 'human'. Psychologically intense images of monstrous motherhood, parthogenesis and artificial birth are related to fears of disturbance in the 'natural' order — and the very demarcation of nature and culture — produced not only by alarmingly rapid social and technological change, but also by the postmodern problematisation of the category 'man'. Included in the many political challenges to this category are feminism and homosexuality.

The question of the lawfulness of the 'natural' reproductive order is dealt with through the theme of monstrous birth. This theme is often worked out through representation of the feared collapse of the boundaries of the biological and the technological (as in Frankenstein) thus vitiating not only gender categories, but the essence of 'the human'. The ostensible role of women in such narratives is, 'naturally', that of the biological, and technology is coded male. Technology is generally considered a male bastion, and to be represented as emphatically phallic tool of human progress. This is often the case, particularly in 1940s and some 1960s science fiction. However, technology is by no means necessarily coded masculine. Not only is science fiction perhaps the only genre which has fairly consistently represented women as a-sexual in the roles of technicians and scientists, but it has equally consistently concerned itself with 'man that is born of woman'.

In the early decades of the 20th century, there were a number of films made about illicit, technological 'birth', or transformation, by mad scientist unleashing evil on the world: Frankenstein (1910, 1931), Homunculus (1915), Alraune (1918, remade 1928), A Blind Bargain (1922), Metropolis (1925). Films dealing directly with this theme thin out in the 1940s and 50s but recur with a vengeance in the 1970s in films such as Embryo (1976), Demon Seed (1977) . In 1980s dystopias, androids or artificial intelligences run amok — too numerous to mention — in films such as Blade Runner (1982). The products of such tampering with or imitation of 'the female' are, if not actually female, 'other', and coded female.

Jardine [1985] and Creed [1990] argue that anxiety around the instability of the post-modern subject is displaced onto 'the feminine' as the uncanny through a process dubbed 'gynesis'. It is also at the level of the uncanny that 'the feminine' is interpreted as subversive. Representations of the imagined social role of women (the realistic) in a future world usually refer more or less directly to contemporaneous discourses on 'the woman question'. It is at this level of representation that pro-feminism is likely to be manifest. If these films manifest superficial pro-feminist content, how then do we interpret the covert presence of the — duly demonised — 'female-subversive'?

It is argued that 'the uncanny' is of itself coded female. However, fears of diminishing 'difference' in a corporate society may also be displaced and expressed in Anglo-American culture as a 'lack' of phallic individualism. The technological may then be coded 'female' via a slippage between a concept of the 'logic' of 'natural selection'; the 'rational' principles of social utilitarianism (and 'contract' theory generally); and the figure of the mother as terrifyingly ruthless in ensuring the survival of her offspring. One of the clearest examples of this kind of coding is Wyndham's Consider Her Ways, in which the 'feminine' ant colony is deployed as metaphor for a fictional feminine society as a ruthless survival machine.

This kind of imagery segued into a paranoid apprehension of 'scientific' (Stalinist) communism in US 1950s science fiction. The 'bodysnatching' sub-genre exemplifies this form of paranoia. It Came From Outer Space (1953), Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956), I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958) (whose 'alien' characteristics are humorously terrestrial to feminist spectators!), Invaders from Mars (1953); in Village of the Damned (1960). It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) is generally credited as the original of the Alien plot in which bodysnatching becomes literally 'monstrous birth'.

The metaphor can also be traced in analogies between feminism and 'Stalinism' (or even 'Fascism') in anti-feminist re-presentations of feminist discourses, particularly during the 'pornography wars' of the 1980s. In the 1980s and '90s, anxiety about the dis-appearing human (white, Western, male) individual (whether into corporatism, an uncertain world-order, the collapse of metaphysics, feminism, or the 'computer-virtual') appears as science fictional obsession with Artificial Intelligence, Androids, cybernetics, corporatism, the Single-Working-Woman-in-space, reproductive technology, and 'monstrous-motherhood'. The invading or technological 'alien' always manifests the mother-as-survival-machine qualities of collectivity and ruthless, unemotional logic without the 'human' (male) characteristics of individualism and creative inspiration.

In the 'post-feminist' decades, individualistic (phallic) characteristics may be personified by a female protagonist; and the de-humanising corporation by mother-as-survival-machine. However, the latter no longer signifies the paranoia of MacCarthyism but the ethos of the multi-national corporation, all-too-clearly out of 'democratic' control, and intent on subordinating the (male) individual to its corporate (female) ends. The popular male conception of feminism in the 1980s is also that of anti-individualism, and the subordination of men to its 'corporate' interest — in short, an imagined monstrous regiment of 'the female'. Thus, such purportedly 'progressive' film narratives may simultaneously validate the tokenistic incorporation of women to the ranks of a phallic-individualist 'pro-feminism', whilst demonising 'the feminine' (feminism) as ruthless corporatism — and demonising (actually male) corporatism as 'alien-feminine'. Confused? You will be!

Where does the lesbian subject find herself (as she clearly does) in these narratives? Are these texts 'positive' and 'progressive' in feminist terms. If not, how are lesbian spectators 'reading against the grain' in order to experience a pleasurable/ subversive identification and/or desire? Are lesbian spectators identifying with the androgynous 'final girl', or with the subversive erotic potential of the 'monstrous feminine'? Or is lesbian subjectivity disseminated through narrative positions in quite a different way?

Chapter 3: Science-fiction and feminism

For all that their plots are more or less sequential, Alien and Aliens are profoundly different narratives, generated by different contexts. It is not only that Aliens has the much faster editing which makes it formally an action-adventure-thriller; but the scopic regime is fundamentally different (partly as a result of the editing). Aliens picks up some of the visual effects of Alien (as does Terminator II) — in particular, the obscure vision and reliance on instrument-readings and scanners where eye-vision is obscure or not available — but its significance is altered. It is at the level of narrative structure and 'realism' that Alien's self-consiously pro-feminist gender-discourse is articulated. It is rather at the level of the irreal — the fantastic — that the film reads female-negative. The narrative conventions of horror/sci-fi are repeated but also undermined, and at this level a more general commentary about 'alien-ness' can be read.

The Lesbian and the Other Woman — Alien

Alien destabilises genre and narrative conventions, generating an atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoid suspense. Visual control is perpetually denied to the spectator. In the opening sequences, there is no central focus of identification (Ripley emerges gradually as protagonist). Ripley's female body undercuts the mastery of phallic subjectivity as protagonist. The cargo ship's 'old-dark-house' (represented literally as body) interiors are claustrophobic and restrict visual orientation. The alien ship is mainly viewed through (frequently defective) instrument scanners. 'Eye-views' are obscured by darkness, mist and the sheer hugeness of the object. The scopic relay from male spectator, through camera, through protagonist, is estranged disrupted — 'interfered with'. Much of the action in the first part of the film is viewed on monitor screens-within-cinema screen. The diagetic camera is attached to the headgear of protagonists and viewed on monitor by other protagonists. The monitor images constantly break up due to 'interference'. Mastery of the image is denied both to protagonists and to the cinematic spectator. The viewer has the constant sensation of straining to see properly — of struggling to master the image.

The cargo-ship setting has taken on the familiarity of the everyday for the sci-fi fan; and is filmed in a style reminiscent of cinema verite. In this setting, struggles familiar to the feminist and lesbian spectator unfold. Issues of class, gender and race are addressed. Parker and Brett agitate for better bonuses, have a generally recalcitrant attitude; turn on steam valves, jocularly pretending they cannot hear the middle-class-woman Ripley's orders. Towards the end of the film, Parker and Ripley draw slightly closer together as each recognises 'common-sense' in the other. Stereotypical masculinity and femininity are critically addressed. Lambert panics, Dallas disregards safety with impatient machismo, Parker's black-macho posturing jumps the gun (and he is unable to act when Parker 'freezes' blocking his aim). As Ripley tries to enforce safety at work, she is contested by the emotional appeals of the feminised Lambert and actually overridden by Ash, who ignores her position of hierarchical authority and acts insubordinately. When Ripley takes him to task, he is clearly resentful of her female authority. The form of his murder attempt, as she uses her authority to override computer security and uncover his duplicity, resembles rape in cold rage — as assertion of challenged male authority.

Homo-social bonding is also critically addressed in the framing as Ash, Dallas and Ripley discuss returning the dead alien to earth, just after Ash has pushed the alien-spider onto Ripley (any girl will remember this from the playground) who cowers behind Dallas' masculine protectiveness. Dallas and Ash's heads are foregrounded, Ripley's head is smaller in the background. As Ash ridicules Ripley's concerns (as feminine 'irrational' fears), he faces out from the screen looking towards Dallas (and the male spectator), in a familiar male-exclusionary manoeuvre (any girl will remember this from the office). Interestingly, there is an almost identical frame with the same significance in The Silence of the Lambs. There is critical irony here because identification with Ripley has already been forged and subsequent narrative developments will show Ripley to be right and Ash to be duplicitous and inhuman. Dallas then ridicules Ripley's feminine-conscientious concern that they are 'blind' on some decks — again events will show Ripley to be right and their 'blindness' becomes literally loss of control as their scanning instrumentation repeatedly fails.

The distinction between 'human' and 'alien' is problematised. Brett is killed whilst looking for Jonesey, the cat. He finds the cat and bends to pick it up. It hisses because the alien is behind Brett. Brett thinks the animal is hissing at him — he is also 'other' to a cat, and both cats and humans are animals to the 'alien'. As Brett is dismembered and carried off by the alien, the cat — in choker close-up — looks upwards-right offscreen after the disappearing alien. The cats eyes, with their vertical-slit pupils, are a common metaphor for alienness, evil, feminine sexuality and feral implacability. But the cat is just an animal. The alien is made substantial — brought into the human real by this reversible 'otherness' — which threatens to annihilate the human/animal distinction.

This choker close-up of the cat's alien gaze looking upwards-right cuts directly to choker close-up of Parker (the black male) looking upwards-left in a match-shot. In this scene, Parker is demanding unmediated violent (male but also animal) action to ensure human survival; Ripley is reflective (feminine but also human). Ash, remarking that 'most animals retreat from fire' advises turning up the heat. Of course, the alien is not animal but clearly cold-blooded and likes heat, unlike the humans. Turning up the heat will merely make their own environment alien and make the alien more at home. Ash, of course, is not animal, human or male. Ash's subsequent attack on Ripley repeats the form of the alien attack on Kane as well as signifying sexual subjection of the female (by an 'inauthentic' male). Otherness is not only reversible here, but an uneasily shifting positionality.

The final scene, in which Ripley is displayed as sexual spectacle in her underwear before overcoming the alien, has been criticised by feminists because it objectifies the female body as site of sexual violence. Clearly, this sexualisation of Ripley's body functions as a disavowal of the lesbian implications of her 'phallic subjectivity' and her 'chastity'. Lesbians may, however, respond quite differently to this scene — in which Ripley is simultaneously female object of desire and active protagonist. Without her masculine clothing, Ripley appears feminised as a vulnerable sexual object. The lesbian spectator generally resists identification with objectified femininity and may slide into the phallic position in the classical scopic relay. As there is already strong lesbian identification with Ripley, when the lesbian (female) spectator looks pleasurably (as phallic voyeur) at Ripley's bi-sexualised body, subjectivity takes on the self-and-also-other structure of lesbianism. The passivity of objectification is also quickly undercut narratively and the polarity of sexual subject/object is further destabilised.

This echoes familiar lesbian strategy for resisting objectification and then coping with the 'impossibility' of reciprocal female subjectivity: 'phallicised' female sexual subject desires self-as-other female reciprocally. This final scene in Alien thus evokes the resistance/desire dynamic of inter-subjective lesbian sexuality. The lesbian resists passive objectification by adopting 'phallic' agency, yet desires a woman as sexual object. This paradox structures personal and political conflicts around lesbian sexual identity.

The alien is initially constructed as rapist/slasher here. 'He' is concealed in the shuttle (hiding in her home) where she thinks she is safe, has removed her clothes, and relaxed her control. The spectator is, then, initially in a position of voyeuristic control. The alien hand grabs at Ripley and she backs into the stored spacesuits, her heavy breathing signifying fear/arousal. However, the camera is angled low and the effect here of the low angle is to empower Ripley as an eroticised presence, and convey active female sexuality to the lesbian spectator. Ripley's barely covered breasts and genitals dominate the image invoking lesbian desire. The alien hand slides sensuously over the metal and tubing of the ship; the inner set of teeth (which slashes out and kills in previous scenes) protrudes slowly, drooling KY jelly. Ripley echoes its actions, repeatedly smoothing the spacesuit she has crept into with her palms and dripping sweat as she pants for breath. There is recognition of self-but-also-other and an implication of mutual wariness. A shot-reverse-shot sequence conveys an exchange of looks between Ripley and the alien conveying a sense of recognition and competition for survival rather than voyeuristic sadism on the part of protagonist or monster. Its 'otherness' feminises the alien and allows mutuality between the woman and the monstrous-other, undercutting the scopic structure of the 'slasher' scene by androgenising both positions and implying reciprocal wariness (and arousal).

Ripley forces the alien out of its cranny with jets of gas. Better adapted to the environment (in a space suit on home territory), she thrusts the alien through the airlock. When it tries to re-enter like a persistent spider up a drainpipe, she uses the engine thrust to blast it away. In spite of the ejaculatory thrust of the grappling iron and jet propulsion she uses to thrust off the alien, the whole scene is 'feminised'. The suggestion of spider/insect as metaphor for alienness is strong here as Ripley confronts her feminine-phobic fear (giving a faint reminiscence of eyeballing a huge spider in the bath!). Ripley's struggle to resist and transform panic into controlled action is signified by singing and chanting like a child. Fear, aggression and arousal combine in an intense adrenalin-high. The noises she makes become increasingly 'ejaculatory' as her fear mounts. The look on her face after expelling the alien is one of post-orgasmic bliss, before climbing into her virginal bed.

On the whole, identification with Ripley in Alien is pleasurable for the lesbian spectator. On the level of realism, Ripley is 'positive' — strong, capable, intelligent and feminist. However, Ripley's sexual difference is dealt with in the real only in terms of sexism at work by male colleagues. The more feminised Lambert is represented extremely negatively as 'hysterical' and ineffectual. At the symbolic level, the narrative is implacable in its explusion of 'the alien' and the mise en scene conveys misogynistic disgust for 'female plumbing'.

As Greenberg [1991] points out, the alien is 'mysteriously ungraspable, viciously implacable, improbably beautiful, and lewd. [italics his]'. The alien/other has phallic characteristics, but is generally coded female, both in its reproductive functions, its fatal, implacable beauty and its amoral survival instincts. In the traditions of sci-fi, it is associated with mad scientist, Ash, and the evil corporation, signified by 'mother' (the implacable, amoral central computer). The signification of the form of a 'feminine' regime as inhuman calculation and amoral acquisitiveness is a traditional patriarchal construction. The overthrow of the alien and its 'mother' corporation by the maiden-warrior recalls a traditional literary narrative in which the Amazon takes up the girdle of a male warrior (that of her patron/father) to suppress an outbreak of 'castrating' feminine excess.

'Have you Ever Been Mistaken for a Man? — Aliens

Aliens has a very different narrative form from that of Alien. It is a standard genre piece (although of mixed genre) in which the pleasures of its young male audience depend on reliable repetition of a known formula. It picks up many of the visual techniques used in Alien, but to quite different effect. The techniques of visual frustration signal occasions for assertive-phallic action. Phallic mastery is challenged only to be re-asserted after a suitable period of predictable suspense. Again, at the level of realism, there is some superficial critical engagement with feminism, 'machismo', militarism and the duplicity and exploitativeness of the corporation. However, this is expressed through the standard form and (male) attitudes of a 'kick-ass' action movie. Aliens plays out a sort of 'Oedipal drama' of dismemberment and reconstitution of self through Ripley as a 'final girl'. Ripley has to face and overcome the nightmares of mutilation with which the film opens and can only do so by ensuring that the alien threat is completely destroyed. In the final scene after overcoming the monstrous alien (who 'feminises' by 'impregnation' and mutilation), Ripley assures Newt that there will be no more nightmares.

Clover [1992] argues that the 'final girl' as protagonist allows the playing out of such Oedipal fears because the male spectator can effectively deny or distance himself from identification with the (female) body being threatened with terrifying mutilation. However, it is common in kick-ass films for the male body to be horrifyingly mutilated, or at least thoroughly beaten, on the road to achieving 'manhood'. This structure is evident in 'kick-ass' films as diverse as Karate Kid and Robocop. These films inherit the Oedipal obsessions of Westerns. Alien shows the impregnation-feminisation, mutilation, dismemberment and phallic piercing of the male body (whilst the female body is threatened with rape, implied by the tail curling around Lambert's thigh and in the final scene between Ripley and the Alien). If the male spectator is squeamish about the mutilation of the male body, he would be obliged to steer clear of the average 'kick-ass' epic.

It would seem, on the contrary, that it is the overt eroticisation of the violence which requires a female victim/survivor. Greenberg's comments on the final confrontation between Ripley and the alien in Alien are illuminating here:

'Simultaneously suffering with her, and voyeur to her victimisation, the viewer (especially the male viewer) experiences a powerful commingling of raw sexual excitement and mortal terror; an effect often sought but rarely achieved so well in suspense cinema.' [Greenberg, 1991]

Neale argues that the male gaze in the Western and action genres is not purely constituted in the relay suggested by Mulvey, but also contains an element of voyeuristic looking at the male body. The male body, stripped for action, becomes object of desire as well as site of suture for the male spectator. The homosexual eroticism occasioned by this feminisation of the male body is assuaged through violent action on the part of the protagonist restoring a sense of sadistic control for the male spectator. Neale comments on suppressed homo-eroticism in such genres:-

'The repression of any explicit avowal of eroticism in the act of looking at the male seems structurally linked to a narrative content marked by sado-masochistic phantasies and scenes. Hence both forms of voyeuristic looking, intra- and extra-diagetic, are especially evident in those moments of contest and combat [...] at which a narrative outcome is determined through a fight or gun-battle, at which male struggle becomes pure spectacle [...] taken to the point of fetishistic parody [...] the look begins to oscillate between voyeurism and fetishism as the narrative starts to freeze and spectacle takes over.' [Neale, 1983]

When the female body is substituted for the diagetic male body in such narratives, the element of homo-eroticism in the male look at the male protagonist is displaced onto the female body and thus rendered acceptable for the male spectator. Solterer [1991] suggests that somthing like this explains narrativisation of female militancy in 15th-century French texts in which the homo-eroticism of male combat as spectacle is displaced onto the female body in dream-narratives in order to suppress the homosexual implications of the gladiatorial spectacle. However, what becomes evident in the resultant masculinisation of the female body is an element of lesbian-eroticism for the female spectator. This, no doubt, goes some way to explaining the appeal of such films to lesbian audiences. Alien, Aliens and Red Sonja all have the narrative outcome determined by a gladiatorial spectacle between two women — against a female excess personified by the monstrous mother (Alien and Aliens) or witch (Red Sonja).

Substitution of the female body in the spectacle of male combat disavows its homo-erotic content for the male spectator. However, if the heterosexual male spectator of the male body is troubled by an element of homoeroticism, female spectatorship of the female protagonist must evoke a lesbian eroticism — both in a phallic-narcissistic identification with and an unmediated looking at the masculinised female body as object of desire. The lesbian implications of this manoeuvre now have to be disavowed or displaced for the heterosexual male spectator (at whom the film is principally aimed) because lesbianism would exclude him, as well as for the heterosexual female spectator. It is interesting to note that Thelma and Louise, which foregrounds female bonding, did not sell well to the young male audience to which this kind of film is directed — but which did consume the images of Ripley and Connor quite happily.

Marginal identities are stereotyped and tokenised in a multi-cultural bunch of 'squaddies'. Differences — particularly those of race and sexuality — are also defused through joking. Vasquez is stereotypically 'butch' and holds her own amongst the men:

— 'Hey, Vasquez — have you every been mistaken for a man?

— 'No, have you?!'

Her racial identity is the subject of another joke:

— 'She thought they said "illegal alien" and signed up!'

Vasquez tops a career of male bonding and bravado by dying in heroic hara-kiri protecting the rear as Ripley and Newt escape (which solves the 'problem' of lesbianism). The squaddies constantly bandy fag-jokes. As the bottled inseminating-alien jumps towards Burke waving a penis-like organ, a soldier jokes on the homosexual implications. Identity politics and 'political correctness' are knowingly sent up. The android objects to the term 'robot', preferring to be called a 'synthetic human', and the alien is referred to as a 'xenomorph' ('you mean a bug-hunt' jeer the marines).

Homo-social bonding, excluding and ridiculing of Ripley by the male-military hierarchy, are broadly sketched. She is offended by the 'off' jokes of the marines; but the boys are alright — underneath they're all lovable. Differences are cancelled by death or submerged in male bonding engendered through mutual reliance in military action. Even the android-other, to which Ripley is initially hostile, proves his masculine reliability, and his final joke is a mutual recognition — that Ripley is 'not bad — for a human [girl]'.

In contrast to the relatively complex exploration of 'otherness' in Alien, Aliens marginalises, narratively resolves, or fetishistically conceals difference. Ripley's 'missing' phallus is more than generously supplied. Ripley wins out through the deployment of sheer firepower and phallic hardware rather than cautious, 'feminine' reflection and self-control as in Alien. There is sheer phallic pleasure in wielding all that wham-bam megavolt hardware and blasting those ugly aliens to smithereens. At one point, a marine shoves the barrel of his gun into an alien's mouth quoting 'eat this' before blowing off its head (a symbolic reference to homo-eroticism familiar in 'Nam action movies). Ripley 'proves' her 'masculinity' and gains some respect from the military by successfully manipulating the hydraulic fork-lift-robot which is 'worn' like an armoured extension of the body.

The masculinised female protagonist avoids the problem of homo-eroticism for the male spectator, and also disavows castration anxiety in the erotic spectacle of the female. However, for the male spectator, the spectre of female sexual aggression is raised and must be controlled or disavowed. The lesbian implication is intensified rather than releived by Ripley's 'female-transgressive' violence. For many lesbian spectators, Ripley's transgressive violence is intensely pleasurable. For the heterosexual female spectator, transgressive aggression may be pleasurable, but its lesbian element must be disavowed.

Male anxiety at Ripley's aggression is controlled by emphasising her heterosexual availability. Lesbian eroticism is thus also disavowed. Female bonding is devolved onto Ripley's relationship with Newt — a substitute child. Ripley's active female-eroticism is thus heterosexually contained without shading into incest (as it would had Newt been her natural child). Ripley is returned to the heterosexual family structure (absent in Alien). When Ripley discovers that colonists have settled on the infested planets she mutters 'families' in agonised tones. Her concern for the families influences her decision to go on the combat mission.

This re-integration of female-eroticism into the family is further signified through Ripley's relationship with Hicks. Each scene of emotional intimacy with Hicks, who is masculine-protective towards her, is followed by a scene of protective, motherly, intimacy between Ripley and Newt. Ripley gives the locator Hicks has given her to Newt. Interestingly, Hicks is blinded by his injuries — but this is the only reference to the implications of Ripley's phallicisation (they sleep in separate life-support units). The final shot is of Ripley and Newt sleeping side by side.

Motherhood is a central theme of both Aliens and Terminator II and functions as 'excuse' for Ripley's transgressive behaviour, as disavowal of lesbianism, and as locus standi of all female aggression. The Amazonian Ripley reluctantly dons the girdle of male aggression to protect the family (the heterosexual order) and to correct injustice, corruption and excessive violence in the patriarchal order — the traditional 'civilising' influence of heterosexual femininity. As though this maiden-warrior-mission were not justification enough, her orgy of violence at the climax of the film is more immediately inspired by the 'instinct' to protect 'her young'.

In Aliens, the feminine coding of the alien is amplified and the sub-textual misogyny of Alien is more explicit as the 'Amazon' meets the 'monstrous-feminine' in gladiatorial spectacle. Ripley's 'immaculate' motherhood is repeatedly juxtaposed to the slimy, drooling, biological, female-plumbing of alien motherhood (the female-reproductive body). Burke tries horrifically to 'impregnate' Ripley and Newt in order to smuggle aliens back to earth. The eggs are being laid by a sort of queen-bee alien deep in the bowels of the space-station. In rescuing Newt, Ripley encounters the queen-bee who has attacked Ripley's 'young'. After Ripley has destroyed her 'nest', the slimy biological alien-mother pursues Newt. Ripley puts on the ultimate armour — the hydraulic robot-body-shell. As the hangar door opens upward, Ripley is gradually revealed transformed. Back-lit, she appears almost like the alien body with angular, metallic planes and hydraulic muscle, suggesting an armoured reptile. At the same time, the image is extremely phallic, converting Ripley's feminine vulnerability to immensely satisfying armoured power.

This female-to-female gladiatorial spectacle also allows the male spectator to work off his anxieties about 'castrating' feminists and the monstrous regiment of women, through evoking, and overcoming the nightmare of female sexual aggression through the figure of the maiden-warrior. The phallicised female gladiator — the Amazon — masters the titilating threat of feminine sexual aggression (erotic excess) in a fetishised display for the male spectator, combining phallic narcissism, fetishistic looking (at Ripley) and voyeuristic-sadistic looking (with Ripley at the alien body).

Ripley challenges the alien to hand-to-hand combat saying: 'Come on, you bitch!' Lesbian 'recognition' in the female-monstrous may well set up a resistance at this point. However pleasurable Ripley's transgressive, orgiastic violence may be, the misogynistic construction of female reproductive processes — the female body — as monstrosity becomes disturbing. If a male protagonist used the term 'bitch' before exerting sadistic mastery over the parthogenetic-female-constructed-as-monstrous, we might be somewhat concerned as feminists. Could it be that the male spectator is disavowing his misogynistic aggression towards ('uppity' self-sufficient) women and/or the threat of dissolution in the (regime of) 'the feminine', by the substitution of the (fetishised) Amazon for the sadistic-controlling male protagonist? As Springer [1991], with reference to Theweleit's [1987] comments on fascist misogynistic identifications, remarks: '[t]he machine body becomes the ideal tool for ego maintenance.' But what happens when the 'machine body' is female and the spectator lesbian?

Does the lesbian spectator risk internalising and then disavowing this misogyny in the pleasurable rush of transgressive violence? Is this (male) violence really transgressive of the dominant order because it is carried out by women?

Whilst both Alien and Aliens tend towards the suppression of homosexual and lesbian elements of visual pleasure, and both exhibit misogyny, there is a discernible difference between them in their degree of self-awareness and the treatment of 'difference', especially sexual difference. Aliens, with its high degree of narrative closure, re-asserts phallic dominance through sadistic violence and heterosexualises the female protagonist; whilst Alien permits a much greater degree of ambiguity to subsist. Nevertheless, there is forbidden pleasure in the masculinised body and violence of the female protagonist in the kick-ass genre. To what extent is such pleasure 'subversive'?

Feminist as Mad Mother-Machine — Terminator II

Terminator II: Judgement Day (again directed by Cameron) also features a 'strong' female protagonist; a surface pro-feminism, and a misogynistic sub-text. In The Terminator, Sarah Jane Connors, played by Linda Hamilton, is a fairly typical 'final girl'. Screaming ineffectually through the initial stages of the plot, she pulls herself together and overcomes the implacable robot. In Terminator II, the first image of Sarah is of her strenuously performing pull-ups in high-security detention. Her body has been 'masculinised', having developed a strongly defined musculature through exercise and combat training, and she wears masculine sport clothes. The implications of Ripley's protagonism have been give a visual point of reference in Hamilton's bi-sexed body.

Sarah has been detained in a mental institution for attempting to sabotage the corporation which she knows to be manufacturing the technological doom of humanity. She describes to the doctor the visit of an implacable robot from a post-nuclear-holocaust future in which the survivors struggle to resist their extermination by robots controlled by an artificial intellegence, originally designed as a defence computer called Skynet. Sarah's unlikely story (feminine voice) and her aggressive determination to protect her child and the human race at large are interpreted as insanity. As she is questioned by the psychiatrist, her face is monitored on a screen-within-a-screen. The doctor pauses on the monitored image of Sarah's face distorted with 'insane' aggressive, feminist rage.

This representation of female anger as lunacy is ironically undercut by the spectator's knowledge (assuming that s/he has seen or is aware of The Terminator) that Sarah is actually telling the truth. This is further emphasised at one point by a cut to a model dinosaur decorating the offices of the cybernetics corporation in question, as Sarah tries to 'con' the doctor that she no longer believes these things in order to gain her release. Sarah is subsequently sexually assaulted by an orderly whilst under physical restraint. This is clear pro-feminist commentary on the patriarchal tendency to ignore women's insights and to interpret women's valid anger as unjustifiable and therefore mentally disturbed, for women to be committed to mental institutions when they are 'troublesome', and the incidence of sexual assault on female patients — because they will not be believed should they complain.

Clearly, all is not well in the patriarchal state. The corporation is soul-less, regimented and corrupted by greed (feminine-ordered). Technology proliferates for its own sake and dominates rather than serving 'man'kind. Women are 'left' to head families, John is out of the control of his foster-parents because his foster-father can't be bothered to 'discipline' him properly. The police are ineffectual or even evil robots themselves. Men are failing in their duties as protective husbands and fathers, and failing to take on board women's demands for a safer world for their children. These are typical concerns of such genres in which the individual must take the law into his own hands because the law is (no longer) reliable. In Terminator II, this is a job for the liberal 'new father'.

Technology is not represented as 'evil' in itself; but as morally neutral. It can be deployed for or against human interests. Sometimes it is indispensable, sometimes it is unreliable, its effects can be unexpected, and it can be overridden or reprogrammed. 'Man' is now powerless without technology, and must exert adequate control over it in order to regain control over human 'destiny'. Sarah is obliged to take on a male role to protect the family, and to become a suitable role-model for her son in the absence of an 'adequate' male. John Connor's 'messianic' quality is his ability to re-assert mastery of the machines. In Terminator II, he has reprogrammed the Terminator as controllable, user-friendly, technology and he is the one who skillfully overrides recalcitrant machines throughout. Sarah's role is biological, as are her motivations — she is to bear and protect the 'messiah'.

The message that Sarah is reluctantly obliged to become aggressive and combatative because the family is under threat is repeated. The image of the playground vaporised in a nuclear holocaust not only appears behind the opening and closing credits, but is rerun as Sarah reflects on the irony that only a machine-father (programmed by the son) 'measures up' as 'father'. Looking wistfully first at her son with Schwarzenegger in the role of 'reprogrammed new father', then at her friends with their infant son — backlit with nostalgic sungold, Sarah drifts into her repeating nightmare in which she stares at a feminised and unselfconscious version of herself with an infant in a playground. As the masculinised Sarah stares at her feminised 'self' through a chainlink fence, screaming to 'wake' her feminised self to the danger, the playground is engulfed in a nuclear firestorm, vapourising the children and the two Sarahs. Sarah's masculinisation is a response to emergency conditions — a crisis in masculinity — her 'natural' self is a happy, unselfconsious mother.

Perhaps sensitive to criticism of Cameron's own films, there is a commentary on violence as 'solution' to violence here. Cameron [1992] claims that this is the first pacifist action movie. John Connor tells the reprogrammed cyborg-soldier that he must not kill, but only disable. John insists on preventing Sarah from killing Dyson, the inventor of Skynet. When the good-Terminator remarks that Sarah will save a lot of lives by killing the inventor of the defence computer, John replies: 'Haven't you figured out why you can't kill people? In case the spectator has not yet figured it out either, Sarah is next shown breaking down, unable to proceed as the terrified inventor's wife and son huddle around him trying to protect him from her murderous onslaught. Realising that she is destroying the family which she seeks to protect, she switches to a 'feminist diatribe' against the inventor.

Dyson, the inventor, is played by a black actor. Sarah rants at him that men 'like him' invented the hydrogen bomb. Whilst the attribution of creative achievement to black people is a positive step for Hollywood, it seems unfortunate that the only 'achievement' thus attributed here is that of the worst instrument of mass destruction ever invented. The hydrogen bomb was, of course, invented by white men who tested in areas occupied by people of colour and then wreaked mass destruction on more people of colour. It's attribution to a black inventor might be interpreted as adding insult to injury. Whilst placing black actors in 'neutral' roles represents a 'progressive' attitude, it can produce negative effects because race is not neutral in Western society.

The image of the black man here bears much of the narrative's critique of 'inadequate' Western masculinity — which, given the history of 'feminisation' (disempowerment) of black men in which this narrative colludes, seems particularly unreasonable. An extremely low-angled, fetishistic shot of Schwarzenegger clad in black leather in Sarah's point of view as she cowers away from him on the floor during her hospital escape is repeated exactly; this time in Dyson's point of view as Dyson cowers, wounded, on the floor at Schwarzenegger's feet. He subsequently requires constant 'chivvying' to keep him up to the mark after he has been reluctantly recruited to the destruction of Skynet. He is also consigned to the 'space of the feminine' by his creation of the machine 'genus' which is protecting its kind by killing off humans (who tried to 'pull the plug' on it to protect their own generic survival).

As Sarah delivers her 'fanatical feminist' tirade against the wounded Dyson, he complains that she is 'judging' him (a common — though somewhat obvious — male complaint in the face of feminist criticism). John advises her to 'get more constructive' and to enlist Dyson's help in destroying the threatening technology — his own monstrous offspring. At this point, it becomes clear that, in terms of this narrative, Sarah not only appears mad — but has become 'fanatically' feminist and has got things just as much 'out of proportion' as Dyson, who cannot see anything wrong in developing technology that may be used in mass destruction. A metaphorical link is thus forged between Sara's feminism and the monstrous regime of the machine 'mothers'. It is left to John, the male messiah, to advance the voice of (white, male) 'reason', to keep his flakey mother under control, to keep the black man on the right course, and to ensure the destruction of the implacable machines.

Motherhood in Terminator II is not only explanation and excuse for Sarah's adoption of a male role, but repeats the 'nativity story' of The Terminator. Facing obliteration by Skynet, its technological offspring (coded feminine in its unknowable, implacable drive to survive), mankind requires a messiah. Sarah is the vessel through which power is transmitted in a closed circle in which time-travelling fuses father and son as aspects of a single individual. Now John Connor (J.C.) sends back a reprogrammed cyborg to represent the ideal-father-aspect which he, the son, will become. Again, Sarah's implacable motherhood is pitted against another implacable mother for the survival of 'man' (thereby ensuring her continuing subordination to the father and the son who will become the father).

On the face of it, it would seem that the high spot of Terminator II for lesbians would be the dunking of Arnold Swarzenegger (as symbolical 'new father') in a vat of molten metal. Nevertheless, a lot of lesbians found Linda Hamilton's masculinised body-image and transgressive violence very pleasurable, and/or sympathised with her character's rage. In particular, the confrontation in the final scenes between Sarah and the bad Terminator in which she advances rhythmically firing an enormous, phallic weapon which is reset by a powerful arm action between firing, gives equally enormous narcissistic pleasure, which also seems 'transgressive' for women and lesbians.

Chapter 4: Camp and femininity

In Alien, Aliens and Terminator II, the lesbian implications of female protagonism are narratively suppressed. I now want to look at a text in which the lesbian potential of the female warrior is manifest content. Red Sonja is different generically from the other films under discussion and its presentation is relatively 'camp'. It is self-consciously a sexual spectacle for a male audience.

The subject of 'camp' and female parody has always been a bone of contention between lesbians and gay men. The parodic representation of femininity is a point of identification for gay men (the 'phallic-feminine' of drag). 'Camp' is notoriously difficult to define. Medhurst [1991] separates texts which are 'taken up by camp audiences' — that is texts which become camp through gay reading strategies; from mainstream representations which consciously capitalise on the humourous self-reflexivity, parodic wit and pastiche style of camp.

Arguably, camp became respectable during the 1960s, when it became a popular parodic style. Camp is sex — even when it is 'The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA' [Sontag, 19892]. But mostly, camp is unmistakably sex — and unmistakably deviant sex. In the mainstream, camp is the form of permissible representations of deviant sexuality, where 'perversity' is displayed as pleasurable spectacle, and/or parodic excess, for heterosexual consumption.

'The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility [...] Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex [...] Allied to [...] a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics [...] ' [Greenberg, 1991]

In other words, the most 'refined [...] sexual pleasure' contains an element of the self-consciously deviant. But camp in the mainstream has another function. Camp is, as Medhurst points out, primarily an adjective, sometimes a verb, but rarely a noun. It is traditionally a reading strategy deployed by gay people (though principally a male preserve) in and through which gays were able to construct identifications and pleasures denied by the dominant culture. However, this could not explain mainstream-heterosexual pleasures in camp representations.

In the mainstream, camp representation is often parody of popular genre forms which foregrounds suppressed implications of 'deviance'. The camp 'sensibility', alive to the 'difference [...] between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice' [Sontag, 1982] lends itself easily to genre-spoofs. But camp, expressing the disruptive distance of 'estranged' gay subjectivity which reveals culture as a construction of dominance, cannot be seen as quite the same phenomenon as the self-affirming 'knowingness' of bourgois sophistication or and/or adolescent cynicism — however pleasurable (and even affirming) the resultant sexual spectacle may be for gay people.

Whilst lesbians have developed similar strategies of reading against the grain (although not usually the same texts), the implications of mainstream (or even gay male) 'camp' representations may not be the same. 'Camp' as sexual spectacle has political ramifications for lesbians that are not the same for gay men. For male gays, 'the female' is a cultural site which they may enter and leave at will. Women — marked as the site of the feminine — obviously have a very different relation to the spectacle of feminine sexuality.

Male appropriation of the codes of femininity (though often misogynistic) may reveal the critical difference between representation as meaning and as artifice. It can be, and frequently is, argued that when a woman takes on the codes of masculinity, a similar effect is produced. However, because gender categories are not symmetrical, the effect produced clearly cannot be symmetrical either. To be coded masculine is to be coded positively. To be coded feminine is to be coded negatively. Consequently, when a man enters the feminine, he becomes unspeakable. When a woman takes on certain masculine codings, her aspiration to freedom may be seen as logical ('tomboyishness' is seen as rather audaciously charming, at least in a young woman).

In the English tradition, the familiar pattern is that a 'plucky' woman who adopts male coding in the name of the law (tomboys, 'principal boys', warrior-maids, cross-dressing heroines of romantic novels, and Virgin Queen Bess) is stripped of her (feminine) sexuality, and becomes a kind of a-sexual androgyne figure. The woman who challenges male power (the law itself) — by attempting to subject men to a 'feminine' regime — is coded with an excess of femininity (sexuality) and punished by death. To put it another way, a man who appropriates feminine coding will be excessively sexualised as deviant. A woman who appropriates masculine coding will be desexualised. A woman who 'usurps' male power will be excessively sexualised as deviant.

This may well be because the masculine coding of the female body has a fetishistic effect for the male spectator which disarms her 'castrating' potential. The male spectator may simultaneously identify with her as a 'masculine' character and desire her as 'really' a — passive — woman. This narcissistic desire is clearly not heterosexual, but this need not be acknowledged because it is mediated by a female body. This is one source of the 'refined sexual pleasure' in question. It is the eroticised 'phallic' woman or the feminised-phallic male who is punished — not the asexual tomboy.

The male spectator may, however, respond masochistically to the 'phallic' woman instead of sadistically. This raises the question of parody in mainstream camp. In her critique of recent theories of masochism and male identification, Modleski [1991] argues that the position of the masochist is a 'juridical' one. The male masochist deploys his internalisation of the symbolic order (vested in the superego, according to Silverman) to punish himself — his ego (narcissistic identification with — homosexual love for — the father). Modleski points out that, when he 'fashions' the woman as phallic tormentor (the symbolic father who beats out his narcissistic love for the male parent), the substitution renders the symbolic order — the law itself — ridiculous. This is seen as subversive by many critics. However, Modleski aregues that, as feminists, we should sceptical of the double-edged effects for women when representations of female 'authority' are constructed by men in order to signify the illegitimacy of of male authority. Much of the 'fun' for the heterosexual male spectator derives from this very effect.

Red Sonja cannot really pass as 'camp'. It entirely lacks the spectacular pleasures of its precursor, Barbarella, but, more importanly, it lacks its parodic edge. On the other hand, it does have camp codings in its mode of representing 'perverse' sexuality as pleasurable spectacle for a principally heterosexual male audience through masochistic fetishism. It is given camp readings by subcultural audiences.

Generically, it is classifiable more or less as sword-and-sorcery, but it has generic connections to the Conan cycle — being based on the works of the same writer. (Conan films are sort of hybrid sword-and-sorcery, gladiator-muscle-epic, and ape-man flicks which circulate through the video-market — to male adolescent rather than cult audiences). The Conan films are right-wing muscle-fests. In Red Sonja, the homosexual implications of the male gladiatorial spectacle (e.g. Conan) are feminised in order to exploit their erotic potential without challenging a heterosexual male audience. It is not exactly critical of the dominant male order. Why, then, should it be popular with some lesbian audiences?

It Can Only Be Touched By A Woman . . .

Red Sonja has many elements from the literary traditions of the female warrior and evil queen in a contemporary context. It is a variation on one of the standard formulaic sword-and-sorcery plots. Swarzenegger, as Kalidor, occupies a controlling position in the narrative, both in terms of genre codings and the scopic structure. The lesbian implications of the female warrior's appropriation of 'male' characteristics are brought to the fore, but contained both by the narrative closure and by the overlooking male gaze of Kalidor (played by Schwarzenegger). Kalidor's controlling, phallic gaze is signified by the setting-up of the relay through which the male spectator controls the image of the woman. There is an establishing shot as Sonja rides off across the plains to begin her quest filmed in longshot with the camera positioned behind Schwarzenegger's shoulder apparently from a 'vantage point' in the mountains. This constitutes a point of insertion for the male spectator which positions both women as voyeuristic spectacle, disarming the threat of exclusive female-bonding. The male spectator is able to have his cake and eat it between sadistic-voyeuristic looking at the lesbians and masochistic-fetishistic looking at the eroticised spectacle of feminine excess.

In the opening scenes the voice-over narration explains that the evil despotic queen Gedren 'wanted [Sonja] for herself' and attempts to kidnap her. But Sonja's (played by Birgitta Nielsen, whose (bi?)sexuality has been the subject of much gossip) 'disgust was clear' — enacted by slashing Gedren's face with her own orb/mace (symbol of authority). Gedren's face, which was covered by a veil, is thus exposed and scarred (cliched metaphors: veil=femme-fatale, scar=homosexuality). Sonja is granted strength by a divine visitation in order to fight for 'justice' and she goes off to a warrior school apparently borrowed from the kung-fu genre.

In the meantime, her sister, a member of an order of warrior priestesses, is massacred by Gedren. Gedren steals the talisman used by 'God' to create the world, the destructive power of which has become too powerful for the priestesses and must now be consigned to 'eternal darkness' in the earth. The talisman can only be touched by women, and becomes dangerous in the light, causing earthquakes and storms (traditional powers of witchcraft). The feminine creative principal can no longer be controlled and must be 'buried' in the earth. In the hands of the lesbian Gedren, it will destroy the world in 13 days if Sonja cannot get to the talisman first and destroy it.

Sonja, initially, 'hates' men and is warned by her martial arts master that 'hatred of men in a lovely young woman could be your downfall'. Sonja does not hate 'all men', however, but has taken a vow that 'no man may have me unless he has beaten me in a fair fight'. In other words, she is dedicated to the 'restoration' of the 'natural' order of heterosexuality disturbed by Gedren's deviance. As she sets out in her quest to find and destroy the talisman, Sonja arrongantly refuses Kalidor's help — guardian of the talisman unbeknownst to her. However, subsequent events show that she does need Kalidor, who repeatedly saves her life. Finally, Sonja kills Gedren, destroys the talisman of female power, and goes off with Kalidor and the boy.

In her first swordfight, Sonja is challenged by a toll-keeper to whom she has refused sexual favours. This fight is filmed quite differently from every other fight in the film. In general, fights are in mid-shot, with the protagonists level. Sonja's first fight is filmed mainly in close-up. Her opponent is shot from below head-on and she is shot from above in reverse shot. Her opponent looks aggressively head-on to the spectator. This kind of sequence would normally set up a suspenseful identification with the imperilled male hero, but here it has the effect of objectifying Sonja. Shots of Sonja generally show her crouching or pinned defensively whilst her opponent lunges. The effect is to disempower her and represents her as vulnerable sexual object, in spite of her winning the fight. Her opponent's troops then advance on her and she is saved by Kalidor. It is interesting to note that in Red Sonja — as with all the films under discussion — the female warrior always has her mouth set in a grimace as she performs the 'distasteful duty' of violence. Schwarzenegger (as Kalidor), by contrast, looks as if he is profoundly enjoying himself — his violence is 'legitimate' in and of itself.

On the way, Kalidor and Sonja acquire a boy-child, who is a dethroned prince, and his servant. Sonja adopts a motherly role in relation to the boy — the boy veers between treating her as mother, father and wife. The relation of the prince to his servant/mentor is 'unbalanced'. Although the 'civilisation' in which the servant's deference made sense has been destroyed (by Gedren), he continues to obey the child, although to do so often puts the child in danger. Sonja restores the 'natural' order by 'putting the boy over her knee'. During the scene in which Kalidor sets out to 'conquer' Sonja (sexually), the boy leaps onto Kalidor's shoulders attempting to 'defend' Sonja who is, of course, metaphorically making love. The fight-scene is constructed in the boy's point of view whilst the boy 'shadows' the lunges, feints and parries with his own small sword until losing interest, remarking: 'Why does she fight so hard, she doesn't want to win!'. Sonja and Kalidor finally sink down exhausted on the ground, evenly matched. Besides the obvious reference to the Freudian 'primal scene', there are resonances of 1960s male 'buddy' films in which the buddies (or sometimes father-son) fight to exhaustion before embracing in mutual recognition — the homoerotic sub-text of which has frequently been remarked on.

This scene makes the function of the Amazon in male culture fairly clear. Gedren's feminine regime has destroyed the 'natural' order of authority, from father to son via mother. Sonja represents feminine self-control as the mainstay of the family. She is supposedly 'equal' to Kalidor, the guardian/father, but in the 'feminine sphere'. She concerns herself with the talisman which Kalidor explains is ultimately his responsibility, but which is entrusted to the priestesses because it cannot be touched by men. That is, the sexes have 'equal' power in their appointed spheres, although ultimately the 'divine right' belongs to males. The priestesses will only take responsibility in Kalidor's absence. Sonja has to learn to rely on him and not to try to exist alone. The boy must accept the 'proper' order of accession to power in the correct Oedipal configuration. He must learn that a 'real' man respects his mother/wife as having an important task in the feminine sphere.

Both in its narrative and mise en scene, Red Sonja simultaneously incorporates and disavows the homo-erotic pleasures of sword-and-sorcery and/or 'gladiator-muscle' epics. The male appetite-whetting spectacle of the clash of Amazons depends, in part, on its lesbian-erotic elements which, in this film, are not disavowed (as they are in the science-fiction films under discussion). The 'cat-fight' is not unusual in genres aimed at predominantly male audiences, such as Westerns, buddy-movies, women's prison films, kung-fu/martial arts, and some fantasy genres. It's lesbian-erotic element is frequently played up as fetishistic spectacle, but also signifies the 'illegitimacy' of female rule.

Gedren is mad, bad, feminine-fatal, and a thoroughly histrionic excess of signification. The mise en scene associates her with the female genitals. Her castle is deep pinky-red with round openings and subterranean tunnels. In contrast to the 'shinie cleare' preistesses and their temple, Gedren and her castle are obscured by dim lighting, and smokey atmospheres. She wears black and gold, hiding her scarred face with a gold mask (masks being another traditional metaphor for sexual deviance). Besides her veils, scars, masks, witchcraft, and supernatural vision, she has a pet black spider (significant of voracious female sexuality and lesbianism). The men who serve her are signified as sexually deviant/inadequate.

The contrast between Gedren and Sonja is underlined in a sequence where Gedren watches Sonja (through her supernatural vision) watching the child go to sleep. Sonja has an expression of maternal softness. Gedren's hand is clenched and she has an expression of hard lust for possession: 'Spare her, I want that beauty here with me' ('hatred of men [lesbianism] in a lovely young woman could be your downfall' — Sonja is, of course, the vengeful 'Fury' who pursues and kills the lesbian Gedren). She will not listen to the advice of her male minister, insisting on generating the talisman's 'full power' although she is told that it will become 'beyond control', whilst Sonja gradually respects Kalidor's authority. Whilst earthquakes shake the castle and storms rend the sky, Gedren curls up on her throne laughing hysterically. Both Gedren and the talisman signify feminine excess — out of control, the monstrous regiment of women will destroy civilisation. Men can no longer control this excessive female sexuality — which destroys men if they touch it. It remains to the chaste maiden to extert feminine self-control, under the proper guidance. This is an extremely traditional protestant ideal of 'companionate' heterosexual femininity.

It is interesting to note that lesbians who say they enjoyed Red Sonja say that it was the image of Birgitta Nielson's Sonja which attracted them — which gave them pleasure. It is particularly telling that, in such a narrative, lesbian spectators would identify with the 'Fury' dedicated to the vengeful destruction of the lesbian? This is in contrast with, say, lesbian vampire films in which lesbians will tend to identify with the vampire rather than with her heterosexual-female victim (with the possible exception of The Hunger — another profoundly anti-lesbian narrative). What is the structure of identification that could produce this effect? Could this be connected with the difference between the predominantly voyeuristic scopic structure of the vampire film as opposed to the predominantly fetishistic scopic structure of the 'gladiatorial' film?

But what of the lesbian spectator? The obnoxiousness of Red Sonja's narrative is 'edited out' by many lesbians because of its 'knowing' camp excess. However, this would not explain why lesbian identification should focus on Nielsen rather than Bergman. Extra-textual sub-cultural gossip that Nielsen is lesbian (or bisexual) may go some way to explaining this paradox. However, similar structures can be seen in the science-fiction films without the element of sub-cultural identification attaching to the actresses playing the female protagonist. I will look at similarities in the ways in which these films construct the female warrior and her 'opposition' to female-excess. Rather than dismissing lesbian pleasure in these films as 'misguided', I want to try to theorise the structures which align female spectatorial identification to the 'male' perspective in these narratives, and then analyse whether the lesbian spectatorial position (assuming that there is such a thing) destabilises this recuperative process.

Chapter 5: Constructing the lesbian subject and spectator

Unfortunately, as there is virtually no research on lesbian audiences it is necessary to fall back on sub-cultural 'wisdom' on lesbian identification with Hollywood Amazons. It seems that lesbian identification is focussed on the representation of the masculinised-active female body (often somewhat physically masculinised through weight-training). Lesbians express both desire for and identification with the bodies of Weaver, Nielsen and Hamilton. As Neale argues, there are two 'moments' in male looking at the cinematic representation of the male body: voyeuristic and identificatory. Lesbian looking at the 'phallic' female protagonist could thus enable both a lesbian identification with and 'homosexualised' desire for the spectacularised, masculinised-female body.

The male spectator inserts himself into the film narrative through the processes of 'suture'. This concept is based on Lacanian theory of how the subject overcomes the divisions of the 'I' by imagining a projected unitary 'ego', a fictional subject, which 'papers over' the divisions in the 'I'. The cinematic spectator overcomes the disunity of cinematic discourse (narrative constructions of space and time through editing etc) in a similar way. The representation of the (male) protagonist's body becomes 'as a relay to the body of the spectator within the already formulated institution of classical narrative films and their system of 'suture' [Williams, 1981].

The representational body of the male protagonist must, then, interfere with any satisfactory process of suture for the female spectator. She is constructed as site of sexual spectacle in the classical relay — or her identification is unstable, disseminated through 'transvestite' identification with the male position and the site of the feminine. Theories of lesbian identification offer either the possibility of 'transvestite' identification with the male position (in a relay interrupted by the spectator's sense of discontuinity between her body and that of the protagonist) or the complex process of feminine masquerade behind the representation of excessive femininity. However, neither would really offer the lesbian a satisfying 'suture' effect.

'Feminine excess' offers all kinds of 'camp' pleasures to the lesbian spectator, and no doubt has important subversive effects — but does not offer the crucial element of powerful subjective control located in the pleasures of bodily action which is so important to lesbians — and traditionally denied to women. 'Transvestite' identification gives an 'estrangement' effect combined with some of the male spectator's erotic pleasures for the lesbian spectator. However, 'suture' through the masculinised female body gives more satisfactory access to the dream-like pleasures of big-budget Hollywood for the male spectator — including an illusion of phallic omnipotence. The lesbian spectator is also offered the erotic 'pleasures of the interface' available in films such as Terminator and Robocop [Springer, 1991] which are also so central to the films under discussion here. (Such pleasures are already 'perverse' in their extension of sexual pleasure beyond the limits of the body; and are further transgressive for women who are normally excluded from mastery in the technological realm.) A stronger illusion of physical presence in the narrative opens up visceral and erotic pleasures to lesbians, uniterrupted enjoyment of which is usually reserved for the male spectator.

The Amazon protagonist offers both a jarring of patriarchal narrative conventions (a potentially subversive 'estrangement effect') — but also offers an effective 'suture' to the lesbian subject. (The intensity of the latter may override the former for the lesbian spectator.) The masculinised female body offers an effective relay between the lesbian spectator and fuller subjective identification with the unified ideal ego projected on the screen (the lacking female is effectively endowed by armouring and by her sadistic-controlling violence). The lesbian spectator is thus enabled to enter a satisfying and reassuring 'dream' of stability and potency normally offered only to the male spectator.

However, this does not necessarily mean that the lesbian subject steps into a heterosexual male identification. The lesbian spectator is also receptive to the element of 'homo-eroticism' (in the extra-diagetic, objectifying, moment of the look) as she looks at the phallicised-female body of the protagonist on the screen. In Neale's analysis of male looking at the male body [Neale, 1983], he discusses how the 'feminisation' of the male body (as object to be looked at by the male spectator) and resultant homo-erotic element is disavowed by violent action on the part of the protagonist. What is objectified/destroyed can be the body of a woman or of another man. The armoured body and violent action of the fascist is argued to be a defence against dissolution into 'the feminine' — the male opponent is transposed to the 'space of the feminine' (the feared dismemberment and reabsorbtion/ death).

The site of the feminine here is occupied by the body of 'the monstrous' (or the realm of the evil machines), possible identification with 'the feminine' is interrupted for the woman (that is, the female body through which the female spectator identifies with 'the feminine' is missing). The site of feminised aggression easily becomes the object of sadistic-punitive looking for the lesbian, relayed through the female protagonist. If there is a female person in the role of monstrosity, she is genre-coded as already destined for disempowerment and death. It is by this process of negating femininity (not necessarily coincidental with female persons) that the lesbian may be aligned with the narrative's misogynistic perspective — even when the 'site of the feminine' is occupied by an manifestly lesbian character (as in Red Sonja). This schema undergoes significant modifications in the different films which I have discussed, but I believe holds as a basic structure across all of them. Representation of 'strong' female warriors can only occur, apparently, at the expense of representation of forms of aggression designated 'feminine' as extremities of horror.

To a lesser degree in Alien than in Red Sonja, Aliens and Terminator II, lesbian identifications seem based in a process of cinematic 'suture' by which the figure of the masculinised female body acts as a relay through which the lesbian spectator may constitute an effective 'fictional' agency. Is this simply a 'mis-recognition' on the part of lesbians, through which we participate in our re-subordination to 'the male'? Or is lesbian pleasure in such images transgressive or subversive? If the non-heterosexual lesbian subject consists in a dissemination of subjectivity across destabilised gender positions, is lesbian identification with these protagonists simply the adoption of a heterosexual-male subject position which reproduces a heterosexual binary? Do Sonja, Ripley and Connor signify a postmodern, bi-sexed presence of a 'he-woman', or a lesbian reprise of the phallic insecurities of the fascist soldier?

It cannot be argued that all films with a female warrior-protagonist are 'always already' either subversive or entirely supportive of the existing order. Each of the films under discussion (which are a tiny sample of the many and varied films with fighting-female protagonists, 'baddies', or other characters in mainstream genres aimed at young male audiences) may produce very different effects for the lesbian spectator, some of which seem positive and some of which seem very negative. These representations certainly try to effect a separation effected between 'good' feminist aspirations to a token presence in a minimally revised male 'reality'; and 'bad' feminist aspirations to 'impose' a 'fanatical' feminine regime (where have we heard that before!) But are lesbian pleasures thus entirely vitiated as self-defeating, or even self-hating? Should lesbians identify more entirely with the 'subversive potential' of the monstrous feminine?

It does not seem that 'the' lesbian spectator is always aligned with the male position, nor necessarily disseminated between gendered positions, nor contained in the space of the feminine. In films such as Alien, lesbian subjective identification may shift from alignment with a male subject-position to dissemination between such a position and the space of the feminine — signified by the monstrous (or the monstrous-technological). This might be seen as having the most subversive potential for the lesbian spectator. In films such as Aliens and Terminator II, lesbian looking may be much more 'locked in' to a relay through the protagonist onto the space of the feminine. But this cannot be seen as solely a negative effect, empowering lesbians, as it does, with a pleasurable illusion of powerful agency and same-sex eroticism.

If you ask a lesbian why she enjoyed a film with pleasurable lesbian-erotic undertones but anti-feminist content, she will almost always reply with a classic form of fetishistic disavowal: 'Well, I know, but . . . ' Perhaps this gives a clue. Male fetishistic pleasure in disavowing castration anxiety involves the simultaneous experience of fear of castration. If this fear were entirely overcome (or forgotten), the basis of the fetishistic pleasure would disappear. Fetishistic pleasure actually depends on the objective embodiment of the fear which is to be allayed. For the male spectator, the body of the female protagonist embodies the castration anxiety and her phallicision (for example as protagonist) allays it. At the same time, in these films, the homosexual anxiety associated with (extra-diagetic) male looking at the, thus, eroticised male body is allayed by substituting the female body. In order for the image to 'work' for the male spectator, he must believe several things simultaneously.

As Williams points out, 'part of our pleasure in cinema derives from the contradiction between our belief in the perceptual truth of the image and our simultaneous knowledge that it is only imaginary — the discrepancy between the perceived illusion of presence created by the image and the actual absence of the object replaced by the image.' [Williams, 1984] The gaps, discontinuities, and contradictions in the constructed cinematic 'reality' are never entirely submerged by the processes of 'suture'. Oppositional reading practices must, in order to exist as such, be maintained in tension against dominant discursive practices. However neatly the lesbian subject may be stitched into the dominant discourse, lesbian subjectivity can never be wholly absorbed into heterosexual power relations, which depend on its exclusion. The suppression of the lesbian possibilities opened up in the dominant text (as it tries to control female resistance within acceptable limits) produces a subjective space for lesbian resistance.

It is not only the anomalous position of the lesbian spectator in the scopic regime of popular cinematic narratives, however, which permits her to negotiate a pleasurable identification with — but simultaneous estrangement from — heterosexist representations.

Lesbian 'sub-texts' are not necessarily intrinsic. The possible implications of 'phallic' identification are suppressed in these narratives — partly by presenting the female warrior as a-sexual. This a-sexuality is characteristic of the heroines of all the films under discussion (heterosexual orientations are implied rather than enacted). The active sexualisation of the Amazon would raise lesbian implications and her passive sexualisation would interrupt her credibility as protagonist. It requires a certain sub-cultural competence to recognise suppressed lesbian eroticism and to 'read in' lesbian identifications. The lesbian reader is a point of 'inter-textual' transmission. Deploying a sub-cultural matrix, she is able to resist the heterosexualisation of feminist appropriations of 'phallic' power by the dominant order, and to re-appropriate the pleasures of a suppressed lesbian eroticism.

It would seem that the lesbian reader is able to construct the meaningfully absent lesbian text partly through inter-textual connections to sub-cultural discourses. It does not seem that there is a single lesbian spectatorial position (or a definitive structure of lesbian subjectivity) offered by the text, readable in isolation from other 'textualities'. Lesbian identity and lesbian reading are active processes and not 'found' in static narrative or psychic structures. The sub-cultural 'language-game' of lesbianism is itself fabricated from such resistant reading of texts, and constantly reconstructed as opposing conceptualisations work themselves out.

There may be many reasons why lesbians would identify with the female protagonist in films which are, at best, recuperative of feminism to a revised male order or, at worst, blatantly gender-conservative. One reason may be sub-cultural codings. Certain stars, or physical types, etc, may become sub-culturally 'coded' as lesbian. The lesbian 'traditions' of cross-dressing and 'passing' for men (especially soldiers) may also feed into identification with the female warrior. Associations of the Amazon with feminism and/or lesbianism may also be a factor. Since the lesbian spectator of films such as Alien, Aliens, and Terminator II can hardly help but be aware of the lesbian-erotic elements of looking at the fetishised body of the female protagonist, textual suppression of lesbianism is not going to be effective. Overt demonisation, as in Red Sonja, is also something we have a long, shared sub-cultural experience of resisting and reappropriating. This is not to say that there is a timeless lesbian psychological structure or 'lesbian sensibility' at work here. The lesbian mobilises her critical readings by reference to the discursive spaces of lesbianism through which she constructs an identity.

There is a tendency to dismiss feminist concerns around sexuality as 'nothing to do with lesbians': as if sexism is the (boring) problem of heterosexual women. On the other hand, feminism is apt to dismiss pleasures which it designates 'male'. If the profoundly confrontational lesbian-feminist identity downgraded desire, then the politics of desire downgrade feminist resistance. At present, lesbian commentary often seems reluctant to analyse feminist resistances in favour of prioritising 'desire'. Heterosexual feminist analysis of horror focusses either on the subversive potential of 'monstrous' feminine excess, or on the male spectator, (or on the sexualisation of the female protagonist which is read as nullifying her impact as 'positive image'). Thus either lesbian pleasure or feminist resistance is being discussed, as though the two bore no relation.

It seems to me, however, that resistance is a condition of lesbian pleasure in the image of the female warrior. Feminists must resist objectification (as the form of exclusion and disempowerment of women in the patriarchal order) in order to act powerfully. On strategy (amongst many) for doing this is to take up a 'phallic' subject position. Having done this, a woman is excluded from the heterosexual order of desire. She cannot desire a woman because that would imply lesbianism; she cannot desire a man as a sexual object (from her phallic subjective position) because that would still imply homosexuality; and she cannot be desired without abandoning her 'phallic' position. In order to desire a woman, she must objectify a woman — who, as a lesbian, resists objectification. To stabilise this paradoxical tension, subjectivitity may be disseminated across the subject and object positions.

When the lesbian spectator looks at the body of the female warrior, the female warrior is sexually objectified for the desiring lesbian, but also identified with as 'phallic' (desiring) subject — opening up a lesbian subjective space. Paradoxically, therefore, it is the heterosexual feminist form of identification, which suppresses the element of desire in her looking at the female warrior, which is more likely to be sutured into a static male identification. This may be why heterosexual feminist analysis focusses, instead, on the male spectator and on the 'monstrous feminine'.

This is not to say that this is a definitive structure of lesbian identification, but a conceptualisation of how lesbian spectatorship might work in specific narratives. Nor is it to say that all mainstream representations of 'strong' women, lesbians, or bi-sexuality are necessarily recuperable for lesbian identifications and pleasures. Such judgments depend on context. Which representations of female protagonism (or female bonding) are seen as sub-culturally recyclable or as irredemably heterosexist — and by whom — remains a matter for the continuing discursive struggle. Lesbian oppositional discourses are transformed and renewed in the context of struggles between different oppositional sexualities and the discontinuous discourses of heterosexuality itself — including the struggle between heterosexual feminisms and 'progressive new-male' discourses of which these films are a representation.

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• Mulvey, Laura [1975] 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' and 'Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by Duel in the Sun, both reprinted in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Penley, Routledge, 1988
• Neale, Stephen [1983] 'Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema', Screen, 24:6
• Sobchack, Vivian [1990] 'The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film', Alien Zone, Verso
• Solterer, Helen [1991] 'Figures of Female Militancy in Medieaval France', Signs, 16:3
• Sontag, Susan [1982] 'Notes on "Camp"', Against Interpretation, Octagon
• Springer, Claudia [1991] 'The Pleasure of the Interface', Screen, 32:3
• Straayer, Chris [1990] 'The She-man: Postmodern bi-sexed performance in film and video', Screen, 31:3
• Theweleit, Klaus [1987] Male Fantasies Vols I & II, Minnesota UP, 1987, 1989.
• Williams, Linda [1981] 'Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions', Cine-Tracts, 3:4
• Williams, Linda [1984] 'When the Woman Looks', Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, AFI

Filmography

Primary Film Texts:

Alien, US: 1979, Ridley Scott
Aliens, US: 1986, James Cameron
Red Sonja, US: 1985, Richard Fleischer
Terminator II: Judgment Day, US: 1991, James Cameron
Barbarella, Fr/It: 1968, Roger Vadim

Secondary Film Texts:

Basic Instincts, US: 1992, Paul Verhoeven
Black Widow, US: 1986, Bob Rafelson
Coma, US: 1978, Michael Crichton
Conan The Barbarian, US: 1982, John Milius
Conan The Destroyer, US: 1984, Richard Fleischer
Desert Hearts, US: 1985, Donna Deitch
Daughters of Darkness, Bel./Fr: 1971, Harry Kumel
Fatal Attraction, US: 1987, Adrian Lyne
Fatal Beauty, US: 1987, Tom Holland
Night of the Comet, US: 1984, Tom Eberhardt
Red Sonja, US: 1985, Richard Fleischer
Robocop, US: 1987, Paul Verhoeven
She Must Be Seeing Things, US: 1987, Sheila McClaughlin
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, US: 1984, John Guillermin
Silkwood, US: 1983, Mike Nichols
Supergirl, UK: 1984, Jeannot Szwarc
The Silence of the Lambs, US: 1991, Johnathan Demme
The China Syndrome, US: 1979, James Bridges
Thelma & Louise, US: 1991, Ridley Scott