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 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'.
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'.