Opengender

Without some kind of extra-textual or inter-textual contextualisation it is difficult to avoid not only the negative positioning of the lesbian spectator by heterosexualising feminist accounts of the scopic relay; but also the occlusion of the specificities of lesbian oppositional reading practices themselves. Black feminists working within a film-studies paradigm (who had also been marginalised by the dualistic construct of gender in film-theory) seemed to be moving in similar directions. Bobo (1988), for example, cited black women's deployment of a "cultural competency" which she defined as "the repertoire of discursive strategies brought to bear on interpreting a text" which had developed through the processes of black history and culture (Bobo, 1993: 285). These politicised cultural competencies enabled black female spectators to recontextualise, or resignify popular films such as The Color Purple which had, elsewhere, been rejected by black critics as negative portrayals of black communities. Whilst it might legitimately be taken for granted that lesbians do, in fact, also deploy such (sub)cultural competencies in reading the popular text, any account of lesbian spectatorship which does not explore the discursive construction of these lesbianisms tends to depoliticise. Lesbianism has too often been articulated in film-theory as signifying an alternative content of desire rather than as effecting a politicised resistance. Interdisciplinary lesbian work on popular culture has more recently begun to take account of lesbian diversity, however:

While tracing this history of the exclusion of images of lesbians and gay men from film has been an important liberationist project, it is important to recognize that lesbians and gay men have in no way been coherent categories. (Patton, 1995: 22)

How may we adequately define a lesbian film, a lesbian film-maker, a lesbian spectator ? Of course, unless we resort to essentialism we are forced to conclude that these things are contingent ... (Wilton, 1995c: 4)

Women of the baby-boom generation ... believed that they could construct a collective sense of what it meant to be a lesbian, and also develop representation of that collective identity. Today's emergent generation, much more aware of the limitations of identity politics, seemingly does not. (Stein, 1994: 26)

In referring conceptualisations from the textuality of feminist film theory to a lesbian (sub)cultural context one is effectively re-referred to the problem of defining 'the lesbian' in the first place. It seems inevitable that, whilst formally acknowledging diversity, lesbian cultural critique has thus almost surreptitiously referred its otherwise inarticulable speculations either to the specificities of the writer's own lesbian 'knowledges' or to an amorphous construct such as lesbian 'cultural competence.' The citation of lesbian 'memory' is not, however, inconsistent with Foucauldian practice — which informs much of the more recent lesbian work (as well as my own). Such work does not seek to establish historical 'facts' by empirical methods, but to draw out, or render more transparent, the cultural conceptualisations which are productive in every-day lesbian strategies and identifications:

In the second volume of his last major work, The History of Sexuality, (Foucault) describes the object of the studies there as being "to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently." (Hamilton 1996: 140; citing Foucault, 1992: II, 9)

Any critical concepts, nevertheless, always need to be situated by what Foucault calls "the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualisation ... (and) the type of reality with which we are dealing" (Foucault 1982: 209). But to Foucault, historical narrative does not constitute a 'factual' or 'authentic' account of the past or the present. It is no more or less unreliable than any other.

History has no meaning though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible ... but this is in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics. (Foucault, 1980: 115)

Foucault advocates using the historical sense to "construct a countermemory — a transformation of history into a totally different form of time" (Foucault 1984: 93) ... Superficially, this 'countermemory' sounds like an exercise in redemption, a remembering of all the voices conventionally dismissed by history ... But Foucault believes that a catastrophic unconnectedness is exactly the authentic state of affairs, past and present. (Hamilton 1996: 138-9)

Although working basically within a film-studies paradigm, Traub (1991) nevertheless rejected any universalising categorisation of 'the lesbian' constituted under the sign of desire.

Whatever a 'lesbian' 'is' is constantly negotiated — a matter of conflicting and contradictory investments and agendas, desires and wills. (Traub, 1991: 305)

Traub's interpretation of Black Widow (1986) implicated a (quasi-historicised) lesbian spectator in the institutionalised organisation of desire in the popular film-text by requiring her to supply 'lesbian knowledges' in excess of those offered by the film's narrative but which were opened out by its incoherences and necessary in order to effect a (lesbian) reading. 'The lesbian' nevertheless remained more or less a prisoner of the naturalising effects of the cinematic process:

'Lesbian' appropriation of the 'gaze' comes only at the price of acquiescence to a system of sexual (gender and erotic) regularization that reproduces dominant taxonomies of sexual (gender and erotic) difference. (Traub, 1991: 308)

... [T]he majority of 'lesbians' I know who saw the film defied spectator conventions, constructing Alex as an erotic object to suit their desires. At the same time, their construction enacts precisely the conflation of gender and eroticism endorsed by the film and by which the dominant ideology homogenizes 'lesbian' desire as 'narcissistic': identification with Alex leads to desire for Alex. (Traub, 1991: 308)

Butler's (1993) Foucauldian re-reading of Lacan's primary account of narcissism, however, offers an opportunity to reposition the Lacanian account of the cinematic process itself within a historicising frame. Lacan's account of the 'mirror phase' (and his pupil, Miller's (1977-8), account of 'suture') are crucial to the film-studies model of the (gendered) identifications offered by the visual relay. If Lacan's originary model of the acquisition of the bodily imago upon which the ego is articulated can be treated, as Butler has done, as an account of the materialisation of "a sedimented history of imaginary relations" (Butler, 1993: 74); then there seems no reason why the psychoanalytic account of the replication in cinematic processes of identification and desire may not be treated as similarly contingent.

Psychoanalytic film theory need not be approached, as it generally has been, as describing the processes by which the cinematic apparatus reproduces the (culturally) gendered organisation of (essentialised) 'drives.' Models of identificatory practice might, instead, be treated as accounts of discursively effected institutionalised relations which are repetitively cited in the (re)production (or refusal) of the gendering of spectatorship. The contingency of cinematic narrative coding has, indeed, long been recognised:

Narrative and image in film are never entirely reducible to one another, if only because the demands of the classic narrative could in fact be met by a range of conventions of cinematic narration, of which the classic system is but one. Conventions, by their nature, are subject to change. Even if the classic narrative retains its dominance as a structure, its basic requirements could conceivably be met by cinematic codes different from those of classic cinema. (Cook, 1985: 215 – emphasis hers.)

The gendered organisation of 'the gaze' might be read as subject to exactly the same productive incoherences and contestations as any discursive construct or cultural code.

[T]he theoretical material on 'the gaze' also fails frequently to distinguish between the look (associated with the eye) and the gaze (associated with the phallus). (Evans and Gamman, 1995: 16)

The (white, male) 'look' might strive to replicate the seamless dominance of the 'gaze' but since the 'gaze' is, in 'reality,' merely a cultural ideal, appropriations of it can never achieve a 'perfect' dominance — that is, no matter how he tries, the male individual can never entirely exclude or annihilate his own 'lack of fit' or the resistances of 'others' to his acts of dominance. Women and lesbians, on the other hand, would not only be debarred from such performances of dominance, but would not necessarily have any interest in attempting to replicate the 'gaze' as dominance. On the contrary, they might very well be motivated, instead, to resistance.

The conventions which render visual-spatial organisation intelligible are, arguably, produced within the same discursive formations as the conventions of any culturally intelligible representation. This is increasingly being recognised in feminist film studies:

We would also argue that the 'cultural competence' of the lesbian spectator (and lack of such competence in other viewers) may influence the way representations are viewed and understood by some women. Using Foucault's model of discourse we would argue against any essentialist model of the lesbian gaze and instead suggest that lesbian viewers may bring certain subcultural experiences and knowledge to the reading of specific texts. (Evans and Gamman, 1995: 35)

There is often a danger, however, for the dominant text to become entirely relativised.

But does the queer gaze always reconstitute the visual text as queer? Or do some images encourage polymorphous identifications more than others? As we argued ... context is important, but the text also is a structuring discourse. (Evans and Gamman, 1995: 45)

It is important to retain a sense of mainstream modes of representation as effecting dominance, and of lesbian reading as representing a challenge — rather than simply as 'diversity' with minimal political valence. If adequate attention is not paid to the processes of popular cinema as a mode of dominance, there can be a tendency to idealise constructs such as 'contradiction' in feminist discourse or 'transgression' in queer discourse — to the point at which they appear as ends in themselves:

For what, after all, is transgression? Transgression has a slightly Sadeian ring, almost as if a notion of blasphemy were lurking somewhere about. In secular terms, what is implied is a flouting of the rules, or a rule, behaviour antagonistic to what is established, the opposite, a radical challenge to what is prescribed. Yet, just as the only true blasphemer is the individual who really believes in God, so transgression depends on, and may even reinforce, conventional understandings of what it is that is to be transgressed. (Wilson, 1993: 109)

My own analysis attempts a critical reading project in which close readings of film-texts are effected by citing lesbian contexts which are, in turn, delineated by a discursive treatment of lesbians' own competing political, cultural, and historical narratives. I want, however, also to try to articulate the productive effects of lesbianisms' and feminisms' own discursive conflicts and struggles — between lesbians themselves as well as between feminisms, lesbianisms, and the dominant formations of popular cinema. That is, in order to historicise the text, as well as the spectator, I have set out to model lesbian (re)readings of dominant cinema by reference to the same discursive struggles which organise the formations of feminism and lesbianism as modes of resistance, and which thus make it possible also narrate a (dominant) context for the films themselves (which may, increasingly, be reflexive not only to cultural contestation and change but to critical discourses in film theory itself), but without being bound over to its modes of domination. That is, it becomes possible to articulate the relationship of lesbian subjectivities to dominant cinema as a politicised process. My own mode of analysis thus takes into account 'preferred' readings offered by popular films.

The intelligibility of popular film obviously depends on readers' familiarity with the dominant cultural codes which it deploys and which its readers re-deploy. In Foucauldian terms, these conflicts are ordered by complex and culturally produced motivations in the (re)production or contestation of power relations. Any spectators who can read conventional cinematic codes, including marginalised spectators, thus have a range of compliant or oppositional reading strategies made available to them. That is, in Foucauldian terms, coercive practices must inevitably refer themselves (metonymically) to the possibility of motivation — either to participate or to resist (for if we were robotically servile coercion would merely signify as excess). Those who are motivated to claim dominance (a will to access power or court its approval) might thus attempt an appropriative or compliant reading of popular texts; whilst those motivated to resist might attempt a disruption or articulate a downright refusal. It therefore seems important to articulate lesbian motivations produced in discursive struggle rather than any fixed or universal identity or interpretative strategy.

I do not treat lesbian identity as a meaningful essence in itself but rather as motivation to resist the processes of women's subordination which finds a variety of modes of articulation. Motivations to resistance may engage, as well or instead, other discourses such as race, sexuality, or class. Furthermore, modes of resistance change over time. Resistance is, above all, a motivated (politicising) activity, and not a passively inevitable product of (lesbian) 'nature.'

I would like to suggest another way to go further towards a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, it consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies. (Foucault, 1982: 211)

This model of resistance has often been subjected to a binaristic interpretation in Anglo-American literatures — that is, the axis of enquiry articulates a dialectical relation between 'dominant' and 'abject.' Foucault expressly rejected the pessimism of such articulations in which resistance appears as "only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat" (Foucault, 1976: 96). A micropolitical analysis must, on the contrary, take account of the production of resistance as not only incoherent but also active.

Lesbian discursive (sub)formations can be discerned as much through the manifestation of lesbian struggles over the meaning of lesbianism as through the struggles of lesbians against 'the dominant'— an equally incoherent process. A discursive method offers a means to posit oppositional discursive strategies which work their reversals within the cultural sphere of the dominant but which come, gradually, to constitute relatively autonomous 'sub-domains,' or formations (shared modes of language use and reference), which are capable of sustaining materialised (apparently substantive) counter-identifications. Whilst any illusion of coherence produced as an effect of such identificatory practices cannot be taken as a lesbian 'authenticity,' they can provide a point for the re-transmission of cultural codes. In other words, they enable a diversity of lesbians to read mainstream culture from lesbian perspectives whilst, from a theoretical point of view, offering no universalising 'truth' of lesbianism.

The incoherence of the discursive productivity of power posited in Foucault's work can, therefore, be used to account for a lesbian ability to effect re-readings of dominant cultural products which are incoherent with preferred readings — and, indeed, with each other — yet intelligible as transformative modes of resistance. In effect, the relation between spectator and text is a dynamic one — the spectator is not the passive victim of textuality (as in psychoanalytic film theory) but then nor is the text a passive object which is entirely relativised by the specificities of the gaze (as in much queer theory). Each represents an attempt to control the production of meanings in the discursive field of popular cinema. I will thus be addressing questions of lesbian identity to a diversity of lesbian discourses, as articulated in politics, literatures, anecdotal accounts and media.

This project, however, is in no way intended to constitute an exhaustive representation of all formations of lesbian culture, identity, or "community" (an unwieldy and impossible task) — nor, indeed, a comprehensive history of cinematic practice. Instead, I have tried to develop a discursive analysis of feminist engagement with a popular genre and to distinguish some basic modes of lesbian spectatorship. The lesbian-contextualising material which precedes my discussions of lesbian readings of specific film texts is intended to sustain lesbian-ising readings of cinematic texts not by empirical reference to extant communities of lesbians, but by reference to the conflicting "agendas, desires, and wills," which have mobilised lesbian practices. Although I have effected a schematic distinction between lesbian modes of reading cinema in a roughly chronological development, clearly lesbian practices do not confine themselves neatly to period. Metaphors and practices such as 'woman-identification' or crossdressing may persist and yet transform over time. Furthermore, oppositional strategies do not always take the form of counter-identifications and, increasingly throughout this decade, they do not do so. Many lesbians now see a proliferation of 'perversity' or 'irrationality' as the cutting edge of change, expanding what might be admitted to a 'pluralistic democracy' (Butler 1990).

Lesbian representation has, indeed, recently achieved a degree of marketability in the mainstream representational order which has, itself, fragmented. Hollywood now markets popular films which represent lesbianism as attractive, glamorous, and desirable. Producers of mainstream cinema are now able to recirculate lesbian subcultural codings; and the lesbian 'knowledges' brought to decoding are culled from a bricolage of lesbian cultural-historical practices. However, this very degree of incorporation and fragmentation problematises conceptualisations of 'the lesbian' not only as the unified figure of identity politics but also as a queer figure constituted through exclusion from dominant modes of representation.

At the same time, I have addressed what I see as some of the limitations of Foucauldian analyses of lesbian cultures, particularly in the field of queer discourse. I have therefore included a critique of Foucault's occlusion of gender in his formulation of the discourse of 'sexuality' as well as an evaluation of lesbian debates surrounding the influence of Foucault on queer discourse.