Opengender

In terms of the conventional model of the structure of the gendered gaze, it would seem that whatever the intention of the director, writers, or stars, the scopic structure inevitably reverberates with a lesbian eroticism whenever a woman looks at a woman. Male buddies may re-assert a masculine integrity through violent action against an externalised enemy, but this strategy would hardly assist the re-feminisation of women looking at women. Indeed, in action-genre movies with single female protagonists, the virilisation of the heroine is emphasised by her violent actions. Denials of lesbian eroticism have nevertheless been effected in a number of ways: by dehumanising the space of "the feminine" as bio, techno, or corporate monstrosity (Alien, Terminator II); by substituting a male love-interest in the place of the feminine erotic object (Fatal Beauty, The Ballad of Little Jo); or by substituting male 'perversity' as the space of the feminine (The Silence of the Lambs, Blue Steel, The Ballad of Little Jo). The visual language of the New Women's buddy film described by Vicinus, Rosenthal and Bailin, which avoids spatially or scopically connecting diegetic female characters, also seems organised precisely to avoid any lesbianising effect.

Some of the later pro-feminist, realist, buddy films took another tack, however. In films such as Times Square and Thelma and Louise, female protagonists were simply substituted into the classic format of the paired male buddy film. This tended to produce a homoeroticisation of the female spectator's gaze as it relays through the female protagonist to the diegetic 'space of the feminine.' In terms of the heterosexualising binary, protagonism is male and the space of the feminine must be occupied by a feminine figure which is either passively erotic or actively evil. If the feminine object is conventionally coded, the female protagonist's look takes on and inverts the power of phallic desire (Desert Hearts, Times Square). If the feminine is, unconventionally, active/evil, the rampant intra-female exchange of looks institutes a narrative resolution in the re-feminisation, demonisation, death, and/or secure confinement, of at least one party to the exchange (Barbarella, Red Sonja, Black Widow).

When the male gaze is relayed onto the spectacularised male, the substitution of a 'dark girl' for one of the buddies may circumvent the problem of homoeroticisation. Similar strategy was used in Greenwald's heterosexual-feminist text The Ballad of Little Jo. An Asian male, narratively coded and styled with feminising (in terms of western conventions) long hair, servitude, domesticity, and emotional nurturing, is substituted in the space of the feminine as the crossdressing Jo's love interest. This strategy has also been tried the other way around in the male-directed actioner, Fatal Beauty, in which the protagonist, Whoopi Goldberg's, love interest is a white male.

During the first half of Ballad's narrative, Jo's character is also counterpointed to a highly pathologised homosexual male figure. Greenwald's representation of both of her male characters was accused of a "drift toward stereotype" and was also seen as intertextually inflected by her identification as a white, heterosexual filmmaker (Modleski, 1995/6: 4, 9-10). Greenwald, however, explicitly claimed identification with Asian masculinity in a way which indicates that this figure does function as a substitute for 'the feminine' in her film:

. . . [T]he same thing has been done to Asian men that's been done to women. In Westerns, they're extras, they're in the background, or they're in the kitchen. They're asexual, and they're slaves who work their whole lives taking care of white men. I felt the two would connect with each other through a similar experience of life [...] (Greenwald interviewed by Modleski, 1995/6: 9)

The productivity of film as discourse has not really been addressed in respect of either film, however. The racialisation of the gendered relay in Ballad and Fatal Beauty (respectively of the Asian male as object of the virilised white female gaze, and of the white male as object of the virilised black female gaze) effectively feminises Asian male sexuality, and virilises black female sexuality (in line with conventional racialised codings). The objectification of male homosexuality as pathology by the virilised white female subject in Ballad conventionally feminises male homosexuality. Whilst both films do simultaneously disrupt race and gender codings, the racialisation or pathologisation of the feminine is nevertheless deployed as a hetero-strategic disavowal of lesbianism. The remaining available heterosexualising strategy is to disarm the female protagonists' gaze.