Bitch Flicks – Page 45 – The radical notion that women like good movies

The Female Gaze: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Female Gaze Theme Week here.

The Female Gaze: Dido and Noni, Two of a Kind by Rachel Wortherley

Directors Amma Asante and Gina Prince-Bythewood illustrate that when a story is told through the eyes of the second sex, themes, such as romance, self-worth, and identity are fully fleshed out. By examining an 18th century British aristocrat and a 21st century pop superstar, it proves that in the span of three centuries, women still face adversity in establishing a firm identity, apart from the façade, amongst the white noise of societal expectations.

Thelma and Louise: Redefining the Female Gaze by Paulette Reynolds

The violence may decrease as the movie progresses, but Thelma, Louise – and we – become comfortable about their actions as the film winds down, because they were now tapped into our veins, nourishing our battered spirits with acts that said, “See? We recognize your anger, cause we’re angry – and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

How Catherine Breillat Uses Her Own Painful Story to Discuss the Female Gaze in Abuse of Weakness by Becky Kukla

The female gaze is more than simply “reversing” the male gaze; it allows for a questioning of why the male gaze is so inherently built into cinema and why women are aggressively sexualised within cinema. With Abuse of Weakness, Breillat attacks both of these concerns whilst also actively encouraging identification with Maud – our female protagonist.

The Capaldi Conundrum: How We Attack the Female Gaze by Alyssa Franke

In any fandom based on visual media, fangirls are attacked because of the way the female gaze is misunderstood and misrepresented.

Murder Spouses and Field Kabuki: The Female Gaze in NBC’s Hannibal by Lisa Anderson

The show treats the bodies of living women with the same respect that it treats those of dead ones.

The Male Gaze, LOL: How Comedies Are Changing the Way We Look by Donna K.

The body is no longer a Lacanian reflected ideal, it is a biological mess that often exists beyond anyone’s control. The effect of this convention is two-fold–a bait and switch of expectations but also the creation of a sense of biological sameness: man or woman, everybody poops. By placing the body in a biological space instead of a symbolic one, physical comedy is questioning the visual tendencies of subconscious desire.

Please Look Now: The Female Gaze in Magic Mike XXL by Sarah Smyth

The trailer offers a kind of meta-advertisement, recognising the very marketing strategies that attracted people, including women, to the previous film. Cutting between clips of the men performing various routines, the trailer includes the line, “We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer but it was very very hard to resist,” before inviting the audience to #comeagain this summer.

No, You Can’t Watch: The Queer Female Gaze on Screen by Rowan Ellis

The desire to show a complex version of yourself seen with male characters in the Male Gaze, alongside a desire for a complex version of your partner seen with male recipients of desire in the Female Gaze, combines in the Queer Female Gaze to produce sexual and romantic relationships often rooted in friendship.

“Everything Is Going To Be OK!” – How the Female Gaze Was Celebrated and Censored in Cardcaptor Sakura by Hannah Collins

In other words, there was a concerted effort to twist the female gaze into a male one under the belief that CLAMP’s blend of hyper-femininity and action would be unappealing for the male audience it was being aimed at.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze by Leigh Kolb

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

Jo March’s Gender Identity as Seen Through Different Gazes by Jackson Adler

The male gaze either holds Jo back from the start, or else shows an “educational” transformation from an “unruly” female into a “desirable” young woman who knows her place.

Pleading for the Female Gaze Through Its Absence in Blue is the Warmest Color by Emma Houxbois

The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

Women in a Man’s World: Mad Men and the Female Gaze by Caroline Madden

In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.

Just Not Into It: Why This Female Gazer Opts Out by Stephanie Schroeder

I choose to only support women-centered film and TV efforts as a funder, promoter and, indeed, gazer, if the intent, casting, storyline, and other elements are female-positive. There’s really just too much misogynistic and women-negating/woman-hating media in the world for me to do otherwise.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Scares Us by Ren Jender

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would.

When the Girl Looks: The Girl’s Gaze in Teen TV by Athena Bellas

In this moment, then, Elena is completely relieved of the conventional position of girl-as-object, and is therefore able to occupy a different position as a desiring subject. By purposefully making herself invisible, Elena momentarily evades and perhaps refuses to be defined by the adult male gaze that governs girlhood.

The Female Gaze in The Guest: What a View! by Deirdre Crimmins

Pinning down what makes the camera use a female gaze can be a little tricky, as we have all lived within the male gaze for so long. It is commonplace to see women on display disproportionately while male characters go fully clothed. The gaze’s assumption of heterosexuality also carries over to the infrequently used female gaze, making it slightly more visible. It is this consumption of the male body in The Guest which initially establishes the film’s gaze as female.

Shishihokodan: The Destructive Female Gaze of YA Supernatural Action Romantic Comedy by Brigit McCone

Recognizing the function of Ice Prince/Wolf in YA SARCom implies the continual defeat of the Whore as structural necessity in male writings also – as a pursuing character she must be resisted to generate sexual tension, regardless of whether the male author is Team Madonna or Team Whore. The destructive impact on the self-image of female viewers is pure collateral damage, just as our SARCom is poisonously emasculating for male viewers.

The Female Gaze: Dido and Noni, Two of a Kind

This guest post by Rachel Wortherley appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

In 2015, the film industry continues to designate female characters to the roles of wives, mothers, girlfriends, mistresses, the clever side-kick, or the sassy best friend. While a form of these categories may exist in reality, a three-dimensional approach allows women to be recognizable human beings. They are conflicted, in love, in hate, trying to find their identities, attempting to cling to self-worth. Women are more than the figures who stand ring-side, cheering and watching their husbands become bloodied and bruised. Women are more than the sex kittens who await their lovers in the bedroom, eager to stimulate him after a difficult day at work. It is rare that those images on film, realistic or not, are funneled through the female gaze.

The films Belle (2014) and Beyond the Lights (2014) demonstrate that women are more than objects for consumption. Directors Amma Asante and Gina Prince-Bythewood illustrate that when a story is told through the eyes of the second sex, themes, such as romance, self-worth, and identity are fully fleshed out. By examining an 18th century British aristocrat and a 21st century pop superstar, it proves that in the span of three centuries, women still face adversity in establishing a firm identity, apart from the façade, amongst the white noise of societal expectations.

Belle and Beyond the Lights share a similar narrative: a young woman, who happens to be mixed race, is plucked from obscurity and in time, gains a better way of life. However, to reduce the dramas to a single line discredits their significance within feminine literature in film. Generally speaking, British-born Gugu Mbatha-Raw is the thread that links both movies. After a few false starts on the small screen, specifically the J.J. Abrams-produced NBC spy drama, Undercovers (2010) and the FOX drama, Touch (2012-13), Mbatha-Raw found her place as the leading lady in two revolutionary films of 2014. Mbatha-Raw, who is a RADA graduate (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), joins the ranks of several English actors and actresses who continue to penetrate North America with their diverse talent. Within a year, Gugu, who, as Ophelia, shared the Broadway stage in 2006 with Jude Law in Hamlet, transformed from an 18th century, aristocratic historical figure to a sexy, fledgling popstar. Mbatha-Raw offers sheer strength and vulnerability behind the eyes of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Noni Jean.

Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay is the illegitimate daughter of British naval officer, Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode) and African slave mother, Maria Belle. Upon her mother’s death, Sir John rescues a young Dido from the squalor of the slums and is in turn raised by her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) and his wife, Lady Mansfield (Emily Watson). Sir John legitimizes his daughter by bequeathing her the name of Lindsay, as well as, demanding that she be raised with her cousin, Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon). In the 18th century, when colonization and slavery is the norm, Sir John makes a brave and radical decision.

Here, writers and producers could have taken advantage of this rich story by constructing it from the male perspective. Through the male gaze it would read as the story of a single father who fights through tempestuous, natural elements to find his mixed race daughter. Upon finding her, Sir John Lindsay has to deal with the pain of leaving his newfound kin for a voyage, and remain stoic amongst the ridicule from his peers. The narrative would then end with his sad demise, never having known Dido. However, audiences watch the 10-year-old curiously gazing at the portraits of her new family. As her aunt and uncle discuss how they will rear Dido, Lady Mansfield questions, where Dido’s race should be placed, “above, or below her bloodline?” The director cuts to an adult Dido who is deliriously giggling with her cousin, Elizabeth. They are inseparable and equals, until the question of marriage emerges.

Dido is at an impasse in society; with her new fortune (2,000 pounds a year left by her deceased father), her aunt and uncle surmise that no aristocratic family will welcome a mulatto and if she marries a man with no title, she risks her rank. While Dido is too high in rank to dine with the servants and too low in rank to dine with members of aristocracy (outside of the family), she continues to carry herself with great dignity. When her future suitor, John Davinier (Sam Reid), addresses her informally, Dido asserts that Davinier speak through the house servant since they have not been formally introduced. To not do so, would compromise social decorum.

Throughout the film, Dido manages to stand up for her self-worth in front of others who threaten to destroy it. Upon Lady Elizabeth’s coming out in London, Lord and Lady Mansfield decide that Dido should stay behind and maintain the house while they are away. There is a striking close up of Lord Mansfield unfastening his keys and Dido with horror on her face as she exclaims, “I am not an old maid!”—their aunt, Lady Mary (Penelope Wilton) is too old to continue to keep watch. The frantic nature in which Lord Mansfield unhooks the charcoaled keys from his hip, paired with Dido’s reaction evokes the images of a slave being punished by their master. Dido cries, “Why are you punishing me?” This softens Lord Mansfield who reassures her that she is most loved. Dido is also concerned that her dignity will be compromised in the portrait of her and Lady Elizabeth. Adult Dido is worried that her image will be reduced to that of a subordinate depicted in all the family portraits along the walls of the house. In the end, Dido is depicted beside Elizabeth, as her equal.

Beyond the Lights begins similarly to Belle, where audiences are introduced to the main character as a child. It is significant that Asante and Prince-Bythewood choose to begin at childhood—our formative years. Noni Jean, who is around 10-12 years of age, is placed on the stage of a talent show and she sings Nina Simone’s “Blackbird.” She settles for the runner-up trophy that her mother, Macy Jean (Minnie Driver), immediately commands her to trash because Noni should never settle for second place.

The camera cuts to a young woman, scantily clad in rubber, with a bare midriff, and sky-high boots as she sings and gyrates in the midst of studio produced hip-hop beats. A rapper, Kid Culprit (Machine Gun Kelly), fondles her. It is adult Noni, who has transformed from the little girl with pigtails to a sexy songstress. She is wildly popular in the music industry and has a hit record before her debut album has been released. However, she finds herself dangling from her hotel terrace with a tear-stained face whispering, “You still can’t see me,” to which Officer Kaz Nicol (Nate Parker) replies, “I see you,” as he grasps her hand and pulls her to safety.

The aftermath of Noni’s suicide attempt does not evoke concern from the parties who hold stock in her image. Her mother reminds her that she has the luxury of fame and fortune. Her record label reprimands Noni for the “accident” and threatens to drop her from the company. She has to maintain the image of the girl who men want and who women want to become. The night of Noni’s suicide attempt, her self-worth was at a low. She is the girl whose image is produced by her inner circle and the media consumes it. Instead of looking at her, they look through her.

Noni’s lack of self-worth is surmounted during her BET performance. As her dancers and Kid Culprit try to open her trench coat to reveal her half-naked body, Noni fights to keep it on. Kid Culprit roughly throws Noni on the staged-bed, attempts to shove her face into his crotch, and violently yanks Noni trench coat, revealing what she tried to conceal. Kid’s act of revenge culminates by his declaration that he dumped Noni. No one dumps Kid Culprit for another man. This moment is comparable to James Ashford’s assault of Dido as a form of degradation and assertion of power. In 2015, women continue to face assault from men when their advances are rebuffed.

In many ways, Dido is looked at as an object for consumption. Dido’s first suitor, Oliver Ashford, sees her as “rare and exotic,” while his brother, James, who is disgusted by Dido, stresses that “one does not make a wife of the rare and exotic. One samples it on the cotton fields of the Indies.” When Dido chooses not to wed Oliver, her family supports her decision, rather than reprimanding the choice. The only suitor who looks beyond Dido’s race is John Davinier—he is the reverend’s son and Lord Mansfield’s pupil. He presents the question of whether she would reduce herself for the sake of rank. The Zong Ship case, the assault, and John’s question helps her decide that she cannot marry into a family who will see her skin color as a burden, or affliction.

Kaz’s heroic action momentarily positions him as Noni’s savior. After their encounter, Noni has the choice to cut ties with him—even after he appears outside her hotel the following night to check on her—but she chooses to leave with him. With Kaz, Noni is able to eat chicken and fries, share her hidden box of songs, and in the most beautiful part of the film, she literally lets her hair down. Noni’s removal of her acrylic nails and extensions is her realization that she is more than the sexy images mounted on the walls. When he softly touches her face, reaches out and “boings” her natural curls, and kisses every inch of her face, audiences see her inner beauty. When she approaches Kid Culprit or walks on stage, it is always, shoulders back, boobs out, with a sultry look on her face. This is the first time Noni’s eyes are free of conflicting thoughts; constantly strategizing how she will present herself.

Beyond the Lights can be vaguely compared to the Richard Curtis film, Notting Hill (1999), in which an ordinary man’s life is changed when a beautiful actress walks into his bookstore. They fall in love, live happily ever after, and she abandons fame and fortune. Yet Notting Hill is written from the perspective of Will Thacker (Hugh Grant). It depicts how his dull life is changed when meets Anna (Julia Roberts) and how empty he is in her absence. As in Prince-Bythewood’s debut romantic drama, Love and Basketball, women are proactive in seeking romance. Monica (Sanaa Lathan) challenges Quincy (Omar Epps) to a game of one and one for his heart. Dido and Noni dictate which relationship they deem appropriate to pursue. Dido chooses John Davinier, while Noni chooses Kaz over Kid Culprit. They choose partners who will respect their newfound sense of self-worth and identity.

Ultimately, Dido and Noni’s suitors help them realize their new selves. However, it is exactly that, help. Dido does not reject Oliver’s marriage proposal because she is in love with John. She rejects it because she is comfortable in her skin and realizes her worth. It is a far cry from the Dido, who at the beginning of the film, gazes upon her image in the mirror and in tears, claws and beats at her breast. Though she must carry the burden of being looked down upon by members within her society, one that Dido is willing to undertake. At the end of Beyond the Lights, Noni stands up to her record label and pushy “momager,” and returns to England, where she presents her true identity on stage. She is wide-eyed, curly-haired, and sings, not underneath suggestive lyrics or studio produced beats, but with a live band and lyrics that come from her heart. As she stage dives into the pit of screaming fans, Noni beams with pride. Kaz showing up to support Noni, elevates her decision to follow her heart personally and professionally. Dido and Noni decide to follow through with the advice employed by their respective suitors. Again, choice is the key idea.

Belle and Beyond the Lights are films that are for women because they truly capture what it is like to be marginalized by society while working through personal growth. What is seen through the gaze of Dido and Noni’s narratives is that in order to function as a rich and diverse character, society must learn to be comfortable with women forming identities independent of two-dimensional categories.

Rachel Wortherley earned a Master of Arts degree at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. Her downtime consists of devouring copious amounts of literature, films, and Netflix. She hopes earn an MFA and become a professional screenwriter.

How Catherine Breillat Uses Her Own Painful Story to Discuss the Female Gaze in ‘Abuse of Weakness’

The female gaze is more than simply “reversing” the male gaze; it allows for a questioning of why the male gaze is so inherently built into cinema and why women are aggressively sexualised within cinema. With ‘Abuse of Weakness,’ Breillat attacks both of these concerns whilst also actively encouraging identification with Maud – our female protagonist.

This guest post by Becky Kukla appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

The name Catherine Breillat is almost synonymous with the concept of the female gaze.

Her works and the female gaze go hand in hand, many of her films providing a platform on which to explore and challenge ideas about sexuality, body image and sexual desire. Romance, A Ma Soeur and Anatomy Of Hell are amongst the most discussed; each film considers our preconceived notions of female sexuality and seeks to question stereotypes about it. Breillat is probably most renowned for this exploration, and the female-centric narratives that her films have. More importantly, her works talk openly from a distinctly female perspective – which is why they lend themselves so well to the concept of the female gaze.

All of this is nothing new, of course. Breillat has earned her title of “porn-auteur” a thousand times over (however ignorant that title is). However, it’s Breillat’s most recent film, Abuse of Weakness (2014), which I think actually pushes our ideas about the female gaze in relation to power and control in onscreen relationships. I was actually lucky enough to (accidentally) buy tickets to a Q & A screening of Abuse of Weakness at the London Film Festival in 2013 (accidentally because I didn’t realize Breillat would actually be there), and she spoke at great length about the biographical nature of Abuse of Weakness. The film itself has a surprising lack of explicitness in terms of nudity or sex. It stands out some way from Romance or Anatomy of Hell, but I genuinely believe it delivers a discourse about the female gaze which is just as interesting, if not more so.

Abuse of Weakness tells the story of Maud Shainberg (the incredibly talented Isabelle Huppert), a director/writer recovering from a stroke. She casts notorious con-man Vilko Piran (Kool Shen) in her new film, and a strange, manipulative relationship begins between the two of them. Somewhere between lovers and colleagues, Vilko begins to exploit Maud–emotionally and financially. Maud, desperate for affection and frustrated by her physical condition, doesn’t stop the exploitation – even though she is completely aware of what is happening to her. It’s an intricate look at relationships and abuse and an autobiographical representation of Breillat herself on making Bad Love. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable film to watch, not only because we know it’s Breillat. Throughout Abuse of Weakness we are aligned with Maud and we not only understand her desires, but can also feel ourselves becoming exploited too.

So where does the elusive female gaze come in? The female gaze is a relatively new cinematic term; traditionally the vast majority of mainstream cinema is aligned with the male gaze. To view and engage with a film, the audience must read the work as a straight, heterosexual male – identifying with the male protagonist and objectifying the women on-screen. Active male, passive female. The female gaze, especially in Breillat’s work, not only allows us to identify with the female protagonist but also allows us to objectify the male characters within the film. As Metz states, cinema is predominantly concerned with pleasure – “The spectator is seen as both the voyeur and viewer who is distanced from the object viewed and who has control over what he sees (and desires).” Breillat’s female gaze enables viewers to actively engage with the female protagonist, and derive pleasure from our identification with her. The female gaze is more than simply “reversing” the male gaze; it allows for a questioning of why the male gaze is so inherently built into cinema and why women are aggressively sexualised within cinema. With Abuse of Weakness, Breillat attacks both of these concerns whilst also actively encouraging identification with Maud – our female protagonist.

The opening sequence of Abuse of Weakness is actually a pretty neat summation of the way in which Breillat exposes the male gaze and actively rejects it. The film begins with a slow pan upward and gradually Maud is revealed lying naked within a large bed. The sheets are white (virginal) and before Maud appears onscreen, there is a familiarity to this type of scene. We expect to see a young, beautiful girl asleep on the pillows – yet we are met with Isabelle Huppert. Huppert is, of course, incredibly beautiful but at 62 she is (by Western standards) far too old to be naked in bed in your local cinema screen. Breillat, naturally, does not care. As we focus on Maud’s face, it is immediately apparent that something is wrong. Maud is having a stroke. As she falls out of the bed onto the floor, she is focused in the foreground of the shot whilst a painting of a naked woman is positioned behind her. This is no mistake; the audience are invited to gaze upon both naked bodies – not to sexualise or fetishisize but as two peieces of art. One is oil, the other is film. As we see in the opening scene of Abuse of Weakness, the audience is invited to view Maud as more than a naked body, or a sexualised piece of flesh, completely contrary to how cinema frequently presents women onscreen. Maud is naked, yes, but it is fear and death which we see in this sequence, not desire or sex. Maud can be naked without being objectified – a feat rarely achieved by women in most films.

Though Maud and Vilko’s struggle for power is they key theme of Abuse of Weakness, it’s actually Maud’s battle for autonomy that wins out as what the film is actually about. This, even more so, solidifies the film as a product of the female gaze. Although Maud is manipulated and abused, it is through her struggles with her own body – a feeling that most women can probably identify with. On the surface, Maud’s biggest turmoil is the moment where she must admit to her family what has been happening. She seems confused, vulnerable: “It was me…and it wasn’t.” Vilko’s manipulations (the “abuse of weakness”) meant that Maud was unable to have autonomy and live her life the way she desired. However, it was Maud’s stroke that initially took away her autonomy. Breillat often explores female body image within her works (A Ma Soeur instantly springs to mind) and Abuse of Weakness is no exception. Maud’s body has literally failed her, with no warning. The stroke takes away her freedom and her autonomy. Maud’s struggle with her body can easily be read as a comment on body image/representation in modern society. Women are expected to be younger, thinner, more beautiful than ever before – what happens when you can’t be? You lose autonomy and freedom striving to be perfect. Maud proves this in Abuse of Weakness and the question is asked; what can women amount to if their body is not good enough?

Although Abuse of Weakness is certainly the least “sexual” of all of Breillat’s films (physically, I mean), the film still places Maud’s desire for sex as an incredibly important concept. Whilst it’s never clear whether Maud and Vilko have a sexual relationship, there are many sequences where Vilko is topless or nearly nude. He is an attractive man, younger than Maud, and the viewer is invited to share in Maud’s objectification of him. To quote Penley, “Feminist film theory [seeks to] look at ways in which roles are gendered…looking is gendered masculine and ‘being looked at is gendered feminine.'” Breillat encourages the audience to place Vilko in a feminine position of objectification, and forces us to reevaluate the way we gender passivity as female and take a traditionally masculine position when we objectify Vilko.

All of these aspects – sexuality, body image, passive/active engagement and the power struggle throughout the film – combine to create a piece of cinema completely devoted to the female gaze. Viewers can easily identify with Maud and reject the notion of the male gaze. Due to Breillat’s influence as a female director and her rejection of the male gaze, the female (and male) audience are able to establish a relationship with Maud as a woman, a person and not a passive object to be lusted over or desired. Whilst it won’t stir up as much controversy as Anatomy of Hell or Romance (I mean, what can?), Abuse of Weakness is still highly valuable as a text which explores femininity and power – and well worth a watch.

Recommended Reading: France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema by Lucy Mazdon

Becky Kukla is a 20-something living in London, working in the TV industry (mostly making excellent cups of tea). She spends her spare time watching everything Netflix has to offer and then ranting about it on her blog.

The Capaldi Conundrum: How We Attack the Female Gaze

In any fandom based on visual media, fangirls are attacked because of the way the female gaze is misunderstood and misrepresented.

This guest post by Alyssa Franke appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

Fangirls everywhere face a common frustration. Call it what you like, there’s a name for almost every fandom — Marvel has the Chrises Conundrum, Sherlockians have the Cumberbatch Conundrum, Whovians have the Capaldi Conundrum. In any fandom based on visual media, fangirls are attacked because of the way the female gaze is misunderstood and misrepresented.

The female gaze is often assumed to be singularly focused on male objectification, to the exclusion of anything else. As a result, women are assumed to either be sexual beings who are present solely to gaze at male bodies, or intellectual beings capable of understanding and appreciating media. Unlike men, we are not allowed to be both at the same time.

Set aside, for the moment, the question about whether or not we can say that the female gaze really exists in franchises that are largely written, produced, and directed by men. At the very least, the creators of these franchises have attempted to appeal to what they believe is the female gaze — a presumed straight female audience — by objectifying their male leads.

Marvel hasn’t been shy about objectifying Chris Hemsworth’s body in his multiple on-screen appearances as Thor. His first solo movie featured several shirtless or partially clothed scenes, but by his second solo film we were upgraded to softly lit, lingering shots of Thor’s torso as he bathed. And Marvel didn’t tiptoe around the blatant objectification and who it was intended for. In a later scene, a woman deliberately falls onto Thor in a crowded subway car just to get a subtle feel of Thor’s chest. Thor is here for women to ogle, and he’s totally down for it.

The creators of Sherlock have also gleefully displayed Benedict Cumberbatch’s body for the enjoyment of his fangirls. Cumberbatch wasn’t deliberately objectified in the first season of Sherlock, though with his well-tailored suits and tight shirts, he certainly wasn’t being hidden away. But by the second season, he was being shamelessly objectified for the female audience. In a now infamous scene, Sherlock answers a summons to Buckingham Palace completely naked, wrapped only in a bed sheet. When he attempts to leave, his brother Mycroft steps on the edge of the sheet and pulls it down, giving women an eyeful of Cumberbatch’s torso and backside.

Doctor Who has been slightly more circumspect about appealing to the female gaze. Multiple female characters are shown gazing at or discussing the attractiveness of the various Doctors, but the men’s bodies themselves are rarely visually objectified for the viewer in the way female bodies are. Scenes with partial nudity are usually portrayed as slapstick or comedic scenes.

There are a few exceptions to this. In a special skit produced for a TV charity marathon, Matt Smith’s Doctor donates his wardrobe for charity. But he’s soon forced to hide behind his TARDIS as the viewers — presumably straight women — discover that pressing a button on their remotes will strip him of his clothing. The event is scripted and presented as a comedy, but women are actively shown objectifying Matt Smith’s body for their enjoyment. And in the first season of the new Doctor Who, Captain Jack, played by John Barrowman, has his clothes zapped away by two female-coded androids. Now naked in front of millions of television viewers, he flirtatiously tells the androids, “Ladies, your viewing figures just went up.”

Given the overall ratio of female objectification in media — and indeed, the ratio of female objectification in each of these franchises — the number of times men are objectified for a straight female audience is practically insignificant. But there’s an enormous disparity in the way male and female fans are treated when they react to this objectification.

Male fans can openly and loudly express their attraction to the female actors in a franchise without question. They can show their appreciation for moments where women are objectified without having their knowledge of a franchise questioned and tested. And their intellectual appreciation and understanding of a show is rarely challenged as a result. If anything, the recent surge of “sexposition” in high-brow TV shows seems to show that creators believe that appealing to the male gaze is necessary while delivering exposition and commentary.

Female fans do not have that same power, respect, or freedom.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, female fans are assumed to only watch the movies because of the attractiveness of the male actors. This attitude goes alongside a general suspicion that female fans of Marvel comics and the MCU are not “real” or “serious” fans, and female fans are often challenged to prove their knowledge of the extensive and convoluted history of those comic book characters.

Female fans of Sherlock have faced similar attitudes. The popular caricature of Sherlock’s fanbase, repeated ad nauseam on the internet and by the media, portrays the show’s fans as crazy Benedict Cumberbatch fangirls. And sure, many female fans do find Cumberbatch attractive. But he is not the sole reason that the vast majority of fans are watching Sherlock. Female fans are also watching for the witty writing, compelling mysteries, and the plethora of other amazingly talented actors called upon to play these classic roles.

Even within the larger Sherlock Holmes fan community, female fans tend to be dismissed based on the assumption that they are exclusively fans of Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and are ignorant of the larger Holmes canon. This is often accompanied by the misogynistic assumption that they are only watching Sherlock to ogle Cumberbatch.

In one particularly notable incident, Phillip Shreffler, a member of the Baker Street Irregulars literary society and former editor of the Baker Street Journal, wrote an article denouncing modern “fans” (a term he uses derisively) of Sherlock Holmes and praising instead the “elite devotees” who meet his accepted level of serious appreciation for the Sherlock Holmes canon. But his screed particularly targeted young female fans of Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, and he specifically singled out the Baker Street Babes podcast, which is composed entirely of women. Ironically, the Babes are devoted to discussing every incarnation of the Holmes story. It was Shreffler who assumed that young women would only be interested in Sherlock Holmes to watch Cumberbatch.

And then we have the Capaldi Conundrum. When it was announced that Peter Capaldi was being cast as the next Doctor, a particularly malicious glee began to seep through some parts of the Doctor Who fandom. At 55 years old, Peter Capaldi was breaking the trend of younger, more conventionally attractive men being cast as the Doctor. And some fans became to wonder if an older Doctor would “drive away” female fangirls.

To these fans, young female fans were interlopers in the Doctor Who fandom. They weren’t real or serious fans that were dedicated to the show or its history. They were just silly little fangirls sucked into watching the latest Doctors because the actors playing them were young and cute. They assumed Peter Capaldi’s casting as the Twelfth Doctor would drive fangirls away from where they didn’t belong. Accusations that female fans only watched Doctor Who to ogle its male actors appeared side-by-side with accusations that female fans weren’t “real” Doctor Who fans.

When most men try to imagine why women watch visual media — when they try to conceive of what the female gaze might be like — they tend to assume women are focused on viewing men as sexual objects. In its most benign form, this assumption results in male writers, directors, and producers creating scenes where men present themselves as passive sexual objects. For which we thank them.

But in it’s most misogynistic form, this assumption portrays the female gaze as something shallow and infantile. If a character is portrayed by an attractive actor, that must be the only reason why women like that character. If a franchise moves into a visual medium or is suddenly filled with attractive actors, that must be the only reason why women decide to become fans of that franchise. Within this mindset, women are assumed to have no interest in the story or its thematic elements. We are assumed to have no deeper intellectual appreciation for that franchise.

These dismissive attitudes put female fans in a bind. Because while we can and do have a deeper interest in and appreciation for a franchise beyond its male actors, many of us are interested in ogling hot guys.

I can be interested in Chris Evans’ ass and still want to examine the way the Captain America franchise examines the current American conflict over the lengths we should go to ensure security. I can watch the gif of a sheet being pulled off of Benedict Cumberbatch’s torso on repeat for hours and still examine the way Sherlock interprets the Holmes canon for a modern audience. And I can stare at gifs of David Tennant’s hair for days and still want to spend the next week marathoning episodes of Jon Pertwee’s and Peter Capaldi’s Doctors.

We need media that employs the female gaze — we need media that is written, directed, and produced by women for an audience of women. We need media that puts women at the center of the narrative and presents them as sexual beings rather than sexual objects. But more than that, we need to treat female viewers with the same respect we treat male viewers. We need to treat them as beings capable of intellectually and emotionally appreciating a piece of media while simultaneously being capable of appreciating Captain America’s ass.

God bless America.

Alyssa Franke is the author of Whovian Feminism, where she analyzes Doctor Who from a feminist perspective. You can find her on Twitter @WhovianFeminism.

Murder Spouses and Field Kabuki: The Female Gaze in NBC’s ‘Hannibal’

The show treats the bodies of living women with the same respect that it treats those of dead ones.

This guest post by Lisa Anderson appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

In discussing the female gaze in media, there’s one television show worth considering that may come as a surprise: NBC’s Hannibal. This plucky little drama has toiled away in bad time slots for three seasons now, winning critical accolades and devoted followers that never translated into ratings. In a landscape littered with crime procedurals that exploit women, Hannibal stands out, and not just for its searing visuals or plot twists. There are three ways that the “gaze” in Hannibal is feminine: the way the show depicts women, the way it depicts men, and the way it depicts sex.

You only need start with the pilot to see that Hannibal is a different sort of show. Not only does it cast two characters who were men in the original novels by Thomas Harris as women – Freddy (Freddie) Lounds and Alan (Alana) Bloom, to be specific – but it gives beefed-up rolls to three characters who weren’t central to the novels’ plots. Those are Jack Crawford’s wife Phyllis, forensic investigator Beverly Katz, and Abigail Hobbes, the daughter of serial killer Garrett Jacob Hobbs. Yet another female character, Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist Bedelia DuMaurier, is created from whole cloth. Showrunner Bryan Fuller has been quoted as saying he balanced the cast this way in part because writing a show with only men would have been boring.

As remarkable as the living women in the cast, however, is the way that the show treats dead women, right from the start. Much ink has been spilled about how many law enforcement procedurals fetishize the torture and suffering of women, or depict female murder victims in a titillating way. By contrast, in the opening moments of Hannibal, the protagonist, Will Graham, invites his students (and the viewers) to empathize with a dying murder victim, not with her killer–in spite of his own unfortunate gift for doing the opposite. As he is drawn into the FBI’s investigations of Hobbs’s murders, the first victim is found tucked respectfully into bed, fully clothed. The second crime scene he visits turns out to be one of Hannibal Lecter’s infamous murder tableaus, and while the dead woman there is naked –impaled on antlers – her body is angled in such a way her gender isn’t obvious and the image is fit for network TV.

Hannibal continues its gender-neutral approach to serial murder throughout its run. As many men are murdered as women (if not more), and whenever corpses are found without clothes on, they are shot such a way that they register as human rather than male or female. (The victims of the Muralist in Season 2 are perhaps the best example of this.) Even when a bare breast is shown straight on (such as with one critical character death in Season 2), it goes by quickly and is soft-focused and the nipple is not shown. Most importantly, the murders on Hannibal aren’t driven by misogyny or some twisted sexual motivation. This is not reflective of real of serial killers at all, but the show is more interesting for it. The one exception is Frances Dolarhyde, who comes on the scene in the back half of Season 3, and whose sexual pathology is impossible to get around. Even there, though, his female victims aren’t depicted in a titillating way.

Surely just having lots of good female characters and not depicting crime in a creepy way doesn’t qualify a show has having the female gaze, though, right? No, and in the case of Hannibal, there’s more to it than that. The show makes the most of the attractive male actors in its cast (and their avid fans), and also centers female pleasure in its sex scenes without exploiting the actresses.

The first (and very unsettling) instance of the female gaze that I noticed in Hannibal centers around the above-mentioned Mr. Graham, played by the amazing Hugh Dancy. Early in Season 1, Graham uses his talent for empathy to imagine himself in the place of a mental hospital inmate played by Eddie Izzard. As he mentally reconstructs a murder committed in the hospital by Izzard’s character, we see him with his shirt unbuttoned, smirking at the victim with a mix of smolder and menace before attacking her. In that moment, Dancy seems to be channeling Eddie Izzrard’s own sex appeal. Nor was that the only time the show has made the most of Dancy’s looks: it’s not common for him to be seen shirtless, but it’s not unusual either, and fans on tumblr have gleefully traded stills of the show that feature his rear end. In terms of Will the character, there is, of course, a perennial appeal to a cute man in glasses and cold-weather clothes scritching a dog… but maybe that’s just me. (I doubt it.)

In terms of the female gaze in Hannibal, however, no character is more important than the titular serial killer, played by Mads Mikkelsen. Sex appeal is part of the “Person Suit” that Lecter puts on, whether it’s the dapper, cultured professional that he puts forward in seasons 1 and 2, or the leather-clad, globe-trotting bad boy that begins Season 3. It’s not to lure his victims, though; it’s to conceal his crimes from society. Nor do clothes always make the man–in Season 2, the audience is treated to a slow pan up Mikkelson’s body as he is clad in only swim trunks. (In another example of the show’s twisted vision, Lecter is actually in dire straights at that moment.) In Season 3, there is a brief-but-langorous sequence of Lecter showing off blood. He emerges from the bathroom to have a tense confrontation with another character, rendered decent only by prop placement that would make Austin Powers proud.

The staff of Hannibal make the most of both their talented and attractive lead and the fans’ appreciation for him. The show’s official tumblr literally teased fans for weeks with the prospect of their favorite cannibal in a swimsuit. Even the show’s hilarious and inimitable food stylist, Janice Poon, has described Mikkelson as the “man o’ dreams,” as she jokingly (?) lamented missing the opportunity to brush glaze onto him.

The show’s eye candy doesn’t end with Mikkelson and Dancy, either. Richard Armitage, of Hobbit and North and South fame, joined the cast in Season 3 as Francis Dolarhyde, the Great Red Dragon. Right from his first, dialogue-free scene, he meets the high bar for acting set by Dancy and Mikkelson. But he also got into fighting shape to play the body-building villain of Harris’ novel, and for the most part, if Dolarhyde is in private, he is either wearing only small shorts or implied to be naked.

The way Dolaryhyde is filmed for Hannibal points to the difference between how depicts men and women. His nudity is not necessarily supposed to be titillating – it’s mainly to show off his formidable form and the vivid tattoo on his back, although it certainly won’t be unappealing to those who go in for muscular men. What it is, though, is gendered. By contrast, in the pilot, we see Freddie Lounds sitting at her computer, with her back turned and no shirt on. The mood is casual (especially in comparison to Dolarhyde’s workouts), and there is no posing for a camera that shouldn’t be there, no implication that she might turn. She’s treated as a naked human, not a naked woman. The same comparison can be made between Lecter’s Season 3 shower and the baths taken Dr. DuMaurier, played by Gillian Anderson. The show treats the bodies of living women with the same respect that it treats those of dead ones.

So, what happens when the men and women of Hannibal get together? Speaking strictly in terms of what’s been confirmed onscreen, we’ve had a couple of opportunities to find out. Women are seduced by (and seduce) serial killers, a lesbian character sleeps with a man to get pregnant but later finds a female partner, and there’s even a hallucinatory “five-way” that involves people hooking up with people while thinking of other people (and also… a wendigo. It’s hard to explain). If it all sounds sensational and potentially problematic, only the first part of that is true.

The sex scenes in Hannibal have a few things in common. First, neither female nor male bodies are really exploited. This could be written off as owing to network TV, the networks manage the male gaze just fine in their sex scenes most of the time. Instead, there’s a dream-like, almost art-house quality to the editing and camerawork. Second, they’re always between central, full-drawn characters, who are both acting out of their agency even if there is information that they don’t have. Third, they all have strategic or plot importance – the feelings of the characters and the dynamics between them are as important as what happens physically.

Most importantly, though, the sex scenes in Hannibal always imply that the woman (or women) involved are satisfied. This is usually done with a tasteful shot of an arched back or ecstatic facial expression. Remarkably, in a show where interpersonal relationships of all kinds prove to be fraught and painful, there’s never been a sex scene where it wasn’t clear that a woman was having a good time. This focus on female pleasure, as much as anything else, qualifies Hannibal as a show with a female gaze.

While Hannibal’s female gaze obviously includes the straight female gaze, it’s not strictly heteronormative. Dr. Alana Bloom, played by Caroline Dhavernas, is attracted to both Will and Hannibal, but ultimately ends up in a long-term relationship with a woman. Will and Hannibal both get involved with women, but in a Episode 10 of Season 3, Bedelia DuMaurier – perhaps the person most in Hannibal’s confidence – heavily and repeatedly implies that they’ve been sexual with each other as well. Many viewers were surprised only by the confirmation, based on the homoerotic subtext between the two from the start. While Hannibal still has never had a gay man as one of the central characters, it acknowledges both male and female bisexuality, which is unfortunately a rarity on TV today. Needless to say, this wins the show points in today’s fandom environment, with it’s overlapping interest in social justice and same-sex pairings.

I’m not saying that Hannibal is a perfect show. Feminists have taken issue with it before. I’ve agreed with some of those criticisms and either disagreed with or eventually softened my position on others. With two more episodes left in Season 3 as of this writing, I can imagine ways in which it could still disappoint me. At the end of the day, though, it explodes many of the misogynist tropes of the TV crime procedural and even the texts where it finds its roots, and makes something truly unique and darkly beautiful with the shards.

Sadly, Hannibal has been canceled by NBC, and has not yet found another financial backer. I hope that it finds one, because I’d love for Bryan Fuller to be able to complete his vision. Until then, I’ll probably revisit it on DVD, and encourage those who I think would enjoy it to check it out. I’ll also look forward to his next project: a mini-series of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I’m sure he’ll bring his singular style to it, and hopefully continued nods to the female gaze as well.

Lisa Anderson is a social services professional and part-time writer living in Nashville Tennessee. Her favorite things include reading, good chocolate, and feminist pop culture deconstruction.

The Male Gaze, LOL: How Comedies Are Changing the Way We Look

This guest post by Donna K. appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

When I was taught the definitions of comedy and tragedy as an angst-y teen, I remember being struck by the way in which they were generalized. In tragedy, everyone dies. In comedy, everyone gets married. I remember thinking, “Yes, marriage IS hilarious!” But in fact, marriage was comic in the sense that everything worked out for everybody–everybody often being defined as the white male with power. Over the last decade, the male gaze has quietly been averted through a new wave of female-driven comedies. Television shows like 30 Rock, Broad City, Orange is the New Black, The Mindy Project, Inside Amy Schumer , and films like Bridesmaids and Appropriate Behavior have paved the way for comedy, specifically the role of women in it, to be re-defined: comedy is a choice. Comedy is not who will marry whom it is the choice to marry or not, to tell one’s individual story, to laugh in the face of the controlling patriarchy until there is nothing left to laugh about.

One of the hallmarks of the new class of female comedies is to subvert the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the female form, begging an audience to gaze upon woman but then exposing the gawkers to the truths below the surface in a physical- almost biological- comedy; Julie (Julie Klausner) publically wets herself in the very first episode of the new series Difficult People; Amy Schumer’s skit “Milk Milk Lemonade” reminds audiences that the sexy booty fetishized in music videos is, in reality, “where your poop comes out”; the explosive diarrhea of food poisoning ruins the extravagant rite of wedding dress shopping in Bridesmaids. The body is no longer a Lacanian reflected ideal, it is a biological mess that often exists beyond anyone’s control. The effect of this convention is two-fold–a bait and switch of expectations but also the creation of a sense of biological sameness: man or woman, everybody poops. By placing the body in a biological space instead of a symbolic one, physical comedy is questioning the visual tendencies of subconscious desire. No longer do audiences expect to walk into a theater or turn on a TV and be greeted with a vision of feminine perfection; now they might be subjected to blood, sweat, tears, and all other kinds of bodily fluids of not just the female form but the human one. The body is an object but not one strictly made for pleasure (yet pleasure is nice too, of course).

In Broad City the character of Ilana (Ilana Glazer) sets the mood propping up mirrors, putting on make-up, prepping herself to be a vision of desire (Season 2 Ep. 8, ““Kirk Steele””). She turns on her vibrator, and some porn, and is ready for some self love: she is not here to please anyone but herself. When Danny (Chris Messina) opens the drawer of Mindy Lahiri’s (Mindy Kahling) nightstand in The Mindy Project and proclaims “Mindy has the same neck massager as Ma,” (Season 3, Ep. 8 ““Diary of a Mad Indian Woman””) not everyone might understand the implication (pssst, pharmacies sell vibrators in disguise). New female comedy isn’t presenting sex as a males want toward females; it is showing sex as a thing all genders desire, even to the point they make it happen alone. Self-love in female comedy could potentially feed into the male gaze, making him even more afraid of castration or exciting him through pleasurable moans, but what is also occurring is a normalization of female sexual pleasure. Sex and the City led the way and now movies like Appropriate Behavior (full of bi-sexuality, threesomes, and a strap on!) and Trainwreck (even if Apatow is undeniably a slut shamer!) are reminding audiences that women use their vaginas for things other than birthing and male satisfaction. These comedies are creating what Laura Mulvey calls a “new language of desire” (where the controlled and the controller are interchangeable between genders, quietly inserting the fact that this dynamic has, in actuality, always existed).

Much like the voice-over in 90s comedies that presented a personal and omniscient guide to female protagonists (Sex and the City, Mean Girls, Clueless, and Election), flashbacks are now the go-to convention used to expose the inner and past lives of women. Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior is a flashback in its entirety, slowly showing the steps that led to the opening break-up between Shirin (Akhavan) and Maxine (Rebecca Henderson), a slow methodical break-down of motivations and personal histories. In 30 Rock, a nerdy child Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) speaks German in a short moment of memory, a happening common in the series with the young Liz sometimes played by Fey’s real life daughter. The characters of OITNB have constant, harrowing flashbacks that connect their present to a long receding past, in Sophia’s (Laverne Cox) pre-transition flashback her character is played by Cox’s real life twin brother. How can one see a character as a hollow, empty image when they are created with an entire life? A life that sometimes even edges into their fictional world? Women are not, as Mulvey says, “Freez[ing] the flow of action.” They are, and have always been, part of the action, whether recognized or not. The stories of women remain untold and the reminder that lives exist beyond their simple image, even in a fiction, is an enormous step forward in terms of making an active female figure rather than a passive one. Herstory isn’t a joke, it is a thing that roots woman in the world, it makes women makers of meaning and not strictly bearers of it.

And then come our good, old friends satire and parody! Comediennes are taking the unattainable expectations and fears of the male gaze, pointing at them and laughing as hard as possible, exposing the ridiculousness in objectification and shaming the power struggle into submission- it is almost like an S&M relationship with the status quo. When Liz Lemon does promos for her show “Dealbreakers” (Season 4 Episode 7, “Dealbreakers Talk Show,” a show that points out the faults in men that make them un-marriable: yas!), she ends up becoming so nervous about her appearance she is reduced to crying from her mouth after off-brand eye surgery. When Amy Schumer consults every possible man in her life, from doctor to mailman to boy scout, on whether she should go on birth control, it is hilarious but it is also not too far from the truth. When Annie (Kristen Wiig) wakes up early to apply make-up and return to bed before her sex friend wakes to give the illusion of flawlessness, it is a joke, and it is also, unfortunately, not a joke. Satire is a powerful way of exposing questionable societal norms, ridiculous attitudes, and insane standards; it is a socially acceptable way to challenge the patriarchy and air our grievances. If we collectively confront the male gaze through satire those in power can no longer turn a blind eye to the true absurdity that exists.

By choosing how we are looked at and creating comical stories beyond the marriage plot, we are making an enormous reclamation of our bodies and ourselves: power lies in choice. Alternative ways of seeing and being seen are created with each new story told, a visibility that is only just starting to be explored as we struggle to be better represented in mainstream media. Contemporary comedies with female leads are now ruled by countless types of desires as we are stick out our tongues at the gazing males frozen in the audience. Raising our laughter is just another form of raising our voices for change.

References

Mulvey (1975). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16.3 Autumn, pp. 6-18

Donna K. is a cultural critic, film festival consultant and creative producer based in Southern Vermont. She is a member of the Women Film Critics Circle and a writer for Hammer to Nail. You can follow her musings about visual storytelling on her blog Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then.

‘Thelma and Louise’: Redefining the Female Gaze

This guest post by Paulette Reynolds appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

“…the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object.” –Jacques Lacan

When psychiatrist Lacan formulated his theory of the mirror image in the 1950s, he was referring to the infant’s discovery of themselves as a meaningful object; thus, the Ego was formed.

Film critics applied Lacan to a number of philosophies on cinematic looking, but it took British feminist and film theorist Laura Mulvey to take this concept to the next level in the early 1970s. By giving it a name she also gave it a purpose, minting the phrase “the male gaze” and asserting that essentially men viewed women as sex objects – and that this objectification existed in all films:

“Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films ‘are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’” [1]

While Mulvey focused solely on men viewing the female characters on the screen, the females in the audience were left searching these cinematic women for the appropriate visual clues as to how they were were to be objectified in their everyday lives. Or were they?

It would be another 20 years before film theorists decided to consider the female spectator and how she felt about what role models were being offered for viewing. Another British film theorist, Jackie Stacey, devoted an entire book to the subject, Star Gazing, gathering female subjects for a study on viewing American films during the WWII years. She developed a broad examination of how women use their own gaze, both passively and actively:

“… Powerful female stars often play characters in punishing patriarchal narratives, where the woman is either killed off, or married, or both, but the spectators do not seem to select this aspect of their films to write about. Instead, the qualities of confidence and power are remembered as offering female spectators the pleasure of participation qualities they themselves lacked and desired.” [2]

I began this article with a quote about ego identification, which seems like a fitting point to keep in mind about the iconic feminist film statement of Thelma and Louise.

This Oscar-winning film from 1991 chronicled the coming-of-age for two working-class women, Thelma and Louise, as they strike out on the mama of all road trips. Each is running from relationship issues that involve absent men: Louise’s boyfriend Jimmy is gone for long stretches because of work and Thelma’s husband Darryl is absent because he cheats. Thelma’s response to Darryl’s infidelity and control issues is to be the perfect wife, clipping coupons and keeping a tidy house. Louise – a rape survivor – answers Life in general by hiding behind a tough outer shell, which keeps everyone out, including Jimmy and those repressed and unresolved memories. Yet we sense that underneath their poor coping mechanisms is a simmering rage, because – yes – we’ve all been there.

The vacation developes into a lost weekend of murder, crime and acts of revenge (and sweet sex), triggered in part by violence directed at them from a variety of arrogant, entitled men. I say in part because Thelma’s passive-aggressive urges frequently surface, leaving Louise to clean up the mess like a good surrogate big sister.

Thelma and Louise’s acting out allowed the female spectator of 1991 to connect and identify with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in an immediate way. This universal understanding – and approval – was instant, after all what woman hasn’t been lied to, disrespected, abused verbally or physically by some man in her lifetime? In a world directed and controlled by men, they did what we often wanted to do. When that truck blew up in a glorious angry ball of fire and heat, that was our exploding anger. The violence may decrease as the movie progresses, but Thelma, Louise – and we – become comfortable about their actions as the film winds down, because they were now tapped into our veins, nourishing our battered spirits with acts that said, “See? We recognize your anger, cause we’re angry – and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

They showed women violently dealing with their anger at patriarchy – perhaps for the first time since the great noir films of the 1940s and 1950s. These were nervous and high-strung working-class women and they weren’t going to sit still anymore. They were going to proactively deal with their situations – and what was more – they weren’t going to apologize for those actions either. This is what ultimately led to their doom, for two women to boldly act like men with unapologetic violence towards their oppressors had to be punished.

And then, cornered like a couple of scared girls, they ran their car off a cliff.

Sitting in that theater, 24 years ago, I felt like I had been victimized. My diffused anger and rage at societal norms of men getting away with gender abuse and violence had suddenly been given a voice. But in a heartbeat, we were all told that those forbidden emotions – those reserved for men to freely express – were not a viable option for us to feel. The lesson was shoved down our throats – abet in a truly melodramatic “chick flick” way – that we would literally careen off a cliff if we explored those feelings too deeply, screamed too loudly. We even had a coach, in the person of Detective Hal Slocumb – a sensitive soul who spent most of the film gently talking to our heroines like they were wild animals, needing to be calmed down before they used the tranquilizing stun gun.

After all, what would have happened if they had been caught or turned themselves in? They might act as role models for other women to reflect upon. What a scary thought to keep millions of men tossing and turning at night – and not in a good way. Some may argue that their suicide was an existentialist “fuck you” to the orderly world that Man had created for Woman, and that they freely chose to die to keep their “dream” of freedom as they went out in a blaze of glory. But such rationalization rings a bit hollow to this reviewer.

If the male gaze finds a “woman’s film” difficult to digest, it might be because the stereotypes they’re familiar with may not be so neatly drawn. Thelma and Louise must have been such a film for many males, who were – no doubt – highly uncomfortable at the images of the female response to discrimination. Even today, most rapes go unpunished, most battered women still live in fear and many women still remain passive in the face of verbal abuse. One can only imagine how vindicated the male audience felt when Thelma and Louise took a nose-dive off the Grand Canyon. The male gaze was once again pacified at the expense of the female audience.

Yet, Thelma and Louise is hailed as a definitive feminist statement by women, film critics, Hollywood, and – oh yes – men. I disagree. A film that spends 128 1/2 minutes making a bold statement, only to cop-out during the last 30 seconds is just that – a film that sold out women with a cautionary ending to satisfy societal expectations – or more importantly – societal fears. The issue of the “male gaze” has less to do with psychologically driven male angst and more to do with propagandizing females to direct our gaze away from empowered images of ourselves, regardless of who writes the script.

Yet something good did come from Thelma and Louise. Remembering that females are “responsible for purchasing 50 percent of all movie tickets” and are “more frequent moviegoers than males in the 18-24 year old demographic ($4.2 million vs. $3.3 million)” [3], movie studios took notice at the 1991 box office receipts for two “feminist statement” films – Thelma and Louise grossed $45 million in the spring and Fried Green Tomatoes followed up with a tidy $119.4 million in December.

And so, the age of the female-centered movie – for the sole pleasure of the female spectators – had arrived. By 1995 Dolores Claiborne was able to get away with murdering her abusive husband and The Quick and the Dead’s Sharon Stone could freely seek revenge for the death of her father.

During the film, Thelma and Louise strike a pose and immortalize themselves in what may be the first screen selfie. The two friends look exactly how they want the world – both female and male – to see them: happy and empowered. They control the camera, and while one level of Thelma and Louise becomes discarded, another stronger image remains fixed within us. It doesn’t matter who writes the scripts – and in many cases, who directs the film – it’s the female spectator of today who has the power to gaze, anyway that she chooses.

Sources

[1] Laura Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18 August 21, 2015.

[2] Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship, New York, NY Routledge. 1994. pp.158

[3] Smith, S.L., Granados, A., Choueiti, M., Erickson, S., & Noyes, A. “Changing the Status Quo: Industry Leaders’ Perceptions of Gender in Family Films”

“An Executive Summary.” Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media (2010) August 21, 2015.

Paulette Reynolds is the Editor and Publisher of Cine Mata’s Movie Madness film appreciation blog. Film viewing and theory are her passion, but film noir remains her first love. Paulette breathes the rarified Austin, Texas air and can be seen on Twitter: @CinesMovieBlog.

Please Look Now: The Female Gaze in ‘Magic Mike XXL’

“Are you ready to be worshipped? Are you ready to be exalted?”

Oh boy, are we!

Magic Mike XXL, this summer’s sequel to the surprise hit of 2012, Magic Mike, is a celebration of (heterosexual) female sexual desire. Centred on male stripping, Magic Mike XXL thoroughly recognises and foregrounds the pleasure of women within the film and within the audience; women are (finally) recognised as having sexual desire, and of gleefully and ravenously pursuing. In this piece, I will discuss how this celebration of heterosexual female desire creates a new space for the female gaze within cinema. Although exciting and radical, I will also flesh out why this conceptualisation is also difficult and slippery. However, ultimately, I suggest that truly productive message of Magic Mike XXL is in the way in which it creates a masculine image, a male spectacle, to be looked at, affording (heterosexual) women the privilege – and the permission – to look.

Magic Mike followed young and unemployed Adam (Alex Pettyfer) who enters the seedy world of male stripping after being introduced by Mike (Channing Tatum). Although the film contained many blatant strip scenes to be used for the audience’s entertainment, it also attempted to be something other than a gratuitous stripping movie. Directed by Academy Award-winning Steven Soderberg, the film was a Serious Picture, all washed-out colours, mumbled dialogue, and loose camera work. The sequel, however, offers a much more conventional (and sexually entertaining) story. We are reunited with Mike who, after leaving stripping to work full-time on his furniture business, is dissatisfied with his new lifestyle. He decides to rejoin his fellow strippers including Matt Bomer’s Ken and Joe Manganiello’s rather subtly named, Big Dick Richie for one last hurrah. After some quick and unimportant narrative exposition to explain the loss of Pettyfer and Matthew McConaughey (in the first film, he played club owner, Dallas), the boys hit the road to perform one last time at a stripping convention (yes, this is apparently a thing).

More explicitly than its predecessor, Magic Mike XXL is aware of the sexual pleasures to be had from male stripping. The trailer offers a kind of meta-advertisement, recognising the very marketing strategies that attracted people, including women, to the previous film. Cutting between clips of the men performing various routines, the trailer includes the line, “We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer but it was very very hard to resist,” before inviting the audience to #comeagain this summer. The previous film may not have been an explicit piece of erotic entertainment, but, for this film, the marketers are clear that Magic Mike XXL is to be enjoyed, to be devoured and, most radically, to be looked at.

In Laura Mulvey’s famous account of the male gaze, she posits that, in traditional Hollywood cinema, men are the active bearers of the look whereas women are the passive objects of the look. She argues,

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female… In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”

Positioning the audience’s look with that of the (traditionally male) protagonist, the internal and external male gaze constructs the sexualized and objectified image of woman. In this way, the female gaze is dismissed; female sexual desire and the act of female looking do not exist.

In traditional Hollywood cinema, the man is the possessor of the look whereas the woman is the object of the look

Considering the ways in which the female gaze is privileged in the film, Magic Mike XXL productively breaks down oppressive phallocentric structures within cinema. The men perform strip teases and erotic dances several times throughout the film both for the pleasure of the women in the film and for the women in the audience. Their final show is constructed under a flurry of excitement and anticipation, making the final release of their performance all the more satisfying. Most radically, women are actually depicted as in charge of their sexual desires and pleasures. The film introduces a new character, Rome, played brilliantly by Jada Pinkett-Smith. Rome owns a strip club where the majority if not all of the audience are Black women (side note: Has there been a mainstream film in recent years that so explicitly portrayed sexual desire within women who are not white? That alone is worth celebrating). Mike asks Rome to accompany them to the convention as their MC, and Rome commands the entirety of the performance. She calls the women in the audience queens and goddesses; she asks the audience what they want; she is effectively a Black woman in charge of white men. For the sexual pleasures it affords women, and for the autonomy it gives women over these pleasures, Magic Mike XXL offers a radical construction of the female gaze.

However, as much as we can praise Magic Mike XXL for this construction, the conceptualization of the female gaze problematically works within a heteronormative framework. Queer men and women as well as non-binary genders complicate this construction. Are women the only group of people afforded the space to look Magic Mike XXL? Interestingly, the trailer does not exclusively aim its erotic spectacle at women, creating instead a gender-neutral invitation to look at these men. However, the clips in the trailer and, indeed, scenes in the film, locate this primarily within the realm of heterosexual female desire. The people who attend the shows are women, the people who the men talk about entertaining are women, and the people who are invited to look are women. This is not to say that Magic Mike XXL isn’t aware of a possible homoerotic or even homosexual appeal. In one scene, the men attend a drag show where they also participate in a voguing competition. Developed out of queer African American communities in Harlem, the men’s voguing situates them within the framework of queer male spectacles. Also, as part of the film’s promotional campaign, the cast of Magic Mike XXL attended the 2015 LGBT pride parade in Los Angeles. The cynical may say they did so simply for the free publicity. But their willingness to embrace their sexualised roles in queer communities recognises a step forward in traditional ideas of masculinity, and a more fluid construction of the gaze.

But let’s be clear. The film primarily operates in a heteronormative framework whereby heterosexual women desire the men. Perhaps we should turn our attention not to who is afforded the look, but how the look is set up in the first place. In cinema, men are not to be looked at. To do so risks being feminised or homoeroticised; both run the risk of emasculation that traditional conceptualizations of masculinity cannot handle. Yet, here, the men offer up their bodies as spectacle, as something to be looked at. Of course, the men don’t embody the level of objectification conventionally embodied by women. For one, their bodies – all pecs, arms and abs – display the traits of the traditionally successful masculine body. As Richard Dyer claims in his essay, “Don’t Look Now,” “Muscularity is the sign of power-natural, achieved, phallic.” It is this, then, that even as we look, reminds us that these men are not passive objects, but hard, active, and, most crucially, masculine. For another, this passivity also refuses to extend to the narrative. As Mulvey claims, when objectified in cinema, woman “tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.” As the active protagonists on-screen and with key roles off-screen (the story is based on Tatum’s own life, and he has production roles in both movies), the men refuse to be simply passive objects of erotic contemplation.

But Magic Mike XXL is more subversive than it seems. Even as these seemingly traditional images of masculinity are renewed within the film, they are undercut by the free way in which the men offer their bodies as spectacle, as something to be looked at. As Tatum says in an interview, “We’re definitely trying to make [our stripping movie] a little different and a little bit less misogynistic. I’m not trying to get very meta about it all because at the end of the day, it’s just for fun.” And, ultimately, isn’t this what feminism is about? Sex is not sinful. When there’s mutual consent, enjoying it visually, aesthetically, and physically, is not sinful. Magic Mike XXL finally offers heterosexual women, if not anyone else, the space to enjoy this kind of sex and, if, as Tatum says, you can have fun while you’re at it, well, then that truly is a pleasure.

No, You Can’t Watch: The Queer Female Gaze on Screen

This guest post by Rowan Ellis appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

The Female Gaze, and scathing criticism of it, has come bursting into the world recently through Channing Tatum’s pecs. And not in an Aliens face-hugger way either (Magic Mike III anyone? No?). Magic Mike and its extra extra large sequel have been talked about as both a rare movie celebrating female sexuality, and as a prime example of feminist double standards. How can you complain about objectifying women’s bodies and then not criticise a film which seems to do the same to men? The whole debate was fascinating to me as a insider-outsider; sure I’m female, but I’m also a lesbian and so have very little interest in any part of Channing Tatum apart from his underrated comedic timing. I’ve talked before about the strange awkwardness of watching both Magic Mike films as a queer woman in the cinema (what are you doing with that spinning metal wheel of sparking fire, Mike? Do you want to burn your dick off? etc), so when this month’s Bitch Flicks theme was revealed to be the Female Gaze, I was ready and raring to go. But it turns out that the Female Gaze, and particularly the Queer Female Gaze, was a lot harder to pick through than I thought.

But let’s start at the beginning. Although the Male Gaze was a term coined in the 1970s, it was just a concrete name for an age old phenomenon. The Male Gaze is two-fold:

The sexual objectification of passive female characters.
More generally the tendency to default to male protagonists, points of view, and stories.

The Gaze can be seen literally as a gaze, the way the camera interacts with the women it looks on, doing things like introducing female characters by trailing slowly up their bodies rather than establishing them with their face and actions. This differing treatment of men and women can be seen to be both informed by a patriarchal social structure, but also to reinforce it. Women can be on screen in a sexual situation, and not be subject to the Male Gaze, provided it is plot-relevant and that they are not only there to be a one-dimensional character purely put there for men’s pleasure. Alice Eve’s controversial underwear scene in Star Trek Into Darkness would be a perfect example of how, although she was not a one-dimensional character in the film as a whole, she was given a pointlessly objectifying scene which established nothing about her character, and seemed oddly out of place. The scene was also an example of how the sexualisation of women on screen, as opposed to men, is often used to reduce their power or respect in some way, either by playing into the “whore as worthless” idea, or by making them physically vulnerable as happened with Carol in the film.

The Female Gaze, however, is a trickier subject, partly because its a newer phenomenon–as Transparent‘s Jill Soloway said last year, “We’re essentially inventing the female gaze right now.” Both women’s stories and their sexuality are much less likely to be the focus of screen time historically. Definitions, classic camera angles, a checklist of what the Female Gaze might be, are hard to find when only 29 percent of current movies have female protagonists, and all women creative teams are rarer than panda sex. Is The Female Gaze always found in films made by women, for women, or about women? And does that gaze have the same definition as the Male Gaze with the genders switched? Perhaps not. Is it really true that women don’t objectify men? That they always view them as complete and whole human beings? The popularity of the Chippendales suggests otherwise. And our old friend Magic Mike is surely the obvious example of that female sexuality in action, proving women’s sexual desires make them see men as objects just as much as men do to women in films.

However, when we look at the story of Magic Mike and his magic mic, the fact the main characters are strippers means the lack of clothes is plot dependant, and the films revolve around an exploration of the men’s interests, personalities, desires, and dreams. They are sexual, but they are also three-dimensional characters. Moreover, romantic comedies are always an example cited by critics of feminist film theory of movies which reduce men to merely a female fantasy. If that’s the truth, then women’s fantasies of men are a lot more full, positive, and respectful than men’s are of women. Men in romantic comedies aren’t just one-sided sexual beings; the appeal of them is hinged on their personal compatibility and often flawed realness as well. Hugh Grant made a career out of playing the soft-eyed Englishman, who bumbled along and stuttered over his words, hardly a paragon of sexual virility you might expect from the directly switched Male Gaze. Conversely, if women’s sexual pleasure and desire is depicted on screen, it is seen as much less acceptable than a man’s, particularly telling in the differences of age rating given to films that show male vs. female orgasms and oral sex.

If the Female Gaze is hard to pin down, then Queer Female Gaze is near impossible. What I mean specifically with that term is the Gaze we might be able to see in work produced for and about women who are attracted to women. Queer female characters in films made for and by end are almost always either packaged in the same sexually objectified way as straight women, or they are the butt of jokes as “ugly butch lesbians.” So although ostensibly it could be assumed the Queer Female Gaze would be identical or at least hugely similar to its male counterpart, in fact it cannot be mapped directly onto the Male Gaze for a few crucial reasons:

The number of films made for, by and about queer women in mainstream cinema is embarrassingly small, and is not compatible to that male default I mentioned earlier.
The sexual desires of queer women are different to that of straight men.
The male ownership of female bodies is something tied to male behaviour rather than an intrinsic reaction to female bodies by anyone who desires them.
Queer women are interested to see interesting women on film, meaning having women be solely sexual objects is not necessarily going to fly with us.

So maybe it’s something in-between, or something new entirely. Maybe, as I have come to believe over the last few weeks, it isn’t something which has a real definition or direction, simply because it doesn’t have a present or strong enough canonical tradition in media. Instead I’ve tried to look at current examples of media for and containing queer women, to see where it differs or intersects with the Male/Female Gazes.

As a queer woman it might seem to any men who are attracted to women, that I would love images of half naked oiled up women, because they do. But while they may just see the object of their desire, I have to also see myself. So when I see sexualised women on screen who are given no agency, plot or power, I don’t get anything positive from that. It feels unbelievably naive and worrying that someone who is for all intents and purposes a pliant sexual object could be genuinely and maturely desirable. This is the source of a long held observation in the queer world that “lesbian porn” is so obviously and inexplicable made for straight men. It also may be why I have never been able to come out to a male stranger who is trying to chat me up without him immediately asking for a threesome. I am infinitely more interested in women who are allowed to make decisions, tell their stories, control the narrative, in addition to being autonomous sexual beings, because that’s how I see myself, my friends, my partners.

Secondary issues that comes with the Male Gaze are problems like a lack of movies that show meaningful female friendship (as shown most simply through a quick look at how many films don’t pass the Bechdel Test; although films that pass don’t necessarily show female friendship, it’s pretty hard to find a film that fails the test that does). Shows with a focus on queer women, like Orange is the New Black or the web series Carmilla, also have a strong emphasis on female friendship alongside female sexual or romantic relationships. The desire to show a complex version of yourself seen with male characters in the Male Gaze, alongside a desire for a complex version of your partner seen with male recipients of desire in the Female Gaze, combines in the Queer Female Gaze to produce sexual and romantic relationships often rooted in friendship.

This is furthered by the prevalence of narratives in queer cinema about coming out and finding community, which can give a tentative and holistic treatment to attraction. In the quintessential lesbian teen movie But, I’m a Cheerleader, Graham and Megan begin as friends and develop parallel to Megan’s own acceptance of her sexuality. Their relationship is more than just sex, because it is so tied to her understanding of herself, in a way which values Graham far more than the Manic Pixie Dream Girls of the “young straight man finding himself through romance” narratives of the Male Gaze. The showing of intimate, dirty, casual or loving sex in any queer narrative does not remove the possibility of the women participating in this sex being fully imagined characters. The Gaze means female desire, both sexually and the desire to see herself present and whole on screen, and this is even more effective the more women you present for those queer female audience members to align themselves with.

Women can be seen on screen as sexual beings, without being sexual objects. Queer women’s position as both gazer and gazee give a brilliant opportunity to reject the tired reduction of female characters in and out of the fictional sheets. What remains to be see, as we make the slow journey towards mainstream queer media, is whether the defaults of The Male Gaze, with its dehumanising camera shots and need for a male presence on screen, will bleed into the Queer Female Gaze through what we take for granted as “just how cinema is made.”

Rowan Ellis is a British geek using her YouTube videos to critique films, TV, and books from a queer and feminist lens.

“Everything Is Going To Be OK!” – How the Female Gaze Was Celebrated and Censored in ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’

This guest post by Hannah Collins appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

With their starry eyes, cutesy costumes, Barbie-esque features, and catchphrases overflowing with dreamy positivity, the magical girls of the shoujo (girls) genre of anime might not seem like the most feminist of heroines upon cursory glance. Yet, the plucky sorceress’ of such cult classics as Sailor Moon can be seen an emblematic of a counter-movement of female action heroes in Japanese culture – the antidote to the hyper-masculinity of the shonen (boys) genre.

This assessment by no means disregards the problems of the magical girl genre – infantalisation; fetishisation and glorification of hyper-femininity – and shoujo characters with their typically doe-eyed innocence can be easily corrupted to cater to a specific male fantasy of virginal femininity. However, the work of the all-female team of manga/anime creators known as “CLAMP” not only combats these issues, but also, as Kathryn Hemmann in The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Culture writes, “employs shŌjo for themselves and their own pleasure.”

I became a fan of CLAMP – like most people of my age – in the 1990s. As a child, my introduction to the wonderfully weird world of Japanese cartoons consisted of the standard diet for most children of that era: Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball Z. Imported, dissected, re-dubbed, and re-packaged to suit the tastes of a Western audience, and more specifically, a male audience. But amongst the shouts of “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” and “Kamehameha!” there was one show that really left a lasting impression on me. It was about a little girl gifted with great power through capturing and using magical “Clow” cards. She wasn’t muscly; she wasn’t self-assured; and she certainly wasn’t male. She was Sakura Kinomoto, the show was called Cardcaptors (Cardcaptor Sakura in its original Japanese format), and it was my first exposure to both CLAMP and the magical girl or “mahou shoujo” genre they helped to popularise.

Like most adolescent heroes, Sakura seems hopelessly ill-equipped to begin with, and yet her sheer determination to achieve her full potential sees her through to becoming a magical force to be reckoned with without ever surrendering her loving personality. Rather than conforming to the “strong female character” stereotype that implies that women must act more masculine to achieve truly equal footing with male action heroes, Sakura’s power stems from traits considered more conventionally feminine: love, empathy, and pureness. Even her wardrobe changes into unapologetically girly battle outfits aesthetically reinforce CLAMP’s refusal to bow to a male audiences’ preferences.

These themes of romance and friendship are a core part of the story development and instrumental in the viewer’s investment in the characters. Through Cardcaptor Sakura, CLAMP explores the complexities of both platonic and romantic female love – both heterosexual and homosexual – from an almost exclusively female perspective. As Sakura pines over her older brother’s best friend (who unbeknownst to her, is also his love interest) Sakura’s best friend Tomoyo pines over her. Tomoyo, who lives a rich and sheltered life in a female-centric household, seems to live vicariously through Sakura. Upon discovering her secret heroics at night, she begins to capture Sakura’s adventures on camera and even provides her with her signature battle costumes, which cause Sakura huge embarrassment. Yet, at the risk of hurting her friend’s feelings, she grudgingly wears them anyway.

As the show develops, we are shown more and more just how deeply Tomoyo’s feelings run. In episode 11, Tomoyo gives Sakura a rare tour of her impressive mansion home, including a cinema room in which she confesses that she watches her recordings back of Sakura in battle constantly. It seems that Tomoyo is as much a part of the audience to Sakura’s life as we – the viewers – are. It also strikes me that this obsessive behaviour might translate entirely differently if Tomoyo were male.

Tomoyo’s idolisation of Sakura is far from veiled, and yet it is not revealed to be unmistakeably romantic until Episode 40, in which Sakura must capture a Clow card that makes people dream about their hidden desires. Sakura, Tomoyo, Syaoran Li (Sakura’s rival and love interest) and his cousin Meilin visit a fun fair. Sakura and Meilin team up to play a Whack-A-Mole game and Tomoyo – as usual – picks up her camera to film Sakura in action. Suddenly, the Clow card appears in the form of a glowing butterfly and lands on Tomoyo’s shoulder. Tomoyo falls into a dream sequence, in which we see her deepest desire play out through her eyes. On a pink background of falling cherry blossom, copies of Sakura dressed in Tomoyo’s outfits call her name and dance playfully around her. We are shown a shot of Tomoyo’s face – staring in awe at first, and then relax into a smile. “I’m so happy!” she says to herself, and runs toward the dancing copies of Sakura – still filming.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAx_vfayMTw”]

It seems like an odd moment to be sexually awakened – watching your crush play a Whack-A-Mole game at a fun fair – and perhaps if the show had been targeted at a more mixed audience (or the characters were older) this moment might have been filled with more obvious sexualised content. But through Tomoyo’s own eyes, CLAMP visually summarise the complex feelings of romance, admiration, obsession, and innocent love she feels for Sakura. Not only this, but as Sakura dances continually out of Tomoyo’s physical reach, the implication becomes one of wanting something you know you can never have. Tomoyo knows by now of Syaoran’s feelings for Sakura and like a true friend encourages their romance for the sake of Sakura’s happiness rather than her own.

This “doomed” romance trap seems to be a family curse, as we discover in episode 10 that Tomoyo’s mother appeared to also be hopelessly in love with Sakura’s mother (her cousin). Similarly, Sakura’s mother didn’t return her cousin’s feelings as she was in love with an older man (Sakura’s father) in the same way that Sakura is attracted to Yukito – an older boy. Both mothers are absent from their lives – Sakura’s mother through death, and Tomoyo’s through continual business trips – yet their daughters seem fated to play out their romantic histories.

Suffering from a bout of nostalgia, I decided to revisit the show as an adult, first in it’s Americanised form, and then the original Japanese version to compare the differences. I was shocked to discover that in an effort to make the show fit the perceived needs of their rigidly defined demographic of young boys, the executives at Kids WB had hacked all elements of “toxic” feminisation from it – romance, homosexuality, and the agency of Sakura has a protagonist (even her name is removed from the title) – dramatically reducing the run-time from 70 to just 39 episodes. In fact, if they had been able to “maximise” their cuts, the show would reportedly have run for merely 13 episodes. In other words, there was a concerted effort to twist the female gaze into a male one under the belief that CLAMP’s blend of hyper-femininity and action would be unappealing for the male audience it was being aimed at. In Japanese Superheroes for Global Girls, Anne Allison quotes this from an executive from Mattel, “[…] In America, girls will watch male-oriented programming but boys won’t watch female-oriented shows; this makes a male superhero a better bet.”

Whilst moaning about all this to my partner recently, I asked him if he had watched the dubbed version of the show as a child. He said that he had, but didn’t realise until he was older that the show had probably been intended for girls. I asked him if he remembered being turned-off that the show’s hero was a little girl as opposed to the ultra-masculine characters of his favourite childhood anime, Dragon Ball Z. His totally undermines Mattel’s assumptions about the show’s gender appeal: “I thought Sakura was really cool. In fact, I loved her so much I begged my mum for roller-skates that Christmas so that I could skate around to be like her.” Even more affirming than this is the fact that whilst the dubbed version of the show ended up being cancelled, the original Japanese one ran to its intended conclusion; spawned two films; and inspired two spin-off series using the same characters – Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle and xxxHolic.

Sadly, by “butching” Cardcaptor Sakura up to be squeezed into the TV schedule alongside Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z, Western children were deprived of the tender and emotionally complex storytelling and character development behind all the magic and swordplay – and even from getting a satisfying ending to the show. It seems that whilst Japanese children are considered mature enough to deal with female superheroes, complex pre-pubescent emotions, and LGBTQ+ representation from a female perspective, Western children are unfortunately not treated with the same respect or intelligence.

Sources

The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Literature, Kathryn Hemmann.

On Writing (Strong) Female Characters, Daniel Swensen.

Magical Girls: Empowered or Objectified? Wiki for SC2220: Gender Studies for University of Singapore.

The Americanisation of Cardcaptor Sakura, Actar’s Reviews.

Hannah Collins is a freelance illustrator, writer, Feminist, anime nerd, and Britney Spears apologist. You can read more of her writing on gender in pop culture at Fanny Pack and her on own blog.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on the Female Gaze.

“… a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed.”

– Catherine Breillat

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has spent her career exploring female sexuality. She hasn’t done so in a comfortable, easy way. When The Woman says to The Man, “Watch me where I’m unwatchable” in Anatomy of Hell, this could very well be Breillat’s message to her audiences as she presents female desire in harsh, jarring narratives that completely subvert the male gaze.

Normally, if we talk about subverting the male gaze and focusing on the female gaze in film, it’s cause for celebration. Finally! We scream. We’re coming!

Breillat’s female gaze is different, though. It pushes us to places of complete discomfort and sometimes disgust, and forces and challenges us to think about the deeply twisted cultural expectations surrounding women and sex.

Sometimes a shock is what it takes to bring us to places of transfiguration. We can’t smoothly transition to the female gaze after centuries of being surrounded and objectified by the male gaze. Breillat delivers shock after shock that serve to transfigure how we see ourselves and our culture. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s powerful.

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

Breillat’s first film, based off her novel, Le Soupirail, was A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille). Produced in 1976, it was quickly banned and wasn’t released in France until 1999. The film centers around 14-year-old Alice, who is discovering and attempting to navigate her sexual awakening. A Real Young Girl is avant-garde puberty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FXxS9VevE”]

There are moments in the film that are confusing and grotesque (most notably one of her fantasies that involves barbed wire and a ripped-up earthworm). While I found some of these scenes disturbing, I like being disturbed. The worm scene horrified me at first, but then I realized that when I was in high school, the hit teen comedy involved a dude literally fucking a pie. Teenage sexuality is weird and when we are faced with a teen girl’s sexuality–something we are not used to seeing (unless she is a sexual object)–in all of its confusion and vacillation between intense desire and disgust, we are uncomfortable. Breillat wants us to be uncomfortable; she wants to push us to the edge to that visceral experience that will challenge how we see both female sexuality and film depictions of female sexuality.

Fat Girl (À ma sœur!), released in 2001, follows two sisters–Elena, 15, and Anaïs, 12–as they vacation with their parents. Elena is conventionally beautiful, and while she likes boys and has experimented sexually, she wants to remain a virgin until she’s with someone who “loves” her. She quickly develops a relationship with a young man who is frustrated with her desire to not have sex. He pressures her into anal sex (which hurts her), tries to force her to have oral sex, and finally convinces her he loves her and she has sex with him. In all of these instances, Anaïs is in the room–feigning sleep, asking them to stop, or, when they finally have sex, crying.

Anaïs’s views on sex are very different than Elena’s. She is starting to feel sexual–she’s not a teenager yet, but she’s not a child. Her desires range from banana splits to having sex just to get it over with. She has sexual desires, and her responses to Elena’s sexual experiences show both naiveté and jealousy. Their ages, their exterior looks, their sexual experiences (or lack thereof) all inform Breillat’s treatment of the sisters’ relationship with one another, with their own burgeoning sexuality, and with a culture that insists on sexualizing Elena and ignoring Anaïs. Their desires–Elena as internalized (and then disappointed) object, Anaïs as frustrated subject–are common categories for adolescent girls to fall into.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHRJRbM2EAg”]

Fat Girl (read Breillat’s commentary on the title here) is disturbing in its depictions of some of Elena and Anaïs’s experiences. However, the end of the film is shocking and violent. After Elena and her mother are brutally killed at a rest stop, the murderer rapes Anaïs in the woods. The next morning, she tells the police she wasn’t raped, and she looks at the camera, in an ending that clearly reflects The 400 Blows. Like the Truffaut classic, we are saddened and disturbed at the life trajectory of our young protagonists, and have no idea where their lives will go from here. We just have a frozen young face staring at us, implicating us in their fate.

Anaïs, at the end, seems to embrace her rape (as her meaningless loss of virginity that she wanted) and deny its violence. This is made even more traumatic since her rapist murdered her mother and sister (her sister who had just become sexually active, and her mother who wanted to punish her for it).

The message here is that girls cannot win. A patriarchal culture–full of boys who think they’re entitled to sex and men who violently rape and kill women–cares little for female desire and agency. This world is a dangerous place for girls. This world treats pretty girls like objects, and unpretty girls like nothing. Their desires are complicated and real, but are eclipsed by toxic masculinity.

Released in 2004, Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie De L’Enfer) is a film that pulls together pornography, misogyny, and female sexuality in a way that shocks and disgusts (male reviewers in particular wrote scathing, condescending reviews of the film). The Woman visits a gay bar and attempts suicide in the bathroom–she is tired of being a woman and being hated by men, and surmises that gay men hate women the most. The Man, however, saves her and she offers to pay him to stay in her home for four days to “watch her where she is unwatchable.” What follows is, for some viewers, unwatchable.

The Woman is naked for most of the film (a body double is used for vaginal shots), and The Man is played by an Italian porn star. His homosexuality serves to completely upend the typical male gaze. He’s disgusted by much of what he’s seeing and experiencing, and the understanding that this primal, visceral, shocking female desire is at the focus of the film (and has absolutely nothing to do with male desire) reflects a culture that typically focuses only on the male gaze and male pleasure. In this culture, female sexuality isn’t a consideration.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbFSZiT2-a4″]

When The Man drinks a glass of water with a used-tampon teabag, certainly the audience is meant to feel disgust. Perhaps some audience members actually gagged at the sight. How many scenes, however, in porn (explicitly) or mainstream film (suggested), feature women swallowing male excretions? Do we blink? Or is it just part of what we expect it means to be a heterosexual woman?

Jamie Russell astutely observes at the BBC, “For all the shocks, though, this is a stoically serious movie: it’s anti-porn, a transgressive sex movie that’s not against pornography but against the (male-dominated) objectification of women’s bodies.”

In an interview with The Guardian, Breillat articulated that her female gaze should directly threaten the male gaze, and that men should examine their own sexuality in the face of female desire:

“It’s a joke – if men can’t desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?”

The reporter points out that Breillat had said “that censorship was a male pre-occupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome,” and Breillat goes on to discuss the religious and patriarchal reasons to censor female desire, which is directly connected to keeping power away from women.

Breillat’s 1999 Romance was originally given an X rating (or banned in some countries). At Senses of Cinema, Brian Price notes that “Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.”

And that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Breillat’s work pushes boundaries and forces us to live in the intense intimacy and discomfort of a female gaze that we are unused to due to social oppression of women and women’s sexuality (at the hands of patriarchal religious and government systems). The literal and figurative red X over Breillat’s work–and female sexuality–needs to be stripped away to reveal what’s underneath–which isn’t always pretty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpH-V6kkOwI”]

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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Jo March’s Gender Identity as Seen Through Different Gazes

The male gaze either holds Jo back from the start, or else shows an “educational” transformation from an “unruly” female into a “desirable” young woman who knows her place.

Written by Jackson Adler as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

(Note: Louisa May Alcott’s novels Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy and Good Wives, published in 1868 and 1869, respectively, are often combined into one volume as Little Women Part 1 and Little Women Part 2. Henceforth, when I refer to Alcott’s novel Little Women, I refer to the combined novel as a whole.)

Many girls and women have loved Little Women and seen their ambitions, drive, or love of reading and writing reflected in Josephine “Jo” March. Harry Potter author J.K. “Jo” Rowling told the New York Times, “My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.” In a world that privileges men and censors women, the largely female cast of Little Women and its main character Jo have naturally been a relief and an inspiration for women, serving as a feminist narrative to many. However, the male gaze has been applied to most of the film and TV applications of the story, despite the scripts often being at least co-written by women. The male gaze tends to twist the romantic ending to use as a weapon against female viewers – reminding them of their “place” in society, and the expectation for them to marry and become housewives. Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film, as previously pointed out by Jessica Freeman-Slade on Bitch Flicks, is far superior to these adaptations in maintaining the female centric integrity of the story, allowing the characters dignity and freedom of expression, and emphasizing Jo’s choices and self-determination. In my research, I have only come across one lonely paper and one recent play that address the possibility that Jo could be transgender. However, I think the case for this view is strong, and that discussion of Jo’s gender and how it is and isn’t seen and represented is important.

Little Women follows four Massachusetts siblings coming of age during and directly after the American Civil War. The four siblings (and I cannot be the only person on Earth who has sorted them into Hogwarts houses) are: Margaret “Meg” March (the sensible Ravenclaw), Josephine “Jo” March (the brash Gryffindor), Elizabeth “Beth” March (the loyal Hufflepuff), and Amy March (the ambitious Slytherin). (Note: Amy and Slytherin both get a lot of haters, but Amy and many Slytherins are wonderful and sweet people, truly.) Though each sibling is allotted a fair amount of attention, the story mostly focuses on Jo, the “tomboy,” for whom I will henceforth use male pronouns. One of Jo’s first lines in the novel, and one repeated in many adaptions, is “I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy…”

At 15 years old, and the start of the story, Jo hates his “rapidly” developing body. His “one beauty” is his “long, thick hair,” and yet he “usually bundle[s] [it] into a net, to be out of [his] way.” The word “boyish” is often used to describe Jo, his preferred name (he hates when his aunt calls him “Josephine”), the habits he uses, and the activities he enjoys. He loves using “boyish” slang and exhibiting “gentlemanly” and “boyish” habits, such as keeping his hands in his pockets and whistling. He even says that he does these things for the very reason that they are “boyish.” Jo’s father (a reverend) and his mother (whom the children refer to as “Marmee,” which in their Eastern Massachusetts/Boston dialect is pronounced as the more common “mommy”) require each of their children strive to fix their bad habits, described as their “burdens” or “bundles” to bear. Meg has her vanity, Beth has her shyness (so great she often has difficulty voicing her own opinions or standing up to others), and Amy has her selfishness. As for Jo, he is heartbreakingly required to try to be more “ladylike” and “womanly.”

This includes some useful habits, such as learning to control his temper so as to treat his siblings (namely Amy) better. However, while Laurie is allowed “Byronic fits of gloom,” Jo is encouraged to be “pleasant” because, as Amy herself states, “women should learn to be agreeable” so as to be “better liked” by society. Far from just Jo’s expressions of everyday emotions, Jo is pressured to police his words and actions every day, such as only barely resisting talking sports at a party. To please his family, Jo tries to adopt “ladylike” behavior, but often fails so miserably that he causes his family (especially Meg and Amy) embarrassment. Jo often feels “lonely” and misunderstood, even when surrounded by people who love him, and sometimes becomes “irritable” because of it. Jo finds some relief in his friendship with Theodore “Laurie” Laurence, with whom he skates, flies kites, goes rowing, and runs races. Laurie even often calls Jo “fellow” and other masculine terms of endearment. When Jo and Laurie feel particularly confined and restricted by their families and by societal expectations, they almost run away to be cabin boys together for the “adventure,” and only stop themselves due to their feelings of responsibility and love for their families. However, even Laurie’s friendly view and boyish treatment of Jo is limited. Laurie uses “sentiment” (flirtation) and is “wheedlesome” (manipulative) when pressuring Jo to marry him, proposing in large part because “everyone expects it.”

At the end of the novel and in the sequels Little Men and Jo’s Boys, Jo and his husband Professor Friedrich “Fritz” Bhaer found a school and a college for diverse pupils, giving a home and love to children who would otherwise be overlooked or even discriminated against. These institutions are open to both boys and girls, include biracial students (one a quarter Black and one part Native-American), and students with mental and physical disabilities. One of his students is another “tomboy” who ends up becoming a doctor and never marrying. Jo is particularly close with the male students and the “tomboy,” as he “sympathize[s]” with boys more than girls.

Out of the many portrayals of Jo March, I think June Allyson’s comes closest to being the “tomboy” of the novel, particularly evident when Allyson emphasizes the line about how “disappointed” Jo is at not “be[ing] a boy.” Not that Allyson’s goal was to portray the character as a transboy (the term didn’t even exist yet!), but a specific kind of heartbreak and frustration come through nonetheless. Katharine Hepburn’s (1933), Allyson’s (1949), and Susan Dey’s (1978) Jos were sadly glamoured up by their male directors. Susan Dey’s Jo feels especially constricted, as if Dey wasn’t permitted to express the character as she saw fit because directors David Lowell Rich and Gordon Hessler were constantly holding her back from showing Jo’s fire and rambunctiousness. While the TV movie still retains some feminist moments, Jo is often grabbed and physically held back by male characters, especially Laurie. Winona Ryder’s (1994) is less objectified or confined under the female gaze of director Gillian Armstrong. Though the characters of Jo’s sisters and mother are more developed and allowed room to breath under the female gaze, Ryder’s Jo is a spirited young woman who merely wants to express herself in whatever way she wants. This is somewhat comparable to director Gaby Dellal of About Ray, stating that she didn’t cast a transgender actor as the title character because that “isn’t what [the] story is about” and problematically refers to the character as “a girl who is being herself.” Ryder’s Jo does not have the same kind of yearning, heartbreak, anxiousness, and irritability that comes with being forced to hide from others (as well as oneself) one’s own true gender.

The male gaze either holds Jo back from the start, or else shows an “educational” transformation from an “unruly” female into a “desirable” young woman who knows her place. Under the male gaze, Laurie is often made into a combination of undesirable nerd and total creeper in order to justify Jo’s decline of his marriage proposal. It is implied in the 1949 adaptation that Laurie continues to have feelings for Jo, while in the 1978 TV movie it is implied that Susan Dey’s Jo realizes she has feelings for Laurie only after hearing of his marriage to Amy, I guess because the director wanted Jo to learn a lesson about how turning down men is bad? (Yeah, I was yelling at the screen.) Interestingly, this version has one of the best set-ups of Laurie’s and Amy’s relationship (Amy and the other sisters often being denied the screen time they deserve in other adaptations). However, this is because Laurie overcoming his feelings for Jo and realizing his love for Amy is used to punish Jo in this adaptation. Ironically, one of the most positive portrayals of Laurie is under Armstrong’s female gaze. This is because a more complex and autonomous Jo lends to more complex reasons for her turning down the love of his best friend. It’s not that he isn’t a good person, or that she isn’t fond of him, it’s just that she doesn’t love him as anything other than a friend, and she’s not going to commit to an-other-than-blissful relationship just because society thinks that grown men and women can’t be “just friends.”

While I think an adaptation of Little Women that portrays Jo as transgender is incredibly needed, providing representation and history for a marginalized and often silenced group, it would require a transmale gaze, ideally in the form of a transmale director. As Hollywood is so averse at diversifying its behind-the-camera positions in any way, it will probably take some time before a project such as this can be made. However, a historical drama featuring a leading trans character would make a big difference in the lives of young trans people. I know that Jo has made a huge difference in my own life as a transman. Jo and his creator Louisa May Alcott (who went by “Louis” as a young person) often feared being alone. But Jo, myself, and others like us, are not alone – and it’s important for us to know that.