The Multifaceted Enigma of Race and Gender

It seems that we revisit the same issues week after week approaching them from slightly different angles adding layer upon layer of complexity with the addition of each new concept.

We’ve returned to Freud this time to examine what he calls the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. I found this excerpt to be depressing. I should have followed Julia’s lead and skipped it entirely. Again we are conceptualized as damaged, this time due to the divided nature of our gendered identity. In Freud’s view men can’t have sex with those they truly love (their mothers, sisters, their first love objects) and can’t truly love those with whom they have sex (substitutes for the first objects of desire). Women, according to Freud don’t need to debase their sexual partners (objects!) but instead substitute secrecy or the element of the forbidden. In either case it is necessary to overcome some obstacle in order to attain sexual pleasure. Even so, it seems we have to settle for less than full satisfaction because the original object of desire is not attainable and must be replaced with a socially acceptable substitute.

Helene Cixous proposes a feminist alternative. She replaces male/female oppositions and the patriarchal hierarchy it engenders with a more encompassing concept of bisexuality in which male and female characteristics coexist in a fantasy of a complete being. It sounds like Lacan’s Real before it is cut into by the symbolic, by language, the phallus and the realm of law and the father. Instead of female being subordinate to and always defined in reference to male, difference and diversity is celebrated. Instead of a closed system that can only be interpreted in one way, open-endedness and fluidity would predominate. Last week Colette asked if a male could successfully capture an unmasked female in a photo. In Cixous’ world the answer would be yes if the voice and truth of the other are allowed to flow through the self.

Laura Mulvey uses the tools of male patriarchy to deconstruct the pleasure to be found in traditional Hollywood narrative cinema. She uses Lacan’s mirror phase and Freud’s voyeurism and fetishism to explain how the cinema uses both the male protagonist and the female star to deal with the male fear of castration. Our excerpt leaves out Mulvey’s descriptions of the Hitchcock movies including Rear Window in which James Stewart plays Jeffries, a photojournalist confined to his apartment with a broken leg. He amuses himself by voyeuristically looking in on the people in the apartment building opposite his rear window. Grace Kelly plays his girlfriend Lisa who doesn’t interest him much erotically until she goes into the opposite building to find evidence against a suspected murderer. When he views her through his camera lens, sees her threatened by the murder suspect and ultimately saves her, she becomes the center of his attention. So the movie is voyeuristic, pleasure comes from watching and objectifying others. It focuses our attention on the human body and, as in the mirror phase, the audience identifies with the male protagonist, trapped in his wheelchair but still capable of saving his girlfriend and solving the crime at hand. The film also makes the female star an icon of ravishing beauty. As a female interested in clothes and fashion, she is doubly intended to be the object of the audience’s gaze. In Freudian terms, when Jeffries views her through his camera lens, she is demystified, threatened and punished. Both her beauty and her punishment dispel the unconscious castration threat Mulvey says is brought up by her presence. Audre Lorde, a black feminist lesbian writer would not approve of Mulvey’s methods. Quoted in Mathew’s article, Lordes says “you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” But Mulvey’s goal is to make us aware of the status quo, “the patriarchal order in which we are caught” and to show how this is encoded in visual culture.

Kobena Mercer applies Mulvey’s theories to Mapplethorpes’ photos of nude black males.
Mercer describes 3 codes applicable to Mapplethorpe’s images by which the artist turns the black male into a sexualized object aestheticized as work of art.
1. The sculptural code in which the black male body is idealized like Greek sculpture. This calls to mind the popular media stereotypes of the black male as powerful athlete and as dangerous criminal. Turning the male into a passive and thus feminized art object tempers this threat.
2. The portraiture code with emphasis upon the face. This humanizes the photos but also recalls tribal masks, criminal mug shots and the Negro minstrel, all used in the past as symbols of black inferiority. The photos also make clear the distance between the viewer and the object of desire. The gaze returned by the objects of the photos is detached and makes them less rather than more accessible to the viewer.
3. Cropping and lighting serve to fragment the body. They focus attention on a fetishistic examination of the details instead of the gestalt of the whole. Mercer likens this to pornography, seen by feminists as acts of violence against women. Mulvey also describes fragmenting of the female image in cinema as one of the defenses used against male castration anxiety. Except in this case it is the black penis that is the object of colonial fantasy.

Rajan, in Real and Imagined Women, examines the “Third World Woman” as the site of a power struggle and as a symbol of universal patriarchy, religious fundamentalism and colonial, national and regional considerations. Who this woman is is totally lost in the plethora of discourses that are laid upon her.
Butler generalizes by saying a definition of woman can’t be fixed for all time. What women are understood to be is a constructed concept that varies at different points in time and in different contexts.
And Bhabha undermines a universal definition of Man by insisting on the positive difference of the Black Man. By positioning his argument within the realm of modernist/postmodernist debate, he prepares us for next week’s topic.