Doane, Maryanne. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Film and Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. 495-509.

“Furthermore, the image of hieroglyphics strengthens the association made between femininity and the enigmatic, the undecipherable, that which is ‘other.’ (495).

“The claim to investigate an otherness is a pretense, haunted by the mirror-effect by means of which the question of the woman reflects only the man’s own ontological doubts” (496).

“. . . the riddle of femininity is initiated from the beginning in Freud’s text as a question in masquerade” (496).

“The woman, the enigma, the hieroglyphic, the picture, the image—the metonymic chain connects with another: the cinema, the theater of pictures, a writing in images of the woman but not for her” (496).

“In this sense, the hieroglyphic, like the woman, harbors a mystery, an inaccessible though desirable otherness. On the other hand, the hieroglyphic is the most readable of languages” (496).

“For the image is theorized in terms of a certain closeness, the lack of a distance or gap between sign and referent” (496).

“This is precisely why Freud evicted the woman from his lecture on femininity. Too close to herself, entangled in her own enigma, she could not step back, could not achieve the necessary distance of a second look” (496).

“Thus, while the hieroglyphic is an indecipherable or at least enigmatic language, it is also and a the same time potentially the most universally understandable, comprehensible, appropriable of signs. And the woman shares this contradictory status” (496-497).

“‘proper nouns and abstract notions (including inflections) are then the ones that will be noted phonetically’” (Todorov and Ducrot in Doane, 497).
“My insistence upon the congruence between certain theories of the image and theories of femininity is an attempt to dissect the episteme which assigns to the woman a special place in cinematic representation while denying her access to that system” (497).

“The woman’s relation to the camera and the scopic regime is quite different from that of the male” (497).

“The image orchestrates a gaze, a limit, and its pleasurable transgression” (497).

“It would seem that what the cinematic institution has in common with Freud’s gesture is the eviction of the female spectator from a discourse purportedly about her (the cinema, psychoanalysis)—one which, in fact, narrativizes her again and again” (498).

“Precisely the fact that the reversal itself remains locked with in the same logic. The male strip-tease, the gigolo—both inevitably signify the mechanism of reversal itself, constituting themselves as aberrations whose acknowledgment simply reinforces the dominant system of aligning sexual difference with a subject/object dichotomy. And as essential attribute of that dominant system is the matching of male subjectivity with the agency of the look” (498).

“The supportive binary opposition at work here is not only that utilized by Laura Mulvey—an opposition between passivity and activity, but perhaps more importantly, an opposition between proximity and distance in relation to the image” (498).

“The voyeur, according to Metz, must maintain a distance between himself and the image—the cinéphile needs the gap which represents for him the very distance between desire and its object. In this sense, voyeurism is theorized as a type of meta-desire” (499).

“‘If it is true of all desire that it depends on the infinite pursuit of its absent object, voyeurism desire, along with certain forms of sadism, is the only desire whose principle of distance symbolically and spatially evokes this fundamental rent’” (Metz in Doane 499).

“Yet even this status as meta-desire does not fully characterize the cinema, for it is a feature shared by other arts as well (painting, theater, opera, etc)” (499).

“The cinema is characterized by an illusory sensory plentitude (there is ‘so much to see’) and yet haunted by the absence of those very objects which are there to be seen. Absence is an absolute and irrecoverable distance. In other words, Noel Burch is quite right in aligning spectorial desire with a certain spatial configuration” (499).

“For the female spectator there is a certain over-presence of the image—she is the image. Given the closeness of this relationship, the female spectator’s desire can be described only in terms of a kind of narcissism—the female look demands a becoming” (499).

“Nearness however, is not foreign to woman, a nearness so close that any identification of one or the other, and therefore any form of property, is impossible. Woman enjoys a closeness with the other that is so near she cannot possess it any more than she can possess herself” (499).

“‘More so than men who are coaxed toward social success, toward sublimation, women are body’” (Cixous in Doane 499).

“This theme of the overwhelming presence-to-itself of the female body” (Doane 500).

“Similarly, Montrelay argues that while the male has the possibility of displacing the first object of desire (the mother), the female must become that object of desire” (500).

“‘This body, so close, which she has to occupy, is an object in excess which must be ‘lost.’ That is to say, repressed, in order to be symbolized” (Montrelay in Doane 500).

“This body so close, so excessive, prevents the woman from assuming a position similar to the man’s in relation to signifying systems’” (500).

“Female specificity is thus theorized in terms of spatial proximity” (500).

“For the little girl in Freud’s description seeing and knowing are simultaneous—there is no temporal gap between them” (500).

“The boy, unlike the girl in Freud’s description, is capable of a re-vision of earlier events, a retrospective understanding which invests the events with a significance which is in no way linked to an immediacy of sight. This gap between the visible and the knowable, the very possibility of disowning what is seen, prepares the ground for fetishism. In a sense, the male spectator is destined to be a fetishist, balancing knowledge and belief” (501).

“The female, on the other hand, must find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to assume the position of a fetishist” (501).

“the mode of judging ‘in a flash,’ is conducive to what might be termed as ‘over-identification’ with the image” (Irigaray in Doane 501).

“ . . . whilst the feminine can try to speak to itself through a new language, but cannot describe itself from outside or in formal terms, except by identifying itself with the masculine, thus by losing itself” (501).

“Irigaray goes even further: the woman always has a problematic relation to the visible, to form, to structures of seeing. She is much more comfortable with, closer to, the sense of touch” (501).

“And, in fact, the result is a tendency to view the female spectator as the site of an oscillation between a feminine position and a masculine position, invoking the metaphor of the transvestite. Given the structures of cinematic narrative, the woman who identifies with a female character must adopt a passive or masochistic position, while identification with the active hero necessarily entails an acceptance of what Laura Mulvey refers to as a certain ‘masculinization’ of spectatorship” (501).

“trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily becomes second Nature. However, this Nature does not sit easily and shifts relentlessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes” (Mulvey in Doane 501).

“What characterizes the sequence is the marked facility of the transformation of the two women into men in contradistinction to a certain resistance in the case of the man” (502).

“The idea seems to be this: it is understandable that women would want to be men, for everyone wants to be elsewhere than in the feminine position” (502).

“After assuming the position of the subject of discourse rather than its object, the intellectual woman whom Riviere analyzes felt compelled to compensate for this theft of masculinity by over-doing the gestures of feminine flirtation” (502).

“Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it . . . The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the masquerade. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing” (502).

“To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image” (502).

“a separation between the cause of desire and oneself. In Montrelay’s words, ‘the woman uses her own body as a disguise’” (503).

“‘we are watching a woman demonstrate the representation of a woman’s body.’ This type of masquerade, an excess of femininity, is aligned with the femme fatale” (503).

“By destabilizing the image, the masquerade confounds this masculine structure of the look” (503).

“ . . . masquerade as a type of representation which carries a threat, disarticulating male systems of viewing. Yet, it specifies nothing with respect to female spectatorship. What might it mean to masquerade as spectator? To assume the mask in order to see in a different way?” (503).

“The first scene in Now Voyager depicts the Bette Davis character as repressed, unattractive, and undesirable or, in her own words, as the spinster aunt of the family (‘Every family has one.’)” (503).

“The woman with glasses signifies simultaneously intellectuality and undesirability; but the moment she removes her glasses . . . she is transformed into spectacle, the very picture of desire” (503).

“the woman’s appropriation of the gaze. Glasses worn by a woman in the cinema do not generally signify a deficiency in seeing but an active looking, or even simply the fact of seeing as opposed to being seen” (503-504).

“There is always a certain excessiveness, a difficulty associated with women who appropriate the gaze, who insist upon looking” (504).

“The man with binoculars is countered by the woman with glasses. The gaze must be dissociated from mastery” (504).

“Joan Crawford’s problematic status is a result of her continual attempts to assume the position of spectator—fixing John Garfield with her gaze. Her transformation from spectator to spectacle is signified repetitively by the gesture of removing her glasses” (504).

“The man is not centered; in fact, he occupies a very narrow space on the extreme right of the picture. Nevertheless, it is his gaze which defines the problematic of the photograph; is his gaze which effectively erases the woman. Indeed, as subject of the gaze, the woman looks intently. But not only is the object of her look concealed from the spectator, her gaze is encased by the two poles defining the masculine axis of vision. Fascinated by nothing visible—a blankness or void for the spectator—unanchored by a ‘sight’ . . . the female gaze is left free-floating, vulnerable to subjection” (505).

“On the other hand, the object of the male gaze is fully present, there for the spectator” (505).

“The woman’s look is literally outside the triangle which traces a complicity between the man, the nude, and the spectator. The feminine presence in the photograph, despite a diagetic centering of the female spectator (although it is not clear whether she is looking at herself in a mirror or peering through a door or window)” (505).

“it also demonstrates how the photograph makes figurative the operation of centering—draining the actual center point of significance in order to deposit meaning on the margins. The male gaze is centered, in control—although it is exercised from the periphery” (505).

“What is it that makes the photograph not only readable but pleasurable—at the expense of the woman? The critic does not ask what makes the photograph a negotiable item in a market of signification” (507).

“The photograph displays insistently, in microcosm, the structure of the cinematic inscription of a sexual differentiation in modes of looking” (507).

“Films play out scenarios of looking in order to outline the terms of their own understanding. And given the divergence between masculine and feminine scenarios, those terms would seem to be explicitly negotiated as markers of sexual difference” (507).

“Both the theory of the image and its apparatus, the cinema, produce a position for the female spectator—a position which is ultimately untenable because it lacks the attribute of distance so necessary for an adequate reading of the image. The entire elaboration of femininity as a closeness, a nearness, as present-to-itself is not the definition of an essence but the delineation of a place culturally assigned to the woman” (507).

“Above and beyond a simple adoption of the masculine position in relation to the cinematic sign, the female spectator is given two options: the masochism of over-identification or the narcissism entailed in becoming one’s own object of desire, in assuming the image in the most radical way” (507).

“The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman” (507).

“Doisneau’s photograph is not readable by the female spectator—it can give her pleasure only in masochism. In order to ‘get’ the joke, she must once again assume the position of the transvestite” (507).

“It is quite tempting to foreclose entirely the possibility of female spectatorship, to repeat at the level of theory the gesture of the photograph, given the history of a cinema which relies so heavily on voyeurism, fetishism, and identification with an ego ideal conceivable only in masculine terms” (507).

“And, in fact, there has been a tendency to theorize femininity and hence the feminine gaze as repressed, and in its repression somehow irretrievable, the enigma constituted by Freud’s question” (507).

“Yet, as Michel Foucault has demonstrated, the repressive hypothesis on its own entails a very limited and simplistic notion of the working of power . . . In theories of repression there is no sense of the productiveness and positivity of power” (507).

“Femininity is produced very precisely as a position within the network of power relations” (507-508).