ABSTRACT
As I have suggested in earlier chapters, an inadvertent liability of some of the feminist (and other) psychoanalytic theories of classical film narrative to emerge from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s was that their elaborations ultimately ended up shutting down signifying and identificatory possibilities for male and female (and, by implication, other) spectators alike. Compelling though the masculine subject/feminine object psychoanalytic paradigm was as an explanatory model for spectatorship in classical cinema, it nevertheless tended to entrench binary thinking about gender generally and gender positioning as supposedly structured by that cinema specifically. Among the most suggestive work, however, was that by Miriam Hansen (1991), David Rodowick (1991), and Teresa de Lauretis (1984), which examined in various ways what Judith Mayne termed a
vacillation between masculine and feminine positions…. [I]n cinematic terms, this would suggest that cinematic identification is never masculine or feminine, but rather a movement between the two. From this vantage point, positions may well be defined as masculine and feminine (or both), but they are taken up by spectators regardless of their gender or sexuality.
(1993, 71) Most frequently, concepts of spectatorship were rooted firmly in psychoanalytically inflected theories of masochism (Studlar 1988), masochism and masquerade (Doane 1982, 1987), bisexuality (Modleski 1988), or film as fantasy (Cowie 1996) in which the spectator can occupy alternating and sometimes contradictory positions, to name only a few examples. However, at this point, I would like to invoke a somewhat quixotic notion toward which to work—that of an androgynous spectatorship and mode of interpretation—to understand not so much discrete positions of an imputed or theoretical viewer but rather movement and the “in-betweenness” of them—the ebb and flow of narrative pleasure, desire, and interpretation that actual viewers may experience as undercutting binary lines of gender and experiencing a spectrum of sexuality.