ABSTRACT
Feminist theory must challenge the idea that femininity is a simple matter of masochism, of pleasure in one's objectification. Notorious suggests the extent to which female masochism embodies and expresses hostile and subversive impulses. A notion of male masochism must be factored into feminist theories of narrative and spectatorship and not in order to depoliticize the issues by pronouncing suffering to be part of the human condition. The chapter analyses of Notorious, as a kind of prolegomenon to a politicized deconstruction of the binary oppositions informing feminist film theory: those oppositions clustered around the constellations male/subject/knower/sadist, woman/object/known/masochist. On the one hand, women at the movies are already engaged in an active, knowing and rebellious activity of spectatorship; and, on the other hand, as Hitchcock never ceases to fear, men are constantly in danger of having their power undermined-of being deprived of the keys to their secrets by women who, though notorious, can never be completely subdued or fully known.
