Reading Response # 5

I just realized that I totally forgot to post this last week, so here it is. Sorry for how ridiculously late it is!

For this weeks reading I would like to focus on Jackie Stacey's discussion of the audience-star relationship in "Feminine Fascinations". It is amazing to me how much stock we put into the "passive audience" in film studies considering the rabid fan culture that re-examines appropriated images from film or television to fit it to their own standards. Stacey's article really throws a light onto how vastly complex the process of reading a film and stars can be. Many times we have discussed what the Classical Hollywood stars represented, especially the female stars, and perhaps took for granted how that image really perpetuated (in terms of identification). The selective memory of the fans' recollection of the stars is a particularly point in Stacey's arguement because it reveals a much more active subconscious in the discerning of parts of the image from narrative context. I think that it also suggests a much richer network of social construction and gender identity in the 40s and 50s than what the "Leave it to Beaver" style texts alone would lead us to believe. On the other hand, while Stacey's article reveals certain rarely explored facets of the implications of spectatorship, I think it also gives even greater substance and complexity to concepts like the 'male gaze'. Mulvey's assessment of the audience relation to the screen yields a treatment of the camera position and narrative structure as an extension of the heterosexual male perspective that women spectators are forced to take on. Thus, subjecting themselves to a relationship to their own gender that takes on a dominating patriarchal eye (a form of self-degradation). Now, in order for the female spectator to relate to the screen images she must take on the 'male gaze' and view her gender through that lens, but we know through Stacey's article that it is not that simple. The process of viewing, especially from the female spectator, constitutes a vast reordering of text and meaning to create a uniquely subjective relationship with the films and their stars. In this way, fan culture (fan fiction and modes of idolization) become vastly more important to getting a true understanding of the interpretations of the text and gender analysis.

Some Questions for the Class:

1. Do you think that work done in feminist analysis of film texts without consideration for the audience reception undermines femininity by assuming how women are portrayed is equivalent to how it is received? Can an analysis be valid without this consideration?
2. Considering Stacey's argument about previous work by Haskell and Mulvey and the differences between female audience identification with stars, do you think that film scholars tend to construe a reading of the text that subverts the dominant audience reading?