The absence of the physical body of the actor, and indeed, the relative unimportance of the spectator's own body, in the experience of film viewing should make cinema the perfect medium for the performance of diverse and free-floating gender identities, but the converse is more generally the case: the extent to which images of men and women are conventionalized in the cinema demonstrates the power of gender norms. Nevertheless, the history of cinematic representations of gender is characterized by tensions, contradictions, and change.
Between its invention in 1895 and the imposition of the Production Code in the early 1930s, American cinema was torn between the modern idea of the New Woman and the antimodern Cult of True Womanhood—a Victorian ideology that prescribed for women the four cardinal virtues of purity, piety, domesticity, and submission. In early cinema, before the stabilization of industry standards and norms and while cinema still lacked respectability, women on the screen were often active, sexual, and even feminist. Three types of movies were especially popular with women in the 1910s: serials such as The Perils of Pauline (1914), white slave films, and suffragist films. The possibility that these genres encouraged active, curious, militant female spectatorship was the cause of some social concern at the time, especially in the case of the white slave films. There was also concern that the movie theaters were drawing women into new and unsafe public spaces. Early cinema formed part of a modern urban cultural scene in which women's increased mobility was both cause and effect of changes in their social roles.
In later silent cinema, the dialectical tension between old and new model femininities can be most clearly seen in the contrasting stereotypes of the virgin, personified by stars like Mary Pickford (1893–1979) and Lillian Gish (1893–1993), and the vamp, most notoriously embodied by Theda Bara (1885–1955) and Clara Bow (1905–1965). D. W. Griffith (1875–1948), the director most prominently associated with the development of longer narrative films and with the effort to establish the cultural respectability of cinema, consciously drew on the theatrical and literary melodrama of the nineteenth century, in which heroines were virtuous, passive, and long-suffering. However, flapper films of the 1920s, such as The Dancing Mothers (1926) and It (1927), depicted and addressed the modern, active, independent women of the decade that began with their enfranchisement. The Hollywood libertarianism that made stars of Greta Garbo (1905–1990), Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992), and Mae West (1893–1980) and that created the new and violent masculinity of the gangster film seemed to have carried the day when, in the early 1930s, under pressure from the Legion of Decency, the Production Code came into force, installing sublimation and double standards at the heart of the Hollywood aesthetic.
The impact of historical events on gender roles often appears in indirect and mediated ways in Hollywood cinema. The Depression and the New Deal generated an ethos of selflessness that arguably informed maternal melodramas such as Stella Dallas (1937), although the film makes no explicit reference to the economics or ideology of the times. Many critics have noted the influence of World War II on gender roles in the woman's film and film noir, genres that have been said to participate in the complex postwar readjustments of social roles for both men and women. The twin figures of the war veteran misfit and the woman whose contribution to the work-force is no longer required have been said to inform the maladjusted femininities and masculinities of many films of the late 1940s that otherwise lack explicit sociological content, including Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Mildred Pierce (1945), and Out of the Past (1947).
In his short career as a leading man, Rudolph Valentino was one of the great idols of the silent era and also one of its most controversial, splitting the audience along gender lines between women who adored him and men who loathed him.
After stints of begging, dishwashing, and taxi dancing, Valentino went to Hollywood, where he got his big break in 1921 when he was cast as the lead in Rex Ingram's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse , the box-office hit that made him a star. At screenings of The Sheik (1921), women fainted in the aisles, inflamed by its heady cocktail of slavery, capture, peril, and romance. Valentino's star image was established by The Sheik in the form of a split personality: the hard-eyed wild man who, once wounded, could be tamed by the love of a good woman.
Valentino acquired a scandalous reputation as a result of bigamy charges brought by his first wife, Jean Acker, gossip about his sexual proclivities and competence, and a second marriage to the domineering Natacha Rambova, whose gift to him of a slave bracelet and whose friendship with lesbian actress Alla Nazimova undermined the star's protestations of "caveman" virility. On the release of The Son of the Sheik (1926), an editorial in the Chicago Tribune famously called him a "pink powder puff" and a "painted pansy." Women felt otherwise: after his death from peritonitis at the age of thirty-one, thousands of women took to the streets for his funeral, grieving hysterically. For a number of years, he remained the object of a posthumous cult with intimations of necrophilia.
Valentino's star image is a fascinating condensation of desires and anxieties popularized in the 1920s. His ethnic "otherness" was sublated into an erotic glamor that mobilized both desire for the exotic and fear of the alien. His sleek and muscular body was adorned and displayed in ways that triggered expressions of anxiety about the nature of manliness. His sexual persona combined aggressiveness and passivity, sadism and suffering, active seduction and objectification in such a way as to make his films polymorphously perverse fantasies for female spectators frustrated by the conditions of their lives and their usual exclusion from active, desiring spectatorship in the cinema. If manliness in the cinema depends on the conventional deployment of a fetishistic gaze and stardom always invites a degree of fetishization, perhaps contradictions are inevitable in the notion of a manly film star. In Valentino's star image, with its visual emphasis on smooth, hard physicality and glamorous costuming, these contradictions coalesce, so that instead of exercising a fetishistic gaze, he became a fetish himself.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), Monsieur Beaucaire (1924), The Eagle (1925), The Son of the Sheik (1926)
Anger, Kenneth. Hollywood Babylon . London: Arrow Books, 1986.
Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film . Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Rambova, Natacha. Rudolph Valentino: Recollections . New York: Jacobson Hodgkinson, 1927.
Studlar, Gaylyn. This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age . New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Walker, Alexander. Rudolph Valentino . New York: Stein and Day, 1976.
Alison Butler
Genre (which shares its etymological root with the word "gender") plays a crucial role in constructions of gender in classical Hollywood films. In the musical and the romantic comedy, the genders are represented as
ultimately complementary to each other, whatever initial incompatibilities might exist. In the western, gender divisions tend to be mapped onto archetypal oppositions between civilization and wilderness, posing a dilemma for the male hero, while the female characters are one-dimensional embodiments of the virtues and shortcomings of civilized society, above all in the stereotypes of the good-hearted saloon girl and the frontier wife and mother. The woman's film is defined by its female protagonist and the "feminine" concerns to which it gives pride of place; men are both extremely important in determining the fate of the heroine and somewhat peripheral to the dramatic interest of the film. Femininity is defined paradoxically in the woman's film, which conveys its undoubtedly conservative morality through cautionary tales of women who break its selfsame rules. Thus Bette Davis (1908–1989) in Jezebel (1938), Joan Crawford (1904–1977) in Mildred Pierce , and Lana Turner (1921–1995) in Imitation of Life (1959) offer female spectators a vicarious escape from ordinary, dutiful lives as wives and mothers, while the punitively moralistic endings of the films reinforce the ideological correctness of conventional lives.
The end of the Production Code in the 1960s allowed for more sexualized renditions of established gender roles but did not necessarily give rise to more flexible and varied constructions of gender. The desublimation of Hollywood cinema resulted not only in more complex and adult female characters, like the neurotic prostitute (Jane Fonda) in Klute (1971), but also in the notorious sexual violence of Straw Dogs (1972). The most extreme transgressions of orthodox gender roles in this period occurred not in the films with liberal social values and realist aesthetics, but in those that engaged most profoundly with fantasy and desire. In Psycho (1960), for example, the Hitchcockian motif of the double operates across the gender divide, not only in Norman Bates's identification with his mother but also in the parallels that are established between Norman and Marion Crane. Although for Hitchcock the merging of male and female personalities signifies psychosis and death, Psycho nevertheless articulates the mutability of identity and the artificiality of the gendered self. More recently, the Alien films (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997) have developed this tradition, giving forceful expression to a wide range of (progressive and regressive) fantasies and anxieties about gender through the figure of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the female hero, and her alter ego, the shape-shifting, alien brood mother.
Hollywood constructions of gender have worldwide significance because of the global reach of the US film industry, but they are also part of American national culture. Ideologies such as "Momism" inflect femininity and masculinity in ways unique to US culture. Outside of Hollywood, configurations of gender are shaped by other cultural histories. In Polish cinema, for instance, representations of men and women are influenced by the iconography of the historic struggle for nationhood, in which the purity and selflessness of the mother serves and motivates the heroism of the son. In French cinema, conversely, it has been suggested that one of the most common Oedipal narrative tropes is the father–daughter relationship, in which female subjectivity is centered but also framed by paternal control. The distinctiveness of configurations of gender in national cinemas confirms the importance of conceptualizing gender in film studies within concrete historical and specific cultural terms.
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