Gender

TRANSGENDER IDENTIFICATIONS AND LOOKS

Until the late 1980s, theories of gendered spectatorship were characterized by a strong demarcation between the genders; transgender identification, when it was mentioned as a possibility, was understood as an imposition of patriarchal ideology or, at best, a tactic by which the female spectator might accommodate herself within the binary system of gendered looking without disturbing the hierarchical relationship between its basic terms. However, studies of stars and genres that seem to appeal to spectators across gender lines have enabled critics to develop complex models of cinematic identification that are more complex, fractured, and mutable.

Miriam Hansen's study of the massive popularity of Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926) among women concludes that the sexual ambiguity that became central to his image offered a space of resistance and rebellion to a particular group of female spectators caught up in the social and ideological contradictions of New Womanhood and the particular contradictions of Hollywood in an era in which female audiences were being recruited to the cinema as passive witnesses to their own subordination. In his films and in the star discourse around him, Valentino functioned as the focal point of a remarkably fluid field of sexual possibilities—a public fantasy figure whose constant shifts between sadism and masochism, potency and impotence, heterosexuality and homosexuality, femininity and masculinity, subjectivity and objectification allowed for complex and multiple permutations of desire and identification. The "Valentino syndrome," according to Hansen, is an example of a female subculture that, although distorted by consumerism, gave temporary expression to female desire and even a kind of female fetishism.

Transgender identification is even more central to the hypothesis offered by Carol J. Clover in her study of horror films made since the late 1970s. Overturning the common-sense view that horror films in which female characters are terrorized by male killers encourages male spectators to take sadistic pleasure in violence against women, Clover argues that the predominantly adolescent male audience of slasher films actually identifies with the female victim-hero, or "Final Girl," as Clover calls her, who after a terrifying ordeal, eventually overcomes the villain. Clover observes that both of the principal characters in the genre may be ambiguously gendered—the killer taking on aspects of a monstrous phallic femininity, for example, while the Final Girl is often a tomboy. Clover distinguishes between the actual gender of the characters and their figurative gender—that is, the ways their significant attributes can be correlated to gendered subject positions. On this basis, she argues that the Final Girl is figuratively a boy whose suffering allows the majority audience to explore castration anxiety within the relative safety of vicariousness. Clover is reluctant to make any claims for the progressiveness of horror films on the basis of these insights, but her approach does highlight the mobility of cinematic identification and the permeability of the boundary between genders.

Yvonne Tasker argues that in the 1980s masculinity became more visible, a marked category in American action cinema signified by the "built" body created by the performer rather than by nature. The knowing performance of masculinity by the built male star enacts but also questions and parodies a previously naturalized gender stereotype. Moreover, the performance of masculinity is not the automatic prerogative of biological males. Tasker coins the term "musculinity" to describe the body type associated with the action hero, regardless of actual gender, and discusses the ways in which female bodies take on masculine functions in recent action cinema, as well as the ways in which male characters are sometimes reinscribed as feminine. Tasker concludes her study with a discussion of the films of Kathryn Bigelow (b. 1951), including Blue Steel (1990), a psychological thriller that consciously and critically explores the role of women in action cinema. Blue Steel uses cross-dressing rather than muscles to indicate the female hero's assumption of certain masculine functions while problematizing her relationship to these functions: Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) joins the police department in order to share in its patriarchal authority, but when the phallic power of her gun attracts a psychotic soul mate, she finds herself alone and under suspicion. Through this exploration of the antagonistic relationship between the female hero and patriarchal law, Bigelow constructs an allegory of the dilemma with which action cinema confronts both the female spectator and the feminist director. A noticeable difference between Blue Steel and the alternative feminist cinema of the 1970s is that rather than rejecting the idea of a woman acting like a man, the film simply points out that this is not institutionally sanctioned behavior.

Cross-dressing is a recurrent trope in both the women's films and the feminist theory of the 1990s, making the composite figure of the transsexual or the woman who passes for a man an emblem of social and sexual change for feminism as well as for queer cultural politics. In a short contribution to a debate about Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Pierce, 1999) in the British journal Screen , Judith Halberstam suggests that the film is significant because, in a brief sequence, it requires the spectator to adopt a transgender gaze. The film is a fictionalized account of the life and death of Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank), a girl who passed for a boy and was raped and

murdered when his/her biological sex was discovered. The film presents Brandon's gender in an interesting way, showing the spectator right at the beginning how Brandon constructs his masculinity through costume and performance. Most spectators nevertheless suspend disbelief in Brandon's masculinity and, like his girlfriend Lana (Chloe Sevigny), accept him at face value for much of the film's duration. Knowledge and belief are thus made issues within the film's diegesis and for the audience, coming to a crisis in the sequence in which Brandon's attackers strip him naked in front of his friends. Lana refuses to look at Brandon's genitals, while Brandon escapes into fantasy in what Halberstam takes to be a representation of an "out of body" experience: he sees himself, fully clothed, amongst the onlookers, gazing at his naked body. The transgender gaze, Halberstam suggests, is a divided look, split between a self that is castrated and a self that is not. The deployment of a transgender gaze in conjunction with an empowered female gaze, according to Halberstam, establishes the authenticity of Brandon's masculinity, at least until the film's conclusion, when, Halberstam argues, Lana's acceptance of Brandon as a woman reestablishes normative gender conventions within a humanist perspective.

Transgender identification in the cinema is not a new phenomenon, but its occurrence in the context of the overt and positive representation of a transgender subject is, indicating that significant changes in the social organization and cinematic representation of gender have taken place. These changes, however, have not affected all aspects of society equally, as a glance at current statistics on the employment of women in the film industry shows.

In early cinema, before the production of film became a vertically integrated industry, women directors were common. Almost all of their careers ended with the transition to sound, which required massive financial backing and resulted in a reorganization of the film industry that closed down many of the small companies in which women directors worked. Between the late 1920s and the late 1970s, only a handful of women directors worked in Hollywood. With the impact of the women's movement, a number of female directors emerged through avant-garde and independent filmmaking, but most of them have had difficult careers, and their presence has not greatly altered the gender balance or macho character of the film industry (although it is interesting to note that in the last two decades, women have been comparatively successful as producers). In 2004, women comprised only 5 percent of all directors working on the top-grossing 250 Hollywood films (the figure rises to a still low 16 percent if executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors are taken into account). Internationally, film is a male-dominated industry, although there are two countries with larger numbers of women directors: France and Iran. It is perhaps significant that both of these nations treat cinema as an art as well as a business, offering state support to filmmaking that is culturally distinctive in style and concerns. The slowness of change in gendered employment patterns in the film industry, compared to the relative speed with which the impact of feminism has been assimilated at the level of the cinematic image, shows how complex and uneven social and ideological changes can be.