Chris Straayer's work in articulating the specificity of lesbian desire extends queer theory's attempts to move beyond the binary constraints of gender and sexuality
The analysis of the exchange of looks is central to theories of fantasy that figure prominently in queer studies of reception, audiences, and spectators. According to Elizabeth Cowie, engaging in fantasy is a potentially liberating act for the individual, who orchestrates "scenes" of desire in which she or he may assume multiple roles and positions as subject and object. By demonstrating that the gendered or sexed subject is not confined to a single perspective or position in visual relations, fantasy theory opens up new possibilities in the realm of queer theory by further demonstrating the intimate connection between identification and desire, and by granting agency to the subject who imagines.
Although fantasy theory does not overtly inform Alexander Doty's discussions of queer identification and desire, his articulation of the queer reader's agency in interpreting mass cultural texts certainly benefits from fantasy's notions of destabilized identification and desire and the ability of the subject to occupy and adapt to a variety of subject positions in the pursuit of pleasure. Doty asserts that queerness in subject positions and in reading strategies cannot be relegated to the disempowered realms of connotation and subtext, thereby subverting the heterosexist reduction of queer subculture's interpretive strategies to the status of "alternative" readings. In the system that Doty organizes, self-defined gay viewers may readily identify with lesbian subject-positions in relation to specific film and television texts if such positioning yields pleasure. Gay men and straight women might also occupy the same subject position in relation to a self-defined straight object of desire.
Gay and lesbian fans' queer "appropriation" of visual media performers is one of the arenas that Richard Dyer addresses in his work on stars and fan culture. Asserting that the star image is constructed as the composite of a variety of discourses and documents including publicity, promotion, criticism, and films themselves, Dyer describes the queer interpretive work in which spectators engage in order to establish connections of identification and desire with star personas. Dyer meticulously details the historical conditions that form the contexts within which queer reading strategies of various groups become possible. In his work on Judy Garland, for instance, Dyer describes confluences of the historical moment that elevated the popular yet troubled singer-acters
Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote, directed, and acted in a Brechtian group called Action Theater (later renamed "antitheater") in the late 1960s, and he brought his closely knit theatrical company with him when he moved to film production at the end of the decade. In a body of work comprising over forty feature films and television miniseries, the self-identified gay Fassbinder wrote and directed only a handful of works with overtly gay, lesbian, or queer themes. Fassbinder's work demonstrates, however, that queerness in cinema is not necessary solely a function of subject matter.
Centralizing the notion that identity is constructed through social relations, Fassbinder's aesthetic destabilizes the identity of his protagonists not only in his notorious reliance on mirrors and mirror images, but also through his arrangement of visual exchange. Relationships are established in the act of looking and being looked at, and visual relations frequently establish unevenly distributed power relations between an individual and a group. This emphasis on alienation and the power dynamics of looking implicates the viewer's own look at the screen in a rich network of identification and desire. When the eponymous Moroccan guest worker of Angst essen Seele auf ( Ali: Fear Eats the Soul , 1974) stands naked and isolated in the frame, he solicits not only the look of his female friend cooking couscous for him off-screen, but also the viewer's look of desire at an object rendered vulnerable. Here and in Faustrecht der Freiheit ( Fox and His Friends , 1975), in which the working-class protagonist (played by Fassbinder) faces the camera as he emerges naked from a mudbath, the male body is put on display at the same time that the director implicates the sexualized object in class relations, linking sexual vulnerability to economic disenfranchisement. In Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant ( The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant , 1972), lesbian relations become susceptible to similar power dynamics, and here the roles of master and servant are interchanged in an unstable relationship of desire and class.
The politics of sexuality become more elaborate in Fassbinder's final film Querelle (1982), where the act of male penetration becomes a staging of power and submission played out according to various contractual terms: the penetrated male reserving the ability to give or withhold pleasure; the penetrator fantasizing that his male sexual partner is actually the partner's sister. The film that enables the most elaborate network of queer positions of identification and desire is In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden ( In a Year of 13 Moons , 1978), which begins as desire has already receded into the past. Its protagonist is the transgendered Erwin/Elvira, who has undergone sexual reassignment surgery after her male lover Anton makes a casual observation about how their relationship would be if Erwin were a woman. When Anton reduces Elvira to the status of a freakish object and discards her, however, the film becomes an emotionally and politically charged investigation of the instability of human sexual identity.
Warnung vor einer heligen Nutte ( Beware of a Holy Whore , 1970), Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant ( The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972), Angst essen Seele auf ( Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974), Faustrecht der Freiheit ( Fox and His Friends, 1975), In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden ( In a Year of 13 Moons, 1978), Querelle (1982)
Elsaesser, Thomas. Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject . Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996.
Kardish, Laurence, and Juliane Lorenz, eds. Rainer Werner Fassbinder . New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997.
Lorenz, Juliane, ed. Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder . New York: Applause Books, 1997.
Michael DeAngelis
to the status of an inspirational figure of strength and resolve for the gay community.
More recently, Steven Cohan has articulated a detailed historical context of the 1950s that both examines dominant ideological perspectives on gender, sexuality, and power in American culture, and explicates the ways in which homosexuality and queerness in film and star texts figure prominently as disruptions of heteronormative and heterosexist power structures. In this tradition, Michael DeAngelis discusses the historically specific queer reading strategies that have been made available to gay viewers of Hollywood film since the 1950s. Analyzing a wide range of texts that constitute the star image and persona, DeAngelis demonstrates how Hollywood cinema has not only accommodated but sometimes strategically solicited the identification and desire of gay male viewers for certain male stars. In his analysis of Keanu Reeves, for example, DeAngelis shows how the fashionably ambiguous sexuality of the star persona becomes attractive to gay men while simultaneously maintaining its appeal to straight male and female viewers. Hollywood's complicity in accommodating queer readings through ambiguous film and promotional texts offers further illustration of Doty's assertion that queerness in film is never only a matter of connotation. The queer theoretical enterprise continues to gain force by extending its concentration upon historically specific studies of power and sexuality on both international and global levels.
SEE ALSO Camp ; Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Cinema ; Gender ; Sexuality
Aaron, Michele. New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.
——. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . New York: Routledge, 1990.
Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinities and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Cowie, Elizabeth. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
DeAngelis, Michael. Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
DeLauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society . London: British Film Institute, 1986.
——. Stars . 2nd ed. London: British Film Institute, 1998.
Freud, Sigmund. "A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of the Perversions." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , translated by James Strachey, vol. 17. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
——. "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , translated by James Strachey, vol. 18. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
——. "On Narcissism: An Introduction." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , translated by James Strachey, vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Straayer, Chris. Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies . New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Waugh, Thomas. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall . New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Michael DeAngelis
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