Queer Theory



THEORIES OF VISUAL EXCHANGE

Although the categories certainly overlap in the application of queer theory to film studies, one can make a tentative distinction between those theorists who contend with heteronormativity by examining the psychological, social, and cultural dimensions of visual exchange itself, and those writers who focus more upon the specific contexts of fantasy and reception that enable potentially queer readings of cultural texts.

One strand of queer theoretical inquiry focuses upon the psychosocial properties of looking and being looked at that are integral to cinematic viewing. The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud serve as the common reference point for this inquiry, since Freud's assignment of sexual identity on the basis of the subject's "successful" strategy of coping with the recognition of sexual difference directly informs queer theory's concern with locating sexual identities and perspectives. Referring to interpersonal alliances, Freud distinguishes between "identification" and "object-choice," the first term designating "what one would like to be " and the second term pertaining to "what one would like to have " ("Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego," p. 106, emphasis in the original). In "normal" human development, Freud argues, the child develops sexual alliances by which she or he identifies with the parental figure of the same gender and sexually objectifies the other gender. This development secures the subject's heterosexual identity.

In the works of Freud and his disciple Jacques Lacan, the gendered relationship between being and having the object forms a dynamic of power in visual exchange that feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey associates with the workings of heterosexual patriarchy. As it plays out in the structure of gender relationships in mainstream cinema, Mulvey contends, men look and women are looked at, and the male look at the female always involves the threat of a recognition of sexual difference that characterizes male castration anxiety. The male eases this anxiety either by fetishizing the female object of desire or by punishing her through voyeuristic probing. In this closed system, Mulvey argues, women forfeit their ability to intervene or to act as anything but masochists. The male is always the subject and agent of desire; the female is always only the desired object.

Demonstrating their indebtedness to feminist theory and psychoanalysis, queer theorists such as Teresa deLauretis and Judith Butler struggle to subvert the seeming integrity of this gender-based system of looking that reconstitutes desire between women as a mere extension of heterosexual relations. DeLauretis takes as her goal the formulation of a specifically lesbian subject-position, a visual perspective through which a female viewing subject might express desire for another female without resorting to the heterosexist power dynamic that Mulvey articulates. She locates this subject-position through an analysis of Sheila McLaughlin's She Must Be Seeing Things (1987), a film that bypasses the male-oriented threat of castration anxiety inherent in the recognition of sexual difference by offering women a distanced perspective of heteronormative relations, and by formulating a scenario of same-sex female desire.

While deLauretis works from within the Freudian psychoanalytic system of visual exchange in order to find a way out of it, Judith Butler takes the outsider's position in a strategy to disrupt the efficacy of the dynamic within. Butler's method is indebted to Jacques Derrida's theories of deconstruction—specifically the notion of the interdependent relationship that exists between "inside" and "outside" and between the presumed "original" and its "copy." Applying deconstruction to sexuality, Butler proposes that in mainstream culture heterosexuality assumes the status of the natural, "given" sexual norm by relegating homosexuality (specifically, lesbianism) to the status of a derivative "other" that lies outside the boundaries of the norm. This process, however, reveals how extensively heterosexuality depends upon homosexuality in order to sustain a distinct identity. Undoing this relationship between the primary and secondary, Butler proposes discursively dethroning heterosexuality from its assumed status as "original," designating it instead as a panicked self-imitation. Through such theorization, Butler derives a notion of gender as an imitation for which there exists no original, and which comes to play only through the act of repeated performance. In the process, the appearance of originality emerges only as an effect of repetition. This focus on repetition ultimately suggests that there can be no stable gendered or sexual identity. In Butler's system, even the seemingly biological reality of sex itself is revealed to be less a natural phenomenon than a "naturalized" effect of gender, as she illustrates through the example of the medical profession's historical use of surgery to "resolve" the ambiguous sex of hermaphrodites, forcing an alignment between sex, gender, and sexuality.

If Butler succeeds in deconstructing some of the basic Freudian premises of human sexual behavior and development, in her more recent work she makes yet more provocative assertions by challenging the efficacy of Jacques Lacan's "orders" of the Imaginary and Symbolic. Butler argues that such psychoanalytic constructs place strategic yet ultimately arbitrary limits upon what is imaginable in gendered or sexual behavior. Butler submits these orders to similar deconstructive operations, concluding that the Symbolic realm of patriarchal order that governs the production of meaning gains its efficacy though reiteration and repetition, and that consequently there is nothing inherent or "given" about either its power or its distinction from the Imaginary, the order governing the operations of identification and desire. When Butler declares that "we are not … in a position of finding identification and desire to be mutually exclusive possibilities" (1993, p. 99), she radically disrupts the basic premises upon which both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis function with respect to gender and sexual difference.



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