Devin Glenn - Core Response #1

Although I very much admire Miriam Hansen’s efforts to safeguard the female spectator from historic erasure by exploring Valentino as a star created for female viewers, I felt that her argument at times lacked necessary nuance and clarification. While Hansen is right to point to the economic/industrial factors arising from WWI that led to a greater recognition of the “female experience, needs, [and] fantasies…, albeit for the purposes of immediate commercial exploitation” (263), absent from this evaluation is an acknowledgement that because the majority of people seeking to target the female demographic during this time were male, what they captured was more of a male interpretation of the female experience than anything else. In essence, Hansen appears to reflect the male fantasy onto the female spectator instead of exploring how the female gaze might altogether be different. Subverting Freud’s androcentric understanding of visual pleasure as Mulvey does, Hansen engages in a reading of Valentino’s body that situates it as the fetishized “other,” but ultimately, her analysis remains entrenched in the male gaze.

With that being said, I do think Hansen is incredibly effective in reminding readers to distinguish between “the historical spectator” and “the contemporary female spectator” (264) as well as to consider the culturally constructed nature of sexual difference as a means of avoiding the pitfalls of gender essentialism (268). It is as Hansen delves into her primary argument regarding narcissism, sadomasochism, and domination that inconsistencies begin to arise. The notion that “millions of women’s hearts were said to have quivered at the prospect of being humiliated by the British-bred barbarian” (273) in The Sheik seems steeped in the male fantasy, but I do think Hansen does an excellent job reading Valentino in this context as an androgynous figure that actually threatened to humiliate hetero male moviegoers.

While Hansen discusses the possibilities Valentino’s films open when it comes to “female desire outside of motherhood and family,” (278) her examples of the ways in which that desire is depicted on-screen feel rather out-of-touch in light of more contemporary conversations surrounding the portrayal of female desire in films such as Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. As opposed to taking something traditionally associated with the male gaze (like the act of undressing), applying it to the male body, and labeling it “the female gaze,” Sciamma highlights the ways in which the camera’s lingering shots of glances and hands may more persuasively represent a form of the female gaze. Rather than basing its romance in sexual domination and voyeurism, Portrait of a Lady on Fire establishes its protagonists as equal partners in a mutually accessible relationship. At one point in the film, as Marianne paints Héloïse, the act of looking is addressed head-on as Héloïse (who functions as the object of Marianne’s gaze) confidently returns that gaze and question’s Marianne’s position as unequivocal subject. Scattered throughout the film, too, are close-ups of both Marianne’s and Héloïse’s hands. Hands are commonplace, but they are also the primary site of artistic and romantic creation. With their hands, Marianne and Héloïse paint, sculpt, and write, and with those same hands, they support, they caress, and they embrace. This visual prominence of hands emphasizes an alternative kind of eroticism which is not objectifying nor destructive, but rather one which celebrates the power of creation.

The primary issue for me is not that female pleasure cannot appear like traditional depictions of male pleasure, but that such traditional depictions are problematic as they find themselves tied up in discourses of conquest and control. It seems distasteful and disrespectful to impose a mode of address upon female spectators that has historically marginalized them. Still, I can understand Hansen’s motivation in wanting to reclaim a space of female empowerment within this bleak landscape. Perhaps my qualms are the result of that “feminist consciousness” that Hansen warns can lead to revisionist histories (268).