Is the Gaze Feminist?

Abstract

It is often claimed nowadays that we have entered a period of feminist criticism even if there are many debates over what techniques are actually feminist. Yet there is no area in which feminist criticism has been formulated so theoretically, and has dominated so conclusively, as in the realm of contemporary film writing. Since 1975, when Laura Mulvey and others first linked sexual representation in film with an implied male voyeur, feminist theories about the ‘gaze’ have acquired the weight of orthodoxy in film criticism. To fail to use gaze theory as a critical starting-point is to be devalued as a serious film critic. Of course, the issue is not only about how particular film techniques are constructed in a submissive/dominant diegesis but also about their cumulative effect on women and men in a society now pervaded by the acceptable imagery of soft pornography. But to ask why film critics, feminist or otherwise, deconstruct patriarchal controls in cinema only in terms of the gaze is to raise an important issue for film criticism concerning the interrelationship of pornography, criticism and feminism. I want to trace the ideas of feminist film critics and thereby assess their claims — not the least problematic is that the gaze is the only means of patriarchal expression in cinema.