alixtii | Meta: Gazes in/and/of Criticism

This post is a response to melannen's much-recced (and deservedly so) post on the slasher's gaze, but more directly a response to a couple of responses to her post, namely ithiliana when she says, "I'm going to immediately complicate it by asking about 'the femslash gaze' (because although people are convincing me that slash can be f/f as well as m/m, her meta seems to focus on the male object of slash gaze…..)," and kyuuketsukirui when she asks "The very fact that there are two men involved means there will be men doing the looking and men being looked at. This applies for gay porn, lit, even real life. How can it be something specifically slashy/the defining characteristic of slash?" To respond to both of these points, however, I think requires a deeper engagement with the original post that prompted these responses. In particular, I want to use lots of examples, because that is that for which Grace (=kyuuketsukirui, but easier to type) asked.

[Note: This was originally longer and more coherent, and then I lost that draft. Since then it's been sitting on my hard drive getting less and less topical. I really don't have the time right now to perfect it any more, so I give it to you as it is.]

The Het Male Gaze

Now I actually talk about the het male gaze quite a bit, as long-time readers of this journal of course know. I am a het male, and as such I consider it to be incumbent upon myself as a feminist and a person of privilege to be constantly interrogating that subject-position. More on what I think about it in a little bit, but first let's examine melannen's gloss:

The "male gaze" is a concept that comes out of feminist media theory. Not having ever formally studied either feminism or the media, I came to the idea mostly through fandom - through online comics fandom specifically, where it's an *extremely* self-evident and relevant idea. It's a kind of sticky concept, but for the purposes of this discussion let's define it as something along the lines of "the assumption that the most important members of any audience are straight males." As a result, everything that we see in the media is first passed through the filter of "would this be attractive to that hypothetical straight male?"

It came out of film theory, I believe, talking about where the camera points and how we choose what is shown on screen, but it's very easily extensible to real life: everyone who performs a female character on screen is expected to think, first, about what the straight male wants - well, so is everyone who performs a female identity in *real life*. In fact, once I started thinking along those pathways, I've had trouble turning it off. How much of what we see in the images around us, in advertising, books, movies, celebrities, fashion - is based on what we think that stereotyped default straight male wants? And as a result, how much do women have to always act in the awareness of their own sexual desirability, and the percieved importance of that desirability?

From a fannish perspective, one of the archetypal instances of the het male gaze in fiction is Frank Miller's All Star Batman & Robin.

Here's a passage which is, in my opinion, indicative of the het male gaze, from my own writing--my Fred/River NC-17 dubcon teacherkink crossover story "School of Lost Souls":

“Three minutes even,” Lei said, looking up from the stopwatch in her hand.[*] “That’s thirteen seconds off your previous record.”

River nodded, then pulled herself up out of the pool. She had already known how long it took her to swim the laps; she had been counting herself. But she didn’t say anything, simply picked up a towel and made her way to the natatorium’s locker room, where she changed out of her bathing suit, showered, and put back on her school uniform. Her exercise regimen for the day completed, she made her way back to her dormitory, planning to work some more on her conceptual matrices before it was time for dinner.

[*The Torchwood fan in me is admittedly giggling like mad over the presence of the stopwatch, but I have to point out that I wrote this fic a full year before "They Keep Killing."]

Ands here's my gloss on the passage in my DVD commentary:

This scene serves several important functions. It shows River engaged in homosocial activity with another girl, a powerful healthy moment in which she is able to connect before she is cut off from her classmates, giving us a better sense of what life on Academy Station is like. It reminds us that River is an excellent athlete, and shows her utilizing that athleticism. And it allows me to imagine River in a bathing suit. And changing out of a bathing suit and using a communal shower. And putting on a school uniform--and believe me, the use of a schoolgirl uniform as a manifestation of a hetboy fantasy is deliberate, evocative of the patriarchal order controlling the way in which she displays her body. Even under the relative freedom River enjoys at this point of the story, there is a sense in which she is always made an object.

Even though the narrator of the story is ostensibly inside River's mind--the entire story is written from River's POV--she is still being put forth as an object for desire. Some (although not all) of what is going on is there simply to cater to my own desire: I, Alixtii O'Krul V, a heterosexual male, enjoy imagining River Tam in a bathing suit, in the nude, in a schoolgirl's uniform. Here we have a return of the bifurcation which is more clearly seen in the Frank Miller scans, which include in thought boxes Vicki's internal monologue but adopts for its visuals the notion of a "camera," an omnipresent voyeur.

Here's an even more explicit exercise in the het male gaze, in that it operates both diegetically (Watsonian-ly) and extradiegetically (Doylist-ly), from my RPF fic "Bullshit":

You make a noncommittal noise, but Morena will have none of it. "Really, Joss, how could you let that happen?"

You disavow responsibility as quickly as you've done anything in your life. "Summer's a big girl," you say, but even as you say it, you know it's bullshit. What's worse, Morena knows it is bullshit, knows full well that you masturbated last night imagining Michelle fucking Summer (visualizing Summer's bare white breasts and ass (oh, what an ass) and Michelle's ravenous pussy (cunt, you think at first, but instantly backpedal mentally)) and Morena's eyes hold no absolution.

Michelle Trachtenberg and Summer Glau have become so objectified by Joss's het male gaze that they've ceased to have a real existence for him outside their rôle in his masturbatory fantasies.

Now, obviously I don't think the het male gaze is intrinsically evil. I enjoy looking at attractive women, and I'm not particularly ashamed of the fact, nor do I exactly plan on stopping. The problem with the het male gaze is that instead of being a gaze, it has become instead the gaze, a gaze which does not turn off, which is weirdly omnipresent even when heterosexual men aren't actually present, which becomes so deeply embedded in our society that women find it difficult to position themselves as any type of subject rather than merely an object, when women's entire being suddenly becomes constructed as being something which exists purely for the sake of men. To be able to turn it off--to be able to masturbate in private about Michelle screwing Summer (no, I can't bring myself to curse in my own voice, grrr), and then to go on the next morning to treat them with all of the dignity that they as human beings deserve--it is what every heterosexual male has to train themself to do. (It doesn't come naturally, because our society is set up so that we never have to do it if we don't want to.) "Bullshit" posits Joss (fictional Joss, of course) falling short of this not because he derives pleasure from the thought of Michelle and Summer having sex--I mean who wouldn't?--but because he allows his desire to prevent him from intervening when he knows, deep down, that he should.

The Queer Female Gaze

But what, specifically, is so "het male" about the gazes put forth above? Fandom is a wide and wonderful place, and despite the darkest NC-17 incest chan BDSM noncon fic I could possibly write, there's going to be somebody writing something darker. Is the het male gaze demonstrably different than the queer female gaze?

The almost silent hum of the AC is the only sound that interrupts their kiss-and-slide wetness; the building is sterile and chilly and Lilah's office even colder. Fred hears it every time Lilah shifts against her, the sound her breath makes escaping in gasps from her lungs, the soft sound of Lilah's stiletto sinking into Fred's long-abandoned skirt, the skitting sharpness of her own gasp when Lilah's hand finds her breast and tugs, hard, on her nipple.

Every time she comes here, Fred becomes a little softer, a little more pliable in Lilah's hands, a little less surprised when Lilah bites her, when Lilah's fingernails scratch her, when her fingers breach her. She's softer and more demanding all at once, settling into the discomfort of being naked and cold and pressed against a plaster wall, comfortable enough in her discomfort to whisper meaninglessly into the silence, to wrap her own arms around Lilah's head and pull her down to her breasts. When Lilah's teeth scrape Fred's skin, her mouth opens but she makes no sound; the gasp is swallowed in surprise when Lilah bites down.

From "Gather Paradise" by

wisdomeagle. Guh.

Um, wait, was I saying something?

Oh right. Het male gaze. Queer female gaze. We see the same bifurcation here we saw in Frank Miller and myself: the narration is inside the head of the object of desire (Fred), but she is set up in a tableau which is quite transparently there because

wisdomeagle thinks it's hot. (Because it is.) (Note, this is NOT a criticism, anymore than I was criticizing myself when I pointed out how putting River in a bathing suit was an example of the het male gaze. If it makes sense in terms of plot and theme and character, then why the hell not do it?)

Has Ari just internalized the het male gaze? Perhaps to a degree, but I don't think that undermines the validity of such a desiring gaze as an element of her queerness. We're not talking about some idealized queer female, after all, but queer females as they exist today in fandom. I think in the name of empowering queerness we can't reject the legitimacy of this type of queer female gaze. (All gazes are, of course, by definition objectifying: there is one who sees and one who is seen. Is this problematizable from a feminist position? Hell, yeah--after all, what isn't? But I don't think we're ready to go quite that deep in analyzing fandom. In the end, we think in terms of subject-verb-object, and deconstructing those thought structures might be more radical than I'm prepared to go in this essay.)

I think of the ways that, at the very least, the queer female presence here in LJ media fandom femslash communities have appropriated the semiotic markers for female adolescent sexuality traditionally used by heterosexual men--and by "markers" I basically mean "the skirt." In the passage quoted above from my DVD commentary for "School of Lost Souls" I discussed the "the use of a schoolgirl uniform as a manifestation of a hetboy fantasy"--but one only has to look to the movie D.E.B.S.--and the femslash community which has responded to it--to see that very symbol taken and used in a lesbian context. Similarily, I look to Bring It On's use of the cheerleader mythos, and the way that femslash fandom has latched onto that movie as well. These are very female-positive movies, and the skirt--which is always-already a symbol of visual objecthood; one wears a skirt to look good in it--does not denote a place of passivity, but rather one of very real power. (Although there is more going on--inside both movies that skirt-centered female power is embedded, at least initially, within a system of male power--but that's not something, I think, which is seen as primary by those whose respond to the texts in fandom.) The het male and queer female gazes, then, seem to draw on a similar store of cultural iconography. Apparently, if there is something we--het males and queer females alike--seem to be able to agree on, it's that we like skirts.

The Femslasher's Gaze

melannen has this to say about femslash:

And f/f stories, which often work by sidelining the male gaze entirely and putting all the power into woman's desire, assigning the supposed 'male gaze' explicitly to a woman looking at a woman.

All gazes are, of course, by definition objectifying: there is one who sees and one who is seen. Is this problematizable from a feminist position? Hell yeah--after all, what isn't? But I don't think we're ready to go quite that deep in analyzing fandom. In the end, we think in terms of subject-verb-object, and deconstructing those thought structures would be more radical than I'm prepared to go in this essay.

Okay, if we assume that

wisdomeagle is representative of a femslasher's gaze (because if she isn't, then who is?), and that Frank Miller isn't (because if he is, then who isn't?), what is the basis for that decision? (We'll put myself to the side as a problematic middle case for the time being.) Honestly, I think only one definition is really tenable: the femslasher's gaze is a gaze which sees woman as its object from a position within a community of women.

(I don't think a purely textualist/formalist understanding of the femslasher's gaze is possible. In this as in all things, context is key.)

"School of Lost Souls," the story I quoted from above--a story absolutely saturated with the het male gaze--was written to be read by women. In part, it was written for specific women. I knowingly tailored it to

wisdomeagle's kinks, and it was written in a 'thon exchange (specifically, for

femslash_minis) for

voleuse. It's not just a story written by a heterosexual male about a fifteen-year-old girl who is seduced by her teacher. It's part of a conversation between a large manifold of people, many of them queer females.