Is the concept of "to-be-looked-at-ness" useful in explaining gender roles?

The representation of the protagonist Lt. Jordan O’Neil in the Hollywood production "G.I. Jane" can rapidly disprove the notion that "G.I. Jane" is a feminist movie. It shows nearly all features mentioned by Laura Mulvey in her article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) according to the male gaze and "to-be-looked-at-ness".

The film provides scenes only constructed for the male voyeurist viewer, as the scene in the bathtub, the shower-scene and the training scenes. Why was Demi Moore chosen for the role of Lt. O’Neil? She has a feminine body, featured in the Playboy and has silicon-breasts. The producer wanted someone to be looked at. When she is doing push-ups, she only wears a small shirt and no bra, shows free arms and shoulders, whereas there are no similar scenes in the movie with little-dressed men.

Lt. Jordan is integrated in a patriarchal hierarchy that tries to manipulate, chicane and suppress her. From Mulvey’s framework you can see a masochistic role and a voyeuristic/sadistic position of the male spectators and the male characters on the screen.

Lt. O’Neil is an obvious threat to the dominant male order, expressing on the screen the abstract psychoanalytical notion of castration threat. As Mulvey puts it, the producers are "inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat." (p.38) They show Demi Moore in close-ups, sell her as a perfect product and promoting army-life as style, fashion and erotic; using her beauty for objectifying her.

G.I. Jane’s wish to become a man expresses from Mulvey’s point of view her penis envy, and with giving away her feminine signs as earrings and long hair, she gives away her potential castration threat, and with the expression "suck my dick" she invents her own penis and is accepted as a man.

Mulvey’s terms of scopophilia and narcissism make sense for construing "G.I. Jane". For female viewers there is the possibility for identification, whereas the male viewers get to control the protagonist through fetishistic objectification.

The split between an active/male role and a passive/female role can be discussed in the respect that the two central female characters, Senator De Haven and Lt. O’Neil, take an active position in the film, but having a closer look they both play clearly male roles.

Van Zoonen rejects the onedimensional role models male/active and female/passive, because they offer "too narrow a conceptualization of gender" (p.91) and deny "the dynamic and contradictory nature of gender discourse and its historic and cultural specificity." (p.91)

So how might a possible female audience receive the media text "G.I. Jane"? Although the analysis reveals a typical patriarchal construction of gender in the film, as Mulvey puts it, "mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order"(p.30), van Zoonen argues that "media texts thus carry multiple meanings and are open to a range of interpretations"(p.41).

Psychoanalysis denies the possibility of female spectatorship and negotiated visual pleasure, different interpretations than the dominant, preferred and transmitted reading. Thus the psychoanalytic scientists were accused to silence women’s experiences with media. Drawing from van Zoonen’s framework, the viewer, female or male, can chose aspects of a media text, favor some of the presented ideas and scenes, reject others. The research made on soap operas, female gaze and media pleasures showed interpretations differing from the dominant reading.

"Psychoanalytic film theory has been criticized, like psychoanalysis in general, for its historical nature and its powerless perspective." (van Zoonen, p.92) The crack point of the use of psychoanalysis for media is the concept of a fixed gender role that is constructed in an early stage in life. Without the possibility of changing these roles through negotiation and discourse, the whole approach becomes worthless. The logic consequence got to be a next step towards a more realistic and powerful perspective in research, as van Zoonen notes it: "Mulvey’s dark and suffocating analysis of patriarchal cinema has lost ground to a more confident and empowering approach which foregrounds the possibilities of "subversive", that is, non-patriarchal modes of female spectatorship." (p.97)

Concluding I would prefer to see gender as a social construction. We have to get one step beyond Mulvey’s manifest approach. Psychoanalysis is a good beginning in this problematic field, but to get to a more powerful position and a useful, more realistic understanding, gender can only be seen as constructed through individual experiences, social background, discourse and negotiations.

References:

• DeFleur, M. & Dennis, Everette, E., "Understanding Mass Communication – A Liberal Arts Perspective", Sixth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1998.
• McQuail, Denis, "Mass Communication Theory – An Introduction", Third Edition, SAGE, London 1994.
• Mulvey, Laura, "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema" in: Screen, 16(3) 1975. Reprint.
• Van Zoonen, Lisbet, "Feminist Media Studies", SAGE, London 1994.
• Attached article "Media System Dependency Theory"