Of Mulvery, Butler, and the Homosexual Gaze
Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze has been received by feminists and queer theorists as highly influential in the fields of both cinema and photography, and has been used by feminists as a starting point to female body disturbance caused by men and advertising representation. Mulvey’s theory from Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, however, focuses on strictly the heterosexual role in visual pleasure, scopophilia, not looking into the homosexual male gaze at all. It is then necessary to use Mulvey’s work, along with Judith Butler’s gender conformativity theory, to analyze how homosexual males view heterosexual, homosexual, and transsexual films. I argue that looking at films from the homosexual male view with the lens of Mulvey and Butler can we see that the homosexual male gaze is quite different from its straight counterpart. Using Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Judith Butler’s gender performance and conformativity theories, the homosexual male role in watching the films XXX, Latter Days, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch objectifies the men in heterosexual target audience films because of the male character’s desire for the female, while in the homosexual films, desire is mixed with empathy because of the coming out process.
Mulvey and Visual Pleasure
Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure essay describes a theory in which the male gaze of women removes their human identity and views her as a sexual object. This is in part because of a Freudian viewpoint that because women do not have a phallus, men are afraid of the castrated human form and must objectify her in order to compensate for her lack of a phallus. “Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze (Mulvey, 3.)” Scopophilia is the “love of looking” that creates sexual objects of those human forms that we are looking at. Her essay further states that the male gaze is so overpowering, that women cannot be represented in movies as anything more than foils for these scopophilic tendency male viewers have. So the women, mentally to watch the movie, must become a man in order to view films. This already becomes a gender displacement in that she must objectify another woman, whom she may have no sexual desire for, because of the overwhelming pressure and presence the male gaze holds. Her compliance with this dominant male gaze creates a situation where she can no longer watch a movie as a sexual woman, but become a man in order to associate her in male dominated cinema.
Gender Conformativity
It is necessary when analyzing Mulvey’s theory to think how roles in homosexual culture are referred and applied to a theory that is largely heterosexually dominant. To do this we must understand the gender roles homosexual men must reside on, and Judith Butler’s Imitation and Gender Insubordination essay outlines her theory that gender is all performative, resulting from constant repetition of what is masculine and what is feminine is society’s eyes in order to solidify these roles. It becomes a binary, where men and women are polarized to opposite ends of what defines a man and a woman. When it comes to gender identity of gays and lesbians, Butler states “[c]oomplsory heterosexuality sets itself as the original, the true, the authentic; the norm that determines the real and implies that ‘being’ a lesbian is always a kind of miming, a vain effort to participate in the phantasmatic plenitude of naturalized heterosexuality which will always and only fail (Butler, 312.)” Butler is arguing that homosexuality imitates heterosexuality’s defining gender roles. That a butch lesbian is imitating a man because of her masculine qualities that only belong to a man, so she must be a fake in order be in the gender realm. The same goes for feminine gay men and even butch gay men whose hyper masculinity is a play on heterosexual masculinity pushed to the edges. So gender must be a societal construct that constantly emulates the heterosexual definitions of masculinity and femininity in order to differentiate between the sexes. When homosexual people enter the gender binary, they must imitate these norms in their relationship, but will always fail. Butler goes on to state that drag is the only way to show the performativity of gender, but more on that later.
The Homosexual Male Gaze
Utilizing these two theories can we form a theory on how homosexual men view cinema. Now two theories can apply when looking at cinema through the homosexual perspective. The first is a direct reflection of Butler’s gender conformativity applied to Mulvey’s theory. It would state that homosexuals must either align themselves with straight women in their viewing of cinema. To do so, homosexual men must become transsexuals themselves, becoming a woman and being subjugated to a dominant heterosexual, scopophilic gaze that a woman undergoes. The homosexual gaze then must have another sex change and undergo the woman’s transsexualism in their mind as well. This seems to have too many transitions, so we can simplify it to a homosexual converting to a heterosexual male. Homosexuals would lose all their desire for the same sex and view women in a degrading way. One would, as straight men do, objectify and strip the woman of identity, regarding her as nothing more than a commodity; a body designed to fulfill that scolophilic gaze.
This theory seems to rely too much on the power of the heterosexual male gaze and ignores the desires of the homosexual male. I propose that an entirely new gaze is created when a gay man looks at film. First, in accordance with Judith Butler’s gender performativity, he still retains scopophilic tendencies, especially when looking at another man. When in a film geared toward a heterosexual male audience writer Derek P. Rucas writes in his essay The Male Gaze, Homosexualization, and James Bond Films:
“In Goldfinger, the audience never takes on the gaze or the [point of view] of a female spectator. We notice that characters such as Pussy Galore and Miss Moneypenny are attracted to Bond, but different conventions are used to articulate this sense of attraction. For instance, the change of intonation in both the voices of Galore and Moneypenny signify an interest in Bond while Bond’s active gaze is the signifier of his female interest. Sociologically speaking, the reason for the subdued female gaze could be a result of prominent ideologies present in the early 1960s. Since the male figure was the dominant of the two sexes, his gaze will be active over the passive one of the female.
Although the female gaze is present in Goldfinger, there is also a gaze cast upon Bond from the male spectator. This is not necessarily a homosexual gaze, nor a heterosexual gaze. It is a gaze that could potentially meet both standards in the sense that both homosexual and heterosexual audiences can identify with the Bond character. For instance, males will tend to idolize Bond because of his smooth McIveresque nature, whereas females will find sexual appeal in Bond. When Bond is tied to the table with the threat of laser castration, the focus is on Bond’s groin area. As we can see, according to Mulvey, Freud’s analysis of the threat of castration is a literal obstacle that Bond must overcome. Although perhaps not consciously intended to be a homosexualized focal point, a gay audience who reads into the Bond films could interpret this scene from a fetishistic standpoint. …[T]he Bond crotch shot has the potential to appeal to both a female and gay audience, sexualizing the Bond character.”
Rucas is claiming that the homosexual male gaze can only come through the female perspective in cinema that our gaze, because it is a male one, overpowers her and her desire becomes our desire. The homosexual gaze is not transsvestivism, but rather a channeling through an outlet of the female desire for the male character, thus objectifying him while he is objectifying her. Because the homosexual gaze overpowers the female gaze, we are essentially turning her into a commodity to look at heterosexual men with. A kaleidoscope, if you will, that alters the perception of the film in our favour to turn a sexual being whose gaze is stronger than the female counterpart and meeting that gaze with an equally strong gaze through the woman.
I feel this is channeling through a woman’s perspective to, while it does have its merit, be a bit of a copout in that Rucas is searching for a way to channel his desire for Bond through a way he can get away with. Women are indeed needed to bring out the sexuality in men, but I propose we are not using them as a lens that we can see through, but when the heterosexual man looks at her with desire, we only see his desire and do not use the woman in the film to express our own. The character’s gaze and desire are enough to elicit a strong enough response so that the homosexual audience or viewer can objectify him through his own sexuality. Our gaze is as strong as a heterosexual man’s that it will be met equally when we look upon him alone or when he is transplanting his own desire onto a woman. I wouldn’t say that we are homosexualizing him, as Rucas would say, because he is being objectified by his own sex appeal and sexuality. The woman then becomes a foil, which we being to sympathize with through her femininity, and not just a sexual object that we objectify. Using Ricas’s own argument, in Goldfinger when Bond first meets Pussy Galore, he immediately beings to try to charm her and stares at her assistance butt as if he were taking in the sights of the women. The gay audience would want James Bond to look at them like that and try to charm them. So far this is following Rucas’s proposal, but when Galore shoots Bond down, we secretly cheer her on and retain a small delusion that he ultimately would charm us. His sex appeal and charm are what we desire, so when he stares at a woman, we stare at his appeal, but as an audience and not through the lens of a woman’s gaze, with equal strength, though he cannot see it. It is complicated by the fact that there is a woman present, but Rucas’s argument is not pushed far enough to show our own scopophilia in the presence of such a man. It is not channeled; it is imposed through our own gaze as an audience member and does not require the commoditization of a woman to make him a sexual object. Bond already is.
We are also attracted to Bond’s “machoness” because we secretly idealize partners to be like him: sexy, charming, courageous, suave, and intelligent. His character traits are what turn us on to him, even when alone, so we continue our scopophilia even when women are not present at all. We sexualize him through out the movie and not just when a woman is present, though it is much more subdued when she is not there. His actions and words are enough to have this response come from the homosexual male perspective.
But when the film is designed for a gay male audience, the situation becomes even more complex is our view of the characters. In this case, the scopophilia and objectifying nature of the male gaze is met with empathy from a common ground. Laura Mulvey’s argument, that, when a woman is looked at by a man, her human identity is cast off and a purely commodifiable identity, where she needs no personality because of her lack of a phallus, is necessary to the male ego to compensate for the lack of the penis, cannot be applied to gay characters because they have a phallus, but are still the object of desire from the audience. Through their desire and sexual encounters do we objectify them into the identity lacking sexual object. But, since most gay films are about the coming out process, the characters can retain their humanity by way of a common experience that binds all out gay men together: the coming out process. The depression, the denial, the family reaction, the church’s reaction, the suicide attempts; all of these experiences come rushing back to the forefront of memory in the gay audience because it has happened to them. This creates an empathetic and sympathetic connection to the characters, giving back their own humanity while still desiring them. It creates a middle ground between objectification and seeing them as a person, which creates both tension and an ability to keep the audience’s attention so a larger message can be conveyed to them. The heterosexual gaze cannot do this in the same effectiveness as the homosexual gaze can.
A New Gaze Applied: XXX
So how does this homosexual gaze apply then to the Hollywood heterosexual male target audience? As stated above, the sex appeal alone of the man is enough to objectify him as the gaze does in the movie XXX. Mulvey states, “[a]s the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look…” Take this further into the gay perspective and the power of the male role in the film becomes fetishized. The machismo that draws the heterosexual male audience into the film XXX proves to be its very way homosexual men can objectify Vin Diesel. In the film he is an extreme sports enthusiast with a macho look and dominating, charismatic attitude. Think of an extreme sports James Bond but with less intelligence and more of a “bad boy” air about him. He frequently looks at women with a more overt gaze than Bond does, but here it is his body that gay men and straight women sexualize.
Broad shoulders, massive pecs, a husky voice, and a handsome, scruffy face- Vin Diesel epitomizes masculinity in Hollywood and, therefore, our eyes. His bad boy with a conscience is what every straight woman wants, so in a sense we are aligning ourselves with straight women in our objectification of his character. But their gaze isn’t as powerful with such a dominant male gaze is present, and even when Asia Argento is viewing him sexually; her gaze is obfuscate by his own. The homosexual gaze is like a third party, the epitome of the scopophilic, voyeuristic view Mulvey describes. We no longer identify him in his role, instead the movie becomes two hours of voyeurism that cannot be expressed or fulfilled with in the narrative of the movie, showing the disappointment of the viewer who wants this attractive masculine man to be their hero as he is for Argento. I would even go far as to say we are envious of Argento in that she does get to play the role of both heroine and damsel in distress, creating a tension between her and the homosexual viewer wanting to compete for his attention. But that is negated by her plight as a woman and being minoritized by her own status in the film. She is constantly reduced to a sexual object during the beginning part of the film and only when she exposes herself as a secret agent who cannot get out of the situation she’s in, the independence of her character is shattered and shows her vulnerability. She then becomes a foil for Diesel to assert himself and the homosexual viewer cannot help but relate because of the stigma she is undergoing. (Women’s plights align with us: they become marginalized because of their submissive nature to men. Homosexuals become marginalized because of their submissive nature towards patriarchal heterosexual society.) Empathy for her takes the envy away, and Diesel becomes objectified when competition is gone from the female character and the viewer, focusing more on his masculinity and body, rather than a his sexual desire and objectification of women.
Homosexual Target Audience: Latter Days
But what happens when the audience is intended for a homosexual audience. The film Latter Days is almost a standard in LGBT films in the coming out process and the repercussions of the process. The film focuses around a Mormon missionary named Elder Aaron Davis and out aspiring actor Christian Markelli in Los Angeles, where Aaron falls in love with the shallow Christian through out the course of his mission. Christian represents the “stereotypical” homosexual- being image and sex obsessed, promiscuous, and shallow. Eventually, Aaron kisses Christian, but not before a lengthy time where his character is developed. From the first time Aaron and Christian see each other, they lock gazes, but while Christian’s gaze is one of desire and curiosity to this missionary sitting in a car, Aaron’s is, while mingled with desire, one of fear. While he gazes up at Christian from the car (representing the superiority of one’s acceptance of self, which is later reversed in another scene) his drops his gaze after a couple of seconds. By dropping his gaze, Aaron introduces his intentional attempt to not acknowledge his desire and his objectification of Christian- something Christian willingly does. This complicates Mulvey’s theory as gay people have the choice to reject objectifying a person from the stemming of the fear to be gay. Aaron’s complex gaze is continually present, though the audience can get slight hints of his sexuality from his gaze being continually shot down and from his continued association with Christian. He is constantly looking away from a person he finds attractive until his desire can no longer be contained and he almost has sex with Christian.
Once his revelation to Christian occurs, the audience is taken aback by this shock. A gay Mormon? But immediately his gaze turns to one of directness. He rejects Christian’s advances as something shallow and meaningless. Here now he is standing up while Christian is lying down and his gaze suddenly direct. The gaze is now complicated by the power of knowledge and self-acceptance, or at least of being forced to comply the feelings one was dealing with in secret. To the gay male audience watching, a feeling of empathy also complicates their objectification of two attractive men. The homosexual male viewer feels both sexual desire for Aaron, but upon revelation that he is gay, we are shocked, at first, and start to develop sympathy for the character. This empathy is brought on by their own coming out process of self-acceptance and also, to some members, dealing with the coming out process in a religious environment that shuns homosexuality. When Aaron is returned home, stripped of title, once he is seen kissing Christian, he asks his mother “[w]hat if it’s nothing that I’ve done? What if it’s who I am?” She then proceeds to slap him across the face and scream, “[d]on’t you say that! Don’t you ever say that!” Aaron is the manifestation of every LGBT member’s coming out process where the family must either accept or reject his or her child’s homosexuality. Furthermore, Aaron’s Mormon upbringing and revelation causes a panic, a sense of self-loathing, depression, and otherness that comes from realizing you are gay in a religious environment. Aaron’s mother further states “[m]aybe Heavenly Father can forgive you for what you’ve done. But who you are? He could never forgive that…” This eventually leads Aaron to attempt to take his life. Shunned by family, friends, and denied forgiveness by God for being who you are, most LGBT members contemplate, attempted, or have committed suicide. The audience has gone through this themselves. Therefore they feel.
This alone creates a great divide between the heterosexual male gaze and the homosexual male gaze in that even though the audience has sexual desire and objectifies the characters, they allow for a grey area between acknowledgement of humanity and objectification. On the one hand they desire the characters, but on the other, because of the shared experience of the coming out process, we acknowledge the plight of the character and feel sympathy for them- silently cheering them on and pouring emotion into the character. This grey area also allows for the characters that we can relate to give commentary on the homosexual social sphere because of the divide. When Aaron rejects Christian (much the homosexual audience’s dismay), he delivers an impassioned speech that sex shouldn’t be “just some fun” but something more. Utilizing the audience’s sympathy, Aaron’s speech is directly referring to the homosexual society’s tendency to have promiscuous sex with each other and the superficiality that comes with the culture. His speech deeply affects Christian, who takes it to heart and seeks to change from the homosexual stereotype. Compounded with a character who was like Christian but now has AIDS as a result of the cultural norm, the audience feels a twinge guilt at said cultural norm. This grey area allows for the scopophilic obsession with bodies to be challenged by our own humanity and it’s projections onto other people who have the same experience- leading us to a struggle between our desire for visual pleasure and our humanity and cultural identity as homosexual men.
A Common Ground: Hedwig
There is an area, however, that the male gaze, heterosexual or homosexual, is united on- drag and tanssexuality. Judith Butler claims that drag “is a compulsory performance in the sense that acting out of line with heterosexual norms brings with ostracism, punishment, and violence, not to mention the transgressive pleasure produced by those by those very prohibitions (Butler, 315.)” Both heterosexual and homosexual audiences have their gaze complicated and confused while watching Hedwig and the Angry Inch because the scopophilia of the movie is thrown into disarray from Hedwig’s outspoken botched sex change. Even in the movie her former lover Tommy Gnosis is torn between loving her and the revulsion of her body, limiting his love for “the back of” her. With the exception of those that find transsexuals sexually appealing (a small percent of both homosexual and heterosexuals), heterosexual and homosexual audiences lose their ability to objectify Hedwig in black and white terms. He’s biologically a man… but he wears women’s clothes and make up? Judith Butler’s point that drag potentially angers heterosexuals because of the blatant performance of gender. This carries over to desire as well; as one cannot truly work out the feelings they have for a woman that is really a man, so they react to it in a negative manor despite whatever fantasies they have deep inside of them. Because homosexuality is essentially imitating heterosexuality in it’s own gender roles, it complicates a homosexual male’s view as well, and places the drag performer somewhere in between desire and repulsion. Gay men are significantly less likely to respond to drag in a negative way, but their gaze is complicated just like straight men. When Hedwig grabs her crotch in the song Angry Inch it alludes to the penis but we also know from the story line and the song’s context that the penis has been castrated; a fear that Mulvey points out to be the cause of the objectification of women. But both audiences cannot objectify Hedwig because of the realization she is a man, so the audience is caught in another grey area that forces the viewer to either reject Hedwig or accept her as a genderless counterpart. The fear of castration causes the violent reaction towards Hedwig that causes a mental disturbance in heterosexual men. It is less so in homosexual men as the LGBT community accepts transsexuals, but very loosely and in a nonsexual way. The only way one can accept them is through a nonsexual, mentally castrated way, which Hedwig pushes by dry humping her husband (also a transsexual but more convincing), grabbing her crotch, or kissing Tommy. By doing this Hedwig becomes a “gender fuck” to the audience. That is to say, here is a transsexual, which our desire is already complicated and torn between, who is parading around their own sexuality.
Hedwig does something that other movies involving drag queen or transsexuals do not do to the audience- they show the character out of drag. This cinematic choice causes the homosexual desire to lean slightly more towards the edge of objectification, while still retaining its complications, as Hedwig still does not have the biological parts to be constituted as a man. When Hedwig has a breakdown during the song Exquisite Corpse she throws off her wig, dress, and (comically because of reference made earlier in the film) her tomatoes that she was using as breasts and storms off the stage to another one where Tommy sings to Hedwig/Hansel; a mirror image of androgynous male bodies. The gaze is complicated. On the one hand, two men stand nearly naked face to face eliciting desire, but in the context of the movie, we still can’t objectify either of them because of the message of finding love and forgiveness which Tommy sings to Hedwig/Hansel. The director, John Cameron Mitchell, can only get away with this at the end of the film when the characters are fully developed and we have been with Hedwig through her journey and troubles. One could argue that Tommy can fall prey to scopophilic gaze, but I would argue that this can’t happen because he is a mirror image of Hedwig; having only a pair of pants on and having the same haircut/make up. Because he is so strongly reflective of Hedwig, he cannot be objectified, and thus the song is the only thing important in the scene.
Conclusion
Using Mulvey and Butler’s two theories can we see how the homosexual gaze is both similar and different in heterosexual, homosexual, and transsexual films. Through a different emotional capacity, the homosexual gaze is not transformed into either a heterosexual male gaze that objectifies women or a heterosexual woman gaze that becomes overpowered by the heterosexual male gaze, but something entirely new with different desires and complications that emerges from reliability or pure desire an combines them into a new gaze entirely. While true there is a similarity between certain points of the heterosexual and homosexual gaze, it becomes imperative to see how the heterosexual male gaze overlaps with the homosexual gaze when viewing homosexual target audience films. Do they hold to Mulvey and Butler’s theory that they are repulsed because of clear gender deviancy from heteronormative practices? Or does the fact that neither person is castrated negate the necessary need to objectify a woman? Does the liberal heterosexual gaze match up with the more conservative? What complications arise in the lesbian or bisexual gaze? I can only theorize and cannot truly say, but it does open up another goal to see how all of the gazes interact, overlap, and deviate from each other in our viewing of cinematic narrative.
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