Page 147 - Decoding Culture

140 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

providing two coherent points of departure for understanding the
entry of feminism into cultural studies. Inevitably, when feminism
began to have an impact it did so in relation to prevailing theoreti­
cal positions, and it is possible to trace the subsequent intellectual
history as a process of grappling with the consequences of attempt­
ing a specifically feminist reconstruction of these two cultural
studies traditions. Accordingly, the discussion that follows falls
into two sections. In the second I shall examine the kind of feminist
cultural studies that emerged from engagement with the charac­
teristic ideas represented in the work of the CCCS, as well as with
the changes in those positions which, as we saw in Chapter 5, were
already in process when feminism began to have its impact.
McRobbie's work will serve as a useful initial focus here. In the
first section, I shall examine the appropriation of subject-position­
ing theory for and by feminism as that was mediated through the
extraordinarily influential essay by Laura Mulvey on 'Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), as well as reflecting on
some of the consequences of that for later considerations of 'spec­
tatorship'. Inevitably, there is some convergence of interests
between the two lines of argument, and I shall try to make that
clearer toward the end of the chapter.

Subjects and spectators

It is some measure of the importance of Mulvey's argument that
the literature is replete with attempts to summarize it and to draw
out its implications. Interestingly, there is a good deal of variation
in such accounts, partly, of course, because others have different
theoretical axes to grind, but partly also because of difficulties with
the text itself. FQr all its manifest influence and multiple reprinting,
'Visual Pleasure an d Narrative Cinema' is a brief and densely

Copyrighted Material