Page 148 - Decoding Culture

G E N D ERED SUBJECTS, WOMEN'S TEXTS 141
argued essay which can give warrant to a range of readings. Where
one interpreter might mainly pick up on its concern to influence
feminist political-cultural practice, another might equally focus on
its examination of gendered activity/passivity and the representa­
tion of women as spectacle, while yet another could attend to its
characterization of the 'masculine' subject positioning intrinsic to
classic narrative cinema. Over the years all these and numerous
other positions have been attributed to Mulvey, most finding at
least some justification in the original text.
Because of this marked variation, and before seeking to recon­
struct her argument for my own ends, I shall first offer a summary
account of Mulvey's position which sticks as closely as possible to
the broad contours of the original essay. She begins by proclaiming
her intention to use psychoanalytic theory as a political weapon,
arguing that particular 'patterns of fascination' are to be found
within individual subjects and the social formations which mould
them, and that these serve to 'reinforce' the distinctive fascination
of cinema. These subjects are constituted as male - she is careful
to use the male third person singular - since 'the unconscious of
patriarchal society has structured film form' (Mulvey, 1975: 6). At
the heart of this process is phallocentrism which, borrowing from
Freud and Lacan, she sees in terms of the central image of the cas­
trated woman. In the space of one dense paragraph (ibid: 6-7) she
offers a whole account of the paradoxical dependence of law, lan­
guage, and the Symbolic on woman as castration threat. For
feminists, she says (ibid: 7), this analysis 'gets us nearer to the
roots of our oppression'.
How, then, does the unconscious structure forms of 'looking' in
the cinema and the pleasures that we take? And how can we under­
mine that pleasure in the cause of feminist politics? The visual
pleasures of the cinema are many, of course, but two of them in par­
ticular concern Mulvey. One she examines in terms of Freud's

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