Page 155 - Decoding Culture

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

only a 'slight revision' to the original argument, Mulvey still 'stands
by' the main features of her position. But, while recognizing that
the female spectator must perforce accept a male subject position
and that such 'trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily
becomes second Nature', she does go on to add the qualification
that 'this Nature does not sit easily and shifts restlessly in its bor­
rowed transvestite clothes' (Mulvey, 1990: 28). Some eight years
after the 'Afterthought', that restlessness has been generalized to
become, in retrospect, a constitutive part of the theory. 'I was using
the term "masculine" in Freud's sense,' she writes of the original
formulation, 'not referring to male in the sense of men in the audi­
ence, but to the active element in the ambivalent sexuality of any
individual' (Mulvey, 1989: 73, my emphasis). 'Active'; 'ambivalent';
'any individual'. Such terms signal a considerable change of empha­
sis, opening up the possibility of more complex negotiations
between individual spectators and textually established subject
positions: ' [ alnyone, male or female, gay or straight, negotiates
his or her own way into the pleasures of spectatorship, at face
value, against the grain, or not at all' (ibid).
Whether or not this flexibility really was a key feature in
Mulvey's original formulation remains a moot point; I am inclined
to think not. It certainly was not how the original analysis was
read, whether by those claiming to be in agreement with it or by
those wishing to dispute one or another of its features. But, what­
ever the actual historical sequence, the prospect of
spectator Itextual-subject negotiations (rather than the textual
determinism so prominent in the mainstream Screen theory tradi­
tion) did prove central to the whole debate. I shall not try to
summarize this vast literature here, and, in any case, Mayne (1993)
offers an excellent discussion. I shall only consider in the most
general terms the four broad families of arguments that Mulvey's
analysis provoked.

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