Page 156 - Decoding Culture

G E N D ERED U B J E CTS, W O M E N ' S TEXTS 149
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First, there were those who sought to show that while
Hollywood film might indeed offer the pleasures that Mulvey iden­
tified, it also provided other pleasures which were at least as
significant and which, therefore, required incorporation into any
adequate theory. Furthermore, some argued, psychoanalytic con­
cepts - even if appropriate in the Mulvey argument - were
insufficient to the task of understanding the full range of such plea­
sures. Secondly, there were those who claimed that, whatever the
distinctive character of the film text, spectators themselves were
active agents who were capable of 'reading' their chosen cultural
forms much more freely than the Mulvey position supposed.
Women were not trapped in a male subject position; they were able
to construct their own distinctive and often fluid relationships to
texts produced within patriarchy. Again, in stronger versions of
the argument, there was a tendency to doubt the psychoanalytic
foundations upon which the original analysis rested which were
thought to limit its capacity to comprehend active spectatorship.
Thirdly, there were arguments already widely raised in relation to
Screen theory, to the effect that texts simply should not be thought
of as constituting monolithic subject positions; although they might
indeed interpellate subjects, that process was far more complex
than Mulvey's theory could countenance. And fourthly, some
observed (as Mulvey herself appeared to do retrospectively) that
spectators were not best viewed as gender-homogeneous; they
brought a range of possibilities, some gendered, some not, to the
reading situation.
What this critical discussion shared - and it was the great merit
of Mulvey's work to put this so firmly on the feminist and cultural
studies agendas - was a recognition that the nexus of relations
between cultural 'text' and social 'reader', and between patriarchal
culture and gendered agent, was not to be easily represented in a
deterministic model. The degree of 'fit' between what Kuhn (1984)

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