Page 157 - Decoding Culture

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

calls the 'social audience' and the 'spectator', the former under­
stood in social and economic terms, the latter as constructed
through signification, is a matter to be explored rather than pre­
sumed simply to flow from a text's constitution of subjectivity. This
is, as Kuhn suggests, part of the larger challenge of grappling with
text! context relations, a challenge that has continued to inform
subsequent theories of spectatorship. Mayne (1993: 42-43) sum­
marizes this history in terms of a series of alternative models
posed against 'institutional' or 'apparatus' theories of the kind rep­
resented by Mulvey. There are 'empirical models', of which she
identifies the cognitive and ethnographic variations, and which ask
how viewers actually respond to texts; 'historical models', which
seek to understand spectatorship as historically and culturally spe­
cific; and, of course, the various counter-views developed in the
course of the feminist debate precipitated by Mulvey'S paper. To
better grasp these developments requires us to examine the
second area in which feminism has had a significant impact on cul­
tural studies theory.

W o men's culture

Whereas most commentators would agree that the Mulvey essay
is a locus classicus for the impact of feminist thinking on the Screen
theory strand of cultural studies, it is not possible to find a single
text to exemplify the conjunction of feminism with the second of
my two cultural studies traditions. This is hardly surprising. So
influential was 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' that it
turned the then emergent subject-positioning theory irrevocably
toward feminist issues, much extended the diffusion of psycho­
analytic ideas throughout cultural studies, and placed gendered
spectatorship firmly at the centre of discussion. It is rare for one

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