Page 168 - Decoding Culture

G E N D E RED SUBJE C TS, WOM E N ' S TEXTS 161

debate. As we have seen, the terms in which this topic came to the
fore derived from Mulvey's work, whether staying broadly within
its framework or reacting against it. The idea that texts, cultural
forms, and even whole discourses might construct their users as
gendered subjects proved helpfully provocative, immediately rais­
ing two kinds of general questions about spectatorship. What
features of cultural artefacts allow them to produce certain kinds of
gendered response? What is it about gendered individuals that
leads them to respond in distinctive ways? In approaching the first
question, researchers drew upon the established traditions of post­
structuralist textual analysis to elucidate the part played by gender
and patriarchy in forming processes of signification. At its simplest
this led to analyses of the 'images of women' type, uncovering the
(stereotypical) ways in which women were represented in culture.
But such work was rapidly overtaken by a more far-reaching exam­
ination of the terms of signification itself, a form of theorizing
typified by Mulvey's account of the patriarchal character of classi­
cal Hollywood discourse. At the same time, this analysis of textual
systems required some way of conceptualizing the gendered char­
acter of individual responses, not simply to deal with the problem
posed for a female audience faced with Mulvey's 'male' subject
position, but also to reconcile the social and historical subject with
that constructed textually.
As it did more generally in 1980s cultural studies, this tension
between 'real' and 'textual' subjects fed into most other significant
developments. So in the second of my areas of feminist influence,
the issues were the familiar ones of the relations between ideology,
the process of 'reading', and the potential for political and cultural
resistance, but given a distinctive feminist twist. If the texts of pop­
ular culture were imbued with patriarchal ideology, both in their
form and their content, was there any possibility of resisting the
force of this ideology by, among other methods, reading against

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