Labyrinth of Theory

Mar 31, 03:28 AM

Current Headlines: By Tay, Sharon Lin

LABYRINTH OF THEORY THE BODY AND THE SCREEN: THEORIES OF INTERNET SPECTATORSHIP BY MICHELE WHITE CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: MIT PRESS, 2006 280 PP./$35.00 (HB)

For film theorists with a keen sense of cinema's transition into the digital age, a book that professes a feminist approach to understanding theories of Internet spectatorship is a worthy enterprise. Given the research that established theories of cinematic spectatorship, the primacy of the male gaze, strategies to theorize female cinematic pleasure, and various subsequent discussions on sexual difference pivotal to such psychoanalytic speculations and dogmatism, a new book that considers this particular legacy of film theory in the digital age would be an interesting contribution to the subject. However, Michele White's The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship raises more issues about the psychoanalytic inflections of feminist film theory than about the Internet and its users. As a result, White seems to get lost down what Patricia Mellencamp referred to in 1995 as "the garden path of theory" in feminist film scholarship. Among her criticisms of the perceived state of film feminisms, Mellencamp chides feminist scholars who failed to critique the psychoanalytic tendency to think through the prism of castration anxieties and the Oedipal complex, thus seeing "a white man's face superimposed over theory," as well as anger-induced attempts to get back what has been lost, since the "problem with anger is that it tries to regain old grounds rather than staking out new territories and making new claims."' It is unfortunate that The Body and the Screen gets tangled up in these unresolved methodological issues that undermine what could have been a discursively productive project to stake feminist claims on digital culture.

Engaging in interdisciplinary work comes with the difficulty of striking a balance between seeking out points of connection between different fields and maintaining a level of discursive sophistication and coherence. While spectatorship is an established concept in film theory, explaining how the classic realist narrative positions a hypothetical viewer, it is unclear how Internet usage becomes a spectatorial activity when metaphors of engagement and interactivity would be more accurate. The metaphor of flow in studies of television consumption might be closer to how a viewer experiences the constant availability of the Internet than the idea of cinematic spectatorship that applies specifically to the linear and closed structure of a classical Hollywood film. In other words, the disjuncture between applying an influential theory of cinematic spectatorship to the Internet without some serious interrogation of the former's premises weakens the arguments that might have been advanced in The Body and the Screen. As a result, The Body and the Screen misses the opportunity to rethink cinema within the context of digital media and to map out the agenda and ethics of a feminist politics in the digital age.

The Body and the Screen replicates the feminist debates of the early 1990s, in which distinguishing between the hypothetically passive female spectator constructed by the film text and real-life women audiences who love Hollywood cinema became the strategic exit point from the oppressive psychoanalytic description of spectatorial pleasure, effectively shifting a theoretical conversation into the realm of cultural studies where apparatus theory becomes secondary to issues of gender, race, and class. In instances where theories of cinematic spectatorship are unable to explain "Internet spectatorship" as described in the book, White turns to the notion of cultural inscription to justify making sexual difference the book's pivotal argument. For example, the chapter on women Webcam operators who broadcast their personal lives on the Internet discusses the ways in which they thrive in the overt flaunting of their sexuality; with White contrasting this phenomenon with Carol J. Clover's argument (in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modem Horror film, 1993) that the Final Girl who survives in the slasher film is asexual. In the chapter on virtual places, White shows how the characteristics of avatars fall on either side of clearly demarcated gender lines, thus confirming the nexus of feminist film scholarship in the 1990s. Similarly, the chapter on the ontological changes that digitization visits upon photography ends with critiques of Keith Piper and Graham Harwood, British digital artists whose works investigate issues of race and class, as being at once political in their commentaries and complicit in that these artists also exhibit in museums and galleries that are allegedly hierarchical and unquestioning of "cultural norms and perceptions." The process by which the chapter reaches such conclusions is unclear; and the productivity of such criticism questionable. It is unfortunate that The Body and the Screen does not quite manage to reconfigure the discursive struggles of the past to politically participate in the continually transforming contemporary mediascape.

NOTE 1. Patricia Mellencamp, "Five Ages of Film Feminism," Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment, Loleen Jayamanne, ed. (Sydney: Power Publications, 995), 24, 29.

SHARON LIN TAY is a lecturer in film studies at Middlesex University in London, when she teaches film theory, world cinema, and digital culture. She completed her PhD in 2003, with a dissertation entitled "Beyond Sexual Difference: Sustaining Feminist Politics in film Theory" (Norwich, England: University of East Anglia, 2003).

Copyright Visual Studies Workshop, Inc. Mar/Apr 2007

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