Occupied Territories

Linda Williams demonstrates how, in Muybridge’s contributions to the prehistory of the cinema, the male figure seems more compatible with processes of narrativization than the female figure. While the man comfortably adopts “natural” poses of activity and agency, the “plotting” of the female body is more difficult. Williams outlines the lengths to which Muybridge goes in constructing narrative situations for the woman which are marked by their very lack of familiarity. With respect to narrativization of the woman, the apparatus strains; but the transformation of the woman into spectacle is easy. Through her forced affinity with the iconic, imagistic elements of cinema, the woman is constituted as a resistance or impedance to narrativization.

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Mary Anne Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s

I’ve been turning this passage over in my head for over a week now. It seems to contain a whole universe of other questions (and maybe even some answers, which in turn will probably lead to more questions), but I haven’t really wrapped my mind around it entirely yet.

Nonetheless, it feels so useful as a starting point for a lot of different work. Not only does it strongly relate to film, of course, but also to, say, pop music, particularly with regards to pop music videos. Some of my favorite K-pop videos, for instance, really are non-narrative, but the effect is less, for me, about turning women into objects to be gazed at and more about creating a space in which narrativization can be usefully suspended (because there would seem to be something distinctly tyrannical and oppressive (especially when it comes to gender) about the supremacy of the narrative over other forms). With narrative suspended, the space opened up is one distinctly oriented toward a kind of play. (Along these lines, Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, which I have just finished reading, is perhaps the alpha and omega when it comes to debunking the notion of the gaze and of looking in general as inherently and solely “sadistic.” Clover’s work, along with the work of Gaylyn Studlar, on cross-gender identification is among the most essential theoretical work I’ve come across.)

In that sense, I’m first interested in why gender and narrativization intersect in these ways (and to what extent, and in which ways, these are mere constructs), and second, I would like to think about ways that the cinema, television, music, and music videos might deviate from strict narrativization and explore other possibilities. Or conversely: what would it look like if women were narrativized in a different way, one less “straining” to the apparatus and more reflective of actual female subjectivity.