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On a Violence Unseen: The Womanly Object and Sacrificed Man

2013; Routledge; Volume: 99; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00335630.2013.777770

1479-5779

Claire Sisco King, Joshua Gunn,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: The GazeMisogynyMulveyLacanViolence Notes 1. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 73. 2. We are thinking of the discussion initiated by Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Rutledge, 1993). 3. Howard Breuer, “‘I Was Scared for my Life’: Oksana Grigorieva, Detailing Her Volatile Romance with Mel Gibson, His Ex Says She Endured Jealous Rages, Threats and Violence: ‘He Needs Help,’” People 74 (October 18, 2010): 76–80. 4. “World Exclusive: Mel Gibson's Explosive Racist Rant,” RadarOnline.com, July 12, 2010, http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2010/07/world-exclusive-audio-mel-gibsons-explosive-racist-rant-listen-it-here. Four more phone calls were released on subsequent days throughout the month by Radar Online. 5. Allison Adato, Ron Arias, Johnny Dodd, Michael Fleeman, Maureen Harrington, Ken Lee, K. C. Baker, Mary Green, Michelle Tan, and Theresa Braine, “After a Drunk Driving Arrest and an Anti-Jewish Tirade, Mel Gibson Checks into Rehab, Saying ‘I Am Deeply Ashamed,’” People 66 (August 14, 2006): 56–61; and Katha Politt, “The Protocols of Mel Gibson,” Nation (March 29, 2004): 9. 6. Joshua Gunn, “MARANATHA,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98 (2012): 359–85. 7. Clifford T. Manlove, “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey,” Cinema Journal 46 (2007): 84. 8. Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” Screen 16, no. 2 (1975): 14–76. For an excellent overview, see Susan Hayward, “The Gaze/Look,” in Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 156–59. 9. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, ed. Mandy Merck (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22–34. The essay was originally published in Screen 16 (1975): 6–18. 10. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 25. 11. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 33. 12. Manlove, “Visual ‘Drive,’” 83–90. For example, arguing that the focus on heterosexual asymmetry in the cinema is too limiting, Jane Gaines argues that Mulvey's conception overlooks gazes orbiting race and class. Manlove observes that the gaze has proliferated into “‘white’ and ‘black’ gazes, the ‘tourist’ gaze, heterosexual and homosexual gaze, the ‘imperial’ gaze, the ‘transatlantic gaze,’ the ‘animal gaze,’ and the ‘meta-fictional’ gaze, to name but a few.” See Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory,” Cultural Critique 4 (1986): 59–79; Manlove, “‘Visual ‘Drive,’” 84. 13. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), xiii. 14. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 19. Also see Jennifer Friedlander, “‘How Should a Woman Look?’: Scopic Strategies for Sexuated Subjects,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society 8 (2003): 99–108. 15. Todd McGowan, “Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and Its Vicissitudes,” Cinema Journal 42 (2003): 27–28. 16. McGowan, “Looking,” 44. 17. Copjec, Read My Desire, 21. 18. McGowan, “Looking,” 28–29. 19. Lacan, Seminar XI, 84. 20. Lacan, Seminar XI, 85–89. 21. McGowan, “Looking,” 29. Such views echo those of Shaviro and others who argue cinematic pleasure derives not from self-validation but self-annihilation, a la Bataille. See Steven Shaviro, Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 22. Manlove, “Visual ‘Drive,’” 84. 23. Roberta Sassatelli, “Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 28 (2011): 126. 24. McGowan, “Looking,” 36. 25. Christian Lundberg, “Enjoying God's Death: The Passion of the Christ and the Practices of an Evangelical Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 406. 26. Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), 85–88; Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993). 27. We should mention the feminization of Jesus in Western art has been widely discussed; for example, “images of Christ's wound … [were venerated] in a vertical position so that the wound and its streaming blood could be easily read as vaginal lips and pubic hair.” Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 70. 28. McGowan, “Looking,” 43. 29. Larry Kramer, “Newsreel,” Film Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1968/1969): 46. 30. James Roy MacBean, “The ‘Ice’-Man Cometh No More (He Gave his Balls to the Revolution),” Film Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Summer 1971): 30. 31. For a detailed analysis of male self-sacrifice in the cinema, see Claire Sisco King, Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). Additional informationNotes on contributorsClaire Sisco KingClair Sisco King is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt UniversityJoshua GunnJoshua Gunn is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin