Reframing Gender and Visual Pleasure: New Signifying Practices in Contemporary Cinema

The term, “to-be-looked-at-ness” (116), coined by Laura Mulvey1 in her seminal article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, and assigned to women as sexual objects in Hollywood visual culture, has assumed a new egalitarianism in contemporary cinema. While the premise of Mulvey’s essay entailed an objectification of the female body by an assumed male spectator, film now diverges from these norms of female representation. In Mulvey’s model, the classic Hollywood film typically positioned its female as a passive object within the narrative, merely functioning in relation to an active male who prompted the story to unfold. Related studies of masculinity by film scholar Steve Neale2 claimed that the male in film could not be subject to an erotic look because of Hollywood’s underlying fear of homosexuality. However, recent filmmakers adopt increasingly diverse ways of representing and looking at both sexes. For example, Girlfight3 presents its female protagonist in a gender-neutral mode. The framing of Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) does not distinguish her from her male counter- parts, and lingering shots of her body focus solely on her strength and stamina. Likewise, the cinematography of Black Swan4 accentuates the female lead’s musculature and agility, while both women protagonists propel their respective narratives.