From the start, the "male gaze" struck me as conceptually limited and wrongly skewed to gender. It seemed to spring /a priori/ from 1970s feminist ideology rather than /a posteriori/ from primary study of world art works, particularly the glorious nudes of Greek, Roman and Renaissance art.
As a pop Warholite and pornographic apostle of the 1960s sexual revolution, I found the "male gaze" to be a reactionary, puritanical idea, needlessly destructive of artistic connoisseurship. Its victim-oriented premise of woman's status as passive object did not conform to my appreciative understanding of Babylon-born erotic dancing -- where strippers rule from the stage -- or of gay male porn, with its roots in the homoerotic idealism of classical Athens.
I believe I finally turned the tide on this issue (and helped kill Lacanian feminism in the process) in my aggressive celebration of Sharon Stone's <http://www.salonmagazine.com/june97/entertainment/stone970620.html> performance in "Basic Instinct," which was being picketed as sexist and homophobic by feminist and gay activist protesters in 1992. When Stone's icy femme fatale flashes her pudendum at a ring of police interrogators and turns them to jelly, which sex has the real power in the universe?
Given this background, you can imagine my trepidation at being informed, on my trip to London in July for the British release of "The Birds," that Laura Mulvey and I would be going head to head about Hitchcock on a prominent BBC radio show. As I stood with a BFI official amid the streaming, early-morning crowd in the magnificent Art Deco foyer of Broadcasting House on Portland Place, I kept flinching as I imagined Mulvey bearing down on us -- one very tall battle ax with granny spectacles gave me particular pause as she grimly swept by.
So it is all the more striking that when Mulvey did appear, rushing through the great doors after being delayed in traffic, I liked her instantly! -- literally from the moment I saw her 20 feet away. She could not have been more generous and amiable, and our conversation on air was stimulating and substantive. Mulvey is a true intellectual, with whom I felt completely at home. Her in-person discourse is both lively and subtle. I kept thinking, "If only American professors were like this!"
Meeting Laura Mulvey (there were several other brief encounters at the Groucho Club reception for my book as well as at the BFI itself) was a remarkable experience. It dramatized yet again for me how terribly wrong American academe has gone in the past quarter century. Mulvey cannot be held responsible for the atrocious, doctrinaire use to which her ideas have been put by the philistines of the women's studies programs here. I cannot believe she would think it appropriate that freshmen and sophomores at Florida State University are being forced to parse her 1973 essay without the prior familiarity with Freud and Lacan that it demands.
When I sent your fascinating letter to my friend Robert Caserio (teaching this semester at the University of Utah), he tartly responded: "Laura Mulvey! She's nice, you say; but the numbers of bad essays written because of that misuse by her of Lacan's gaze! Gak! There ought to be a ten-year moratorium on reading that oppressive, totalitarian-minded essay. In Lacan 'the gaze' is not anywhere identified with any personal agency, nor is it identified with a human eye, male or female; instead, it's rather like a cosmic /mal occhio/ ["evil eye"], a derangement of the sense that one tries to make of things and of one's self. Mulvey's usage is more a vulgarization of Sartre than anything adequately derived from Lacan. I have my own intelligent grad students at Temple who are sick to death of it. The Mulvey thing hangs on because it's a catchall easy substitute for analysis."