"Screening the Male" re-examines the problematic status of masculinity both in Hollywood cinema and feminist film theory. Classical Hollywood cinema has been theoretically established as a vast pleasure machine, manufacturing an idealized viewer through its phallocentric ideological apparatus. Feminist criticism has shown how difficult it is for the female viewer to resist becoming implicated in this representational system. But the theories have overlooked the significance of the problem itself - of the masculine motivation at the core of the system. Little attention has been paid to the problems arising from the easily recognized masculine "norm" equated with activity, voyeurism, sadism, fetishism and story, set alongside the female subject, associated with passivity, exhibitionism, masochism, narcissism and spectacle. In this scheme the power, stability and wholeness of masculine subjectivity seems unquestioned and universal, but the essays here explore those male characters, spectators, and performers who occupy positions conventionally encoded as "feminine" in Hollywood narrative and question just how secure that orthodox male position is.
- ISBN10 0415077583
- ISBN13 9780415077583
- Publish Date 18 February 1993
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 8 November 2009
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Imprint Routledge
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 224
- Language English