SUBVERSIVE PLEASURES: FEMALE VIEWERS AND FEMALE

FRIENDSHIP FILMS.

BY
MARIA-VASILIKI KARAGIANNI

A thesis submitted to
The University of Birmingham
For the degree of
Master in Philosophy
 Introduction.

This project focuses on three Hollywood films about female friendship and the

reception of these films by a small group of female viewers. As a consequence of that,

ideology and gender play a crucial role in this research. Since the 1970’s, visual

culture and discourse has been the subject of endless analyses and theories within the

field of film studies and feminism. The work from various theorists has placed the

question of ideology at the heart of both film narratives and their reception from the

audience. Detailed analysis of film techniques, genres, narratives and representations

exposed visual culture as one of the most important ideological apparatuses, which

through its primary characteristics and style, has the power to interpellate its viewers,

by presenting its commodities as objective evidences of the world, rather than as

subjectively authored interpretations of it1.

Hollywood’s ability to conceal opposition, present social institutions and social roles

as natural and normal, without lecturing, browbeating or even disciplining its viewers

is at the core of every analysis ever made about its products and the effect they have

on those who consume them. Although the notion of the essentially passive audience,

of an audience duped to respond en masse to the cynical machinations of the

dominant cinema has been largely abandoned from theorists, nevertheless, the

question of ideology and gender representations in cinema, and their effect on

audiences is still a pressing one, especially within the field of feminist film and

cultural studies.

Feminism has along and valuable history in uncovering and challenging the confines

of women’s social, political and economical roles. Throughout the years, feminist

1
Philip Green, Cracks In The Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood (University of Massachusetts
Press: Amherst, 1998), p. 17.
critics and theorists examined the roles and the representations of women in the

production, distribution, and consumption of cultural texts and they have both

questioned the process that constructs and reconstructs ‘woman’, as well as stressing

the effects such ‘constructions’ have on real women2. During the 1970’s and 1980’s

the need to unveil the patriarchal representations and ideology lurking in classical

Hollywood narratives and their effects on female spectators has produced a vast

number of feminist film analyses, that explained the workings of patriarchal ideology

within film and the subject positions available to the women in the theatre. By the

end of the 1980’s however, the relationship between the cinematic female spectator of

feminist theory and the female spectator in the theatre recurs as a constant pressure

within the writings of feminist film theorists, such as Charlotte Brunsdon and

Christine Gledhill3.

The need to theorize the relationship between the feminist, the textually inscribed

female spectator and the woman in the audience marks feminist engagement with the

perspectives about film texts and reception emerging within British Cultural Studies 4.

Judith Mayne notes that more and more film scholars have turned to ethnographic

studies as a way of restoring complexity and contradiction in flesh-and-blood people

in contrast to the abstract and often politically dismal pronouncements of apparatus

theory5. Feminists have a greater motivation than any other theorist to link the

theoretical with the practical. The ethnographic research done on actual historical

spectators within the field of cultural studies then opened up the way for a lot of

feminist film theorists to produce powerful textual analyses of contemporary films,

2
See Jackie Byars, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in 1950’s Melodrama, (London:
Routledge, 1991), p. 27.
3
See Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction To Feminist Film Theory (London:
Arnold, 1997), p. 67.
4
See Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 73.
5
Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 59.
that were simultaneously responsive to theories concerned with the discursive

construction of subjectivity and the research on actual historical readers and their

different responses to the struggle among the elements within a text.

Even though the current interest in cultural studies and ethnography challenged the

hegemony of the text and raised important questions about the degree of abstraction

present in theories of the subject in film studies, for many film theorists the

ethnographic approach to the audience of films has been more a horizon of research

than an actual practice6. Feminist film theorists, such as Jackie Stacey and Jacqueline

Bobo however, have attempted to introduce ethnographic research on audiences of

film. Their work, as well as the work of other feminist film theorists on contemporary

Hollywood film genres has produced valuable accounts about the context of reception

of film texts, the process of interpretation and the uses of film narrative and images in

women’s everyday lives. Jacqueline Bobo, investigating the public debates about The

Color Purple argues that the position of female viewers in relation to public dominant

discourses about film is a position of silence and absence 7. The task of the critic then,

according to Bobo is to give voice to those who are usually never considered in any

analysis of cultural works8. In the case of female viewers the need to ‘break the

silence’ is even more pressing. The exclusion or misrepresentation of women’s voices

and opinions in the public domain has a long history in western culture. So has the

ridicule and guilt many women have had to suffer for their pleasure in consuming

popular cultural products. This project is a direct result of my engagement with such

feminist preoccupations and my firm belief in the need for more ethnographic

research on female audiences of Hollywood films.

6
See Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, p. 59.
7
Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p.
52.
8
Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers, p. 51.
In this project the women who have been interviewed about their reaction to the three

female friendship films are not professional film critics, but are members of an

audience who have been brought together to talk about their relationship to the three

specific cultural texts. Their interpretations and their understanding of the actual act

of watching a film with a strong female cast, differs to that of a journalist or even a

feminist film critic. Radical feminist film critics, as it will be indicated through out,

have rejected some of the images and meanings present in the three films of this

project, because of their limitations and eventual recuperation of the sexual order at

their ending. To try and determine the ‘correct’ reading of these texts however is not

among the preoccupations of this project. What is more important in this study is the

investigation of how female viewers rethink and rework media materials as the basis

of their own social interactions and cultural exchange. How through their engagement

with the text they resist patriarchal representations and find ways to empower

themselves through their negotiated reception.

In doing that, I do not aim to replace textual analysis with the interpretations of the

viewers. Such a practice will only replace the monolithic assumptions about film

‘subjects’, with one equally as monolithic. The women interviewed in this project are

not meant to be stand-ins for every female viewer that has watched and enjoyed these

films.

As a result, the responses of this group of female viewers are not treated as self-

evident truths about media messages that speak for the majority of female viewers, or

attempt to explore every aspect of their spectatorial pleasures and interpretations.

How readers understand the meaning of media messages depends on their position

within the given culture, their previous encounters with other texts, and their
subjectivities and assumptions about human nature and sexuality. How researchers

treat their responses depends also on the theoretical concerns of their projects.

My aim in this project is to use feminist film criticism of these films, as well as the

public debates surrounding their releases in two ways. First, as valuable critiques that

stress the textual limitations of dominant visual products, but at the same time, they

uncover the gaps and excesses usually present in dominant texts. I have used these

critiques as a map that determines the points where readers must go beyond the

information provided by the text and forge their own interpretations. The interviews

with the specific group of women focuses on those points within the three films and

aims to show the process this particular social group undergoes in its negotiation of

the issues in the films and the relationships between the heroines. The focus is on both

the similarity and the diversity of their responses and appropriations of the text. Their

understanding and use, but also resistance against dominant definitions and

representations of femininity and at the same time their ability to use some of the

images in order to empower themselves presents film viewing as a complex and often

contradictory activity that operates within the confines of dominant ideology, but

often transcends it. The investigation of real audiences then, opens up avenues for

feminism to explore spectatorship of popular women’s films as a process that

compromises both patriarchal ideology and the possibility of resistance and excess,

and has the potential not only to revise film criticism, but also to put pressure on

cultural production.

In the first chapter of this project then I set out to contextualise the methodology of

this project within current research in the area and explain my choice of qualitative

methods rather than textual analysis for the investigation of film reception.
In the second chapter of this project I move on to describe the process of selection and

interviewing of the women in the group. This way, I intend to explain how these

women’s different age and background, their viewing patterns, their attitudes towards

Hollywood genres and products, as well as my personal views and the scope of this

study has shaped their reactions to the films and my presentation of their

interpretations.

In the last two chapters that follow I concentrate on the public critique of the female

issues and friendships between women present in the three female friendship film

narratives and the interviews with the two groups of women about their reception of

these issues. Using the public and feminist debates surrounding the images and

representations in these films as a starting point, in order to determine the various

points in them that caused controversy, I then turn to the women to examine their

interpretive struggle with the ideology and female representations of these three films.

What I am hoping to have established by the end of this study is the ongoing

participation and complicity of women in meaning making processes. We are never

outside ideology or able to "step outside" patriarchal discourse. However, patriarchy

is not monolithic, because ideological struggle is evident everywhere and patriarchy

only constructs its opposition. Texts are powerful delimiters of meaning, but they do

not fully control their readings and even their cinematic language is not immune to

feminine influences. The closer investigation of the conscious meaning making and

pleasures of audiences then could contribute to the removal of the prohibition against

simultaneously thinking the "social" and the "discursive" subject, so that we can more

fully recognize ourselves as both discursive and social-historical subjects; as products

of both discursive and extra-discursive phenomena. Moreover, by taking seriously the

narratives of social audiences' experiences of the viewing process of women's films

we can start to understand how popular films provide material for the production of

diverse meanings and how the women in the audience use this material for their

pleasure and potentially the reinvention of their identities.