CAMERA OBSCURA 20-21 (1989), special issue

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on The Female Spectator, ed. Bergstrom & Doane

The Female Spectator: Contexts and Directions

Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane

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“She’s a slippery character, of this we’re all
agreed, shadowy to the point of abstraction.”

I
Lesley Stern

The concern with spectatorship in the study of film emerged from a

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theoretical matrix which focussed, at least initially, on the question of
the extent to which the methods and goals of structural linguistics
were appropriate for the cinema and on the concept of cinematic
specificity.’ These issues were articulated most systematically and per-
suasively in the early work of Christian Metz, in particular, the rigorous
and intricate Langage et cinbma (1971),2 which mapped the field of
cinema semiotics into the study of codes and the study of textual
systems. Metz’s early work was disseminated in English primarily by
the British journal S c ~ e e n which
,~ in 1971 experienced an editorial
rupture resulting in a sustained engagement with new Continental
theories of ideology and subjectivity (specifically,through the writings
of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan). Metz himself began to rethink
the limits of a purely formal semiotics of cinema as it had been derived
from structural linguistics and became fascinated with the question,
“What contribution can Freudian psychoanalysis make to the knowl-
edge of the cinematic ~ignifier?”~ In the same way in which kmile
Benveniste’s introduction of subjectivity as a crucial component of
linguistic exchange substantially reoriented structural ling~istics,~
Metz’s turn to spectatorship in his essays, “The Imaginary Signifier”
and “The Fiction Film and its Spectator,” in the landmark “Psycho-
analysis and Cinema” issue of Communications (Paris 1975), opened
up an entirely new terrain in the study of the cinema.6 The subject
was now an indispensable category in the theorization of signifying
practices.
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Much of the excitement generated by the early linguistidsemiotic
work was connected to the search for that which was “cinematically
specific”-in other words, a way of distinguishing film from other
signifying practices such as literature. This new work directed attention
to the specific ways in which meaning was produced in the cinema,
thus moving away from flat thematic analyses and the establishment
of aesthetic hierarchies. Consequently, subjectivity was theorized as a
textual effect fully bound up with processes of looking and hearing

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which were peculiar to film as a medium. Such an emphasis upon
subjectivity and processes of looking and image formation would in-
evitably seem to raise questions of sexual difference. Nevertheless,
these issues were markedly absent from the work of Metz and semiotic
theoreticians publishing in Screen (Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath,
Ben Brewster), at least until 1975 when Stephen Heath’s work opened
out in this direction.’ In hindsight, it is somewhat ironic that it was
the introduction of psychoanalysis (itself a bone of contention among
feminists) which forced the issue and compellingly demonstrated in its
very language and formulations the necessity of an attention to the
inscription of sexual difference. In Screen’s own special issue on “Psy-
choanalysis and Cinema’’ in 1975, published immediately after its
French predecessor, an article by Julia Lesage was reprinted from Jump
Cut--“The Human Subject: You, He, or Me? (Or, the Case of the
Missing Penis)” -in which Lesage criticizes Screen writers for Freudian
orthodoxy and a phallocentrism which ignored all questions of female
subjectivity. (This was the same issue of Screen in which Metz’s “The
Imaginary Signifier” was published.) In the following issue of Screen,
Laura Mulvey’s extremely influential essay, “Visual Pleasure and Nar-
rative Cinema,” appeared, dramatically changing the form of theo-

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retical inquiries made about the cinema.*

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It is important, however, to avoid an overly linear account of the
development of feminist interest in the female spectator. In the early
1970s various feminist filmmakers addressed their work (primarily in
the documentary mode) to a female audience (Janie’s Janie; Antonia,
Portrait of a Woman; Three Lives; The Woman’s Film). Marjorie
Rosen’s Popcorn Venus (1973) and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence
to Rape (1975) both confronted the problems associated with a female
audience and the specific characteristics of women’s genres. From 1972
to 1975, the journal Women and Film investigated cinematic images
of women, and from 1974 on,Jump Cut consistently dealt with feminist
issues. Camera Obscura was present in nascent form in 1974, in various
stages of discussion and production until the first issue appeared in
1976. In England, Claire Johnston and Pam Cook activated Conti-
nental theories of signification in their research on women and rep-
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resentation in such publications as Notes on Women’s Cinema (1973)
and The Work of Dorothy Arzner ( 1975).9Nevertheless, it was Laura
Mulvey’s 1975 essay which acted as a catalyst for considerations of
sexual difference and spectatorship per se. “Visual Pleasure” provided
a theoretical framework which feminist film critics henceforth felt
7

compelled to acknowledge -whether to extend and amplify her in-

sights or to criticize the psychoanalytic or anti-Hollywood assumptions
upon which they were based. It was as though her essay produced a
stunning recognition effect which thereafter determined the terms of
the discussion.
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” managed to articulate a
powerful, if controversial, theoretical matrix (informed by Freudian
and Lacanian psychoanalysis) and a strong feminist investment in
questions of representation. Just as crucial was its debt to the early
semioticians’ concern with cinematic specificity, hence its emphasis on
terms which would dominate feminist film criticism for years -the
“look” and the “gaze”: “It is the place of the look that defines cinema,
the possibility of varying it and exposing it. . . . Going far beyond
highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way

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she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself.”lo For a while it seemed
(and often still seems) that every feminist writing on film felt compelled
to situate herself in relation to Mulvey’s essay. The structure of psy-
choanalytic concepts -fetishism, voyeurism, castration -and their ar-
ticulation with the aesthetic categories of narrative and spectacle in
her essay generated a tremendous amount of rethinking and discourse.
As David Rodowick points out in this issue, “Foucault remarks that
certain authors are ‘transdiscursive’ in that they open problematics
and set theoretical agendas that inaugurate whole fields of investiga-
tion. In this respect, we all owe a great debt to the work of Laura
Mulvey.”
If we insist upon situating Mulvey’s essay as the inaugural moment-
the condition of possibility -of an extended theorization of the female
spectator, it must also be remembered that this “origin” is constituted
by an absence. In “Visual Pleasure,” there is no trace of the female
spectator. Indeed, spectatorship is incontrovertibly masculine, as evi-
denced by the frequently noted use of the pronoun “he” in the essay.
What was so overwhelmingly recognizable in “Visual Pleasure’’ was
our own absence. Thus, one of the questions raised about Mulvey’s
psychoanalytic framework was inevitably, “What about the female
spectator?” This question was addressed both within and outside of
a psychoanalytic problematic. Since the linguistidsemioticlpsychoana-
lytic paradigm encouraged a text based analysis, women’s genres such
as the woman’s film and soap opera were central to initiating the
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analysis of the female spectator (in the work of Doane, Kaplan, Mod-
leski, Waldman, Williams). Many of these debates circulated .around

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the positive and negative effects of one of the reigning oppositions of
1970s film theory- that between the classical Hollywood cinema and
the avant-garde.
At times the vulnerability of Mulvey’s analysis seemed to lie in its
very strength. Together with the AlthusseriadLacanian paradigm
adopted by Screen, Mulvey’s largely Freudian framework for the un-
derstanding of sexual difference was often perceived as totalizing,
oppressive, claustrophobic. Whereas Mulvey theorized pleasure as a
negative term, a mark of the subject’s complicity with an oppressive
sexual regime, for a host of others the term pleasure became a flag to
rally around, offering the promise of a visual empowerment of women.
In an attempt to construct a kind of pathology of contemporary film
theory, Lesley Stern distinguishes between paranoia (the obsession with
system and coherence) and its psychical opposite, hebephrenia (the
rejection of pattern and order): “If ’70s Screenese now seems almost
blatantly paranoid that obviousness is surely filtered, rendered visible,
‘written’ by the ‘post modern’ and ‘post feminist’ hebephrenic euphoria
that is now, in the late ’ ~ O Subiquitous.”12
, Nevertheless, Stern claims
that this hebephrenia is not only reactive but is evidence of a lack in
Screen’s discourse at its most scientistic moments- a lack of attention

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to precisely what one ought to expect from a psychoanalytically in-
flected theory: the impact of subjectivity, desire and fantasy upon
writing about the cinema.
Other criticisms of the semiotic/psychoanalytic problematic focussed
on its abstraction and over-generalization. Psychoanalysis seemed to
mandate and perpetuate 9 treatment of spectatorship that was ahis-
torical. The urge to move beyond generalities, or to test them against
particular instances, manifested itself both in a renewed search for
historical specificity in modes of spectatorship (in the work of critics
such as Haralovich, Spigel, Jacobs, Hansen, Petro) and in approaches
inspired by work in British cultural studies. Furthermore, in isolating
sexual difference as the most important factor in the intersection of
textual and psychical processes, psychoanalysis allowed critics to over-
look the pertinence of other types of difference. Laura Mulvey describes
this tendency in her overview essay on Britain in the context of the
appeal that the discovery of the classical Hollywood cinema held for
feminist critics:
Themes revolving around sexuality were central to Hollywood. This (un-
censored) cinema “spoke” sexual desire and, in an undercurrent running
beneath its normative surface, could acknowledge its difficulties and, some-
 times, its deviances. Other issues, such as class or race, tended to collapse 9
into narrative in which sexuality determined in the last instance.
Speaking from a later vantage point, Ellen Seiter voices the concern
of many when she claims, “Psychoanalytic theory has blinded feminist

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film studies to the significance of race and class difference.” Others
in this issue add to this differences of age, ethnicity and sexual prefer-
ence. This blindness, or single-mindedness,is perhaps symptomatic of
a more general problem in feminist theory. As Chris Straayer points
out, “Any group identity which is defined by its opposition to another
group tends to privilege internal similarities above internal differences.
. . .” Nevertheless, criticisms of the overly specific, or exclusive, ori-
entation of feminist psychoanalytic film theory and criticism have
underlined the extent to which this research has been a primarily white,
middle-class enterprise.13
A more positive expression of the need to broaden the scope of
inquiry is given by a number of writers in this issue who argue that
studies of the female spectator have opened the way to an analysis of

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other kinds of differences within audiences. According to Jacqueline
Bobo, who is one of the few so far to have undertaken a study of
Black spectatorship:
Unfortunately, when the female spectator is usually spoken of and spoken
for, the female in question is white and middle-class. As a Black woman
working within the discipline of cultural studies, my goal is to expand the
scholarship on the female spectator beyond this. . . . Much more work can
be done on people of color, women within a broad range of economic and
social strata and others commonly perceived to be on the margins. I think
a worthwhile first step began with the idea of a spectator different from
white males and now needs to be pushed beyond even this.
And Marsha Kinder adds:
I also think it’s essential to explore spectator positioning, not only in terms
of gender, but also in terms of racial, ethnic, generational and class dif-
ferences. Feminist theory has clearly done the ground-breaking work on
spectator positioning; the articulation of gender with these other issues can
only strengthen that project.
However, we need to be aware of the difficulty of this task. As can
be seen from the statements of a wide spectrum of writers in the
following pages, it is easier to point to the need to “take other dif-
ferences into account” than it is to arrive at satisfactory methods for
doing so, or even, more simply, to understand what it is that we want
to know, and why.
The semiotic paradigm which grounded early cine-feminism favored
10

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a text based analysis which was countered by a frequent appeal to the
notion of ccexperience,” whether theorized in some detail as in the
work of Teresa de Lauretis or invoked as a kind of automatic guarantee
in its own right (as if one had only to look to “experience”-one’s
own or that of others -for certitude about spectatorial processes). The
terms “experience” and “actual’’ or “real” spectators recur in a variety

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of forms in these pages. Gaylyn Studlar, for instance, claims that “If

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for no other reason than for its theoretically well-behaved nature, the
textually constructed spectator is methodologically attractive. Actual
spectators’ responses are much more unruly. . . .’’ Miriam Hansen, on
the other hand, attempts to dismantle the insistent binary opposition
between signification and experience by espousing “a concept of ex-
perience which is not just the opposite of socially constructed signs
and systems of representation but, rather, mediates between individual
perception and social determinations.” For Joan Copjec, the very con-
cept of experience has serious limitations: “. . . to say that we are
social subjects is to say that we are subject to certain relations that
we have never lived, never experienced. These relations not only delimit
our experiences, but also insure that we are not delimited by them.”
The desire to account for multiple differences (race, class, age) in
relation to spectatorship together with the felt necessity of incorpo-
rating some notion of experience within theory found support in an
intellectual tradition quite distinct from that offered by Screen. What
has come to be known in general in the 1980s as “cultural studies”
has been strongly influenced by the work of the University of Bir-
mingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under the direc-
tion of Stuart Hall.14 The Centre’s Marxism was aligned with the work
of Antonio Gramsci and, in particular, with Gramsci’s concept of
hegemony. This work distanced itself from what was perceived as an
overwhelmingly deterministic view of the relationship between texts
and audiences, authorizing instead research on ‘csubcultures” and the
notion of subcultural resistance. Power was not perceived as mono-
lithically imposed by a dominant class (or institutional framework)
upon a subordinate one but was conceptualized as a constant struggle,
a play of forces. In his extremely influential essay, “EncodinglDecod-
ing,” Stuart Hall proposed a distinction between three different types
of reading strategies: dominant, negotiated and 0ppositiona1.l~ (See
Jacqueline Bobo’s contribution here and Christine Gledhill’s “Plea-
surable Negotiations” for some feminist appropriations of these
terms.16) These reading strategies would be linked to one’s social and
cultural positioning so that the notion of determination remained in
play but a greater degree of flexibility was now possible. Above all,
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the analyst could attempt to avoid hisher constant and tautological 11
reinscription of hisher own privileged cultural position.
The problem, of course, was how to find out what these reading
strategies were and where the subcultural resistance was located. Be-
cause the analyst’s desire was somehow to construct a knowledge of
the “other” -or more precisely, the other’s knowledge -a resort to
anthropological or sociological methodologies seemed inevitable. This
approach, which has come to be termed “ethnographic,” makes use
of such techniques as participant observation and audience interviews.

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There is a sense in which the concepts of “text” and “reading” are
no longer applicable here. The media become, instead, a kind of sig-

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nifying environment or space, and individual media instances are
“used” by the subculture, not necessarily read.17 A well known and
frequently cited instance of the ethnographic approach is Charlotte
Brunsdon and David Morley ’s Everyday Television: ‘Nationwide’
( 1978).18In order to avoid the epistemological implications of “number
crunching” sociological methods, these writers conduct a type of “qual-
itative analysis” which consists of intensive interviews of subjects cat-
egorized in relation to such factors as class, gender, political affiliation,
ethnicity and age. Although a great deal of this ethnographic work
has been British, Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) has
had a major impact on the study of women’s genres in the United
States.l9
As politically laudable as this approach is in its attempt to delineate
subcultural reading strategies, the same problems of abstraction and
generalization which haunt theories of the spectator from a semiotic
point of view plague an ethnographic analysis as well. As Ellen Seiter,
who aligns herself with this methodology, points out in this issue,
“There is an overwhelming urge to reduce the ‘subjects’ to essentialist
categories of gender, class and race based on the briefest acquaintance
and questioning, to lapse into a ‘happy positivism.’ ” And unless it is,
in fact, completely positivist, such research does not escape problems
of interpretation. There is a danger of seeing ethnography as providing
an automatic epistemological guarantee, particularly when it is con-
trasted with textual analysis. In her contribution, Maureen Turim
contests such a view: “Sociology is for me already a theoretical en-
terprise; rather than providing a means of circumventing textual anal-
ysis, it multiplies the texts and therefore the philosophical questionings
that comprise textual analysis.”
As anthropologists have recognized for years, whenever one attempts
to account for the understanding of the other, questions of power and
authority and their relation to knowledge come into play. There is a
12
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classic anthropological catch-phrase used to designate the subjects of
one’s study -“my people” -which indicates the ever-present potential
for an imperialistic possessiveness in the ethnographic enterprise. But
as James Clifford, who traces the “formation and breakup of ethno-
graphic authority in twentieth century social anthropology,” claims,
the expression “my people” used in participant observation really
means “my experience.”2o He goes on to note that “Precisely because
it is hard to pin down, ‘experience’ has served as an effective guarantee
of ethnographic authority. . . . It is worth noting, however, that this
‘world’ [of the participant observer], when conceived as an experiential
creation, is subjective, not dialogical or intersubjective.”21 As in any
social science research, it is the ethnographer who constructs the terms
and the situation of the experiment.22
Whereas strong support for cultural studies and the ethnographic
approach is evidenced in the pages of this issue, there are also criticisms
of such a tendency. The difference between a semiotic/psychoanalytic
methodology and ethnography in media studies is not simply a dif-
ference between text based and audience based analysis, but a profound
divergence in epistemological premises and theories of subjectivity. For
the ethnographer, the unconscious is not a pertinent factor. What he/
she has access to are the conscious observations people make about
the media, observations which the ethnographer may not take at face
value but which are not subjected to a detailed scrutiny in view of the
psychical strategies of disavowal, denegation and repression. One con-
stantly has to keep in mind the question: at what level do the media
have their effects? Annette Kuhn argues that “In attempting to marry
female audiences with feminine spectatorial positions, we should cer-
tainly not be tempted to abandon the Unconscious.” And Patricia
Mellencamp, referring to a particular strain of cultural studies, asserts:
If so many “subversive” readings are available for everyone, with any text,
then feminist films and videos addressed to women, by women and about

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women are hardly necessary, clever readers that “the people” are. The
scholar’s analysis also becomes unnecessary. . . . If the female spectator is
a notion unmoored from representation, fiction and history, anything goes
and feminism will indeed be irrelevant.
Such contests over meaning, theory and the questions of reading and
reception indicate that today, in 1989, the female spectator has become
a fractured concept, activating a host of conflicting and incompatible
epistemological frameworks, circulating around what could even be
seen as entirely different objects of study (e.g., the “spectator” vs. the
“audience”). It should also be kept in mind that there are two different
media involved: ethnographic analyses tend to take television as their
object of study while accounts of “spectator positioning” primarily
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focus on film, where such studies originated. As Meaghan Morris points
out, “part of the problem with ‘the female spectator’ as rubric is
precisely its capacity to attract and reconcile otherwise incompatible
discourses (and political interests) in the unargued assertion of a com-
mon project.” We chose the unfamiliar and relatively unused term
13

“Spectatrix” as the title of this issue not to suggest sado-masochistic

tendencies in the concept (although those connotations may not be
entirely irrelevant), but instead to indicate the density and complexity
of the matrix (or matrices) from which these issues emerge. The term
“female spectator” is, perhaps, an overly familiar one, a convenience
which unwittingly and misleadingly implies that one has complete
control over the very questions which are posed about film and tele-
vision. There is no attempt, in this issue of Camera Obscura, to rec-
oncile the many divergent interests displayed here; rather, our aim is
to present some of the tensions, the intellectual alliances and the con-
flicts which characterize contemporary feminist film and television
theory insofar as it circulates around issues of reading, reception,
spectatorship.
The “history” which we have attempted to delineate here cannot
avoid a certain reductiveness. Like all intellectual histories, it is un-
doubtedly too neat, particularly in view of the diverse views expressed
here. Other strong lines of development appear. For example, the
Frankfurt School has been central to the work of theorists such as
Miriam Hansen, Gertrud Koch, Heide Schliipmann and Patrice Petro.
It is more difficult to pinpoint the movement from theory to histori-
ography evidenced by a growing number of film and television scholars
who borrow in different ways from tendencies already described as
well as others. The work of Lynn Spigel, Lea Jacobs, Giuliana Bruno
and Judith Mayne, among others, is testimony to this vital area of
intersecting methodologies and interests. Lea Jacobs draws attention
to the problem of evaluating “evidence” (what counts as evidence?)
in writing film history or film theory:
Clearly, materials such as advertisements, popular reviews and oral histories
play an important role in contextualizing readings. But an appeal to the
reception context does not solve the methodological problems of film anal-
ysis-problems of description and quotation, and of the selection of ex-
amples-nor the more general theoretical issues which arise from the at-
tempt to consider films in terms of their spectators. Thus, we still need to
find ways to account for the explanatory status of our construction of texts,
and to acknowledge the scope and historical limitations of our critical
procedures.
The issue of historical specificity and the contextualization of spectator-
ship is a crucial one and has the potential to demand a reinterrogation
14 of the very premises of much of the psychoanalytically based theori-
zation of the female spectator. Similarly, different geographical con-

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texts often illuminate the extent to which theory is inflected by national

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and cultural determinations. Giuliana Bruno gives expression to the
difficulties of translating theoretical questions from one cultural con-
text to another:
Writing feminist criticism on female spectatorship in Italy and in the USA
is not the same thing. . . . Questions such as female spectatorship arise,
are formed, developed and defined within a specific cultural framework,
at particular historical junctures. Although not nationally bound, the terms
of discourse are culturally defined and not easily transferable from one
culture to another. Issues are formulated differently, carry a different weight
of meaning, have different origins, modes of existence and circulation.
Writing in and in between two quite different cultural scenes, I grapple
constantly with the question of the placement of discourse and of subject
positioning.
It is perhaps television which poses the greatest challenge to theories
of spectatorship and indicates the very limits of the conceptualization
of viewing as “spectating.” The concept of the audience^' often seems
to carry a great deal more epistemological weight in the realm of
television than in that of film studies. As Charlotte Brunsdon points
out, “The academic history of research into the television audience
uses quite different paradigms from those of cinesemiotics . . .” She .
goes on to say, “and I have felt homeless in each set.” For Lynne
Joyrich, the medium of television-particularly insofar as it has been
linked to the notion of the postmodern-forces a reinterrogation of
the very theoretical framework within which we operate:
Within the fluctuating field of postmodern consumer culture, relations of
sexual difference continue to intersect with textual formations but they
may do so in ways which have not previously been theorized. Television,
the postmodern medium par excellence . . . calls attention to these changes,
requiring critics to reevaluate the terms of our theoretical engagement with
sexual and textual difference.
Annette Kuhn, specifying that there are “many different televisions”
also warns against importing “wholesale into studies of television
theories and methods developed in relation to the reception of films.”
Because the initial work on female spectatorship was largely produced
in relation to an analysis of the classical Hollywood text theorized as
closed and homogeneous and with respect to a binary opposition
between that text and a more or less open avant-garde, the fragmented
flow and intensive commodification associated with television pose
major difficulties for methodological borrowing. As mentioned earlier,
cultural studies and ethnographic approaches have to a large extent
focussed on television as their object of study. Television, conceptual- 15
ized as a piece of furniture within a domestic space, an event, a process,
an environment, a family pastime, a diversion-as well as a “text”-
promises to open up the inquiry to new considerations about culture
and its operations.

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Although the tendencies we have described are not all-inclusive, this
outline does give a sense of the kinds of battles that are taking place
around the concept of spectatorship and of the varied attempts to mark
out new terrain. Feminist media theory has not developed in a vacuum.
In a way, it is particularly tempting to write a history of feminist
theory -precisely because it is feminist -which stresses or even implies

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“progress.” Yet, it is important to acknowledge that, even and perhaps
especially within feminism, there is the ever present potential of re-
gression, uneven development, failure and disillusion, not to mention
misunderstanding. For some, what had once been enabling is now
perceived as a restrictive and tiresome paradigm, which generates anal-
ysis after analysis but little new insight. There is a kind of ennui which
haunts the project of feminist film criticism at the moment and which

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has become increasingly visible. Lesley Stern, for instance, maintains,
it’s not as though I’ve lost interest in this project [that of the female spec-
tator] but I have developed an abhorrence for the restrictive tropic repertoire
that frames the enquiry. . . . There’s a kind of generic predictability about
the enterprise that has to do with disciplinarity and academic accreditation.
As Stern’s quote perhaps implies, a sense of lost purpose can be
linked to the successful institutionalization of feminist film criticism.
It is crucial to stress, however, that this is only true in the United
States, where film studies has entered many universities, and, to a much
lesser extent, Australia and Canada. Moreover, the presence of feminist
film studies varies greatly from institution to institution. In the United
States, feminist film criticism has become a central, even mainstream,
aspect of film studies; it is a highly marketable commodity within the
arena of publishing and has generated rising careers and even an
academic star system of sorts. It is important for feminism to pause
and take stock of its own trajectory. How has feminist film criticism,
which was marginal and controversial at the outset, come to be seen
so quickly as an orthodoxy, a monolithic enterprise? To some extent,
this is undoubtedly linked to its alliance with psychoanalysis, which
has always been confronted by the spectre of orthodoxy. But it is also
a function of feminist film criticism’s academic entrenchment. Critical
and theoretical texts which conveyed a political and intellectual ur-
gency in the 1970s have become part of a canon which graduate
students must master for their oral exams or dissertation projects.
There are marked generational differences among those now working
16 zyxwvutsr
in feminist film criticism, as can be seen very clearly in the essays in
this issue. An older generation came of age at the same time as the
women’s movement and the beginning stages of feminist film theory,
largely outside the confines of the university, and helped to bring these
areas into an institutional context. A younger generation has already
written dissertations based on a large body of pre-existing literature
written by feminist film scholars. There is a feeling among many,
whether they were veterans of the sixties or not, that feminist film and
media theory has been cut off from its original sense of bold innovation
and political purpose. It is time to re-examine our priorities and to
remember a sense of shared goals in the light of our history over the
past fifteen years, in order to renew the sense of vitality that once kept
film studies from the self-perpetuating careerism that inevitably invades
any academic (publish-or-perish) discipline. Can feminist film and me-
dia theory escape the divisive Oedipal dilemmas which characterize a
patriarchal educational enterprise, one which can’t recognize itself in
its own history? Feminism in the academy has at times seemed to speak
from a position of uncontestable political authority which, as a matter
of course, generates resistance.
We must be careful, however, not to seem to participate in what is,
in effect, a generalized cultural backlash against feminism. We inhabit
a time in which social contradictions allow for an institutionalization
of feminism which is simultaneous with a continuing refusal to give
to women an adequate number of secure positions in teaching, writing,
filmmaking and, yes, even administration. Postmodernism and post-
feminism threaten to remove women’s concerns from the intellectual
arena altogether. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to presume that
the term “institutionalization” automatically implies that which is

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politically and ideologically reprehensible. We all inhabit institutions
of one sort or another (the family, the press, legal, educational, gov-
ernmental institutions) and persistently work within, on the border
and outside of these institutions. Relations among power, access to
discourse, institutionalization and resistance are complex and difficult
and require extended analysis -in particular, a feminist analysis. It
would be bitterly ironic if feminists were to succumb to a pop-psy-
chology concept of women’s “fear of success” just now, when one at
least glimpses the possibility of real change.

I1
“The Spectatrix” is a survey of research on and theories of the female
spectator in film and television studies. Because this has been an issue
of central importance to feminist film and media theory as well as to 17
the entire field of contemporary film and media theory, the survey is
broadly based and wide-ranging in order to address its subject in an
instructive and productive manner. “The Spectatrix” is intended to do
several things: (a) to provide a comprehensive statement about the
diverse positions held and research undertaken to date, and to project
avenues of future studies; (b) to provide a history as well as an intel-
lectual resource guide; (c) to show the international dimensions of
research on the female spectator. In order to do this, we have included
two types of contributions: individual responses to a “survey letter”
that was sent mainly, but not exclusively, to Americans; and overview
articles on research in Australia, Canada, England and Italy. A general
bibliography consisting of entries provided by contributors is located
zy
at the end of the issue; several of the international overview essays are
followed by their own bibliographies.
To initiate the project, we drew up several questions which we sent
to nearly 80 people who had written specifically about the female
spectator or who had written about feminist issues in film and/or
television which presupposed a notion of the female spectator. How
were contributors selected? We consulted publications in the field and

zyxw
lists of professional organizations and we made inquiries about recent
dissertations. We received about 60 responses, all of which are pub-
lished in this issue. Inevitably we missed people whose work is relevant;
we also regret the absence of essays from those who were invited to
contribute but were unable to do so. Perhaps some of these missing

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perspectives will be seen in a future issue of Camera Obscura in which
we hope to publish articles in response to ideas expressed in the fol-
lowing pages.
We asked contributors to respond to four broad questions. Some
did so in a single essay; others answered question by question, referring
to the following question numbers in their texts.
1. Please outline the history of your own critical engagement with
the issue of female spectatorship. How did you first become inter-
ested in “the female spectator” per se? How did you incorporate
this into your own work? Has it been a central issue in your work?
Why or why not? What was your view originally? Has your view
changed? If so, what is your view today, and why did your opinion
or approach change?
2. The very term “female spectator” has been subject to some
dispute insofar as it seems to suggest a monolithic position ascribed
to the woman. In your opinion, is the term most productive as a
reference to empirical spectators (individual women who enter the
18 zyxwvutsrq
movie theater), as the hypothetical point of address of the film as
a discourse or as a form of mediation between these two concepts?
Or as something else entirely?
3. Has the notion of the female spectator outlived its usefulness?
Is it important now to shift the terms of the problematic addressed
by feminist film/TV criticism? If so, in what direction?
4. An extremely important aspect of feminist film criticism has been
the notion of “reading against the grain.” Consistent with this ap-
proach is the idea of creating a reading space for women in which

zyxwvu
they can forge their own meanings. Are there limits to this form of
criticism? What kinds of meanings are produced through this pro-
cess and is there any way of choosing among them? How can
numerous “readings against the grain” be accounted for? Under
one or another name, “reading against the grain” has been central
to virtually all of contemporary film criticism, especially essays
aimed at demonstrating the complexity of film texts or contradic-
tions among discursive levels and their relationship to social and
cultural forces. Are there instances where specific alternative read-
ings are available to women that are not available to men?
Contributors were asked to limit their responses to seven pages.
This practical limitation, necessitated by the number of contributors,
required writers to crystallize their views, their history and their prob-
able direction in the future. Because of this brevity, contributions are
very readable, making it easier to understand each writer’s point of
departure, as well as to compare views. Writing styles and strategies
are quite different, and generally are more inviting than traditional
academic prose.
The questions were designed with a view toward gathering infor-
mation, but they also carried an implicit challenge. In what terms is
the vitality of a field of inquiry measured? If feminist analysis is still

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easily dismissed in some quarters, the following pages show that it is
at the cost of jettisoning far-reaching issues of quite different orders,
with ramifications that impact all facets of our multi-disciplinary field,
For us, as editors, the impetus to organize this collection was partly
strategic. We felt it was time for a non-reductive account of an issue-
“the female spectator” -that necessitated reflection on the develop-
ment and goals of feminist film and media theory in general. In reading
these accounts of histories and theories, one gains, in addition to the
subject at hand, a unique sense of the development of contemporary
film theory since the early 1970s, and TVIaudience studies since their
entry as a force within the field-so crucial have theories of sexual
difference and audience differentiation been. We felt that it was time 19
to assess a certain progress to date, to ask people to think about their
position in a shared field and to reflect on views which they might
have held for years unquestioningly. The survey questions were for-
mulated with a view toward bringing out underlying assumptions
about issues that had perhaps not been stated previously in the same
way, in immediate proximity, by their authors. The responses to the
survey letter are complex and rarely reducible to an easy count of
people on this or that side of an issue. In rendering “the female spec-
tator” less obvious a category or entity, a wide range of issues surfaces.
On the one hand, the ideas articulated in these pages reveal differences
of opinion and apparent internal contradictions that will take a long
time to sort out; on the other, they provide eloquent testimony to a
deep sense of vitality and a willingness to share and pursue ideas in
our field. The survey seems timely in another respect: there is a growing
awareness that feminist issues in contemporary film theory are begin-
ning to lead to new perspectives in scholarship in other fields, especially
art history and literature. We are also witnessing a renewed interest
on the part of artists and filmhideo makers. Now that the expression
“gaze theory” is gaining currency outside our field, it seems appropriate
to provide an index, from within, of the history that led to this insti-
tutionalization. This collection constitutes a refusal to allow a sense
of stasis to sink in; it provides a vivid display of the diversity of positions
held and an indication that, as many of our contributors state, these
issues are only beginning to be explored.
It is probably the desire to negotiate a relationship between theory
and personal experience, or the experience of others, that makes the
responses most difficult to analyze: they may be compatible in some
ways and incompatible in others. Many use their personal experiences
as a bridge to discussing the history of their theoretical positions. But
it is here that an unarticulated slide between spectators as theoretical
entities and audiences as empirical entities occurs most frequently. The
overwhelming majority of respondents express the desire to unite these
spheres of inquiry, although they state this in very different ways.
One of the best examples of the difficulty of negotiating between
theory and experience emerged in response to the question about

zy
“reading against the grain.” This strategy was generally presented in
terms of the political engagement of the writer’s personal history, in
which “reading against the grain” was seen explicitly as a political
tool in the analysis of films, particularly the classical Hollywood cin-
ema. It was also undoubtedly symptomatic of the claustrophobia oc-
casioned by a frequently totalizing theory of the sheer extent and
20 zyxwvutsrq
deceptiveness of an ideology (a dominant one, of course) disguising
itself as “nature.” Reading against the grain as a feminist, one could

z
zy
salvage texts previously thought to be entirely complicit. Many fem-
inists saw it, and continue to see it, as a strategy that attributes political
activity and agency to a feminist critical endeavor, as that which gives
their work a sense of purpose and, in some cases, a sense of political
correctness. What these critics looked for, against the grain, was some-
thing different from the readings of texts by the editors of the Cahiers
du Cinbma or Screen, which were geared toward exposing more general
ideological contradictions within films. The question which arises from
all of this is: what is the status of this kind of feminist interpretation-
to whom does it belong? To what extent can one generalize from a
given reading? To what extent is this a solipsistic, isolated endeavor
of the feminist academic who has access to highly sophisticated tools
of interpretation- and for whom is she speaking? There is a great
deal of support for the process of reading against the grain in this
issue. It is perceived by many as a way to reappropriate texts and
pleasures renounced by a more pessimistic analysis of patriarchy’s
success. Reading against the grain is seen as profoundly enabling. Gina
Marchetti argues that the concept forges a link between feminist aca-

zyxwvu
demics and other female spectators:
The idea of “reading against the grain” helps to remind us that we female
academics are also members of audiences. If we can find alternative readings
and marginalized pleasures within dominant media texts, similar meanings
and pleasures most likely are available to other women. It is a concept that
keeps us honest. . . .

zyxw
Diane Waldman, on the other hand, contests such a position when
she claims that although
“reading against the grain” has been extremely productive for feminist film
criticism . . . I think we are on shakier ground theoretically when we start
extending these oppositional readings to all women, as I believe that it is
not just the experience of being female in a patriarchal society which
produces critical or oppositional reading, but the availability of and our
interpellation by discourses which interpret that experience in a critical

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fashion.
The historical context which engendered the concept of reading
against the grain was profoundly shaped by the de-emphasis in semiotic
analysis on what a text means in order to understand bow it means.
This theoretical reorientation helped prop up a common and generally
unstated belief that, when it comes to mainstream media, the “dom-
inant reading” of a text is obvious. Meaghan Morris maintains,
 zyxwvutsrq
zyxwvut
I am more interested in producing feminist meanings by reading “the grain’’
than I am in reading ‘against’ it. I think that if the notion of reading against
the grain now seems tired, and indeed has come to represent some of the
most vapid tendencies in criticism, it is because it can authorize a complacent
sense that we know what the doxa investing a text is like, and it hasn’t
21

changed in twenty years.

For Margaret Morse, this difficulty in the concept is exacerbated by
the confrontation with television:
“Reading against the grain” presumes an already established discourse with
a determined direction and a reliable paradigm for method. While this is
true of film studies, it is hardly true of other areas of cultural studies in
media such as television, video and computers. Thus, I and anyone else
undertaking writing on such subjects are in the happy and unhappy position
of writing on our own without much against which to read.
A similar concern with the types of texts which are read is present in
Charlotte Brunsdon’s interesting analysis of the concept. She defines
“reading against the grain” as the “re-making of classical popular
cultural texts through modernist criteria, so that what had seemed
organic, coherent, discursively hierarchical and ‘realist,’ was instead
revealed as incoherent, fractured, plurivocal.” Such an approach, she
claims, ironically maintains the aesthetic hierarchy which privileges
modernism over popular culture, while a more profitable strategy
would entail work on women’s genres (romance fiction, women’s mag-
azines, soap opera) which are “not amenable to this modernist re-
vamping.”
The second aspect of the project opens onto its international di-
mension. In part, our motivation comes from the same sense of the
current need to understand the history of contemporary film and media
theory which prompted the survey of individuals. Additionally, we
think it is essential to see our work in the United States in terms of a
shared international project, that which had been the wellspring of a
great part of the energy of film theory in the 1970s. We asked several
people to write overview articles on the relative importance of questions
about the “female spectator” in the film and media criticism of their
countries. Writers were asked to address the following questions:
How has the question of the female spectator been formulated? From what
kinds of theoretical or practical frames of reference? Has there been a sense
of an evolving exchange of opinions? Where would such issues be made
public? To what extent is this question linked to the university setting? To
contemporary efforts of feminist filmmakers? To what extent is “the female
spectator” seen as an international question? Are there regional differences
that are especially important?
22 zyxwvuts
We are publishing articles on Australia, Canada, England and Italy.
In each of these countries, a significant body of work exists and has
evolved a history of its own that is crucial to understand, especially
since the national contexts are so different in terms of the opportunities

zyxw
zyxwvu
for publication, public forums for discussion, the relationship to par-
ticular traditions of critical and historical writing, and to feminist
filmmaking. We had hoped to include an article on Germany, but our
German correspondents felt that the sphere for debate was almost non-
existent in Germany, and that the site of public exchange has been
primarily the journal Frauen und Film. Gertrud Koch and Heide
Schliipmann, two of the editors of Frauen und Film, contributed in-
dividual responses which recount some of this history. The most sur-
prising omission is undoubtedly France, considering the immeasurable
impact of French film theory internationally. However, there is a dis-
tinct absence of film theory written in France that is concerned with
feminist issues, nor has there been any effort to publish translations
of influential work from the anglophone or German-speaking world.
Because the United States is already so heavily represented both in the
very form of the questions and the number of responses, we did not
feel it was necessary or desirable to include an overview on the U.S.
We are unaware of a substantial body of work in other countries that
has been published, or that has been made public through festivals,
conferences or in some other way. In fact, each of the international
essays, in its own way, emphasizes the difficulty of reaching a public
or defining a public space for the discussion of feminist issues in film/
television theory and production. Individual essays by Barbara Creed,
Meaghan Morris, Lesley Stern (Australia), Claudia Preschl (Austria),
Lucilla Albano, Giuliana Muscio (Italy), Annette Forster (The Neth-
erlands), Gertrud Koch and Heide Schliipmann (West Germany) also
tend to make this point. The situation in England is somewhat different,

zyxw
as can be seen from a number of individual responses by writers who
are familiar within the American context as well as Laura Mulvey’s
overview essay. We would be pleased if “The Spectatrix” served as a
catalyst to bring to our attention activity in other areas of the world
which could be published in Camera Obscura.
The intellectual frameworks of the question of the female spectator
are most similar in the English-speaking countries, but each country
clearly has a different inflection of the question (if the question could
even be said to be posed in the same way). As Giuliana Bruno points
out in her survey, Italian feminism has not found the same foothold
in academia as it has in the U.S. and consequently experiences a stronger
relationship among theory, politics and social praxis which is inex-
tricably rooted in social history. Such differences are even a function 23
of architecture and spatial organization: “The ‘campus’ as it literalizes
architecturally a separation of academia (insofar as it is an arbitrarily
placed, isolated and self-sufficient site) is not a traditional topos of
Italian culture.” Rhona Berenstein’s essay makes it clear that for Ca-
nadian feminism, American cultural imperialism-particularly in the
realm of film and by extension in film theory-is a crucial issue. She
explores the complex relations between national identity and feminism
and the strong desire on the part of feminists to promote Canadian
women’s filmmaking. Laura Mulvey traces an intricate history of
changes in broad cultural traditions in Britain, consolidated by the
New Left, in order to provide a context for understanding the im-
portance of feminist discussion groups and special events organized
around feminist film theory and filmmaking. These provided the im-
mediate environment within which the highly influential British version
of psychoanalytic feminist film theory emerged with an international
impact. The development of feminist film theory in Australia, as Bar-
bara Creed points out, can only be understood with reference to the
factors of geographical isolation and extension. She also indicates the
significance of filmmaking and of film festivals in the formation of the

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feminist enterprise. In a sense, these surveys constitute only a gesture
in the direction of an “international survey,” but at least they indicate
that differences of another order come into play in the evolution of
feminist theory.
No introduction can give an adequate sense of the diversity, richness
and density of the responses collected here. As Marcia Butzel points
out, feminist theory is a “heterogeneous political activity and not a
discrete methodological position.” Not only are a variety of “posi-
tions” represented but often they seem to inhabit entirely different
(and incompatible) epistemological realms. The idea is not to force
them into a compulsory compatibility but to collect them together in
what is, at the very least, something of a shared political project. And,
as Joan Copjec maintains, “NO political truth can ever be reached
alone. This is a matter of definition. The resistance and doubt of others
does not interfere with the logical process of solution, it exfoliates it.”
In the pages that follow, many contributors voice the expression that

zy
they are eager to find out about new work that may have a bearing
on their own efforts. This is another reason that the international
dimension of this survey is essential for facilitating the exchange of
information, since a great deal of feminist work is published in small
circulation journals and books with limited distribution. We have in-
cluded academic or other affiliations so that people can contact each
24

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other more easily. There is nothing old-fashioned about feminist net-
working. Above all else, the contributions gathered together here dem-
onstrate that the “feminist orthodoxy’’ is illusory.

A note on the referencing system:

Citations within individual responses refer to the general bibliography at
the end of the issue. This bibliography is composed of entries provided by
contributors, who were asked to list their own work relevant to the question
of the female spectator and the work of others they have found most useful.
Footnote numbers refer to notes at the end of a given article. The inter-
national overview essays on Australia, Canada and Italy are followed by
separate bibliographies. This allows references to periodicals and publi-
cations that may have a limited circulation outside their national boundaries
to be kept together for purposes of identification. A separate bibliography
for England was not included because this work has been much more widely
distributed in the United States.

NOTES

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1. This is not an attempt at a neutral introduction, but an intervention in
the terms of the feminist debate evidenced by the contributions in the
following pages-an attempt to sort out their various implications by two

zyxwvutsr
editors who have themselves assumed positions (not necessarily static) in
these debates. The issue was not inspired by a desire for a democratic
pluralism, but by a desire to pause and take stock of the accomplishments,
the tensions and the failures of feminist film criticism.

zyxwvut
2. Langage et cinkma (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1971).
3. A strategically important double issue on “Cinema Semiotics and the
Work of Christian Metz” was published in 1973.
4. Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” Screen 16, no. 2 (Summer
1975), 28.
5 . See, in particular, the section “Man and Language” in Grnile Benveniste,
Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables: University of Miami

zy
Press), 195-246.
6. Communications 23 was co-edited by Raymond Bellour, Thierry Kuntzel
and Metz. Metz’s book The Imaginary Signifier, which contains a number
of other essays, was published in English in 1982 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press).
It is important to remember the on-going work published in the Cahiers
du Cinkma and Cine‘thique which led up to these considerations of the
 zyxw
zyxwvut
spectator and the cinema, much of which was presented in explicitly
psychoanalytic terms. In these journals, in the 1970s the debate was carried
out primarily in terms of cinema’s ideological effects and the possibility
25

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of creating a truly radical cinema that would take the deepest structures
of subjectivity into account. Both Metz and Bellour had published im-
portant essays in the Cahiers du Cinkma well before Communications23.
7. Stephen Heath’s extremely influential “Film and System: Terms of Anal-
ysis” examined the representation of sexual difference as one of the key
“terms of analysis” in his case study of Touch of Evil. It was published
in two parts in Screen 16, nos. 2 and 3 (Spring and Summer 1975). His
article “Difference,” published by Screen in Autumn 1978, marked a
distinct turning point in the entire field in the recognition of sexual dif-
ference as a fundamental aspect of all theoretically informed film analysis.
8. As Laura Mulvey points out in her national overview in this issue, Screen
was not the venue in England for most feminist theoretical work, which
appeared instead in the context of Edinburgh Festival publications and
booklets published by the British Film Institute. In other words, Mulvey’s
article was ground-breaking in terms of what Screen was publishing as
well as in cutting a bold, broad theoretical swath directly through what
many people held dear, namely their love-hate relationship with the clas-
sical Hollywood cinema. Her article did not allow even those who were
more interested in the workings of ideology than in the cinema itself to
relax, since henceforth sexual difference (or its omission) would also
become a crucial element of ideological analysis. In this respect, her article
had, perhaps, a similar effect within film studies to Juliet Mitchell’s Psy-
choanalysis and Feminism (1974) within New Left political circles more
broadly. In each, a compelling case was made that Freudian psycho-
analysis, feminism and politics had to be integrally related.
However, it should not be forgotten that Screen did, in 1975, publish
two other extremely important articles that pointed to ways that various
codes in cinema (crisscrossingMetz’s “specific” and “non-specific” codes)
combined to form textual systems in which sexual difference was a key,
perhaps the driving element: Stephen Heath’s two-part study of Touch
of Evil “Film and System: Terms of Analysis’’ (Spring and Summer issues),
and Raymond Bellour’s “The Obvious and the Code” (on The Big Sleep)
(Winter 1974-75). Unlike Mulvey’s trenchant analysis, these articles were

zyxw
not written from a feminist perspective. For an account of their importance
for feminist film analysis, see Janet Bergstrom, “Enunciation and Sexual
Difference” in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New
York: Routledge, 1988), 159-185.
9. Notes on Women’s Cinema, edited by Claire Johnston (London: Society
for Education in Film and Television, 1973);The Work of Dorothy Arzner:
Towards a Feminist Cinema, edited by Claire Johnston (London: British
Film Institute, 1975).
26 zyxwvut
zyx
10. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen (Autumn
1975), 17.
11. In the introduction, we have made extensive use of quotations drawn
from the essays of individual contributors. If a quotation is not referenced
in the text, one should assume that it can be found in the individual
contribution of the person concerned.

zy
12. The quotation is drawn from Lesley Stern’s contribution to “Remembering
Claire Johnston” by Lesley Stern, Laleen Jayamanne and Helen Grace,
Framework 35 (1988), 118.
13. See Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gen-
der in Feminist Film Theory,” Cultural Critique 4 (1986), 59-80.
14. See John Fiske, “British Cultural Studies and Television” in Channels of
Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allen
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 254-90.
15. Stuart Hall, “EncodingDecoding” in Culture, Media, Language, ed.
Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128-39.
16. “Pleasurable Negotiations” in Female Spectators, ed. E. Deidre Pribram
(London and New York: Verso/Routledge, 1988), 64-89.
17. However, there is at least one instance of an attempt to mediate between
the concepts of “using” and “interpreting.” See David Morley, Family
Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure (London: Comedia,
1986), 13.
18. Everyday Television: “Nationwide” (London: British Film Institute,
1978). See also David Morley, The ““Nationwide”Audience: Structure
and Decoding (London: British Film Institute, 1980); Dorothy Hobson,
“Crossroads”: The Drama of a Soap Opera (London: Methuen, 1982);
and Angela McRobbie “Dance and Social Fantasy” in Gender and Gen-
eration edited by Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava (London: Macmillan,
1984), 130-61.
19. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
20. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Eth-
nography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

zyxw
1988), 22.
21. The Predicament of Culture, 37.
22. See Tania Modleski’s article, ‘‘Some Functions of Feminist Criticism, Or
the Scandal of the Mute Body,” for an interesting critique of the ethno-
graphic approach. She asks the question, “. . . to what extent are the
responses elicited by the ethnographic critic testimony to the predispo-
sition of the masses to be surveyed and tested, submitting themselves
 zyxw
zyxwv
zyx
voluntarily and even eagerly to the relentless efforts of the media (and
now of the media critics) to know them?’’ October 49 (1989),6.
23. Ginette Vincendeau wrote about the absence of French women writing
feminist film theory in her article “Vu de Londres: Mais oh est donc passCe
27

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la thCorie fkministe en France?” CinirnAction! 47 (1988), a special issue
on “Les thCories du cinCma aujourd’hui,” 95-99. See also Janet Bergstrom,
‘‘American Feminism and French Film Theory,” IRIS (forthcoming). Re-

zyx
cently, IRIS has begun to review English-language books on feminist film
theory from a French perspective. See, for example, Marc Vernet’s review
of Mary Ann Doane’s The Desire to Desire in which he also refers to the
appearance in France (in English) of Home Is Where the Heart Is, edited
by Christine Gledhill, Tania Modleski’s The WorneH WhoKnew Too Much
and Kaja Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror ( I R I S 9, 1989, 177-181).