Desire Cloaked in a Trenchcoat

Abstract

Desire Cloaked in a Trenchcoat is maybe a corny image to inform an investigation of pornography, performance, and spectators. But the man sitting alone in a darkened theatre masturbating under his coat while staring at the screen is an image engraved on our collective imagination. Male arousal by pictures is an accepted part of dominant cultural discourse. The provocative relationship between sexuality and representation is revealed perhaps most blatantly in pornography. Pornography is an important locus for feminist critical thought because it provides a site for the intersection of feminist sexual politics and the politics of representation. Whether you are for or against pornography, or straddle the anticensorship fence with First Amendment painted on it, pornography has to be dealt with as representation. As Susanne Kappeler points out in The Pornography of Representation, Representation is not so much the means of representing an object through imitation (that is, matching contents) as a means of self-representation through authorship: The expression of (1986:53). Antiporn feminists condemning pornography as both image and educator of male violence against women look for a match of contents by equating pornography and reality.1 But pornography is more than simple mimesis. As representation, it helps to construct subject positions that maintain the strict gender divisions on which the culture operates. The subject/object relations delineated by pornography are also paradigmatic of those structured by representation in general. Feminist film and performance critics argue that representation is addressed to the gaze of the male spectator. He is invited to identify with the active male protagonist portrayed in the narrative through voyeuristic and fetishistic viewing conventions. The male spectator shares in the pleasure of the hero's quest to fulfill his desire for the story's passively situated female (see de Lauretis I984, Kaplan 1983, Mulvey I975). If all representation is structured by male desire, then sexuality is as integral a part of constructing spectator subjectivity in a Shakespeare production at Stratford as it is in live sex shows in Times Square. Any representation can be seen as essentially pornographic, since the structure of gendered relationships through which it operates is based on granting men subjectivity while denying it to women.