Invited to gaze: butch characters and the trope of mental illness in American postwar film

Abstract

ABSTRACTDue in part to the psychiatric model of homosexuality, American postwar films often depict butch masculinity through the trope of mental illness. Films utilize what disability theorist Elizabeth Donaldson calls the ‘psychiatric gaze,’ a technique in which the camera diagnoses a butch character as ‘sick’ or ‘crazy’ and invites the viewer to participate vicariously in this diagnosis. I establish in this article an historical context for a postwar psychiatric gaze, and analyze two examples of films that pathologize butch characters through this gaze: Young Man with a Horn (1949), and The Member of the Wedding (1952). Both films were released in close proximity to the publication of the original 1953 American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) which included homosexuality as a ‘sociopathic personality disturbance.’ Butch subjects were targets in the postwar era because of the ways they expressed ‘deviant’ gender and sexuality, and thus undermined both heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Butch therefore posed a unique threat to homophobic, ableist, and transphobic discourses. This analysis therefore engages an intersectional approach and utilizes feminist film theory, and recent work in disability and transgender studies in order to gain a precise understanding of the operation of this psychiatric gaze against butch subjectivity.