Voyeuristic Gaze Research Articles

Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends by Jody Enders (review)

REVIEWS 224 ter five explores the impact on the legend of the idealization of domestic privacy during the Victorian era when Godiva is refurbished as a symbol of female self-sacrifice (namely in her reluctant emergence from her rightful place—the home) in the service of the common good. Donoghue’s final chapter deals primarily with Godiva in the twentieth century, over the course of which she loses her political and moral motivations and becomes largely a symbol of indulged naughtiness unburdened by guilt and shame: “Peeping Tom has gone off on a career of his own. Godiva rides. Everyone gazes. And everyone winks” (108). The author explains this evolution partly in terms of Godiva’s appropriation by the chocolate manufacturer, but also hypothesizes that the cultural work of the legend as articulating a theory of the voyeuristic gaze has been overwhelmed and antiquated by the cinema. Throughout the book Donoghue engages in a candid examination of the state of medieval studies and their largely unacknowledged indebtedness to popular medievalism. Donoghue’s writing style is upbeat and enjoyably irreverent, conveying his personal enthusiasm for a subject which he has obviously researched exhaustively and conscientiously. If the book has a weakness it is in its organization— Donoghue’s most tantalizing ideas concerning Godiva’s place in theoretical discussions of voyeurism, privacy, and subjectivity (for example) lose their impact by being scattered throughout chapters organized more chronologically than thematically. (A historian might equally well observe that Donoghue’s chronological organization is continually derailed by theoretical conjecture.) The book remains, nonetheless, an intellectual treat, allowing readers burdened with a variety of agendas and backgrounds to pause and indulge in the private consumption of an irresistible legend. CHRISTINE THUAU, French and Francophone Studies, UCLA Jody Enders, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002) xxx + 324 pp., ill. An unusual addition to the burgeoning list of studies of death and dying in the Middle Ages, Death by Drama undoubtedly fulfills its author’s wish to imbue “medieval French drama studies with contemporary relevance” (xxviii). Because theater invites belief, asking its audience to suspend disbelief even while asserting itself as a pretense, theater and the stories surrounding it are particularly suited to a study about how and where the components of art and life intersect . Enders recognizes that these intersections, in which “believability is ‘truer’ than truth,” are not limited to the theater but are also the “province of urban legends” (11). With this similarity in mind, Enders directs her accounts about “the real life of medieval theatricality ... to medievalists, theater historians , cultural historians, performance theorists, fiction lovers, urban-legend mavens, and general readers” (xxviii), and she warns her readers to expect a blurring of narrative registers: “I will be too much a storyteller for the historian, too much a medievalist for the general reader, too contemporary for the history buff, too historical for the popular-culture enthusiast” (xxviii). Some readers are likely to add that Enders is too self-consciously a postmodern writer. Her reluctance to draw conclusions and to assert one view over another, alongside her eagerness to interrogate a narrative from all possible points of view, to ask question upon question, and to uncover all possible meanings, especially the REVIEWS 225 contradictory ones, can wear heavily upon a reader. And Enders enjoys contradicting her own assertions, as in this example from the end of part I: “The Devil now takes us by the hand into part II, where he demonstrates that, if incredulity was as credible as true belief, and faith as incredible as diabolical magic, then fear and trembling were just as likely as grins and giggles. Or were they?” (102). Enders may be highly entertaining as well as annoyingly clever, but happily, she is usually willing to put weight upon anything that seems likely to be true, granting the accommodating reader some reprieve from a tiresome play of signifiers and rhetorical sleight-of-hand. And with its contemporary relevance and its interdisciplinary bent, Death by Drama has much to offer the scholar. The research is top-notch, the notes are thorough if idiosyncratic, the bibliography excellent, and the inclusion of the original French and...

Capturing the Shadows of Ghosts

Research Article| June 01 2001 Capturing the Shadows of Ghosts Lynette Felber Lynette Felber Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2001) 54 (4): 27–37. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2001.54.4.27 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lynette Felber; Capturing the Shadows of Ghosts. Film Quarterly 1 June 2001; 54 (4): 27–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2001.54.4.27 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

History as Voyeurism: from Marguerite De Valois to La Reine Margot

Queen Marguerite de Valois of France (1533-1615) is among the most vilified characters in French history. Accused of incest, corruption, insatiable sexual desire, murders, treason, and direct responsibility for the political disintegration of France in the Sixteenth Century, her image has never stopped intriguing historians. The historical Marguerite, however, is overshadowed by the popular heroine of Alexandre Dumas's novel Queen Margot (1945). The article traces the influence of the novel on historical scholarly biographies of the queen, arguing that professional historians have not been able to disentangle themselves from the literary poroduct. Neither have they been capable of overcoming the role of sexual desire in their shaping of the queen. The Marguerite historians have portrayed has been shaped by the sexual fantasies and the sexual politics of the nineteenth-century author, and by the historians' own voyeuristic gaze. In a time of professional anxiety and debate about the uniqueness of historical analysis and writing as compared to literary and artistic productions, the article questions the possibliity of distinguishing between these enterprises.

'Healthy viewing?': experiencing life and death through a voyeuristic gaze.

Recent times have witnessed a groundswell in the number of British television programmes that deal with the 'real life' experiences of people in various health care settings. Such programmes tend to focus upon the two interrelated strands of the experience of those who deliver professional care and those who are at the receiving end of it. The usual rationale given for such programmes is that they offer insights about the delivery of health care that are not readily accessible to members of the public. This article will look beneath the rationale and reasons offered by programme makers for the existence of such documentaries. It will explore insidious and questionable elements that go beyond revealing the 'lived experience' of professional carers and those for whom they care. Emerging from this is the challenging notion that such programmes deliver the opportunity to experience the vulnerability, suffering and even death of others through a voyeuristic gaze.

‘Healthy Viewing?’: experiencing life and death through a voyeuristic gaze

Recent times have witnessed a groundswell in the number of British television programmes that deal with the ‘real life’ experiences of people in various health care settings. Such programmes tend to focus upon the two interrelated strands of the experience of those who deliver professional care and those who are at the receiving end of it. The usual rationale given for such programmes is that they offer insights about the delivery of health care that are not readily accessible to members of the public. This article will look beneath the rationale and reasons offered by programme makers for the existence of such documentaries. It will explore insidious and questionable elements that go beyond revealing the ‘lived experience’ of professional carers and those for whom they care. Emerging from this is the challenging notion that such programmes deliver the opportunity to experience the vulnerability, suffering and even death of others through a voyeuristic gaze.

Women filmmakers of the African and Asian diaspora: decolonizing the gaze, locating subjectivity

An examination of the works of six contemporary black and asian women filmmakers. It also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled Other Voices, documenting the work of other black and asian filmmakers. The book analyzes the key films of Zeinabu Irene Davis, one of a growing number of independent black women filmmakers who are actively constructing an 'oppositional gaze'; British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah and Julie Dash, two filmmakers working with time and space; Pratibha Parmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British black filmmaker concerned with issues of representation, identity, cultural displacement, lesbianism and racial identity; Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese-born artist who revolutionized documentary filmmaking by displacing the voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker; and Mira Nair, a black Indian woman who concentrates on interracial identity.

Turning the Inside Out: Morals, Modes of Living, and the Condition of the Working Class

Writing on the Living conditions in Devon and Somerset in 1849, Alexander Mackay set out to discredit the often picturesque depiction of the homes of the poor:We are accustomed to associate with the idea of a country village, or with a cottage situated in a winding vale, or hanging upon the side of a rich and fertile slope, nothing but health, contentment and happiness. A rural dwelling of this class … makes such a nice pencil sketch, that we are naturally inclined to think it as neat and comfortable as it appears. But to know it aright, it must be turned inside out, and its realites exposed to the gaze of the observer. (qtd. in Lester 320)It was this turning “inside out” of working-class interiors to the voyeuristic gaze of their largely middle-class readers that Mackay and his fellow journalists on the Morning Chronicle set out to accomplish in a series of “letters” written in 1849 and 1850. But such depictions of working-class houses and their interiors had been a staple part of the discourse on the condition of the laboring population as early as 1832, when the Manchester physician and later Assistant Poor Law Commissioner James Kay published The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, and they continued to appear throughout the 1830s, 40s, and early 50s in the work of Peter Gaskell, William Alison, Thomas Beames, Hector Gavin, Edwin Chadwick, Henry Mayhew, and others. This writing, as I will demonstrate, betrays similar discursive and ideological underpinnings as the workingclass interior becomes the focal point for the assertion of bourgeois value and the maintenance of class distinction.

Desire and deviate nymphos: performing inversion(s) as a lesbian consumer.

This paper uses a personalist methodology to discuss my experience of being a lesbian consumer of pop-culture representations of lesbianism. It details, through cultural and feminist/lesbian theory, film theory, and performance criticism, my confusing and contradictory postmodern-feminist-lesbian-theorist response to and desire for what I read as lesbophobia inscribed all over a postcard photo of the cover of a lesbian 1950s pulp novel. I discuss my position as a lesbian looking at a lesbian looking and note the obvious elements of lesbo/homophobia present in this cultural artefact: the trivialization of lesbian desire; the stereotyping of lesbian women; the censorship or erasure of the possibilities of healthy same-sex desire; the prefiguration of the male voyeuristic gaze turning lesbian sex into a spectacle for male pleasure. The paper aims to underline the critical strategies of lesbian experience, the required negotiations in a hostile culture, and the ways that cultural criticism in the academy shape and prefigure my responses to lesbophobic performances in mass media. I question the nature of my pleasure in lesbophobic fictions and detail the process of reversing discourse in the Foucauldian sense. As I identify with the representations, however inaccurate, however fictional, I must invert or queer the lesbophobic message, finding pleasure in the very discourses that oppress me, stereotype me, tolerate me, target me.