ANNE HERRMANN 65
Mary Ann Doane, in "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the
Female Spectator" (1982), attempts to imagine the position of the
female spectator not through trans-sex identification with an active
male gaze, but through over-identification with the female image,
especially in relation to the "woman's film" of the 1930s and '40s.
She observes that if the female spectator is the image, her relationship to the image must be characterized by closeness, resulting in an
over-identification with the object of the gaze. Overidentification
leads to trans-sex identification (a term Doane borrows from Mulvey) in order to establish a certain distance: the female spectator
vacillates between a masculine and feminine mode of looking. Masquerade, in turn, offers a reaction-formation against this form of
"transvestism" by constructing "femininity" at a distance, as a mask
that can be worn or removed by the female spectator. Thus "femininity" itself becomes a kind of performance, a form of "masquerade" necessary even to women who seek to position themselves in
relation to the classic cinematic image.
Against the insistence of psychoanalytic theory on the gaze as
male, Carol Clover in "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher
Film" (1987) asks what the appeal might be to a largely male audience of a film genre that features a female victim-hero. The answer
lies in what Clover calls "gender displacement," a kind of "identificatory buffer," whereby a male viewer experiences the bodily sensations of abject terror by watching violence directed at and overcome
by a member of the opposite sex. The Final Girl (the female victimhero) in the slasher film is both boyish and sexually inactive so that
her female body offers only an apparent femaleness to its male audience, enough to invoke heterosexuality. Clover breaks down the
supremacy of the male gaze by shifting the discussion from theoretical spectatorship to actual audiences and by suggesting that the gaze
becomes, at least temporarily, female. Through what she calls the
"active investigating gaze," the Final Girl reverses the look by making a spectacle of the killer and a spectator of herself. By collapsing
the categories masculine and feminine into a single character ("a
physical female and a characterological androgyne"), Clover argues
that the slasher film offers a visible alternative to traditional representations of gender: while masculinity remains a privileged category, it is represented by means of a female body. She avoids the
notion of gender as "natural" by insisting on the "theatricalization of
gender," whereby the male audience is "feminized" in the process of
