This post is not so much about teaching as about writing academic essays.
I’m working on a paper on the concept of sexiness as regards men under the female heterosexual gaze and for the umpteenth time I’ll have to quote Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” (In The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality. Eds. John Coughie and Annette Kuhn. London: Routledge. 22-34; 1992)
I have no idea how quotations are counted for impact indexing –I imagine underpaid students boringly keeping track of who quotes whom, in an Orwell-style open-plan huge office– but, surely, Mulvey’s already quite old essay (for our hectic academic standards) must have broken all records.
What irks me is that I don’t agree at all with her psychoanalitycal conceptualization of the person holding the active gaze as male. Many, many other feminists have expressed the same annoyance with Mulvey’s categorization of the passive as feminine and the active as masculine, which has in practice prevented heterosexual women from clearly explaining how they desire the [onscreen] men they find sexy (I’m trying to explain this, at least to myself). Yet, inevitably, we have to quote her in order to manifest our disagreement and offer alternatives that never really seem to discredit her work.
This leads me to the conclusion that, quite possibly, the most often quoted author needn’t be the one who best illuminates an issue. I see Mulvey’s merit in breaking new ground for the understanding of the mechanism of desire in film consumption and I see how she contributed to clarifying the exploitation of women as sexual objects by plenty of voyeuristic masculinist cinema, thus inviting women directors to re-imagine film (although, to tell the truth, I find only Kathryn Bigelow up to the challenge and she’s been called a ‘male-in-drag,’ just imagine… Well, see her Point Break, please.).
Anyway, I assume we quote Mulvey again and again because of her ground-breaking effort but I get tired of endorsing her work in one way or another and it worries me that, 35 years later, there’s no new ground-breaking work to ‘replace’ hers. We seem to be too busy saying NO to her to come up with a radically new idea. I have the impression that only work that forgot about Mulvey could really offer a truly new approach but I know that simply ignoring her won’t do, as it would be, yes, bad research.
Mulvey would matter less to me, of course, if impact indexes were not a reflection of mere quantification. Her impact index must be, of course, enormous but I wonder why/how impact can be positively quantified even when of this irking, negative kind. I wish I knew how to write an essay so wrong that it would prompt everyone to quote me in disagreement and I’m beginning to realise that maybe that’s a merit.
In my stupidity, I though that impact had to do with making a striking point that generates productive consensus and a significant paradigm shift (yes, Judit Butler’s Gender Trouble did that back in 1990). Mulvey did shift the paradigm but I still puzzle that she did so by generating disagreement and, although that’s also VERY productive, personally I prefer quoting those I admire.