Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Twelve: Chapter Twenty: The Spiral Dance of Symptom and Specter
As a point of departure for considering animation technics related to gender, let’s take Laura Mulvey’s famous account of Hollywood cinema, in which she argues that specific techniques in cinema position men as subjects and women as objects. Her argument has three parts.
First, there is scopophilia, which means that moving images are delightful, and we’re attracted to them. To anticipate later discussion, let me add that we might think of this scopophilia in terms of affect. Affect is a relation prior to the emergence of a distinction between subject and object in which one entity feels the attraction and sway of another entity. For instance, we feel the attraction of moving images. But we don’t feel this attraction as subjects separate from an object. Rather the moving images grab us, sway us, and we’re inseparable from the moving images, swept up in them. We’re under their sway. You can also think of affect as a relation in which we are not one. We’re part of a continuous material assemblage that includes projection or delivery technologies, images, specific environmental parameters (darkness, stillness), spaces, temporal parameters (the time of the watching and the time in the watching), and other human watchers or interactors (whether in the same room or not) as well as producers and distributors. And you can probably add to the list. But affect is not a logic of ‘everything is connected is everything.’ It is a logic of ‘everything is connected with a specific orientation, a specific continuous set of material orientations.’ I’ll return to affect, but, for now, let’s stick with Mulvey’s account.
Second, this scopophilia disappears very quickly in Mulvey’s account. Pleasure gives way to anxiety. Simply put, men may delight in images of beautiful women but, according to Mulvey, men resist identifying with them. Men resist the material continuity implied in scopophilia due to castration anxiety. They don’t want to be continuous with women.
Third, men thus strive to position themselves as subject and to position women as objects. Mulvey’s account agrees with that of Saitô Tamaki and Enomoto Nariko (whom he cites): men have to fix their position in order to experience desire. In other words, men strive to ‘be one,’ that is, to be a subject in relation to objects. If I turn to Mulvey here rather than Saitô, it is because Mulvey talks about specific techniques of Hollywood cinema. Saitô gives the impression that techniques don’t really matter — hence the provocative title of his 2007 book, “Media don’t exist” (Media wa sonzai shinai).
