Gender

Traditionally, the term "gender" refers to the grammatical categories of masculine, feminine, and neuter, but in recent usage it refers more widely to sex-based social categories. Social scientists and anthropologists commonly distinguish gender, which is applied to social and cultural categories, from sex, which is reserved for biological categories. The distinction between sex and gender is underpinned by theories in the life and social sciences about the respective roles of nature and culture in the creation of human identity. Debates around sex and gender have tended to be controversial, and in recent years these have been intensified by medical and scientific research that has provided grounds both for and against the mapping of biological sex onto gender. Some of the most interesting perspectives on sex and gender have come from researchers studying intersexuality. In an influential paper published in 1993, biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling posits the existence of not two but five sexes—male, female, and three degrees of hermaphroditism. In the ensuing debate, which has practical bearings on gender assignment for hermaphrodite children as well as on a whole array of gender-rights issues, it has become clear that the variety of possible sexes and genders is greater than traditionally thought. Within most cultures, however, binary gender division is a persistent norm.

GENDER AND FILM

Feminist arguments against the concept of biologically determined gender identity began with the assertion by Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) that women are not born but made. The sex-gender paradigm was taken up widely in the 1970s and 1980s in feminist arguments for rights denied to women and girls on spurious biological grounds. The emphasis of feminist analysis was thus skewed toward deconstructions of gender, while sex itself remained relatively unexamined. Some feminist positions took advantage of the notion of a "real" or "natural" femininity that existed prior to the impositions of capitalist patriarchy, although ultimately all arguments for women's equality were undermined by such essentialism, to a greater or lesser extent.

In a groundbreaking essay published in 1975, Gayle Rubin coined the term "sex-gender system" to describe the ways in which societies transform biological sex into cultural gender and align the processes of human reproduction with those of economic production. Rubin's analysis places marriage, kinship systems, and heterosexuality at the heart of the sex-gender system. Her hypothesis exposed certain contradictions and differences that were particularly marked within American feminism at the time. One of these concerns the legacy of African Americans, whose slave ancestors were denied marriage and kinship and therefore a place in the sex-gender system as Rubin describes it, and for whom gender consequently has different meanings. The situation of African Americans draws attention to the need to conceptualize gender and its relationship with other social systems within historically specific frameworks. Lesbians also fall outside the gambit of Rubin's sex-gender system: by opting out of heterosexuality and its attendant kinship structures, they become radically other to the system. Although this outsider status legitimated lesbianism as a logical and effective expression of feminist dissent, it also contributed to the creation, in the 1980s, of an idealized image of lesbian sexuality that was widely rejected by queer culturalists in the 1990s. The "sex-gender system" failed as a universal paradigm but succeeded in establishing the importance of mapping convergences between particular social and economic systems in the production of gender.

The recognition that differences among women are at least as important to feminism as differences between women and men has enriched feminist thinking massively, but it has also placed the fundamental assumption of feminism—the commonality of women—under great pressure. Postmodern critical theorists see this as a good thing, potentially enabling the emergence of multiple and mutable sexual identities. In Gender Trouble (1990), the most widely influential deconstruction of gender identity published in the 1990s, Judith Butler argues that feminist assertions of the commonality of women as a group unwittingly contribute to the regulation of gender relations. Membership of the class of women, according to Butler, is not the inescapable consequence of biological femininity. Gender identities are not expressions of an essential core but performances built from citations and imitations specific to a given context. The hegemony of patriarchal heterosexuality is therefore neither natural nor inevitable. Butler argues that performances that subvert, confuse, or ironize gender norms have the power to unsettle or even unseat those norms. However, this reformulation of gender is not without drawbacks. Its dissolution of the concept of women as a class or category could be premature. Feminism is the struggle for women as a class and for the disappearance of that class, but it is possible that women as a class might disappear from postmodern feminist discourse while continuing to exist in all their diversity within other discursive and social formations. Further, the notion of gender identity as "free-floating" and flexible needs to be circumscribed by a recognition of the effects that normative social forces and their uneven application have on people of different cultures and conditions. Individualistic subversions of gender norms are not equally possible for all and do not necessarily benefit those who are left behind in the ghetto of women.

GENDER ON THE SCREEN

The absence of the physical body of the actor, and indeed, the relative unimportance of the spectator's own body, in the experience of film viewing should make cinema the perfect medium for the performance of diverse and free-floating gender identities, but the converse is more generally the case: the extent to which images of men and women are conventionalized in the cinema demonstrates the power of gender norms. Nevertheless, the history of cinematic representations of gender is characterized by tensions, contradictions, and change.

Between its invention in 1895 and the imposition of the Production Code in the early 1930s, American cinema was torn between the modern idea of the New Woman and the antimodern Cult of True Womanhood—a Victorian ideology that prescribed for women the four cardinal virtues of purity, piety, domesticity, and submission. In early cinema, before the stabilization of industry standards and norms and while cinema still lacked respectability, women on the screen were often active, sexual, and even feminist. Three types of movies were especially popular with women in the 1910s: serials such as The Perils of Pauline (1914), white slave films, and suffragist films. The possibility that these genres encouraged active, curious, militant female spectatorship was the cause of some social concern at the time, especially in the case of the white slave films. There was also concern that the movie theaters were drawing women into new and unsafe public spaces. Early cinema formed part of a modern urban cultural scene in which women's increased mobility was both cause and effect of changes in their social roles.

In later silent cinema, the dialectical tension between old and new model femininities can be most clearly seen in the contrasting stereotypes of the virgin, personified by stars like Mary Pickford (1893–1979) and Lillian Gish (1893–1993), and the vamp, most notoriously embodied by Theda Bara (1885–1955) and Clara Bow (1905–1965). D. W. Griffith (1875–1948), the director most prominently associated with the development of longer narrative films and with the effort to establish the cultural respectability of cinema, consciously drew on the theatrical and literary melodrama of the nineteenth century, in which heroines were virtuous, passive, and long-suffering. However, flapper films of the 1920s, such as The Dancing Mothers (1926) and It (1927), depicted and addressed the modern, active, independent women of the decade that began with their enfranchisement. The Hollywood libertarianism that made stars of Greta Garbo (1905–1990), Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992), and Mae West (1893–1980) and that created the new and violent masculinity of the gangster film seemed to have carried the day when, in the early 1930s, under pressure from the Legion of Decency, the Production Code came into force, installing sublimation and double standards at the heart of the Hollywood aesthetic.

The impact of historical events on gender roles often appears in indirect and mediated ways in Hollywood cinema. The Depression and the New Deal generated an ethos of selflessness that arguably informed maternal melodramas such as Stella Dallas (1937), although the film makes no explicit reference to the economics or ideology of the times. Many critics have noted the influence of World War II on gender roles in the woman's film and film noir, genres that have been said to participate in the complex postwar readjustments of social roles for both men and women. The twin figures of the war veteran misfit and the woman whose contribution to the work-force is no longer required have been said to inform the maladjusted femininities and masculinities of many films of the late 1940s that otherwise lack explicit sociological content, including Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Mildred Pierce (1945), and Out of the Past (1947).

RUDOLPH VALENTINO
b. Rodolpho Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Gugliemi di Valentina d'Antonguola, Castellaneta, Italy, May 6, 1895, d. New York, New York, August 23, 1926

In his short career as a leading man, Rudolph Valentino was one of the great idols of the silent era and also one of its most controversial, splitting the audience along gender lines between women who adored him and men who loathed him.

After stints of begging, dishwashing, and taxi dancing, Valentino went to Hollywood, where he got his big break in 1921 when he was cast as the lead in Rex Ingram's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the box-office hit that made him a star. At screenings of The Sheik (1921), women fainted in the aisles, inflamed by its heady cocktail of slavery, capture, peril, and romance. Valentino's star image was established by The Sheik in the form of a split personality: the hard-eyed wild man who, once wounded, could be tamed by the love of a good woman.

Valentino acquired a scandalous reputation as a result of bigamy charges brought by his first wife, Jean Acker, gossip about his sexual proclivities and competence, and a second marriage to the domineering Natacha Rambova, whose gift to him of a slave bracelet and whose friendship with lesbian actress Alla Nazimova undermined the star's protestations of "caveman" virility. On the release of The Son of the Sheik (1926), an editorial in the Chicago Tribune famously called him a "pink powder puff" and a "painted pansy." Women felt otherwise: after his death from peritonitis at the age of thirty-one, thousands of women took to the streets for his funeral, grieving hysterically. For a number of years, he remained the object of a posthumous cult with intimations of necrophilia.

Valentino's star image is a fascinating condensation of desires and anxieties popularized in the 1920s. His ethnic "otherness" was sublated into an erotic glamor that mobilized both desire for the exotic and fear of the alien. His sleek and muscular body was adorned and displayed in ways that triggered expressions of anxiety about the nature of manliness. His sexual persona combined aggressiveness and passivity, sadism and suffering, active seduction and objectification in such a way as to make his films polymorphously perverse fantasies for female spectators frustrated by the conditions of their lives and their usual exclusion from active, desiring spectatorship in the cinema. If manliness in the cinema depends on the conventional deployment of a fetishistic gaze and stardom always invites a degree of fetishization, perhaps contradictions are inevitable in the notion of a manly film star. In Valentino's star image, with its visual emphasis on smooth, hard physicality and glamorous costuming, these contradictions coalesce, so that instead of exercising a fetishistic gaze, he became a fetish himself.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), Monsieur Beaucaire (1924), The Eagle (1925), The Son of the Sheik (1926)

FURTHER READING

Anger, Kenneth. Hollywood Babylon. London: Arrow Books, 1986.

Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Rambova, Natacha. Rudolph Valentino: Recollections. New York: Jacobson Hodgkinson, 1927.

Studlar, Gaylyn. This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Walker, Alexander. Rudolph Valentino. New York: Stein and Day, 1976.

Alison Butler

Genre (which shares its etymological root with the word "gender") plays a crucial role in constructions of gender in classical Hollywood films. In the musical and the romantic comedy, the genders are represented as

ultimately complementary to each other, whatever initial incompatibilities might exist. In the western, gender divisions tend to be mapped onto archetypal oppositions between civilization and wilderness, posing a dilemma for the male hero, while the female characters are one-dimensional embodiments of the virtues and shortcomings of civilized society, above all in the stereotypes of the good-hearted saloon girl and the frontier wife and mother. The woman's film is defined by its female protagonist and the "feminine" concerns to which it gives pride of place; men are both extremely important in determining the fate of the heroine and somewhat peripheral to the dramatic interest of the film. Femininity is defined paradoxically in the woman's film, which conveys its undoubtedly conservative morality through cautionary tales of women who break its selfsame rules. Thus Bette Davis (1908–1989) in Jezebel (1938), Joan Crawford (1904–1977) in Mildred Pierce, and Lana Turner (1921–1995) in Imitation of Life (1959) offer female spectators a vicarious escape from ordinary, dutiful lives as wives and mothers, while the punitively moralistic endings of the films reinforce the ideological correctness of conventional lives.

The end of the Production Code in the 1960s allowed for more sexualized renditions of established gender roles but did not necessarily give rise to more flexible and varied constructions of gender. The desublimation of Hollywood cinema resulted not only in more complex and adult female characters, like the neurotic prostitute (Jane Fonda) in Klute (1971), but also in the notorious sexual violence of Straw Dogs (1972). The most extreme transgressions of orthodox gender roles in this period occurred not in the films with liberal social values and realist aesthetics, but in those that engaged most profoundly with fantasy and desire. In Psycho (1960), for example, the Hitchcockian motif of the double operates across the gender divide, not only in Norman Bates's identification with his mother but also in the parallels that are established between Norman and Marion Crane. Although for Hitchcock the merging of male and female personalities signifies psychosis and death, Psycho nevertheless articulates the mutability of identity and the artificiality of the gendered self. More recently, the Alien films (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997) have developed this tradition, giving forceful expression to a wide range of (progressive and regressive) fantasies and anxieties about gender through the figure of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the female hero, and her alter ego, the shape-shifting, alien brood mother.

Hollywood constructions of gender have worldwide significance because of the global reach of the US film industry, but they are also part of American national culture. Ideologies such as "Momism" inflect femininity and masculinity in ways unique to US culture. Outside of Hollywood, configurations of gender are shaped by other cultural histories. In Polish cinema, for instance, representations of men and women are influenced by the iconography of the historic struggle for nationhood, in which the purity and selflessness of the mother serves and motivates the heroism of the son. In French cinema, conversely, it has been suggested that one of the most common Oedipal narrative tropes is the father–daughter relationship, in which female subjectivity is centered but also framed by paternal control. The distinctiveness of configurations of gender in national cinemas confirms the importance of conceptualizing gender in film studies within concrete historical and specific cultural terms.

THE GENDERED GAZE

The study of gendered representations in the cinema began in the early 1970s with Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974). Haskell looks at images of women in movies made from the 1920s to the 1970s (the 1980s are included in the second edition), mainly—but not exclusively—in Hollywood. The book's scope is ambitious, identifying major themes in American cinema such as "The flight from women and the fight against them in their role as entrappers and civilizers" (p. 61). Haskell's critical method, which maps genres and stars historically, has been questioned subsequently by academic film theorists, although some of her ideas, such as the notion of star images as "two-way mirrors linking the immediate past with the immediate future" (p. 12), are more sophisticated than her detractors might suggest.

The study of images of women was crucial to the development of feminist film culture in the early 1970s but was superseded in the feminist film theory that emerged in the middle of that decade by textual approaches concerned less with the manifest content of films than with the ideological predispositions embedded in their syntax and in the apparatus itself. Drawing on post-structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, Claire Johnston developed a theory of cinematic representation based on an understanding of film narrative as a mythic system that naturalizes conventional gender relations. Within this system, the figure of woman functions not as a representation of female subjectivity but as the object of male desire. Thus Johnston's remark that "despite the enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema, woman as woman is largely absent" (p. 26). However, rather than calling for the production of realistic or positive images of women, she argues that the more stylized and unrealistic a film's iconography, the more it de-naturalizes both itself and the ideology it serves. Unlike many feminists in the 1970s, Johnston does not reject popular cinema as a "dream machine" but embraces its contradictory possibilities. In her comments on the films of Dorothy Arzner (1900–1979), one of a very few female directors in the studio system, Johnston lays claim to a reflexive and critical strain within Hollywood cinema.

Working within the same feminist framework, in 1975 Laura Mulvey wrote what is perhaps the most celebrated and contentious essay in the history of film studies, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Mulvey's essay is also concerned with Hollywood but concentrates on looking at relations as they are systematized by mainstream conventions. In mainstream cinema, Mulvey contends, a gendered division of labor allies the male hero with the movement of the narrative and the female figure with its spectacle. The cinematic apparatus aligns the gaze of the spectator with that of the camera, and editing conventions subsume the look of the camera into that of the protagonist. This system of looks assumes narcissistic identification with the male protagonist of the narrative and voyeuristic enjoyment of the female object of the gaze. This enjoyment is, however, ambivalent, because of the castration anxiety engendered by the sight of the woman. The two forms of pleasure associated with the female image are also defenses against this threat: sadism, which acknowledges sexual difference and takes pleasure in investigating woman's guilt, and fetishism, which disavows sexual difference and worships woman (or a particular body part or item of clothing) as phallic substitute. Mulvey concludes her essay with a radical attack on the pleasures of mainstream cinema and calls for a cinema of "passionate detachment" in terms that strongly evoke the materialist avant-garde and the political counter-cinema of the 1970s. This analysis has been revisited and modified by many theorists and historians, including, on several occasions, Mulvey herself, and from this debate film studies has developed a complex understanding of cinema as a social technology of gender.

The initial emphasis on femininity in the study of gender in cinema clearly resulted from the political impulse to identify and work against gender inequalities. However, as Steve Neale and a number of other critics have argued, it is also important to analyze cinematic masculinities in order to better understand not only how these function to reinforce normative gender relations but also how they may transgress or destabilize them and in what ways they may be subject to transformation. Neale finds numerous instances in mainstream cinema of the male body functioning as visually pleasurable spectacle, but he argues that these images are encoded so as to disavow their eroticism—for instance, in shoot-outs in westerns or in fight sequences in epics. Rather than disputing Mulvey's account of gendered looking relations in mainstream cinema, Neale confirms it but points out the high degree of contradiction within an apparently normative system. Peter Lehman argues more trenchantly that in the proliferation of critical discourse on sexual representations of the female body and the relative paucity (until the 1990s) of critical discourse on sexual representations of the male body, film studies actually replicated the sexual ideology it aimed to deconstruct.

Scholarship on masculinity in films has clustered around a number of themes, including the idea of a crisis in masculinity during the postwar period and after, the fine line between homosociality and homosexuality, and the effects on male subjectivity of psychopathologies, such as hysteria and masochism. The notion of masquerade, initially introduced into feminist film theory by Claire Johnston and Mary Ann Doane, and developed in relation to Judith Butler's theorization of gender performativity, has been applied to cinematic masculinities by film theorists. Male masquerade is a notion with interesting implications, destabilizing hegemonic masculinity and effectively rendering all gender identities and relationships relational and contingent. The notion of male masquerade has been taken up most productively in historical work, such as Gaylyn Studlar's study of male stars of the silent era, which relates their performances of masculinity to specific cultural manifestations of the gender ideology of the times, ranging from the idealized masculinity of Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939), contextualized in the movement to reform "boy culture" and resist the perceived threat of feminization, to the transgressive appeal of Lon Chaney (1883–1930), whose association with the grotesque and the liminal grounded his popularity with male fans.

Unlike the feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, scholarship on masculinity in cinema has tended to focus on highly specific, often historical, examples rather than on developing a general theory, partly because of the prevailing fashion for historical rather than theoretical inquiry in film studies since the early 1990s, but also because it lacks the political impetus that feminist theory derived from the women's movement. Against the backdrop of declining feminism and resurgent, retro-styled masculinity in postmodern popular culture, there is a risk that critical discourses on masculinity in the cinema will lapse, unintentionally or otherwise, into conservatism and nostalgia. This risk is confronted directly and effectively by Sharon Willis's work on race and gender in contemporary Hollywood film, especially her essay on Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963), which uses a psychoanalytic framework to argue that his admiring imitation of African American masculinity is inflected by the conflict played out in his films between Oedipal structures (borrowed style, aging male stars) and ferocious preoedipal impulses (relentless bathroom references, anal rape). Tarantino's postmodern recycling of popular cultural masculinity, Willis notes, is self-consciously multicultural but inflected by regressive fantasies: his sense of the past from which he takes his reference points is nostalgic and private rather than historical and shared. Tarantino's films stand as a salutary reminder that irony, pastiche, and sexual transgression are not in themselves guarantees of a progressive or transformative critique of gender identities and relations.

TRANSGENDER IDENTIFICATIONS AND LOOKS

Until the late 1980s, theories of gendered spectatorship were characterized by a strong demarcation between the genders; transgender identification, when it was mentioned as a possibility, was understood as an imposition of patriarchal ideology or, at best, a tactic by which the female spectator might accommodate herself within the binary system of gendered looking without disturbing the hierarchical relationship between its basic terms. However, studies of stars and genres that seem to appeal to spectators across gender lines have enabled critics to develop complex models of cinematic identification that are more complex, fractured, and mutable.

Miriam Hansen's study of the massive popularity of Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926) among women concludes that the sexual ambiguity that became central to his image offered a space of resistance and rebellion to a particular group of female spectators caught up in the social and ideological contradictions of New Womanhood and the particular contradictions of Hollywood in an era in which female audiences were being recruited to the cinema as passive witnesses to their own subordination. In his films and in the star discourse around him, Valentino functioned as the focal point of a remarkably fluid field of sexual possibilities—a public fantasy figure whose constant shifts between sadism and masochism, potency and impotence, heterosexuality and homosexuality, femininity and masculinity, subjectivity and objectification allowed for complex and multiple permutations of desire and identification. The "Valentino syndrome," according to Hansen, is an example of a female subculture that, although distorted by consumerism, gave temporary expression to female desire and even a kind of female fetishism.

Transgender identification is even more central to the hypothesis offered by Carol J. Clover in her study of horror films made since the late 1970s. Overturning the common-sense view that horror films in which female characters are terrorized by male killers encourages male spectators to take sadistic pleasure in violence against women, Clover argues that the predominantly adolescent male audience of slasher films actually identifies with the female victim-hero, or "Final Girl," as Clover calls her, who after a terrifying ordeal, eventually overcomes the villain. Clover observes that both of the principal characters in the genre may be ambiguously gendered—the killer taking on aspects of a monstrous phallic femininity, for example, while the Final Girl is often a tomboy. Clover distinguishes between the actual gender of the characters and their figurative gender—that is, the ways their significant attributes can be correlated to gendered subject positions. On this basis, she argues that the Final Girl is figuratively a boy whose suffering allows the majority audience to explore castration anxiety within the relative safety of vicariousness. Clover is reluctant to make any claims for the progressiveness of horror films on the basis of these insights, but her approach does highlight the mobility of cinematic identification and the permeability of the boundary between genders.

Yvonne Tasker argues that in the 1980s masculinity became more visible, a marked category in American action cinema signified by the "built" body created by the performer rather than by nature. The knowing performance of masculinity by the built male star enacts but also questions and parodies a previously naturalized gender stereotype. Moreover, the performance of masculinity is not the automatic prerogative of biological males. Tasker coins the term "musculinity" to describe the body type associated with the action hero, regardless of actual gender, and discusses the ways in which female bodies take on masculine functions in recent action cinema, as well as the ways in which male characters are sometimes reinscribed as feminine. Tasker concludes her study with a discussion of the films of Kathryn Bigelow (b. 1951), including Blue Steel (1990), a psychological thriller that consciously and critically explores the role of women in action cinema. Blue Steel uses cross-dressing rather than muscles to indicate the female hero's assumption of certain masculine functions while problematizing her relationship to these functions: Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) joins the police department in order to share in its patriarchal authority, but when the phallic power of her gun attracts a psychotic soul mate, she finds herself alone and under suspicion. Through this exploration of the antagonistic relationship between the female hero and patriarchal law, Bigelow constructs an allegory of the dilemma with which action cinema confronts both the female spectator and the feminist director. A noticeable difference between Blue Steel and the alternative feminist cinema of the 1970s is that rather than rejecting the idea of a woman acting like a man, the film simply points out that this is not institutionally sanctioned behavior.

Cross-dressing is a recurrent trope in both the women's films and the feminist theory of the 1990s, making the composite figure of the transsexual or the woman who passes for a man an emblem of social and sexual change for feminism as well as for queer cultural politics. In a short contribution to a debate about Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Pierce, 1999) in the British journal Screen, Judith Halberstam suggests that the film is significant because, in a brief sequence, it requires the spectator to adopt a transgender gaze. The film is a fictionalized account of the life and death of Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank), a girl who passed for a boy and was raped and

KATHRYN BIGELOW
b. San Carlos, California, 27 November 1951

Among women directors, Kathryn Bigelow is exceptional for her acceptance by critics and audiences as an auteur and for the sustained and intelligent way she has engaged with traditionally "male" action genres. She trained as a painter at the San Francisco Art Institute and through the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program before going on to study film at Columbia University, where she encountered critics Andrew Sarris and Peter Wollen. Her work has often been described as "painterly" for its stylish and controlled visual composition, but this is misleading praise insofar as it overlooks the equally controlled complexity of her well-crafted stories. Her first film, the experimental short The Set-Up (1978), deconstructs screen violence and established concerns she has pursued in her feature films. Like a number of female directors, Bigelow began her career in independent film in the 1980s, crossing over to Hollywood in the 1990s.

Bigelow's first feature, The Loveless (1982), co-written and co-directed by Monty Montgomery, is a revisionist biker movie that pays homage to the iconography of The Wild One (1954). The film's slow pace and formal style, characterized by long takes with a static camera, introduce a meditative distance on the subject matter. Its treatment of female characters suggests a nascent interest in exploring the place of women in a "male" genre. Near Dark (1987) is a generic hybrid—a vampire western in which the sympathetic outlaws are again subcultural outsiders, with the main female character a point of articulation for a complex clashing and blending of the generic codes of the western and the vampire film. Blue Steel (1990) is Bigelow's most explicitly feminist film, a psychological thriller that explores the position of the female hero in the action film. The ambivalence of Bigelow's engagement with action cinema is less pronounced in Point Break (1991), perhaps because of the film's emphasis on its male characters, although it does foreground the genre's submerged homoeroticism. A critical attitude to screen violence re-emerges in the neo-noir Strange Days (1995), in which the invention of a virtual reality device for recording and replaying sense impressions gives rise to an underground economy dealing in extreme experiences, which are inevitably violent, sexual, or both. The central male character is made to experience sexual violence from the perspective of both perpetrator and victim, undergoing a transgender identification in the process, but as an allegory of voyeurism, Strange Days is ultimately unclear.

After a five-year break from directing for the cinema, Bigelow returned with The Weight of Water (2000), a surprising feminine thriller that was neither a critical nor a box-office success, and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), a return to action, spectacle, and masculinity. Although the career difficulties that Bigelow has encountered since Strange Days are by no means entirely due to her situation as a woman director, the material with which she has worked most successfully emerged from a particular convergence of art, feminism, and cinema, and these may not adapt well to changed times.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990), Point Break (1991), Strange Days (1995)

FURTHER READING

Grant, Barry Keith. "'Man's Favorite Sport'?: The Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow." In Action and Adventure Cinema, edited by Yvonne Tasker, New York and London: Routledge, 2004: 371–384.

Islam, Needeya. "'I Wanted to Shoot People'—Genre, Gender and Action in the Films of Kathryn Bigelow." In Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment, edited by Laleen Jayamanne, Sydney, AU: Power Institute of the Arts, 1995: 91–125.

Lane, Christina. Feminist Hollywood from Born in Flames to Point Break. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000: 99–123.

Redmond, Sean, and Deborah Jermyn, eds. The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. London: Wallflower Press, 2003.

Alison Butler

murdered when his/her biological sex was discovered. The film presents Brandon's gender in an interesting way, showing the spectator right at the beginning how Brandon constructs his masculinity through costume and performance. Most spectators nevertheless suspend disbelief in Brandon's masculinity and, like his girlfriend Lana (Chloe Sevigny), accept him at face value for much of the film's duration. Knowledge and belief are thus made issues within the film's diegesis and for the audience, coming to a crisis in the sequence in which Brandon's attackers strip him naked in front of his friends. Lana refuses to look at Brandon's genitals, while Brandon escapes into fantasy in what Halberstam takes to be a representation of an "out of body" experience: he sees himself, fully clothed, amongst the onlookers, gazing at his naked body. The transgender gaze, Halberstam suggests, is a divided look, split between a self that is castrated and a self that is not. The deployment of a transgender gaze in conjunction with an empowered female gaze, according to Halberstam, establishes the authenticity of Brandon's masculinity, at least until the film's conclusion, when, Halberstam argues, Lana's acceptance of Brandon as a woman reestablishes normative gender conventions within a humanist perspective.

Transgender identification in the cinema is not a new phenomenon, but its occurrence in the context of the overt and positive representation of a transgender subject is, indicating that significant changes in the social organization and cinematic representation of gender have taken place. These changes, however, have not affected all aspects of society equally, as a glance at current statistics on the employment of women in the film industry shows.

In early cinema, before the production of film became a vertically integrated industry, women directors were common. Almost all of their careers ended with the transition to sound, which required massive financial backing and resulted in a reorganization of the film industry that closed down many of the small companies in which women directors worked. Between the late 1920s and the late 1970s, only a handful of women directors worked in Hollywood. With the impact of the women's movement, a number of female directors emerged through avant-garde and independent filmmaking, but most of them have had difficult careers, and their presence has not greatly altered the gender balance or macho character of the film industry (although it is interesting to note that in the last two decades, women have been comparatively successful as producers). In 2004, women comprised only 5 percent of all directors working on the top-grossing 250 Hollywood films (the figure rises to a still low 16 percent if executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors are taken into account). Internationally, film is a male-dominated industry, although there are two countries with larger numbers of women directors: France and Iran. It is perhaps significant that both of these nations treat cinema as an art as well as a business, offering state support to filmmaking that is culturally distinctive in style and concerns. The slowness of change in gendered employment patterns in the film industry, compared to the relative speed with which the impact of feminism has been assimilated at the level of the cinematic image, shows how complex and uneven social and ideological changes can be.

SEE ALSO Feminism;Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Cinema;Sexuality

FURTHER READING

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women and Chainsaws. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. London: Jonathan Cape, 1953.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. "The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are not Enough." The Sciences 33, no. 2 (1993): 20–24.

Halberstam, Judith. "The Transgender Gaze in Boys Don't Cry." Screen 42, no. 3 (2001): 294–298.

Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 [1974].

Johnston, Claire. "Women's Cinema as Counter Cinema." In Notes on Women's Cinema, edited by Claire Johnston, London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973.

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Alison Butler