Doane, Mary Ann

Mary Ann Doane is an American film theorist whose work in feminist film criticism shifted the focus from representations of women in cinema to [Page 69]analyzing how filmic depictions of women target the female spectator. Working from the assumption that as an aspect of a patriarchal society, the Hollywood film bases its construction of the gaze as male, Doane examined the effects of filmic identification on women. Her prominent works in this area of film criticism, beginning in the early 1980s, thus moved the subject of the gaze from men to women, notably through her work in analyzing and categorizing women's films of the 1940s using analytic tools provided by psychoanalysis, namely, the theories of Sigmund Freud and the French psychologist Jacques Lacan. Of import to Doane's and other feminist film theorists' work is how femininity and the woman signify absence or negation in relation to the man.

In terms of subjects and objects of the gaze, the patriarchally based world of cinema and Hollywood film privilege men in both roles; women who appear serve only as objects of the gaze, as Laura Mulvey explicated in her influential essay on the male gaze, upon which Doane bases her departure from the male-spectator perspective. Scopophilia, the “love of looking” underlying the pleasure derived from voyeurism, had been reserved for men, namely in the context of men looking at women. Within the context of patriarchy, the insistence of looking on the part of women poses a threat. In Femmes Fatales, for example, Doane notes that because the intellectual woman, whose cognitive mastery becomes further underscored by the wearing of eyeglasses, looks and analyzes, she serves as countertype to the feminine object of the male gaze and thus threatens the established, patriarchal system of representation.

In Doane's collection of essays on female spectatorship and cinematic discourse, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s, she defines the woman's film and organizes its subgenres, using psychoanalysis as a method by which to interpret the psychical operations of the cinema and cultural conventions depicted in film as reflective of a gendered society during World War II, when women's incursion into the working world posed a threat to ideals of femininity. The woman's film as genre does not constitute one in a technical sense in terms of thematic content, iconography, or narrative structure; these films can include thrillers, films noirs, melodramas, or love stories. Rather, the woman's film attempts to engage female subjectivity by addressing the female spectator. The woman's film thus refers to movies about women created for women; they dealt with a female protagonist contending with female issues—the family, children, and self-sacrifice. It is thus the ways in which the female viewer identifies with and approaches the active female character that provide the basis for Doane's treatment of the female viewer–female character relationship and its resultant forms within the woman's film genre.

Given the male-based structures of cinematic narrative, the lack of distance that results when a woman watches another woman creates several problems, which Doane outlines in terms of the sub-genres reflecting psychoanalytic theories that define the feminine as pathological. Doane addresses four subgenres of the woman's film, each characterized by a corresponding psychoanalytic condition. Films of medical discourse replaced the erotic gaze with the medical gaze; the narrative involved a male doctor treating a female patient, whose external symptoms of disease or defect belie an internal, mental illness, corresponding to hysteria, wherein a woman is betrayed by her own body. The female body/object of gaze is framed as pathological, in the same way that disease and the feminine are socially devalued or undesirable. The maternal melodrama, which Doane refers to as the familiar “weepie,” features the real or threatened separation of a mother and child, resulting in depictions of masochism. The classic love story centers on female desire and the consequences of desire for women in patriarchy; the instrument of closure in such films is the woman's death, especially if she commits adultery. Women waiting serves as a recurrent theme of the love story, symbolizing women's roles as outsiders, excluded from the active world of male-dominated politics and business. The gothic or paranoid woman's film features a female protagonist who has hastily married, only to suspect either correctly or incorrectly that her new husband is trying to murder her. Invoking elements of the gothic novel such as locked doors in a large, forbidding house and a secret involving family history or the husband himself, Doane utilizes the Freudian concept of paranoia, the conviction of being watched or delusions of observation, to elucidate how female exhibitionism becomes transformed into a fear of being looked at. This “ever-present sense of being on display for the gaze of a judgmental other is symptomatic of another condition within our culture as well—that of femininity” (p. 126). Through the woman's film and corresponding marketing strategies and product tie-ins aimed at female audiences, [Page 70]the Hollywood movie industry thus created an image of femininity targeted at women that reasserted the prewar status quo.

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