Refusing Female Spectatorship
Brigid Cherry’s essay “Refusing to Refuse to Look: Female Viewers of the Horror Film” attempts to revise and rework the notions of female spectatorship as it relates to female fans of horror films. With a range of qualitative methodologies Cherry investigates female horror fans and their refusal to perform the prescribed gender role for female audiences of horror films. The title refers to the traditional behavior of female horror fans which is to turn away rather than watch frightening, gory horror scenes.
Although woman rejected the prescribed gender behavior of “refusing to look” Cherry found that a number of female horror fans nevertheless felt a certain stigma attached to being a women and a horror fan because of the popular association of horror with masculinity. She also found that her participants had a particular dislike for typically male subgenres such as slashers and gore films and a preference for Gothic subgenres of horror such as vampire movies like Interview with the Vampire because of the romance of the story. We could suggest that even this traditional male genre of horror attracts female viewers that find pleasure in slasher and gore subgenres
Cherry’s participants also applied oppositional interpretive strategies when it came to the representation of gender in horror films rather than abstain from much of the genre because of its negative stereotypes of women. These fans often deliberately ignored, diminished or reconstituted sexist or misogynistic representations within different horror films. For Cherry’s fans the images of female victimization provided opportunities for critical and feminist readings of sexist imagery. They also tended to emphasize within the genre the numerous images of female victims who fight back and exhibit strong aggressive behavior against a male monster.
Cherry’s ethnographic investigation of female horror fans is groundbreaking and a much needed antidote to the view that the horror genre is exclusively male and that women have little or no interest in it. For example academia, journalism and popular opinion have created a strikingly similar image of the audience for horror films; this image of the horror film audience is often some version of adolescent boys identifying with and delighting in the misogynistic rampage of male monsters murdering female victims. Often it is thought this image of teenage male spectatorship is driven by unconscious sexual desire; by watching horror films these adolescent males find an outlet for their anxious and confusing sexuality.
Cherry’s notion of the horror film fan runs counter to representations of the “fan” in general. What Tulloch and Jenkins describe as academic views of science fiction fans as “representations of subliterate, infantilized or politically duped audiences” can be said about horror fans. However this view of horror fans as “other” rests on little direct investigation of real horror film audiences; the scarcity of research on viewers of horror films mirrors the lack of research on film audiences in general. Ironically the interest in film audiences comes at a time when the traditional forms of film rooted in a specific historical moment, Classical Hollywood cinema from roughly 1920-1960, wane and increasingly new and hybrid forms of cinema emerge from technological, institutional and cultural forces. Some current research has attempted to correct this oversight. Recent research on television within cultural studies significantly revised the picture of television audiences; this focus on television audiences and its various genres (news, soap opera) and contexts however left film and horror audiences in the dark.
Within the literature that deals with the horror genre there is often an explicit or implicit construction of the horror film audience. Several genre critics construct an explicit representation of the horror audience in order to define the horror genre itself. This reference to a particular type of audience in the exploration and definition of the horror genre is key because like other genres such as melodrama or pornography, horror’s meaning rests to a large part on the responses and behavior of the audience and not solely in the structures and devices of the generic text. Intertwined with this audience-based genre criticism are psychoanalytic notions of the horror audience. the psychoanalytic audience in general – too much “perversion”; where the classic Hollywood spectator was “implanted” with cinematic perversions (voyeurism, masochism, narcissism, fetishism) the horror audience is seen to be inherently perverse. His interest in horror films is already a perverse act over and beyond any perversion that may be involved with the fundamental constitution of spectators.
Furthermore the general conceptualizations of fans as “obsessive”, devoted to the object of their adoration and not in control of their reception is magnified within the assumption of the horror fan’s unwholesome emotional involvement with the horror film. Horror fans are thus under suspicion for their emotional investment as fans and their unwholesome pleasure in images of monstrosity and carnage. Soap opera fans, Elvis fans, X-philers are seen as emotionally suspect only for their investment in fandom and the cult-like adoration. However their pleasures in the object of fandom is not seen in itself as objectionable as is the case with horror films. It may be the case that the perception of horror fans may be more about the the pleasures derived from watching horror films more than the pleasures of fandom.
