Jackie’s Women
Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (1994) by Jackie Stacey is a study that focuses on British female audiences and their practices in consuming film. This is a much too brief and simplified discussion of Stacey’s complex and skillfully argued book. In her research, Stacey studied British women and their experiences of Hollywood stars during the 40s and 50s. Stacy solicited female readers through two major women’s magazines and asked them to write about their memories of film-going during the two decades. The respondents who answered Stacey’s ad received a questionnaire which they filled out and returned to Stacey. Stacey, as a feminist, used the qualitative method of written self-reports to counteract certain oversights in feminist cinema studies; primarily the theoretical and methodological tendency to dissociate the “spectators” of cinema from actual film viewers. The exclusion of actual audience responses allowed feminist film researchers to overlook two things. First, it helped to maintain a questionable textual determinism concluding that female viewers passively identified with the viewing positions presented by the film text. These viewing positions defined by the researchers were argued to be the only ones open to women, and were primarily male spectatorship positions ideologically consistent with patriarchy. Secondly, the absence of empirical data left out the experiences of actual female viewers whose experiences possibly contradicted the theoretical constructions of academic film scholars. In this regard Stacey’s work resembles Janice Radway’s attempt to redeem the romance novel by investigating the reading rituals of actual romance fans in their domestic contexts. Both researchers discovered complex and contradictory tendencies in women’s consumption of popular culture texts that ran counter to feminist orthodoxy.
Stacey analyzed her respondents’ letters and developed several themes characterizing their cinematic experience. The first theme, which emerged from her data, was the concept of “escapism”. This term historically has had a pejorative meaning within popular and academic debates about film and other media. It often connotes a sense of unhealthy fantasy and a trivial diversion from more important aspects of life. Furthermore, escapism is often connected to specifically feminine forms of popular culture. Stacey points out that her respondents frequently mentioned “escapism” as one of the reasons for going to the cinema. She also questions the easy dismissal of the term in favor of a more complex understanding of escapism in the lives of British female film goers during the 40’s and 50’s using Richard Dyer’s theorization of the utopian nature of popular culture in his book Only Entertainment. So for example according to Dyer one of the most escapist forms of popular culture, the musical, provides solutions via fantasy to various social problems. Where Dyer considers escapism’s utopian solutions only in terms of the cinematic text, Stacey extends Dyer’s assertions into the social context and experience of going to the movies.
Stacey’s participants described not only the visual pleasures of the movies and the glamor of movie stars, but also the pleasures of the social ritual of attending the screening, the shared feelings and community of the audience, and the opulence and luxury of the cinema theater itself. Stacey situates the notion of escapism and the experience of film going in the historical context of wartime Britain and contests the theorization of the concept in terms of universal and eternal attributes. Stacey points out that it is important to see the experience of escapism in this context: women were escaping from the hardships, dangers and restrictions of wartime and post WWII Britain in a socially legitimate way.
The second major category Stacey notes is identification which she defines as “the relationship between stars and spectators and the processes of the formation of feminine identities through cinematic modes of address” (126). Like the term “escapism”, Stacy problemitizes the concept of identification and the way it has been discussed within the discourse of film studies. Stacey discovered that British women had complex relationships of identification to the American film stars of the day, in contrast to previously held theories of identification proposed by scholars such as Laura Mulvey who hold identification as a universal and fixed position under patriarchy.
One drawback to Stacey’s work is its focus on the participant’s earlier film going experiences. Although responses to questions of film attendance and interpretation are largely drawn from memories of past experience, Stacey leaves out the current experiences of her participants with films and film stars.
