Feminism and motion pictures (Analysis
belong to a female" (164, 165).
While Hark dramatically complicates the male body as a signifying field, Robyn Wiegman transforms the feminist paradigm of the "specular colonization" (176) of the female body from an issue of gender to one of race, in which the black male becomes constructed as feminine, suggesting "not simply an aversion to racial difference but a profound attempt to negate masculine sameness, a sameness so terrifying to the cultural position of the white masculine that only castration can provide the necessary disavowal" (179). To Wiegman this "terrain of masculine differences in the context of masculine sameness" requires nothing less than a "rethinking of feminism's commitment to patriarchal organization" (179). Understanding how "masculine sameness provides the very terms that construct and defend hierarchies of oppression and exploitation among men" helps explain, Wiegman says, the negotiation of the black male position between "feminization (buffoonish Uncle Tom) and hypermasculinization (well-endowed rapist)" (180).
Along with such ambitious studies of the male body, Screening the Male also includes an analysis by Adam Knee of gender inversion in Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), in the form of a dialectic between female aggression and Eastwood's "male hysteria." This piece, which epitomizes the book's use of the male star's body as a source of sexual and cultural complexity, also provides an interesting comparison with Paul Smith's Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Smith's book constitutes a major effort to treat a star seriously in the light of contemporary studies of the representation of the body and the contrast between the "real" body of the actor and "reel" body on the screen, both ree(a)ls being both inevitably different and inexorably linked together. Smith breaks new ground not only through the depth and extent of his serious study of Eastwood but also through his method of connecting a broad range of cultural
While Hark dramatically complicates the male body as a signifying field, Robyn Wiegman transforms the feminist paradigm of the "specular colonization" (176) of the female body from an issue of gender to one of race, in which the black male becomes constructed as feminine, suggesting "not simply an aversion to racial difference but a profound attempt to negate masculine sameness, a sameness so terrifying to the cultural position of the white masculine that only castration can provide the necessary disavowal" (179). To Wiegman this "terrain of masculine differences in the context of masculine sameness" requires nothing less than a "rethinking of feminism's commitment to patriarchal organization" (179). Understanding how "masculine sameness provides the very terms that construct and defend hierarchies of oppression and exploitation among men" helps explain, Wiegman says, the negotiation of the black male position between "feminization (buffoonish Uncle Tom) and hypermasculinization (well-endowed rapist)" (180).
Along with such ambitious studies of the male body, Screening the Male also includes an analysis by Adam Knee of gender inversion in Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), in the form of a dialectic between female aggression and Eastwood's "male hysteria." This piece, which epitomizes the book's use of the male star's body as a source of sexual and cultural complexity, also provides an interesting comparison with Paul Smith's Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Smith's book constitutes a major effort to treat a star seriously in the light of contemporary studies of the representation of the body and the contrast between the "real" body of the actor and "reel" body on the screen, both ree(a)ls being both inevitably different and inexorably linked together. Smith breaks new ground not only through the depth and extent of his serious study of Eastwood but also through his method of connecting a broad range of cultural