Mary Anne Doane The Masquerade Essay

Apply Doane’s theory of female masquerade to a film listed on the module schedule, assessing its disruption of the gaze in the film.
Mary Ann Doane’s theory of the masquerade inherently usurps the binary in constructing the gaze in terms of being active and passive of Laura Mulvey’s theory of scopophilia and to-be-looked-at-ness in classical Hollywood narrative . Mulvey’s theory is pivotal around the assumption the gaze of the hypothetical audience is structured around a masculine view point as facilitated by the cinematic apparatus such as the mise en scene, lighting, costuming and so on. By essence of this assumption, the masculine view point is one of actively consuming the image of women on screen, while the image of the woman is passive in being consumed. Doane seeks to assess the image of the woman and the role of the character in portraying this image, and dissect ways in which women on screen can be seen to assume this image and use it in favour of social gains though the process of masquerade.
The Masquerade, essentially the process of women over emphasising their femininity to disguise their true motives, denotes the presence of a dissonance between self, projected self, and ideal self, as well as reaffirms femininity as a constantly negotiated construct in ideology . In Dorothy
Bubbles’s understanding of the gap between who she is and the femininity she needs to present to get what she wants work together to disrupt the binary of the active and passive structure of the gaze. Although she does this as a façade, the gaze is very clearly disrupted given we know Bubbles uses her femininity to over exemplify herself as an object to be looked at by men. Therefore, she is active in constructing herself to be looked at as a means of gaining the most traction in her