Publisher's Synopsis
"Screening the Male" re-examines the problematic status of masculinity both in Hollywood cinema and feminist film theory. Classical Hollywood cinema has been theoretically established as a vast pleasure machine, manufacturing an idealized viewer through its phallocentric ideological apparatus. Feminist criticism has shown how difficult it is for the female viewer to resist becoming implicated in this representational system. But the theories have overlooked the significance of the problem itself - of the masculine motivation at the core of the system. Little attention has been paid to the problems arising from the easily recognized masculine "norm" equated with activity, voyeurism, sadism, fetishism and story, set alongside the female subject, associated with passivity, exhibitionism, masochism, narcissism and spectacle. In this scheme the power, stability and wholeness of masculine subjectivity seems unquestioned and universal, but the essays here explore those male characters, spectators, and performers who occupy positions conventionally encoded as "feminine" in Hollywood narrative and question just how secure that orthodox male position is.
