Alternative Gazes, Aesthetics, and Affects in ILove Dick

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Notes

Notes

1 In this essay, I argue that I Love Dick enacts and performatively resolves the vexed histories of conceptions of the gaze that challenge the normative male gaze, as first theorized by Laura Mulvey (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen). Feminist film theorists from Teresa de Lauretis and E. Ann Kaplan to I Love Dick co-creator Soloway have engaged questions of whether a woman can be the bearer of a “female gaze” and a man its object, or whether subject/object hierarchies can be collapsed in a “mutual gaze.” Critical debates about the possibility of non-normative gazes fall along lines of affirmed individual agency versus delineated structural constraints. The series suggests that while individuals might assert a female gaze or realize a mutual gaze in a particular context and moment, patriarchal power structures render such instances anomalies rather than sustained alternatives. Soloway argues that the protagonism affirmed through non-normative gazes nonetheless inspires others to claim subjectivity, which has a cumulatively revolutionary effect (Herman, “How to Adapt the Impossible,” in The Ringer). By the final episode of I Love Dick, the protagonist’s assertion of a female gaze has invited a performative response through which community members achieve both a mutual gaze and “wide-angle vision”—a perceptual practice drawn from wilderness experience that aims to collapse subject/object distinctions and create inclusive awareness of an environment as an integrated whole (Bent, “The Wild and Woolly Worlds of Playwright Sibyl Kempson: The Experimental Theatremaker Takes Her Cues From the Natural World, the Subconscious, and Feminist Thought in Her Genre-Defining Works,” in American Theatre).

2 Benson-Allott, “No Such Thing Yet: Questioning the Female Gaze,” in Film Quarterly, p. 66.

3 Ibid.

4 Chris Kraus’ 1997 work I Love Dick, a blend of epistolary novel, confessional memoir, and feminist art criticism, sold few copies until it was reissued in 2006. Since then, “through word of mouth and the endorsement of some influential writers and critics, a new generation of readers has discovered the novel” (Blair, Chris Kraus, Female Antihero: She Turned Her Failures as a Filmmaker and in Her Romantic Relationships into the Boundary-Breaking Autobiographical Novel “I Love Dick,” in New Yorker), and it has garnered both a (white) feminist cult following and significant scholarly attention—for example, several critics theorize and respond to Kraus’ text in a 2017 special issue of Journal of Visual Art Practice.

5 The series’ “female gaze” is the focus of even mainstream media reviews of I Love Dick, including Andrea Mandell’s review in USA Today and Hank Stuever’s review in The Washington Post.

6 Mulvey, Visual Pleasure.

7 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, pp. 8–9.

8 Soloway, The Female Gaze Master Class.

9 Kaplan, Is the Gaze Male? in Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, p. 330.

10 Soloway, Female Gaze.

11 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 17.

12 Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect, p. 153.

13 Ibid.

14 Benson-Allott, No Such, p. 67.

15 Mulvey, Visual Pleasure.

16 Quoted in Herman, How to Adapt.

17 Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, pp. 14–15.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., p. 598.

20 The men’s movement that Faludi disparages, with “its dusted-off copies of Grimms’ Fairy Tales and its caveman clichés,” is the mythopoetic men’s movement that received heavy media coverage in the 1990s and that continues in various forms to this day (see, for example, the website of the international ManKind Project < https://mankindproject.org>). In the 1990s,

newspapers, magazines, and television reported that thousands of middle-aged, middle-class white men were retreating to rustic settings to share their feelings, to cry, hug, drum, dance, tell poems and fairy tales, and enact primitive rituals. The men were supposedly trying to get in touch with the inner “Wildman” and other masculine archetypes, as urged by movement leader Robert Bly, a famous poet and author of the 1991 bestseller Iron John (Schwalbe, Mythopoetic Men’s Work as a Search for Communitas, in The Politics of Manhood, p. 186).

I argue that Devon’s ritual directly responds to the movement’s “implicit critique of men’s lives in American society,” something not addressed in the media coverage (Ibid., 186).

21 Faludi, Stiffed, p. 41.

22 Papaioannou, Nowhere.

23 Faludi, Stiffed, p. 15.

24 The international ManKind Project, for instance, offers “New Warrior Training Adventures,” weekend-long rituals of “male initiation and self-examination” through “the ‘hero’s journey’ of classical literature and myth” (as advertised on the organization’s website, 6 September 2018 <https://mankindproject.org>).

25 Bly, Iron John, p. 19.

26 Thompson, Performance Affects, p. 156.

27 Kaiser, “Drum is Still Beating for the Men’s Movement,” in Chicago Tribune.

28 Rohlinger, “Eroticizing Men: Cultural Influences on Advertising and Male Objectification,” in Sex Roles, p. 66–70.

29 Ibid.

30 Faludi, Stiffed, p. 34.

31 Ibid., p. 38.

32 Ibid., p. 599.

33 Soloway, Female Gaze.

34 Ibid.

35 Mulvey, Visual Pleasure

36 The term mutual gaze appears with different resonances across disciplines. In developmental psychology, for instance, it is bi-directional looking “whereby both parties concurrently focus their attention on each other” and signal “the reciprocal nature of the affiliation” (Nurmsoo, Einav, and Hood, “Best Friends: Children Use Mutual Gaze to Identify Friendships in Others, in Developmental Science,” p. 417), while in tourism research, the term mutual gaze names a reciprocity between “tourist” and “local” gazes (Maoz, “The Mutual Gaze,” in Annals of Tourism Research, p. 221).

37 Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze, p. 292–303.

38 Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, pp. 103–4.

39 Quoted in Bent, Wild and Woolly, p.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Kraus, I Love Dick.

43 Syme, Rachel. “The Liberating Obsessiveness of I Love Dick,” in New Republic.

44 Ryan, TV Review: “I Love Dick” on Amazon Starring Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Hahn, in Variety.

45 Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, pp. 84–85.

46 Thompson, Performance Affects, p. 139.

47 Ibid., pp. 137–140.

48 Ibid., p. 136.

49 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, p. 3.

50 Thompson, Performance Affects, p. 143–145.

51 Ibid., p. 153.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., p. 157.

54 Ibid.

55 Quoted in Adams, “Runner Defends Letting Period Bleed Freely at London Marathon: Women's Bodies Don't Exist for Public Consumption,” in People.

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Kristina Deffenbacher

Kristina Deffenbacher is Professor of English at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her teaching and writing tend to focus on the relationship between cultural dynamics and textual form in locations ranging from the Victorian novel and Irish literature to urban fantasy fiction and contemporary television.