Interrogating the Look of the Gaze: Theorizing a Latina Cine-subjectivity

Abstract

Abstract: This article concerns sexual object choice, transgender subjectivities and emancipatory heterosexuality as imaged in three films: The House of the Spirits (1993), I Like It Like That (1994) and Mi Vida Loca (1994). The author argues, through her examination of the three films, for cinematic ways to refocus and interrogate the look and gender of the gaze, thereby envisioning what the author theorizes as a Latina cinematic subjectivity. The idea of a Latina cinematic subject is presented in order to articulate how at particular moments in the films an autonomous Latina subjectivity is created through narrative and mise-en-scène. It is at these narrative and aesthetic moments that the characters look back at the objectifying gaze, thereby creating a cinematic sexual subjectivity for the characters and a model of agency for the culturally resistant spectator who is doing the looking. The House of the Spirits points to the contradiction of sexual object choice and female desire; I Like It Like That reveals the performative and fluid possibilities of gender, as well as the hybridity of black and Latino cultures; and Mi Vida Loca reflects the struggle for agency in Chicana heterosexual relationships and in their material lives. The author argues that the three portrayals begin important cultural work in the rethinking of sexualities, as they unthink the rigidity of monosexuality, destabilize normative conceptions of gender and reinvigorate agency and egalitarianism in heterosexual relations.

Keywords:

• Latina
• Chicana
• film
• sexuality
• gaze
• subjectivity
• spectatorship

Notes

¹Proposition 187 was proposed and passed in the 1995 California state election. The proposition's goal was to regulate mostly Mexican immigration to California by limiting the rights of undocumented workers in California and to discourage the crossing of the Mexico–California border outside of ‘legal’ channels. Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts provides a fine example of the use, deployment and ramifications of the cultural discourses that gave birth to and materialized the proposition (Lowe 1996: 174, 187).

²Early feminist scholarship about film argues for a destruction of pleasure through narrative and aesthetic techniques or a refocus from the male phallocentric gaze (see, for example, Mulvey 1974). Later scholarship, however, argues the opposite. For example, Teresa de Lauretis writes: ‘feminist work in film should not be anti-narrative or anti-oedipal but quite the opposite. It should be narrative and oedipal with a vengeance … with and against narrative in order to represent not just a female desire … but working, instead, to represent the duplicity of the contradiction of the female subject in it’ (Lauretis 1987: 108).

³There is, therefore, a distinction I am making between the ‘gaze’ and the ‘look’. I agree with film and cultural critic Ann Kaplan that ‘the gaze is active: the subject bearing the gaze is not interested in the object per se, but consumed with his own anxieties, which are inevitably intermixed with desire. [The object of this gaze] is a threat to the subject's autonomy and security and thus must be placed, rationalized and, by a circuitous route, denied’. Kaplan further states that the gaze is ‘not a relation or a process’, but, rather, an exercise in enjoying the scopophiliac pleasure of looking at the Other, which only the subject gazing enjoys. By contrast, the look, or reversing the look through interrogation as I have suggested, opens up a space for a new set of looking relations, where the subject designated as the Other gains control over the look, control over representation and ‘looks back’ (to use the phrase of cultural critic Kobena Mercer) (Kaplan 1997: xviii–xxi). For oppositional looking relations theory in film and the cinema, see hooks (1993), Mercer (1991) and Pribram (1989).

⁴The term ‘Latino’ as a political collective appears in other texts (see Augenbraum and Stavans 1993: xxii; Noriega and López 1995: ix–xxii). There is a discussion of this in Flores and Benmayor (1997). The authors use the term ‘Latino’ as a way to express a ‘cultural citizenship’ of Chicanos, Latinos and those of Latin American heritage in the United States, to articulate and name ‘a range of social practices which, taken together, claim and establish a distinct social space evolving and developing new forms, contributing to an emergent Latino consciousness and social and political development’ (Flores and Benmayor 1997: 1).

⁵Allende's use of magical realism is not under discussion here, though it is important to avow that this narrative technique largely informed the book, is a reoccurring trope of Latin American culture, literature and art, and is non-existent in Bill August's film version. On the connection between magical realism and the work of Allende, see Hart (1989).

⁶Judith Mayne argues that one way to disrupt the positioning of women as the object through the keyhole is to have women, both literally and figuratively, on both sides of that keyhole (Mayne 1990: 9).

⁷‘Herstory in the Making’

⁸I place the ‘hetero’ part in parentheses to bring attention to the fact that I do not wish to place or privilege this identity as normative, thereby not being critical of its construction and institutional subjugation of same-sex sexual relationships. However, it remains an important critical project to theorize, envision heterosexual relationships and desire that produces subjectivity for spectators. I have borrowed the concepts of homo- and heteronarrative from cultural critic Judith Root. Root describes heteronarrative as the workings of narrative that convert difference into a narrative of sexual sameness (Root 1996: 159–61).

⁹Ramírez writes: ‘since the early 1990s, the figure of the pachuca has largely been replaced in Chicana cultural production and U.S. popular culture by that of her heir in the late twentieth century and the twenty-first, the Latina gang member. In 1994, this figure garnered widespread attention with the release of Allison Anders's film Mi Vida Loca’. On the historical and cultural significance of Mexican American women in urban life, including mention of the lady zoot suit movement as a precursor representation to the film Mi Vida Loca, see Ramírez (2009: 137).

¹⁰The idea of film performing cultural work and acting as a social technology is central here. For a discussion of the use of film as a social technology—that is, as an apparatus which produces, deploys and affects the material interpretation of these differences—see Lauretis (1987: ix).