Against the Lesbian Gaze in Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)

Abstract

Ever since the publication of Laura Mulvey´s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) very few concepts have been as widely contested by feminist scholars as the idea of the patriarchal gaze. Mulvey’s thesis was that women on screen are the object of the male gaze, an idea supported by traditional psychoanalytic binarisms that associate man with subjective, active desire and woman with passive lack, negating the possibility of female desire – and spectatorship – as such. According to both Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane (1982), the “over-proximity” of the woman to her own image negates the distance required for the voyeuristic and fetishist pleasures found in cinema. However, this account of the scopophilic gaze does not consider the position of the quintessential desiring female subject: the lesbian, that “privileged site of enquiry” for feminist film theory that is both subject and object of desire. It was not until 1991 that Teresa de Lauretis started to locate the coordinates for this desiring (lesbian) subject within film studies beyond the traditional opposition object/subject. In her essay “Film and the Visible,” based on Sheila McLaughlin´s She Must Be Seeing Things (1987), she draws on Jean Laplanche and Bertrand Pontalis´ notion of fantasy as a setting of desire in order to describe how the lesbian spectator might find pleasure adopting any of the roles available in the cinematic fantasy, “looking on, outside the fantasy scenario and nonetheless involved.” (1991, p.96) With these ideas in mind, I will argue whether Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) constitutes a mise-en-scène of lesbian fantasy, or whether it imposes a privileged voyeurism in consonance with Mulvey´s account of the dominant male gaze, becoming a text contaminated by the director´s own fantasies of lesbian sex, a “commercial”, aestheticized portrait of lesbianism fitting into what Monique Wittig called “the straight mind” (1992).