possibility of female gaze/sanctus/mulvey

     While reading our most recent assignments (Mulvey, Silverman, and Lauretis), my mind keeps drifting back to the Barbara Hammer film we watched a couple weeks ago - Sanctus.  The found footage of x-rays is reimagined by Hammer with the incorporation of music and lighting effects to reveal our scopophilia as humans, and to perhaps make the voyeur uncomfortable in their pursuit of seeing.  After watching Sanctus and discovering that Hammer is a “lesbian artist,” I wondered what makes this piece feminist, or if it is feminist at all. 

            Mulvey’s critical exploration of scopophilia addresses both the desire to look at and the desire to be seen.  In looking at traditional narrative film, it is suggested that women are not only what audiences want to look at, but also desire to be gazed at in this way – the entire concept of scopophilia is therefore gendered, as is also expressed in Silverman’s discussion of the male gaze in cinema.  However, when Mulvey argues that there is in fact a narcissistic aspect to scopophilia, she suggests that the viewer (male or female) identifies with the woman being viewed.  Human desire to see ourselves exposed, as in Sanctus, and human desire as expressed historically via media, cinema, literature, and art to see women specifically exposed, may reveal that the human body is a gendered concept, too.  Because female bodies produce life and arouse sexual curiosity in our society, maybe viewers are subconsciously more apt to identify with a woman on camera than a man.  The cultural stereotype or assumption that heterosexual men are intrigued by the thought of two women touching each other sexually, as well as the artistic pattern of female bodies as subjects both suggest something “pure” or “natural” about the lack of the phallus, and perhaps perceive the phallus as an interruption of something beautiful.  Which is perhaps why some may argue that pornography objectifies women to the extent that they are not relevant/valued/represented in pornographic videos at all, because all focus is emphasized on the phallus. 

            Because it is unclear to me as to whether or not all the bodies shown in Sanctus are female, it bends these previous conceptions of gender that the film-viewer might hold.  In this way, I think the piece is feminist – it portrays some “obviously,” culturally signified “women” (skeletons applying makeup and gazing in mirrors), but also incorporates body ambiguity – at the end of the day, skeletons are both male and female.  The music is also of an almost religious nature, something like choir or gospel music, which presents the bodies as holy and spiritually relevant.  However, the juxtaposition of the music with the images that feel overwhelmingly intrusive and inexpressibly degrading also questions what we as a society uphold as possibly virginal, true, pure, and beautiful.  I think this is Hammer’s commentary on societal conceptions of what is a woman, what physically makes a woman, and how these two converge.