Male Gaze A Perpetual Motion Analysis

The Confinement of Male Gaze: A Perpetual Motion?

1. Introduction

Directed by Stephen Daldry in 2002, the Hours centers three female protagonists in different decades, who are juxtaposed and interconnected with each other. All of them live in material plenty, however, fail to escape from the pressure from the family and society. Besides the fact that one of the heroines, Virginia Woolf is a feminist icon, the meticulous portray of female subjectivity, marriages, and desires also indicates the feminist subject of the film. These characteristics are echoed by the Perpetual Motion, a Chinese film made in the next year, focusing on the inner struggles of four bourgeois females in Chinese modern landscape. The director Ning Ying, co-scriptwriters

The heroines in both films also stand out for having remarkable professions, including the real estate, movie star, artist and writer, which is symbolic for defining women as the “maker of meaning”, rather than merely the “bearer of meaning” (Mulvey 305). Among these professions, the writer is outstanding for not only “narrat[ing] their life” (Marchetti 199), but implying their contributions to challenging the language system developed by males, which is quite significant in Mulvey’s view, because the language of patriarchy leads to the unconscious suppressing females. Although Laura Braun in the Hours leads a childbearing life, she keeps reading the novella of Woolf rather than the works by other male writers, which emphasizes on the significance of female's intervention in patriarchal language system and females as the important creator of the

Different from the heterosexual relationships embodied by the good-bye kiss between Laura and her husband as a ritual, which although problematic, represents the normal order, these same-sex kisses, according to Judith Halberstam, act as a disruption to the domestic “schedule of normativity” in the definiton of patriarchal system (Pidduck 58). The lesbian relationship between Clarissa and her girlfriend is even more remarkable as a modern “normativity”, while the homoerotic desires conversely becomes a disruption of normal life, indicating the increasing visibility of normative lesbian lifestyle in modern cinema. On the other hand, these same-sex intimacies, from the perspective of lesbian feminists, like Jackie Stacey, establish the association between the identifications of female spectators with the female stars by offering them homoerotic pleasure, rather than reducing their fascination with the idealized other to male gazes and male desires