| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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Textual Application
While the critical background on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Marilyn Monroe is useful for exploring a historical trend in feminist film theory which treats the sex goddess variably as abject figure, commodity fetish, or a projection of racial superiority, at times empowered, and always ambivalent, I will now illustrate one example of a direction this critical discussion will take through another blonde sex goddess: Mae West. Pamela Robertson, in her article, “ ‘The Kinda Comedy That Imitates Me’: Mae West's Identification with the Feminist Camp,” invokes Joan Riviere's and Mary Anne Doane's idea of the “female masquerade” as she explores Mae West's performance of gay camp as a “female form of aestheticism” (57). This idea of a female aestheticism works well with the cinematic production of the construct of the sex goddess. Although, like earlier feminists, Robertson also weighs the term “excessive femininity” with a negative value, her discussion of Mae West's “masquerade” and its connection to “gay men and women, lesbian and straight” adds a valuable contribution to feminist film theory (“Kinda Comedy” 57). While refusing to recognize that what she calls “stereotypes,” as she refers to images of hyper-feminine women, actually fall outside any sense of societal norms, Robertson uses her idea of stereotypes, in addition to Joan Riviere's theory of “womanliness as masquerade” and Mary Ann Doane's extension of Riviere which describes excessive femininity as a “performative” device used to “deprive stereotypes of their currency” to develop her argument about West's “ironic female masquerade” (“Kinda Comedy” 65).
Like many earlier feminists, Robertson believes that West uses the masquerade to produce an act of the “hyperbolization of the feminine” (“Kinda Comedy” 63). She states that, while