| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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Thus, in developing her theory of Mae West's use of gay male camp, Robertson reiterates the view of many social constructionist gender theorists. Robertson fails to note, however, that many heterosexually iden-tified women, as well as gay men, already find an aesthetic pleasure in performing the female aesthetic of hyper-femininity without having to appropriate it from elsewhere, as Robertson does when she appropriates camp from gay male culture for feminist use. In other words, Mae West's close association with gay male culture doesn’t necessarily have to make her into a drag queen performing a parody of herself.
When attempting to capture West's own “double mimesis” and give West agency, Robertson writes that “West was simultaneously sexy and a parody of sex; she was both a sex object and a sexual subject” (“Kinda Comedy” 63). In opposition, I will assert that West, and the other sex goddesses that this book will address (Jean Harlow, Lana Turner, and Jayne Mansfield), are women who resist objectification at almost every turn: they in fact turn ideas in both the popular and even feminist imagination about their “objectification” into those of their own empowerment, and they do so by seductively turning back onto their viewers, or so-called “subjects,” the very objectification they are thought to embody, thereby effectively objectifying the viewers themselves. This idea of objectifying the viewer will be developed through a reapplication of Lacanian gaze dynamics to film, one which overturns Mulvey's theory of the gaze, where the gaze is conceived of as only a one-way flow from spectator (subject) to screen image (object). Film theorist Todd McGowan has readdressed Mulvey's theory as a “Foucauldization” of Lacan, and in an article elsewhere1, I have further developed McGowan's correction of Mulvey and applied it to screen images of women to show how they are active agents in the construction and control of their own spectatorship. Additionally, this work will seek to develop and apply elements of affect theory in order to show