The Search for the Neuter: Sexual Difference and the Status of the Subject in Contemporary Films, Masculine and Feminine

The Search for the Neuter: Sexual Difference and the Status of the Subject in Contemporary Films, Masculine and Feminine Marie-Claire Ropars The neuter, the neuter, how strangely that resonates with me. Maurice Blanchor, L'Entretien infini (1969) While there are male characters in Esther, these characters have never ceased to be played by girls, with all the propriety of their sex. It has been all the easier for the girls to do this as the garments of the Persians and the Jews of ancient times were long gowns which hung down to the ground. Jean Racine, Esther, Préface (1689) MY MAIN THESIS STEMS FROM the confusion which assumptions both identity- and gender-linked may cause in a topic bearing upon questions of sexual identity. This coupling of ideas does not go without questioning, for two divergent reasons. First, it appears to link the possibility of identity to a being in sexuality, and this peculiarly restricts the theoretical field of the very concept of identity. Secondly, and the consequence is just as problematical to my mind, it invites us to give precedence to the criterion of personal identification, or a reference to the possibility of being oneself, in order to apprehend the experience of individuals, elsewhere sexually defined. Even if we are engaged in questioning the difference of the sexes and studying the representations which come to cloak or exalt it, is it necessary to use a test paradigm based on the assumption of a becoming-subject , one which would control the demand to be, in the feminine as in the masculine ? The risk would be that of replacing a sociologically based ideology with another, inspired by philosophy. Without wishing to eschew the area of the study—depictions of men and women in men's and women's films since the New Wave—I would like to bring another hypothesis into play and into the debate. It is in the form of three propositions, expressed bluntly for the moment. 1) Writing—whether literary or film writing—and more broadly the aesthetic act, does not fall within the domain of the subject but of die neuter person—to be defined as such. 2) Today certain films by women, from Agnès Varda to Laetitia Masson, 122 Spring 2002 ROPARS contribute in a particularly original way to a critique of the idea of subject, a way which could lend itself to an invention of the neuter: the example given precedence here is A vendre (Masson, 1998). 3) This peculiarity is clearly not to be explained by a feminine specificity of so-called women's cinema. It appears and develops in conscious or unconscious reaction to a fact of cinematography of the dominant tendency, issuing no doubt from the new wave of the 1960s, that of Truffaut, Chabrol and later of Jean Eustache. This is not to be confused with the new cinema tested simultaneously by Resnais, Varda or even Godard. The latter searched for new forms of montage, in which discursiveness would not be confused with the embodiment of a subject, while the former and their posterity built a model of the subjective quest, for a masculine protagonist in search of his identity. The female figures served as auxiliary to the identity realisation of the hero and were effective because sexually oüier. Descending from a long line, the most exemplary instance of this today is doubtless Ma vie sexuelle by Arnaud Desplechin (19%). These Üiree hypotheses diverge widely in status. The first, the hypothesis of the neuter, is one of principle and is treated theoretically. The two that follow are parcellary and rest on examples treated fragmentarily; alone they do not constitute a representative sample. Here the analysis extends and questions the theory more than it illustrates or substantiates it. This does not amount, however , to the opposing of a counter model to a model supposed to be dominant, but rather to sketching the break lines in certain concepts of reference, which could easily obstruct the progress of further reflection. It is just as well if, today, women who make films are spearheading this critical undertaking. In so doing, they are motors for the generating of inventive film forms, in...