(G)Aping Women; Or, When A Man Plays The Fetish

To gape (intransitive verb): to gaze stupidly or in open-mouthed surprise or wonder. Gape (noun): unfilled space or extent.

—Merriam Webster's

The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me.

—Roland Barthes¹

This paper began as a look at my attraction to Cary Grant. But it evolved into an analysis of Lucille Ball's nose. I wanted to ask: what happens when a female spectator looks at a man with desire? When a man plays the fetish, is his presumably heterosexual female spectator "aping" or imitating "man" looking upon his specular image, thus mimicking the cultural male gaze? Does her "ape" therefore reveal the gape in the classic Hollywood text of female desire—or does it reflect a woman's specificity?

But I also wanted to ask: What distinguishes a male from a female fetish body, "the body of desire," to quote Christian Metz, whose "presence" stands in for the absence reproduced by the cinematic apparatus and its image?² In its classic psychoanalytic definition, the fetish is a substitute for the missing maternal phallus, enabling the child to disavow his traumatic sight of "lack."³ Fetishism itself, as Laura Mulvey writes, is that "sequence of events" initiated specifically by male castration anxiety and its disavowal of sexual difference.⁴ So can a man play the fetish? Contemporary discussions about masculinity's representation in Hollywood suggest that men do, but with a difference.⁵

To be "a man," the male screen figure must project narcissistic ideality and control, as Steve Neale notes in his study of masculine spectacle. The larger-than-life masculine ideal exudes a confident "intact" ego, which distinguishes a glamorous male from his female-fetish counterpart, whose tie to "lack" yields "little intrinsic value."⁶ Marc Vernet writes that "she" is but a "sign of an attempt to represent in the form of an object something that has disappeared or indeed never existed [the female phallus]."⁷ The female fetish is ever presented through cinematic shots of body fragmentation alternating with those that display her body's over-valuation through female masquerade. Cultural femininity's masquerade preserves the male gazer's disavowal, privileging "belief over knowledge," Metz concludes.⁸

Yet when a man plays the fetish, his particular "body of desire" complicates the cycle of disavowal and belief. The male figure cannot be articulated through a female-style fragmentation, but rather must reconfirm male narcissism's "construction of an ideal ego," in Neale's words.⁹ Still, if the male body is rarely subject to castration's "'set of processes' tied to . . . figural lack,"¹⁰ the male fetish must necessarily bear his own contradictions, hinting at its glamorous masquerade. So, linked to notions of feminine duplicity, the man who plays the fetish is the ultimate coquette: a narcissistic perfectionist who also undermines the Hollywood masculine ideal by hinting at erotic ambiguity and bisexuality. Through the crisis of cultural masculinity that ensues, the figure of the male fetish mirrors the visual ironies of the female spectator.

These ironies I conceptualize as a "gap(e)," the figural "O" as "unfilled space or extent" that marks the impossibility of women's visual desire but also its potential placeholder in the Hollywood entertainment text. The female (g)ape might be dramatized by a woman starring in a film, who stares at the mesmerizing male fetish of her dreams with a wide (g)aping mouth. More ubiquitously, however, the female (g)ape is what women in front of the screen experience, not only in the implicit absence of their desire but in its reminder through the (g)aping look itself. The (g)ape is an ironic figure that encodes the visual conundrum of the female spectator as she peers at her desired object, in this case, a male fetish, which thus projects back the female spectator's own bisexuality and erotic oscillation.

While the male fetish may represent bisexual desire, so, too, does the female look. As Mary Ann Doane has explored in her groundbreaking work on female masquerade, the female look is inherently bisexual—women "vamp it up," or cross...