Spectatorship: Shifting Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Media eds. by Roxanne Samer and William Whittington (review)

An edited collection made up of articles previously published from a single journal is a tricky undertaking. On the one hand, the quality of the contributions is assured through prior peer review. On the other, the scope of selection is limited, leading to potential issues of currency and relevance in the field as a whole.

For their collection subtitled Shifting Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Media, Roxanne Samer and William Whittington have selected seventeen articles from Spectatorship, a refereed journal established in 1982 and published by the University of Southern California. In their introduction they situate the journal in the field of film and media studies. Although I am not an expert in film studies, I would agree with the editors that Spectatorship has added to the critical conversation that began and is carried on in leading journals such as Screen, Jump Cut, and Camera Obscura. It also has appropriately broadened its focus to include critical analyses of other media (television, music) as well as production and reception. The collection is intended to capture these shifts in the field by providing a historical perspective in relation to analyses that draw specifically on feminist and queer theory. Although a number of the articles are of interest and remain relevant, I do not believe that the collection, by virtue of its design, is able to capture such major shifts in sufficient breadth or depth. Moreover, given the late entry of film studies to the television and new media studies game, and the fact that most audience and fan studies research has been published elsewhere, the few articles that do address issues of reception are not representative.

The collection is divided into five sections. In the introduction, Samer and Whittington clearly and succinctly explain the purpose and focus of each; however, as I explain below, more editorial engagement was needed to make this collection work. The first section, "Revisiting Film Subjects and Pleasures of Cinema," is what one might expect: a look back at work published in Spectatorship in the 1980s and 1990s. The authors of the four chapters included in the section critically examine gender, race, and sexuality, often through reworking influential feminist and gay film criticism from the previous decade. Amy Lawrence's chapter, a textual analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's early film Blackmail, looks at how sound and voice are used to signify a feminist resistance to the patriarchal order but ultimately constrains and dismisses it. Stephen Tropriano examines the erotic spectacle of the male body in three films by Andy Warhol that starred Joe Dallesandro. In borrowing from gay pornography, these films challenge the heteronormativity of the gaze. Yet while the characters played by Dallesandro are sexualized, they do not express sexual desire. Moreover gay sexual acts are never shown on screen. In the end the films diffuse gay sexuality and desire, the result of which is the "shortchanging" of gay spectators (72). The only article that deals with reception is by Anna Everett, who examines media criticism of racialized representation in the alternative black press in the 1930s. She looks specifically at the response to Imitation of Life, which she describes as the first "interracial buddy film" that starred a black actor (48). Most interestingly, at least one critic captured the responses of black audiences and the identifications and pleasures to be gained from a film that was liberal in some ways but still overtly racist.

Part 2, "Speaking Up and Sounding Out," consists of essays that do not cohere into a theme that provides a clear rationale for their republication. The editors claim that the first two chapters focus on the "sonal elements" that are often ignored in film studies. In fact, only the first chapter, by Scott. D. Paulin, looks at soundtracks and the ways in which gay or bisexuality is both implied and constrained. The second, by Christie Milliken, as the editors themselves note, is...