ALICE HAYLETT BRYAN
In 2012 two North American independent films were released that featured female protagonists carrying out surgical procedures in contemporary interpretations of the mad-doctor horror sub-genre. Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) in Richard Bates Jr.’s Excision (2012) and Mary (Katharine Isabelle) in Jen and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary (2012) are two very different characters; one is a teenage outsider with an unconventional surgery and blood fetish in a sexually repressed middle-class suburban town, whilst the other is a rape victim and medical student in a world of prostitution, pole dancing and body modification. However, both Pauline and Mary’s use of surgery can be read as a search for control over their lives; that through exploring and manipulating the human body, these two women seek to comprehend their position within a society that constantly alienates them. This chapter will explore the potential of these films to challenge issues of power and heteronormativity in contemporary sex and society, arguing that the depiction of women as surgeons in these films allows for a dissection of white, patriarchal, middle-class values. Using the work of the gender theorist Jack Halberstam, it will explore what happens when women pick up the surgical scalpel and begin to penetrate instead of being penetrated, asking whether this act still operates within a heteronormative structural logic, or whether it potentially allows for a queer interpretation of the penetrating female protagonist.
In April 2010 the American College of Surgeons published a report on the surgical workforce of the United States, in which it was stated that in 2008 women counted for only 21% of surgeons working in America (2010: 16). If those employed in gynaecology and obstetrics are discounted (the only sector where female surgeons nearly equal the male total at 47%), the figure drops to just 13% (2010: 16–17). Even though the number of women in surgical training outnumbers those currently practicing, in the near future men still look to outnumber women in the operating room two to one. Surgery, it appears, is very much a male domain. The same can be said for the representation of surgeons in horror cinema, where the role is almost entirely a male one. From Henry Frankenstein (
Frankenstein, James Whale, 1931) to the Mantle twins (
Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg, 1988) and Dr. Heiter (
The Human Centipede: First Sequence, Tom Six, 2009), the history of the mad doctor is that of a male antagonist and his victims or creations of both sexes. Given this overt prominence of male characters in the sub-genre of the mad-doctor film – as well as in current society – the release of two horror films that portray female surgeons in 2012 is noteworthy. In a continuation of research carried out on the original male manifestations of the character on film, this chapter will look to
Excision and
American Mary to explore the representation of gender and sexuality in contemporary North American horror cinema, revealing how and why the deconstruction of these categories is still a necessary and insightful process.
In American Mary, protagonist Mary is a surgical student struggling to pay her bills. After applying for a job in a strip club she gets pulled into a world of extreme body modification surgery. In an attempt to further her career she attends a party hosted by the male surgical residents from her hospital and university, where she is drugged and brutally raped by her lecturer. With help from the strip club owner Billy, she organises the abduction of her attacker and then proceeds to torture him slowly by practicing different extreme body modification techniques on him. Forced to drop out of medical school after the rape, Mary begins to make a good living from carrying out surgical procedures, attracting clients from all over the world. However, her new life begins to unravel around her and she is eventually killed by the husband of one of her patients.
The world that surrounds Mary is one of sex, power, blood and filth. Interior locations are dark and gloomy, whilst the outside world too is often grey and cold, and indeed rarely depicted. Apart from Mary’s grandmother and a police detective, all other lead characters in the film are in some way counter to the ‘norm’; either they have extreme body modifications, work in the sex industry, are part of a crime outfit or abuse their positions of power. This is in stark contrast to the surroundings of Pauline in Excision, which is one of middle-class white American suburban life. The young social outcast Pauline wants to be a surgeon so that she can help her sister Grace (Ariel Winter) who suffers from cystic fibrosis. However, her aspirations of a medical career run a little deeper, as Pauline’s fantasy life is dominated by her surgery and blood fetishes, the colourful depictions of which stand as a counter to the sterile suburbia that surrounds her. Her mother (played by Traci Lords) attempts to instil in her daughters an all-American wholesome life of school, church, cotillion classes and good manners. However, under this façade of the American dream lies an unhappy marriage, troublesome parent/child relationships and an inability to communicate with those they love.
Pauline is a teenage misfit. With her androgynous clothing and unkempt hair she goes against everything her mother is trying to enforce. Throughout the film she questions her own sanity, and makes constant requests to her parents for psychiatric help. Not taking her pleas seriously they first send her to a local minister for guidance, and by the time they agree to proper medical care it is too late. During the film the viewer is constantly questioning whether Pauline’s declarations of mental illness are just an act – a cry for attention in contrast with her sister’s physical disease – or a real need for care. However, the film’s climax shockingly provides an answer when upon hearing that her sister needs a lung transplant, the untrained teenager kidnaps another young girl and attempts to perform the operation, killing both patients.
There are a number of key themes that feature in both American Mary and Excision, but they deal with these themes in very different ways. Both works can be seen to tackle the issue of being a woman in a patriarchal society, and the relationship between sex, power and control that comes with this position. Whereas in American Mary the sexual objectification of women is overt through the location of the strip club and the predatory behaviour of the surgeons, in Excision it is manifest in the subtle enforcement of traditional gender roles that Pauline struggles against. In her suburban world men go out to work, whilst women stay at home to raise the children, with no alternative to this lifestyle offered. These films can also be seen to comment on male and female sexuality and non-normative sexual tastes such as blood play and surgical fetishes. However, what links all these different themes together is the manner in which the idea of monstrosity is presented, and how this can be seen subvert or reinforce heteronormative gender roles in modern American society.
Mad Doctors, Sex and Violence
Rhona Berenstein (1996) has argued that traditionally the sub-genre of the mad-doctor film displays homosocial discourse – the relationships between men – behind a scant façade of heterosexual desire. Drawing on films released during the peak of the sub-genre in the 1930s, she contends that the classic mad doctor is obsessed with the masculine body, caring little about helping the sick and instead holding deistic aspirations about the creation and manipulation of the human (usually male) form. Berenstein contends that this obsession with the male body can be read as a displacement of the mad doctors’ unspoken homosexual desire. She argues that although female victims and monsters do feature in these films, their role is subsumed to that of a mediator and expresser of fear – a means to symbolise horror – whilst still perpetuating a purely male-to-male discourse. Berenstein’s use of the term ‘homosocial’ to discuss these works is twofold: ‘first, as a combination of the social and erotic charges that bind rivalrous men together in narratives, and second, as a description of the manner in which patriarchy excludes women’ (1996: 128). However, she argues that it would be incorrect to read these films as direct representations of a repressed homosexual voice. Instead, the homosocial exchange visible in these films comes about through the extension of patriarchal power by the attempted erasing of the need for women in the act of procreation. Being a celebration of male-to-male relationships, homosocial discourse is a fundamental part of patriarchy, yet these relationships are also always prohibited to an extent, so that patriarchal society can continue to replicate itself.
Along with Berenstein’s work on the sub-genre, Barbara Creed has also referred to the mad-doctor sub-genre in both
The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) and
Phallic Panic (2005). Creed argues that the true source of monstrosity in these films is the idea of ‘man as womb monster’: the creation of life without the involvement of a woman (2005: 41–67). She contends that in these films it is the doctor who is the true monster, not his creation, by his attempts to generate life through various uncanny uterine scenarios. However, if the mad doctor is a female character, there is no need to attempt to create life, as this is achievable biologically. What, then, makes a female doctor mad? Instead of the creation of life, is it the taking of it?
Excision and
American Mary break from the traditional mad-doctor plot in a number of ways. First there is the presence of willing patients. Apart from her rapist test-subject, those who come to Mary for their body modification surgery respect her and want her help. They are happy with the outcome, and are represented as wanting these changes for themselves, rather than to please others or fulfil any societal ideal, as is the case with most cosmetic surgeries. In her fantasies, Pauline’s patients are in various states of decimation, but there is a never any suggestion of sadism in the scenes. Instead her patients worship her, their bodies willingly submitting to her advances. Critically, too, Pauline’s patients are never truly dead, and even though they may be missing the top of their head, for example, they still remain mobile, entailing that her desires are not strictly necrophilic, but instead bound in the very matter of the body. Pauline’s fantasies are not about creating life; indeed, in one of them she gives birth to a foetus and then destroys it in a micro-wave-like machine. But she does have a desire to help people and to be admired as a figure who can bring back bodies that are on the brink of abject death; treading that dangerous border and going where no others dare. Her desires are to be god-like, but they are not maternally orientated.
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However, the greatest contrast to the traditional mad-doctor film in these contemporary works is their critique of homosocial relationships. On the face of it, American Mary with its rape-revenge narrative and lack of positive male/female or familial relationships could be read as a feminist polemic against patriarchal oppression and sexual violence. The role of intercourse throughout the film aligns with Robert Jensen’s definition of copulation in his radical feminist essay ‘Patriarchal Sex’ from 1987. Jensen argues that in patriarchal culture ‘sex is fucking’, and that to be a man in this culture you must be a male who fucks (1987: 533). For Jensen, fucking is about control; masculine dominance and feminine subservience; it is the eroticisation of power. As the man is the one doing the penetrating, even if he plays at being subordinate, he still holds that which produces the action, the penis. Jensen also draws links between the use of the word ‘fuck’ to denote sex, and its other use to express an act of violence, such as ‘he fucked me over’ or ‘I am going to fuck him up’. Jensen argues:
Sex in patriarchy is fucking. That we live in a world in which people continue to use the same word for sex and violence, and then resist the notion that sex is routinely violent and claim to be outraged when it becomes overtly violent, is testament to the power of patriarchy. In this society, sex and violence are fused to the point of being indistinguishable. (1987: 538)
American Mary is full of fucking in both the sexual and violent sense. Although there is only one direct scene of penetrative intercourse – Mary’s brutal rape – the film depicts sex and sexual desire as something inherently misogynistic. All sexual activity in the film is linked to abuses of power, such as Billy (Antonio Cupo) using his position as an employer to get one of his employees to preform oral sex on him, or the drugging of women at the surgeons’ party. Therefore, these acts could be considered as fucking due to their objectification and violation of another’s body, even though they do not always involve vaginal or anal penetration. This violation is also apparent in the film’s depiction of violence, where retribution and self-defence are achieved through the penetration and manipulation of the human form. Interestingly too, in a foreshadowing of his future rape of Mary, every single time that her lecturer speaks to her, he uses the words ‘fuck’ or ‘fucking’.
Fig. 1: Mary (Katharine Isabelle) is drugged at a party whilst a group of surgeons molest an unconscious woman behind her, in American Mary (2012).
The male surgery staff who dominate Mary’s life are bastions of patriarchal power. They objectify the bodies that they operate on, whether male or female, by calling themselves ‘cutters’, removing the sense of care and empathy usually associated with medical careers. Surgery for these men is another form of fucking, the penetration and therefore control over a body, which puts them in a position of power over life and death. Assuming Mary to be a prostitute due to the money that she has recently earned from her underground surgery work, the surgeons at her teaching hospital invite her to one of their parties. Unbeknownst to Mary, at these gatherings the male doctors hire prostitutes so that they can take part in group sex, with some of the women being drugged so that the men can exploit their powerless bodies. Mary herself is drugged, and whilst the sedative begins to take hold she fails to notice that behind her a barely conscious woman has been hoisted onto a table, penetrated and masturbated over by a group of the doctors cheering each other on and filming the event. The need to drug these women (including Mary), even though they are supposedly consensual sex-workers, suggests that the men enjoy the feeling of power gained over the powerless body. Sex for them – like surgery – is not about emotion, but power. It is a homosocial experience that allows for the exhibition of competitive masculinity; fucking in the presence of other men, enjoying
their company and rivalry more than the drugged person you have penetrated. As one doctors replies when Mary asks him if he is a surgeon: ‘I’m a fucking mother fucker, no seriously babe, I cut people up for a living!’ The mad doctors in
American Mary are not crazed loners working on secret projects, but a group of confident and successful men who have the respect of those around them.
Whereas patriarchy is represented as a depraved threat in American Mary, it is an emasculated obstacle in the life of Pauline, but one that ultimately pulls her under like quicksand. Her father is a pathetic figure in the shadow of her domineering mother, who constantly verbally attacks and demeans him. The other male figures in Pauline’s world are the usual symbols of masculine authority; a high school jock, a maths teacher, her school principle – with portraits of Reagan and Bush on his office wall – and the Minister whom her mother sends her to, but Pauline refuses to submit to the requests of these men. She attempts to control her interactions with them, always trying to have the upper hand and the last word. Instead of commenting directly on the subjugation of women through the homosocial nature of the patriarchal project, Excision reveals the absurdity of Pauline’s position in a male-dominated America where no one will listen to her. It is a world where beauty and conformity are encouraged in women, where – as her sister Grace informs her – boys just care about breasts. Instead of the apathetic males that surround her, it is actually her mother that really attempts to maintain this superficial society. Absurdly, when Pauline nearly drowned as a child and her father saved her by giving her mouth-to-mouth, her mother just scolded him for having a cold sore and infecting her with it. Further to this, instead of encouraging her to become a surgeon she insists that Pauline attend cotillion classes to improve her chances of getting a husband. Pauline’s mother is not a monster, but the world that she perpetuates and encourages her daughters to enter into is perversely horrific.
Pauline’s attempt to take control of her life can be seen in the loss of her virginity. She approaches a young track star called Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) saying that she has decided that she would like to lose her virginity with him. She purchases oral contraception, and she decides the date of their meeting so that she can be menstruating at the time and therefore bring part of her blood play fantasies to life. The young boy is so desperate to have sex with anyone, even though he has a girlfriend, that he agrees to the meeting. Like the surgeons in
American Mary, he does not care who he fucks, he just wants to have sex. However, straight away Pauline emasculates him by inspecting his genitalia and instantly dismissing the extra-large condoms that he stole from his brother, as he is ‘too small for the big kind’. She dictates the sex at first, being on top and in control. As the scene progresses it cuts between their real-life intercourse and Pauline’s simultaneous sexual fantasy. In her mind, as she has sex with him the sheets become drenched in blood. Compared to the novice thrustings of their actual sex, in her fantasy the couple are locked together in pleasure, as she splashes the blood across the walls and moans in ecstasy. As this fantasy climaxes the film returns to a now silent and weeping Pauline, on her back, being slowly penetrated by an equally silent Adam. The few tears that Pauline wipes away from her eyes shows that she is not completely devoid of emotion when it comes to the loss of her virginity. However, her uncomfortable expression and the slight gestures of her hands which suggest that she wants the boy to get off her could also be read as displaying that these tears are as much to do with disappointment as anything else. If this is her example, sex in real life does not live up to her fantastical expectations. Nevertheless, after instructing him to go down on her and his bloody discovery during oral sex, Pauline appears content with the whole affair in counterpoint to the distressed Adam.
Figs. 2 & 3: Pauline’s (AnnaLynne McCord) sexual fantasies, in Excision (2012).
From the very beginning of the film Pauline is represented as a sexual being, with an active sexual fantasy life. These sequences are inserted throughout the film and are rich with bright lights of hospital operating rooms and the bold colour of blood. In these fantasies Pauline depicts herself as both surgeon and abject body, finding intense sexual pleasure and emotional satisfaction in both positions. The audience are introduced to her queer desires straight away as the film opens with a long-shot of Pauline sitting staring at a double of herself. Dressed identically, her fantasy doppelgänger is only differentiated by the blood that wells up out of her mouth and flows down her chest. This gory vision of herself visibly excites the watching Pauline, and as she grinds her legs together in climax her double spits out a money-shot of blood, providing a visual symbol of phallic ejaculation. This initial scene is critical in explaining Pauline’s sexual tastes; she is neither sadist nor masochist, but instead a visceral fetishist with an obsession for the bloody machinery of the human body. This is in contrast to Mary, who is depicted as an object of sexual lust rather than the holder of it.
American Mary has two sexual fantasy sequences; however, importantly they are both Billy’s fantasies about Mary rather than the other way round. In the first he pictures her stripping – pouring blood all over her semi-naked body – and in the second, he imagines that she stabs him with her surgical blade. Although Billy is clearly intimidated by and infatuated with Mary she rejects his advances. It is obvious that she does have some affection for him, but this is not dominated by sexual lust, as is the case with his desire for her.
Both Pauline and Mary use surgery – the penetration of bodies – to attempt to take control of their lives. Mary is presented as being exceptionally good at what she does, and even though unqualified, gains respect from the community that she caters for. However, her use of surgery transforms throughout the film. Starting as a desire to help others, by the end of the film she uses her abilities to scare and manipulate those around her, moving from life-saver to life-taker. She threatens an innocent stripper using her surgical implements, and kills a security guard who accidentally stumbles across the now limbless lecturer. Further to this, her horrific and prolonged torture of her rapist, that eventually leads to his death, brings up the ethical question: can the revenge for rape ever go too far? In Excision, Pauline also views surgery as a means to take control over the events in her life that she feels powerless in confronting, namely her sister’s illness. In her fantasy life her abilities as a surgeon transform her into a worshiped being, a life-saver and life giver, that animates even the decimated bodies that she comes into contact with. However, in actuality she is a deluded and emotionally unstable young woman who fails to acknowledge that surgery takes years of education and training. As the film progresses and she is faced with Grace’s death, her fantasy life begins to take over, leading her to carry out her gruesome but well-intended act. Whereas the climax of American Mary carries with it a sense that Mary deserved her fate, Pauline’s attempted surgery is both shocking and also incredibly emotional. Grace, her sister, is the one positive relationship that Pauline has, and the fear of losing her has brought on an illness to which Pauline is completely defenceless against. Yet ultimately, the blame for the death of these two young girls falls not on Pauline’s shoulders, but on those of the parent entwined in the veneer of heteronormativity. This is a guilt represented so clearly in the film’s closing image of Pauline and her mother finally embracing like mother and child should, but with the mother screaming out in the realisation of her involvement in what has occurred. If American Mary depicts the brutal patriarchal desire to fuck, Excision can be seen as representing the failure of heteronormativity.
Surgery and the Gendered Body
The homosocial world in which Pauline and Mary live is one that constantly omits and oppresses them: violently in the case of Mary’s rape, and apathetically with its dismissal of Pauline. As Berenstein stresses, when thinking about homosociality, although the erotic subtext of homosexuality is key so too is the force of heterosexuality that sustains patriarchy. Homosocial bonds necessitate heteronormative values in order to keep men
in control and women
under control. Eighty years after the height of the classic mad-doctor movies,
Excision and
American Mary show that even though this oppression of women is now a consciously represented experience in cinema rather than an unconscious subtext, women are still being forced into performing feminine subjugated roles in the face of patriarchal society – be that society violent or farcical. In Jack Halberstam’s work on the potential of the slasher and neo-splatter films to dismantle heteronormative assumptions about gender, Judith Butler’s
Bodies That Matter (1993) is drawn upon to argue that it is the way that bodies are made intelligible that binds masculinity and maleness, and femininity and femaleness. Halberstam writes: ‘The masculinity of the male is secured through an understanding of his body as “impenetrable” and as capable of penetrating. Femininity, then, becomes that which can and must be penetrated but which cannot penetrate in return’ (2005: 34). As Butler has discussed, these positions are integral to the structure of the heterosexual matrix; so what happens if women begin to penetrate?
Through its depiction of the exploration of the human body, the mad-doctor sub-genre has much in common with the slasher and splatter films that Halberstam discusses, and in the manner that such sub-genres shift and overlap, Excision and American Mary could equally be seen as the latest permutation of the splatter film. Halberstam argues that these films, which are focused on the borders of the body – of tearing them apart and stitching them back together again – present the potential for new understandings of gender that utilise monstrosity, power and violence. In Skin Shows (1995), Halberstam argues that bodies that splatter – those belonging to the characters who die – are gendered feminine as they have been penetrated. Female bodies that do not splatter, therefore, must be considered as being sutured and apart from the traditional gender construction that would equal their death. These improperly gendered women are the Final Girls of the slasher genre, Carol Clover’s masculinised and non-sexualised survivors who penetrate rather than be penetrated. In Skin Shows, Halberstam argues that this improper gendering of the Final Girl aligns her with the monstrous as she is counter to heteronormative gender assignment, stitching gender traits together in order to defeat her attacker and take control. Therefore the Final Girl becomes a symbol of a queer female adolescent with masculine traits that has positive links to monstrosity as being something outside of the heteronormative structural logic. Halberstam argues: ‘The technology of monsters when channelled through a dangerous woman with a chain saw becomes a powerful and queer strategy for enabling and activating monstrosity as opposed to stamping it out’ (1995: 143). Neither Pauline nor Mary are Final Girls, however it could be contested that one of them can be considered a monster within and reinforcing heteronormativity, whilst the other follows in the footsteps of those Halberstam points towards, becoming a queer figure counter to patriarchal control.
American Mary reinforces heteronormativity through Mary’s monstrosity, whilst Pauline’s monstrosity can be seen to challenge it, reveal its weaknesses and expose the horror of those pushed to – and over – its boundaries. Although
American Mary starts as a rape-revenge narrative, Mary’s spiralling descent from victim to perpetrator can be seen to move her from being a positive activation of monstrosity by getting revenge on those who harmed her, to the traditional patriarchal construction of the castrating – but also fallible – monstrous-feminine. Instead of operating outside of the heteronormative structural logic, Mary’s appetite for destruction once she has assumed the phallic power of penetration actually can be seen to reinforce gender roles, as the position she attempts to inhabit between them in unsustainable. Once Mary has assumed this position between genders she stops being a sympathetic character and becomes monstrous, terrorising and killing innocent people. This entails that she can never be the positive activation of the sutured figure that Halberstam sees in the Final Girl, and is instead an unstable entity that combines a feminine body, phallic power and, critically, the will to kill in order to keep that power. At the point when she kills the security guard she becomes that which the film has previously labelled as monstrous: a person willing to violate and destroy another’s body for their own gain. Her brutal attack recreates the violent fucking exhibited by the male surgeons, transforming her from being a sympathetic character reacting to monstrosity, to being a monster in her own right. Her death, therefore, is seen as just; she returns to being a splattered feminine body and patriarchal power is restored, troubling any potential feminist readings of the film.
In contrast, Pauline, who is also responsible for the death of two innocent people, offers more scope for challenging patriarchal control and heteronormativity. She constantly defies the figures of patriarchal power that surround her. However, her confrontation is still met with restriction. She is forced to go to school, to attend cotillion class and not given the access to a psychiatrist that she demands. Her unhappiness with her own lack of real power is transported into her fantasy life where she is in complete control of the proceedings. Although these fantasies are gory, they also revel in their monstrosity through playfulness and black humour. They are not sadistic, nor do they involve Pauline killing anyone. Instead, in her dream world she is both a life-saving surgeon and a dismembered body. Her fantasies are orgies of abject excess that fail to conform to heteronormative values. Pauline caresses, and is caressed by both men and women indiscriminately. It is not the gender of the body that Pauline finds attractive, but the body itself, bodies that are at the boundary of life and death, clean and unclean, pure and sullied. These bodies where gender no longer matters, are the very things that heteronormativity is trying to expel.
The full potential of the queer power of Pauline’s sexual fantasies can be revealed through their relation to Halberstam’s third-wave manifesto
Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and Age of Normal (2012) published in the same year as the film was released. For Halberstam, Lady Gaga’s willingness to be excessive, phony and unreal, and her playfulness with her own body and gender, signals a new form of feminism that is ‘a monstrous outgrowth of the unstable concept of “woman”’ (2012: xiii). Pauline’s experimental and explorative fantasies can be read as her own form of ‘going gaga’: losing any sense of gender, sexuality or bodily border as she slices, stiches and sprays. Although her actual life is full of the battles of the performance of being a ‘proper’ young woman in middle-class America, in her fantasies being a woman does not matter, it is just
the human body that matters. This undoing of being a woman is critical for Halberstam’s gaga feminism. The category ‘woman’ must be undone and played with, built up, and then torn apart again. In this same manner, in her fantasies Pauline is a bejewelled queen, a latex-clad surgeon and a decapitated head. Compounding this is the fact that these fantasies are enjoyable to watch. They are original and surprising, and filmed in a colourful and bold style reminiscent of Mathew Barney’s
The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002). As Halberstam notes, Gaga’s fans call themselves ‘little monsters’, dressing to excess and being whatever they want to be, revelling in their own monstrosity just as Pauline loves to explore her own abject self in these beautiful but bloody sequences. It is a reclamation of the monstrous-feminine that rewrites it in a new language. Reading Pauline’s desires through this lens supports Halberstam’s argument that in order to break with heteronormativity we must first break with gender and deconstruct the concepts of masculinity and femininity. As Pauline demonstrates in her own sexually-driven way, this can be done by returning to the body itself and starting again. When Pauline penetrates the bodies of others she does not do so in the same manner as the objectifying surgical cutters of
American Mary. Pauline’s desire to penetrate is not fuelled by the want to fuck, but by a desire to take control in order to save lives and explore the wonders of the human body. Gender is irrelevant to Pauline. Her sexual satisfaction in her fantasy sequences is not from objectification, but from embodiment. She both penetrates and is penetrated, defying the heteronormative system that tries to tie her to just one gender performance. The totality of her position in her fantasy life is a disavowal of her feelings of powerlessness in the heteronormative world that surrounds her, a world into which she is unable to fit.
In Gaga Feminism Halberstam argues that in patriarchal society female desire is never given the chance to flow and develop. In North America – as well as in much of the world – girls grow up in a society that constantly bars them from expressing and exploring their sexuality. Whereas boys and men are encouraged to indulge their desires and fetishes, and be always open to more and more varied experiences, girls remain in a system of prohibition and stasis. This regulation and manipulation of sexual desire that women experience in everyday life is rooted in the homosociality of men. Women must be subservient and controllable so that they can be exchanged, whilst men are encouraged to demonstrate their masculinity through their sexual potency: the desire to fuck. However, as Halberstam notes, female sexuality is inherently more flexible in spite of these controls. To support this argument Halberstam refers to an article from the New York Times Magazine (2009), which discussed a study that had been carried out into male and female responses to erotic pictures. In this piece it was concluded that heterosexual and lesbian women were turned on by images of both sexes, whilst men only enjoyed the relevant gender akin to their sexual persuasion. Therefore, it can be argued that women – like Pauline – have a greater potential to look past gender and see only the body and its erotic potential. Has this willingness to assume a flexible position in their fantasy life allowed women to mentally escape the confines of their overly controlled social sex-life?
Conclusion
Halberstam argues that it is not Lady Gaga’s personal political views that shape gaga feminism. Instead it is her willingness, and that of her fans, to experiment with self-representation and gender, and to tear apart the norm and rebuild it into something new that influences what she sees as a new feminism for a generation willing to embrace the queer and excessive. In the same way, this chapter has read the narratives of
Excision and
American Mary as an illustration of its own project rather than with reflection on the directors’ intended messages. These two films show how, just as in the 1930s, the mad-doctor sub-genre can still be used to pick apart the homosocial nature of patriarchal society, albeit to uncover a potentially positive queer message rather than a repressed homosexuality that excludes women. These films perform and deconstruct the gendering of the body, and the walls of the heteronormative matrix that attempt to keep that gendering in place for patriarchal gain. The bodies in
American Mary are gendered bodies, those that penetrate are male, whilst those that are penetrated are female. Men are represented as desiring beings who fuck, whilst women are just objects or vessels to receive them. The surgeons who are meant to teach Mary do not care about the body that they penetrate – whether sexually or medically – they only care for their own penetration, and the sharing of that penetration with other men. Pauline, on the other hand, is obsessed with the body itself; the body that transcends gender and gives pleasure though its very being. In her sexual fantasies the heteronormative matrix breaks down in her desire to penetrate and be penetrated, and in her total disregard for the gender of those she engages with. Pauline lets herself go – goes gaga – and in doing so her fantasies show how the fluidity of desire is starting to break down the dam that has been built by the homosocial relationships of patriarchy.
Note
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