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spectators, whether on the big screen at fannish conventions like MediaWest, Esca pade, and Vividcon, or by distributing them to female-dominated fan communities online. In either case, their audience is specifically constituted of women who have come together, not just as fans of the visual source texts, but as fans of the vidders and of vidding itself?this particular way of seeing. Julie Levin Russo suggests that "A Fan nish Taxonomy of Hotness" should be read as an allegory for female fans themselves: "I think part of what [this vid is] saying in creating this largely joyous collection (there's a lot of dancing in this vid) is: 'Look how much fun we're having?we're really hot!' "12 But if female fans are hot, they're hot in the sense of being turned on, and the fun they're having is explicitiy the fun of watching, not of being watched. Fan activities such as vidding may be crucial to theorizing the social conditions necessary for female fetishism and the safe expression of female desire. *

This essay examines some of the uses of examples from films in theoretical writing. Employing Žižek’s concept of interpassivity, it argues that the use of examples need not be limited to illustrating a preexistent theory that is already believed to be true.

In a recent article on cross-gender identification and spectatorial pleasure, Sharon Willis recalls a childhood fascination with the boys and cars of "Route 66."' Her memories of identifying with the masculine leads of the television series prompt Willis to develop a theory of identification across boundaries of difference and constituted along the axis of desire-of spectatorial identification-as-bricolage. Willis develops her theory specifically within the context of responses to the film Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)--a work that problematizes masculine privilege (and standards of representation) by placing female characters in the lead roles of a formerly "masculine" genre. Thelma and Louise represents a kind of "outlaw" sensibility or desire, both in its narrative content and in its structural approach, by usurping a highly codified genre of masculine experience and making it "other." Like Thelma and Louise, a number of other recent films have begun to work at eroding some of the stereotypical standards of the "masculine" genre, most notably Gregg Araki's The Living End (1992), which features two HIV positive gay males and Bruce MacDonald's Highway 61 (1992), a work set in Canada that illustrates the lure of the elusive American dream to those outside or at the margins of American mainstream consumer culture. These films align themselves with a position of disempowerment with respect to the pervasive culture that literally defines both the mise-en-scenes in which their characters find themselves and the terms of the characters' exclusion. Willis's argument for what might be termed a "postmodern reader formation" allows for a variety of interpretive positions to develop. It takes into account various spectatorial/reader responses across a wide spectrum, from the kind of straightforward viewer response anticipated during the planning and preproduction phases of film development (audience market research) all the way to responses like camp that radically re-interpret the messages and images presented by the work and, in doing so, negate the exclusionary standards of representation, repositioning the outsider as "inside" the system of meaning production (through interpretation). For the above mentioned works (and especially the latter two), this kind of interpretive instead of "passive" receptive approach is literally incorporated into the narrative. These films cite, through the comments of their characters or

Scopophilia, fetishism, the gaze, the sexual Other--such terms are the common currency of much recent discussion of the representation of sexuality in narrative cinema.' Many of these discussions have relied on a post-structuralist methodology employing concepts borrowed from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The purpose of this essay is to discuss some of the shortcomings of the post-structuralist, psychoanalytic account of sexual representation, with reference to the pornographic image. First, the inheritance of Freud and Lacan will be considered along with the manner in which the pornographic image makes problematic some key psychoanalytic concepts. Second, persistent methodological ambiguities of current psychoanalytic analyses of pornography will be considered. A serious lack of fit prevails between what is asserted at the level of theory and what is observed within the texts. To show the ways in which this occurs, I will compare various theoretical assertions about the content and structure of the pornographic image with data collected as part of a study on the content and form of pornographic feature films. In a number of important areas, the data conflicts with the descriptions offered by theory. The issues this article investigates raise a broader problem regarding contemporary film theory, a problem of relationship between film theory and its object of study. What should film theory do, what should it be -expected to accomplish, and how should its results be evaluated? Some might assert that an object of study is the construction of a given theory and that theory should be, primarily, a practice that avoids repeating the subject-object split of positivist science.2 Rather than replying to this position now, I will begin the investigation and then return to this issue when I have established the extent to which current

Toward the beginning of The Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz, in model expository form, spells out the question that propels his research: "What contribution can Freudian psychoanalysis make to the study of the cinematic signifier?"' The answer he unwinds over the first part of the work can be extracted from his text with equal ease: "As can be seen, the cinema has a number of roots in the unconscious and in the great movements illuminated by psychoanalysis, but they can all be traced back to the specific characteristics of the institutionalized signifier. I have gone a little way in tracing some of these roots, that of mirror identification, that of voyeurism and exhibitionism. There is also a third, that of fetishism."2 The project of my article is to analyze the soundness of Metz's attempt to apply this third psychoanalytic construct to the media of film and photography. Metz's key writings on the topic are separated by a relatively large time span (at least for a field prone to the sway of intellectual fashion) the essay "Photography and Fetish" first appearing in the journal October in 1985,3 and the chapter "Disavowal, Fetishism" in The Imaginary Signifier exactly a decade earlier. Their separation is useful, for one can detect elements of revision in the later work, and, on a simpler level, Metz's decision to return to these issues indicates a commitment to their basic relevance to photographic media. Following Metz's lead, then, let me spell out the question that motivates this article: What contribution can the concepts of disavowal and fetishism make to a study of the cinematic and photographic signifier? Because it serves as the impetus, and ideally the touchstone, for Metz's theoretical work on fetishism, let me begin by recapitulating Freud's well-known 1927 essay in which he first outlined the scenario of fetishism as a safeguard against castration anxiety.4 The male child, seeing for the first time the naked body of his mother, perceives the fact that the female lacks a penis. This lack contradicts his belief that all people possess a penis as he does and horrifies him because he construes the lack as indication that the mother has been castrated, and furthermore as indication that he too is in peril of a similar mutilation. The child's reaction is to disavow, to refuse to believe, what he has seen. But unable to repress the evidence of castration he has perceived, he doubles his belief in the phallic woman by devising a fetish a material object that functions as a