Viewing Positions - Linda Williams

The essays in this volume represent some of the best new thinking about
the crucial relations between visual representation in film and human
subjectivity. No amount of empirical research into the sociology of
actual audiences will displace the desire to speculate about the effects
of visual culture, and especially moving images, on viewing subjects.
These notions of spectatorship, however hypothetical, become extremely
compelling metaphors for the workings of vision within the institution
of cinema. Viewing Positions examines the tradition of a centered,
unitary, distanced, and objectifying spectator's gaze; investigates the
period when film spectatorship as an idea began; and analyses gender-
and sexuality-based challenges to the homogeneous classical theory of
spectatorship. It makes available critical understandings of
spectatorship that have, until now, largely eluded cinema studies.