Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

15.5 Gender and positioning
Unit 15 Positioning the reader or spectator
Section 3 Attributing meaning

The space or position that a text offers to a reader from which it makes most sense may be of various kinds, but one kind of position that has received particular attention of a critical and searching kind relates to the gender of the reader.

15.5.1 Positioning of the reader as male

Feminists such as Judith Fetterley (1981) and Elaine Showalter (1977) argue that, when women read literature, they often read as men, precisely because literature often constructs the implied reader as male. Thus, women readers often assent to background assumptions that are actually the shared assumptions of males, masquerading as a kind of general knowledge that ’we all know’ to be true. So, for example, when women readers read the passage from Conrad cited on page 183, they may read it without questioning the sexism contained in the text since it accords with stereotypical background assumptions.

In the text below - an advertising flyer for Trippet’s Nail and Tan - there are a number of assumptions about girls that the reader has to agree with in order to make sense of the text:

Lost for an idea for a children’s party ? Look no further. Trippet’s nail and tan are now available for children’s beauty parties. £12 per head (includes goody bag). Treatments available - mini manicure and polish, nail art, mini facial, make-up samplings, temporary body tattoos. Full makeover for party girl.

First, the reader has to assume that children’s parties could include such things as body tattooing and that girls should be trained in this way to see that they need to have beauty treatments. It assumes that, in much the same way as boys are given parties that involve swimming or ten pin bowling, girls’ sense of enjoyment should come from concentrating on their appearance. This background knowledge is not made explicit, but the reader is forced to construct it and the reader may feel some sense of disjuncture between their own sense of what is appropriate for children and the seemingly ’common-sense’ assumptions about girls that are articulated here.

Similarly, in film theory it has been argued (see Mulvey, 1981) that women characters in many Hollywood films are posed as objects ’to-be-looked-at’.³ The camera focuses on women characters from the perspective of male characters, and it is often a very sexualized vision of the women that is produced. This means that women spectators watching these films have to watch them as if they were male voyeurs. This may be a pleasurable experience for women spectators, but it may also make the woman spectator complicit with assumptions about women that she may not ordinarily share (see Stacey, 1994).