By the time you read this, the Film and Publications Board should have decided whether to allow screenings of One Night Stand (Pour Une Nuit) at the upcoming Out in Africa gay and lesbian film festival.
One Night Stand is a film by Émile Jouvet, who decided to investigate lesbian women’s attitudes to porn by … well, by making a porn movie. This promises to be very interesting. But it gets more interesting. Three out of four screenings in each city will be restricted to women only, and if a man wishes to attend the fourth screening he will have to be accompanied by a woman.
A colleague of mine, perhaps not entirely facetiously, suggested that such a restriction would be in contravention of the straight male’s constitutional rights. Before we rush to Chief Justice Pius Langa, however, we should consider the legitimacy of lesbian woman’s dislike of being subjected to the straight male gaze.
Strict Muslims dress their women in all-concealing garments to shield them from what they know could be the sexual visual attention of other men (or lesbians, presumably). Many straight women do not like being looked upon by men as sex objects, though they reserve the right to dress attractively. Certainly, Freud knew that one of our primary drives was what he called the Schaulust — the urge to see, to consume visually, to possess by looking.
A hardline feminist might justify the women-only restrictions on screenings of One Night Stand as lesbian women justly refusing the colonising male gaze. They don’t want their bodies to become consumables in the male sexual imagination. (Though Jouvet might simply shrug at the peeved straight man who feels excluded and say, with Rocky Horror’s Frank N Furter, ”I didn’t make it for you.”)
Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon saw clearly how the settler’s proprietory gaze upon black bodies was a form of colonisation, co-extensive with a political and economic project. Ronald Suresh Roberts evoked this view at a recent conference on freedom of expression and the right to privacy, commenting on the flap over the Sunday Times‘s stories about the health minister’s, er, health. According to Sapa, he said: ”[There is a] problem with treating the body of the health minister as a place where journalists can go and trespass.”
He is objecting to the minister’s body, as represented by her medical records, being colonised by the gaze of others and turned into news, gossip and political currency. One could argue that the public is not remotely interested in the minister’s body except insofar as it influences her actions as an elected representative of the people, but that’s another argument.
The native body and the land were often conflated in the rapacious colonial mind, as JM Coetzee showed in White Writing, and the identification continued under apartheid, as imagined by Nadine Gordimer in The Conservationist. Roberts makes a territorial metaphor of the minister’s body: he wants a kind of law of enclosures, or Land Act, to protect it from poachers and prevent it from merging with the body politic.
By contrast, Roberts’s fellow panellist Dali Mpofu put his own body rather startlingly in the spotlight. At the same conference, he continued his exposition of African traditions (such as not referring to one’s elders by their first name), and said that, for instance, in his culture it would not be appropriate for him to address a gathering such as this if he were not circumcised.
By putting his penis on the table, so to speak, Mpofu placed his body right in the centre of the gaze of the other, of what he called ”narrow Western eyes” — but offered it as an assertive counter-statement. He does not need to hide his body, he seemed to be saying, for its most private part has been given the imprimatur of manhood by his culture. The ancient traditions of Africa are etched on his very flesh.
Not that that makes them universally useful or applicable (can I use that excuse next time I’m asked to be on a panel?). But, in Mpofu’s gesture, there is a reminder of the flipside of the urge to conceal even the most vulnerable bodies from ”trespass”. To get back to One Night Stand, there may be a wish to avoid male trespassing, but there is surely also a kind of affirmative exhibitionism, a desire to flaunt the lesbian body.
I think we should all go and see it to clear our heads.
Go to www.oia.co.za for more information about the festival