Percepcija i perceptivnost
Perception And Perceptability: Issues Of Gaze And Emasculation In High Fidelity

Summary/Abstract: The theoretical concept of gaze has its origins in film theory and relates to the ways of identification with regards to visual pleasure. In the Western cultural context, the spectator is typically male (identification with this position involves scopophilia, which in turn involves either voyeuristic or fetishistic modes of identification) and the spectacle is typically female (identification with this position involves narcissism). The categories of masculinity and femininity are not considered to be universal or natural categories. In a such socio/gender context a reinterpretation of characterization of heroes and processes of narrativization becomes possible. The goal of this paper is to consider the gaze mechanisms within in aforementioned theoretical framework, in the novel and the film High Fidelity. First, the implications such an identification implies, especially when it comes to identification with the subject, which the hero ties to external manifestations of masculanity (success in career, physical strength and suppression of feelings) are considered; then come potential consequences of failing to occupy a desired position having in mind emasculation of the hero; and finally, possibble ways of compensation are scrutinized, with special attention focused on camouflage and yearn for invisibility, as mechanisms of subjectivity acquirement. The paper also points to the instability of the subjectivity concept and the crisis incoming with the hero’s commencement of analysis of his own subjectivity status, and his understanding he is simultaneously spectator and object of observation, seeing himself through an implied gaze of others.

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