Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face examines the representation of iconic female faces in the golden age of Hollywood - Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor - and the gay male fetishization of those faces.
Classical Hollywood cinema is given to an aesthetic and ideological struggle between rival scopic economies: an erotics of -to-be-looked-at-ness- is countered by a hermeneutics of -to-be-seen-through-ness.- The latter emerges triumphant, but the legendary female faces of Hollywood resist, in their different ways, a coercive and normalizing knowledge, which is the source of the gay male investment in them. A disciplinary society privileges a hermeneutics of gaze; the iconomic female faces of classical Hollywood cinema demand an erotics. Classical Holly Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face explores the tension between the two through detailed readings of Ninotchka, Sun
