Parallax Historiography: The Flâneuse as Cyberfeminist

Abstract

Haraway's cyborg manifesto may seem an odd choice of theoretical paradigms for developing insight into silent cinema; and yet I would like to suggest that new media technologies have created new theoretical "passages" back to the first decades of film history. The flâneuse, an imaginary construction of female subjectivity who is our guide in this journey, is herself a cyborg. She figures the relationship between women and technology as a mobile, fluid and productive means of, in Haraway's words, "building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, spaces, stories" (1997: 482). Recent developments in film historiography by feminist theorists have shifted the emphasis from textual analysis of the woman onscreen to the invisible history of the spectator-subject. As Patrice Petro puts it, "In contrast to formalist film historians, who seek to recover what is increasingly becoming a lost object, feminists have been primarily concerned to unearth the history of the (found) female subject" (1990: 11). This is a discovery that calls for discourse drawn from the utopian genres of techno-feminism.