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Journal of Visual Culture
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journal of visual culture

VCR Autopsy

Caetlin Benson-Allott, PhD

Department of English at Cornell University, cab85{at}cornell.edu

The immanent commercial obsolescence of the VCR affords film studies a new opportunity to examine domestic spectatorship and the challenges it poses to contemporaneous apparatus theory. While scholars like Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry have argued that spectators understand movie projection as a gendered process of motion picture reproduction, the VCR's electronic engineering — its inner basket, heads, and stacks — demonstrate that filmic sexuality does not necessarily conform to heterosexist binaries. The VCR's sexualized inner architecture incarnates neither the alleged masculine gaze of cinema nor its televisual counterpart, the feminine glance, but rather suggests that the domestic viewer approaches film with a hermaphroditic curiosity that emphasizes the physical pleasure of making movies.

Key Words: apparatus • bachelor machine • sexual anatomy • reproduction • Video Cassette Recorder (VCR)

Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 6, No. 2, 175-181 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1470412907078558
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