Intimate Violence explores the consistent cold war in Hitchcock's films between his heterosexual heroines and his queer characters, usually though not always male. Decentering the authority of the male hero, Hitchcock's films allow his female and queer characters to vie for narrative power, often in conflict with one another. These conflicts eerily echo the tense standoff between feminism and queer theory. From a reparative psychoanalytic perspective, David Greven merges queer and feminist approaches to Hitchcock. Using the theories of Melanie Klein, Greven argues that Hitchcock's work thematizes a constant battle between desires to injure and to repair the loved object. Greven develops a theory of sexual hegemony. The feminine versus the queer conflict, as he calls it, in Hitchcock films illuminates the shared but rivalrous struggles for autonomy and visibility on the part of female and queer subjects. The heroine is vulnerable to misogyny, but she often gains an access to
agency that the queer subject longs for, mistaking her partial autonomy for social power. Hitchcock's queer personae, however, wield a seductive power over his heterosexual subjects, having access to illusion and masquerade that the knowledge-seeking heroine must destroy. Freud's theory of paranoia, understood as a tool for the dissection of cultural homophobia, illuminates the feminine versus the queer conflict, the female subject position, and the consistent forms of homoerotic antagonism in the Hitchcock film. Through close readings of such key Hitchcock works as North by Northwest, Psycho, Strangers on a Train, Spellbound, Rope, Marnie, and The Birds, Greven explores the ongoing conflicts between the heroine and queer subjects and the simultaneous allure and horror of same-sex relationships in the director's films.
Industry Reviews
"Greven discovers an impressively wide range of queerings... [and] complicates his search for queer figures and readings in refreshingly unexpected ways... Greven's argument is tightly framed by his meticulously nuanced readings of earlier Hitchcock critics, especially feminists and queer theorists." --Thomas Leitch, The Hitchcock Annual
"Brilliantly uniting feminist and queer readings into a powerful new synthesis, David Greven offers compelling and original insights into the work of Alfred Hitchcock, the most masterful troubler of complacent idioms of sexuality and gender that the cinema has ever known. Filled with excellent readings as well as splendid theoretical interventions, this is a major step forward not only in Hitchcock criticism, but in film theory and critical practice at large."
-- Jonathan Freedman, Marvin Felheim Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Michigan
"Intimate Violence bravely creates a dialogue between queer and feminist film theorists, confirming that such a conversation is long overdue." -- Tania Modleski, Florence R. Scott Professor of English at the University of Southern California-Dornsife and author of The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory
"Intimate Violence is an admirably generous and enthusiastic contribution to Hitchcock studies, a book that deserves recognition and elaboration."--Leland Poague
