INTIMATE VIOLENCE

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 para