The Postfeminist Masquerade and the Cynical Male Gaze: The Disavowal of Sexual Difference in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a commentary on the Lacanian appropriation of Breaking the Waves by Slavoj Zizek, Frances Restuccia and others who argue that the film’s saintly heroine, Bess, performs an authentic feminine act paradoxically in her very suicidal over-identification with her husband’s male chauvinistic desire pressing her to have sex with other men, through which she successfully demonstrates the deadlock of sexual difference and subverts the phallic-masculine symbolic order. By contrast, this paper argues that the heroine is rather trapped in what Angela McRobbie called the postfeminist masquerade, a feminine gender performance that returns to old forms of patriarchal subordination but with an ironic distance, thereby allowing the subject to imagine herself free of the capture of the masculine symbolic universe. In a cynical move which undermines the postfeminist association of irony with freedom, the director equates Bess’s belief in God with her acting for the gaze of his camera, betraying his skepticism about a feminine subject not captured by the cinema’s patriarchal apparatus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".