Women's Studies 2283F/G Chapter Notes -Voyeurism, Time Complexity, Libido
1 May 2013
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Document Summary
It takes as its starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form. The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated women to give order and meaning to its word. Its her lack the produces the phallus as a symbolic presence. To summarize briefly, the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she firstly symbolizes the castration threat by her real lack of a penis and secondly thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Woman"s desire is subjugated to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound; she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it.
