Alice Doesnt Essays - Gender, Freudian Psychology, Free Essays

Alice Doesnt Essays - Gender, Freudian Psychology, Free Essays Alice Doesnt 7 Lacanian psychoanalysis/Claude Levi-Strauss- both theories deny women that status of subjects and producers of culture. Like cinema, they posit woman as at once the object and the foundation of representation, at once telos and origin of mans desire and of his drive to represent it, at once object and sign of (his) culture and creativity, man as the sole term of reference Hence the position of woman in language and in cinema is one of non-coherence; she finds herself only in a void of meaning, the empty space between the signs- the place of women spectators in the cinema between the look of the camera and the image on the screen, a place not represented, not symbolized, and thus pre-empted to subject (or self) representation. 10 The overriding question is: in what ways does narrative work to engender the subject in the movement of its discourse, as it defines positions of meaning, identification and desire? Freuds story of femininity, Heaths account of narrative cinema as Oedipal drama, and Metzs notion of identification are points of departure for a more adequate and specific understanding of the subjective processes involved in female spectatorship: that is to say, the operations by which narrative and cinema solicit womens consent and by a surplus of pleasure hope to seduce women into femininity. [Summary of Chapter 5]