You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Elizabeth Cowie's useful and wide-ranging book Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis has three sizable objectives. Overall, the book sets out to respond to certain feminist calls for positive representations of women as a means of visualizing alternatives to patriarchal constructions of Woman. Second, the book reconsiders Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as identification, fantasy, fetishism, the drives, castration, and the gaze, in the interests of adding to the psychoanalytic understanding of gender formation and desire. Finally, in these contexts of representation and psychoanalysis, the book focuses on film in order to refine film theory's use of psychoanalysis to describe how narrative positions the spectator, how the spectator identifies with the image, and how cinematic representation operates in relation to desire.
A well-integrated collection of previously published and new material, dating from 1978 to the present, Representing the Woman grounds itself in feminist concerns over representation before moving on to the extended consideration of psychoanalysis in film studies. Chapter 1 critiques the feminist use of Lévi-Strauss's work on kinship structures as the basis for a theory of patriarchy on the grounds that in the system he described,