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This paper draws upon Lacan's schema of objects and his formulae for sexuation, as he develops them in Encore, with a view to elaborating a feminist strategy for spectatorship. I take up the question of “how should a woman look” in the sense of what it means to look as Woman rather than at Woman—a shift from the focus of most feminist film theory. In other words, my interest is to move away from discussions of how a woman is looked at (how she is seen) and to think instead about how a woman looks, (not as she appears, but how she sees as woman). In this sense, my project extends Parveen Adams' claim that “it is not the image of woman as such that is crucial, but how the image organizes the way in which [it] is looked at” (Adams 2).
Laura Mulvey, in her highly influential polemical 1975 article “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema,” argues that “woman is an indispensable element of spectacle … displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men” (Mulvey 11, 13). If under the male gaze, woman is the object of what Mulvey calls “fetishistic scopophilia,” the political question then becomes: how should women look in order to avoid both the masochism of taking up the viewing position of man as well as the narcissism of identifying too closely with the fetishized image of woman on-screen?1 Subsequent feminist media studies scholars have often advocated a strategy for female spectatorship that involves a “distance” from the image as a means of opposing the voyeurism of the male gaze. Griselda Pollock, for example, calls for a Brechtian strategy of “‘distanciation’” developed along psychoanalytic, feminist lines as a technique for reading a text against its patriarchal inscriptions. Pollock contends that the practice of “ ‘distanciation’ disrupt[s] the ‘dance of ideology’ which engages us on behalf of oppressive regimes of sexist classifications” (Pollock 163, 158).
Yet, if one follows Slavoj Zizek, rather than “disrupt” the “dance of ideology,” the practice of “distanciation” cont