The Vanished Woman and Styles of Feminine Subjectivity

How does the development of a feminine culture relate to the deconstruction of femininity? Does deconstructive thinking mean that we can do no more than deconstruct the meaning of femininity, and that we cannot work on feminist style development? I began to ask myself these questions because of a number of experiences I had recently which were linked to the deconstructivism of French philosophy. However, the primary reason was the attempts of women to develop a pornography of their own, and the criticism, based on deconstructivist thinking, these attempts evoked. In the framework of this theme, the development of feminine visual pleasure, I want to try and answer these questions. My main concern here is the theoretical legitimacy of the construction of a feminine style. Psychoanalytical theory is often advanced as a foundation for the so-called ‘feminine’, and thus for a specifically feminine way of looking, which can give rise to ‘new forms of visual pleasure’. The premiss here is that there is a male way of looking, which is characterized by an active, voyeuristic position, and a feminine way which is described as a passive, narcissistic position, and that these continue to exist alongside the sexual division in our society. This premiss presupposes an essential difference between real, living men and women. But I have my doubts about this approach. In her chapter, Angela Grooten demonstrates that Freudian psychoanalysis cannot underpin such a difference between men and women as two different essences, because the masculine and the feminine, and in this connection the masculine way of looking and its so-called feminine counterpart, are not unequivocally divided between the sexes. Masculine and feminine are used, in fact, as terms which signify different positions in relation to culture, and personally I believe it would be much better if this was expressed in other terms; it would perhaps be better to stick to the terms ‘symbolic’ and ‘imaginary’. But would this get us anywhere in our examination of the question of ways of looking and visual pleasure of real women? No. And in this connection it would seem to me more sensible to drop the whole psychoanalytical project altogether.