The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference and Film Theory

This book argues that serious misreadings of Freud and Lacan on sexual difference have characterized prevailing models of psychoanalytic film criticism. In critiquing theories of identification and female spectatorship, the author maintains that early film theorists and feminist critics are equally guilty of imposing a binary conception of sexual difference on Freud’s thought. By embracing such a rigid definition of male/female difference, they fail to understand the fundamentally complex a...