ABSTRACT
Film theory, including much from feminist and queer perspectives, has come to be dominated by a psychoanalytic paradigm that itself is dominated by a highly restrictive binarism whereby masculine/feminine are not only understood as the definitional polarities of gender but also coopted unproblematically as the exemplary paradigm for understanding sexual desire, pleasure and identity. Film theory is not unique in this, rather it is merely obedient to the hegemonic paradigm which has structured mainstream thinking about both gender and the erotic since Freud (and indeed, on and off since Plato). It also reflects, as Cindy Patton points out (this volume), what has tended to happen in film itself, whereby a pop-Freudian paradigm has profoundly influenced filmmaking. This obedience to the paradigm has presented difficulties for those who would claim a place for women as spectators rather than as spectacle of film, for, within the psychoanalytic paradigm, agency (and this includes ownership of the gaze), is masculine. Feminist film theory has tied itself up in increasingly baroque knots trying to establish a
coherent and radical theory of female cinema spectatorship and of female identification as part of that spectatorship within the terms of this binarism (Stacey 1994). For lesbian film theory, there is the added problem that psychoanalytic binarism has no place for lesbian desire.
