ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the benefits and disadvantages of the structuralist and Lacanian influences on feminism. Psychoanalytic theory, especially, extends the analytic concepts of postmodernism, anthropology, politics and common sense into thinking about the origins of discursive structures, and about the patterns determining the aetiology of cultural misunderstanding. Within visual culture, feminist methodology is indispensable for opening and disinterring the repressed and troubling questions of sexual difference that inflect the visual. Feminist exploration of visual culture aims to loosen the ties that bind gender and sexuality to visual representation in such limited, repetitive and stereotypic ways, and to understand the relation of representation to the psychic economy of thought, fantasy and emotion. Feminist research into visual culture has found psychoanalytic theories of the part played by such unconscious fantasies an indispensable part of interpretation.
