ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how psychoanalytic writings on the gaze can help us to understand the dynamics at stake in viewing photographs. It compares the work of Jemima Stehli and Laurel Nakadate as a way of exploring the gaze in relation to some of the key feminist writings on gender. Psychoanalysis would seem to have little to offer feminism. While feminism is concerned with questioning and challenging the symbolic value that is accorded to the biological differences between men and women, psychoanalysis insists on the primacy of sexual difference. Understanding the relation between the antimonies woman and man in this way relocates the terrain of a feminist politics of spectatorship. It allows us to see that patriarchy is underpinned by a fantasy of the successful sexual relationship which replaces antinomy with eroticized difference. That is to say, it offers an account for the failure of the sexual relation in symbolic terms.
