ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how contemporary film theory, in its appropriation of Freud's work, constructs its version of subjectivity. Freud's case histories and analyses of phantasy life repeatedly address the question of femininity. Indeed one way of outlining Freud's theory of sexuality is to say that he traces the "originary" bisexual disposition of the Sexualtrieb as it is organized into components and vicissitudes, and finally channeled into masculine and feminine identifications. Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, and Linda Williams all presume that sexual identity, construed in this sense, is exhaustively defined by the opposition of masculinity to femininity as distinct, selfsame, and irreconcilably opposed gender categories. From these binary schemata, positions of desire and knowledge are attributed to aspects of filmic signification and correlated with sexual identity. However, Freud's views on sexual difference are paradoxical; his metapsychological writings treating the theory of sexuality tend to hypostatize these categories, organizing them in a linear sequence.
