The Emptiness Of The Image

The author discusses how images of women have been politicized and how this has affected the way women are represented. She also discusses how psychoanalytic theory can be used to explain how images of women can have an effect on people's desires.

There has long been a politics around the way in which women are represented, with objection not so much to specific images as to a regime of looking which places the represented woman in a particular relationship to the spectator's gaze. Artists have sometimes avoided the representation of women altogether, but they are now producing images which challenge the regime. How do these images succeed in their challenge? This study offers a psychoanalytic answer, and argues that, despite flaws in some of the details of its arguments, psychoanalytic theory retains an overwhelming explanatory strength in relation to questions of sexual difference and representation. It goes on to show how the issue of desire changes the way we can think of images and their effects, and discusses the work of theorists, artists and filmmakers such as Helene Deutsch, Catherine MacKinnon, Mary Kelly, Francis Bacon, Michael Powell and Della Grace. Review: ... well articulated...moments of brilliance here.. - SIGNS, Winter 2002 Few scholars match Adams' skill in this masterful integration of psychoanalytic and feminist theory on the one hand, and the critical exploration of images on the other. -Mieke Bal, Professor of the Theory of Literature, Director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis The Emptiness of the Image goes far beyond the stunning analyses she provides of a range of texts--and practices--from exhibitionism to the art of exhibition. -Joan Copjec, Center for the Study of Arts and Letters, State University of New York, Buffalo