Concluding Remarks: The Object Is Speaking

Abstract

Throughout this book, I have drawn upon Irigaray’s concerns with interiority and consciousness as a way of analysing the representation of women in certain films that both benefit from and demonstrate the value of an Irigarayan perspective. Irigaray’s analysis of the superficiality and exteriority of the representation of women in western culture, and the ramifications she suggests occur as a consequence, has been shown to inform female characters in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Her assessment that ‘the loss of divine representation has brought women to a state of dereliction’ (1993b: 111) accords to a great extent with the analysis of women’s presence and function in cinema as described by Laura Mulvey in the 1970s, but Irigaray’s strategies for creating and preserving female subjectivity enable a constructive understanding of portrayals of women in historical and contemporary cinema.

We need only understand that our humanity is not constructed through things external to us but by following the path of interiority, an interiority which is indispensable to us, man and woman, in order to subvert the impact on culture and on love of the unmediated affect which drives us. (2000a: 25)