Freud, Feminism, and the Gaze

According to Freud, all of us have had to repress basic instinctual feelings because of societal pressures. Because we are unhappy with the reality that we must live in due to these repressions we develop fantasies. Our fantasies let us experience what we cannot live out in reality. Each one of us handles these repressions and fantasies differently. Most of us have developed a way to cope with what we’re forced to repress. Others may live too deep in their fantasies and as a result are labeled as suffering from neuroses and mental illnesses. A fine line separates artists from these individuals. The “artistic gift” allows individuals to “transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of symptoms.” Artists express their fantasies through their artwork. The public accepts the artwork because they recognize and understand the fantasies and repressions that are being depicted.

Lacan deviates from Freud and uses three stages that include the mirror (the middle stage) stage followed by the introduction to language. Somewhere in there falls the “gaze” concept which I’ll come back to later.

Mathews gives us an overview of feminism and art history. She reviews three different strategies that feminism can take “(1) recuperating the experience of women and women artists, (2) critiquing and deconstructing authority, institutions, and ideologies, and (3) rethinking the cultural and psychological spaces traditionally assigned to women.” She then discusses her own strategy and applies it to the paintings of Suzanne Valadon. Mathews returns us to the discussion of the “gaze.” How do we look at nudes? How do we critique nudes? Do we look at them as Freud says we do…through repression and fantasy? Should we use masculine doctrines or should we look at them using the methodologies advocated by feminisms?

In the different readings, the discussion of the “gaze” involves not only us looking at the artwork, but the subjects themselves looking back at us. Three images are stuck in my mind (1) Monet’s 1917 self portrait, (2) Valadon’s “Catherine Nude Seated on a Panther Skin, and (3) Peter Hujar’s self portrait from the Queer Cultural Center (http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Hujar/hujarindex.html). What have these individuals had to repress? What fantasies are expressed? How have their experiences shaped their gaze as they look back at us? From all of this I've gathered that our experiences are a three-way street; they shape how we look, interpret, critique ourselves, how we depict ourselves, and how we present ourselves to others.