Occupied Territories

If feminist theory has reason to lament that system of representation [of women within dominant cinema], it is not because woman so frequently functions as the object of desire (we all function simultaneously as subject and object), but because the male look both transfers its own lack to the female subject, and attempts to pass itself off as the gaze. The problem, in other words, is not that men direct desire toward women in Hollywood films, but that male desire is so consistently and systematically imbricated with projection and control. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul begins to make it possible to distinguish between those two things, by differentiating as it at times does between the look and the gaze.

—Kaja Silverman, “Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image,” Male Subjectivity at the Margins.