In “Sexuality in the Field of Vision,” Jacqueline Rose insists that psychoanalytic theory can prove to be a valuable political ally to feminism. Rose’s text seems to be organized in a way that logically moves towards her claim that “artists engaged in sexual representation (representation as sexual)” can work with visual images in a way that may not necessarily conflict with the concerns of feminism, thereby providing an opportunity for politics of resistance to take place within the framework of the tradition that such politics are working against. However, I think that Rose’s essay more accurately demonstrates that historical and theoretical contexts shape (and are shaped by) the way we perceive the world around us. Accordingly, I think that Rose’s argument becomes apparent through shifting the reader’s attention away from what seems to be the “logical” movement of the essay, and instead highlighting how Rose’s text requires one to actively keep track of how Rose frames each aspect of her inquiry.
Rose points to instances in Freud’s work that explicitly connect sexuality to visual representation. Rose details how the legacy of these examples from psychoanalysis may be applied in contemporary artistic practices. Rose appears to reinforce the possibility of using a psychoanalytically informed definition of sexuality in creative practices by reviewing how aspects of psychoanalysis have already been successfully incorporated into literary practices. Rose lays out the theoretical links underlying the role of psychoanalytic theory in Modernist literary writing. In applying the same theoretical links to various modern and postmodern artistic practices, the difficulty of maintaining the integrity of such links become apparent. Here, Rose highlights the inadequacy of a decontextualized approach to understanding the role of sexuality in visual representation, and uses this moment as an opportunity to insert her proposal for a politically motivated...