Teresa de Lauretis 1984, "Alice doesn't. Feminism, Semiotics, cinema",
Indiana University Press, Bloomington, p.5
Teresa de Lauretis:
"By "woman" I mean a fictional construct, a distillate from diverse
but congruent discourses dominant in Western cultures (critical and scientific,
literary or juridical discourses), which works as both their vanishing
point and their specific condition of existence. An example might be helpful.
Let's say that this book is about woman in the same manner as science fiction
is about the future - a speculation on present social reality cast
in a particular perspective whose vanishing point is "the future", be it
"1984", "2001", or "a year ago tomorrow". From the present state of scientific
theory and research, the science fiction writer extrapolates and projects
the possibilities that, were they to be realized and concretizes into a
social technology, would effect an alternate world; that future, then,
being at once the vanishing point of the fictional construct and its specific,
textual condition of existence, i.e. the world in which the fictional characters
and events exist. Similarly here woman, the other-from-man (nature and
Mother, site of sexuality and masculine desire, sign and object of men's
social exchange) is the term that designates at once the vanishing point
of our culture's fiction of itself and the condition of the discourses
in which the fictions are represented. For there would be no myth without
a princess to be wedded or a sorceress to be vanquished, no cinema without
the attraction of the image to be looked at, no desire without an object,
no kinship without incest, no science without nature, no society without
sexual difference....
By women, on the other hand, I will mean the real historical beings
who cannot as yet be defined outside of those discursive formations, but
whose material existence is nonetheless certain, and the very condition
of this book."
Bibliography
Displacing
Hegemonic Discourses: Reflections on Feminist Theory in the 1980's