What Can a Woman Know? Subjectification, Desire, Perversion, and Possibility

ABSTRACT Creative works allow a discourse that can be collectively subjective, rather than denuding experienced meanings through attempts at objectification. Jennifer Fox’s film The Tale offers an encounter with the Real as informed by an Imaginary that shifts and transforms over time. She shows the objectification of one woman’s experience by tracing her ambivalent efforts to subjectify her own story. Asserting her own desire becomes possible as she recognizes how that desire became hidden under and subservient to the needs, desires, and limits of others. This film highlights how cultural pressures can make it difficult to find one’s own desire and to say no to the desire of the other. The film shows how the enigmatic message of maternal abjection has invited women to subjugate themselves in relation to a cultural injunction that demeans and devalues embodied experience in ways that can make “development” perverse rather than transformative.