In "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey argues that "the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold, she first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic" (833).  This idea--and the obvious connection to pyschoanalysis--brought me back to Freud and to Beauvoir.  According to this argument, it is not that woman exists as a lone subject, rather like Beauvoir's point, she is seen in relation to man.  "Her real absence of a penis" even sparks the "patriarchal unconscious."  I can't help but feel to argue this is to uphold Freud's argument that a woman craves a phallus: penis envy.  Is this what Mulvey is suggesting?  If this is her suggestion, doesn't it undermine woman as existing beyond the "other?"  And is Mulvey suggesting that it's woman's fault for "forming the patriarchal unconscious" because she lacks a penis?

I don't know.  I feel like a lot is being dumped on woman.  That's all.