Penis
Related: phallocentrism - genitalia - male frontal nudity in film
Sigmund Freud theorized fetishism thus: the naked female body, when first seen by a little boy, "lacks" a penis. Linda Williams remarks that the little boy's discovery causes an unconscious desire to disavow this lack by putting a fetish in its place. Next, the fetish object --a shoe, an undergarment, the woman herself-- becomes the substitute for the phallus "which the little boy once believed in" and which "he still wants to believe." Stuart Hall has extended Freudian fetish object to the black body itself, noting that in contemporary representation, for every image of the black subject as a savage, native or slave, there is a comforting image of the docile servant or clown. 15 --Theresa M. Senft, Department of Performance Studies [accessed June 2004]
Phallocentrism
The paradox of phallocentrism in aIl its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. --Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema