Teresa de Lauretis

“If narrativity brings to cinema the capacity for organizing meaning, which is its primary function since the time of the classical myths, the inheritance of Renaissance per­ spective, that comes to cinema with the camera, could perhaps be understood as Schaulust (scopophilia), Freud's word for visual plea­sure. The scopic drive that maps desire into representation, and is so essential to the work of the film and the productive relations of imag­ing in general, could be itself a function of social memory, recalling a time when the unity of the subject with the world was achieved and represented as vision. Together, narrativity and scopophilia perform the "miracles" of cinema, the modern equivalent of linear perspective for early Renaissance audiences. If psychoanalysis was dubbed by its inventor "the royal road" to the unconscious, surely cinema must be our way of "looking into the soul.”
― Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema

“Eco's emphasis is a productivist one: his view of sign production, and especially of the mode he calls invention, associating it with art and creativity, is from the perspective of the maker, the speaker, the artist, the producer of signs. But what about the woman? She has no access to the codes of the invisible city which represents her and absents her; she is not in the place of Eco's "subject of semiosis"-homo faber, the city builder, the producer of signs. Nor is she in the repre­sentation which inscribes her as absent. The woman cannot transform the codes; she can only transgress them, make trouble, provoke, per­vert, turn the representation into a trap ("this ugly city, this trap"). For semiotics too, finally, the founding tale remains the same. Though now the place of the female subject in language, in discourse, and in the social may be understood another way, it is an equally impossible position. She now finds herself in the empty space between the signs, in a void of meaning, where no demand is possible and no code available; or, going back to the cinema, she finds herself in the place of the female spectator, between the look of the camera (the masculine representation) and the image on the screen (the specular fixity of the feminine representation), not one or the other but both and neither.”
― Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema