Laura Mulvey states that female spectators are forced to identify with the woman on screen who is the object of desire and connotes "to-be-looked-at-ness"; yet the spectator occupies an uncomfortable subject position because diagetically man is "bearer of the look" and punishes the same woman for her castrating potential (19).


When the object of identification becomes the object of sexual desire, Freud states that, "In the first case one's father is what one would like to be, and in the second he is what one would like to have ." Freud argues that a gay man identifies with his mother, becomes her, and then seeks objects upon which he "can bestow such love and care as he has experienced from his mother." The formation of fixed subject-object relationships wherein the object is only either desired or derided negates any agency or resistance in a patriarchy where the woman or a feminized "other" (i.e. a gay man) is constantly fetishized or punished .