Linda Williams Group

The apparatus of the camera of cinema and Muybridge's photographic method and zoopraxiscope open up a "frenzied" object of study through visuality. This is problematized by the notion that this visuality is subject to a double-bind of blindness. To make something visible is to create an epistemological desire to make it "known."
The category and object of "woman" stands at the point of this "blindness." The female body "confesses" itself to the male inquiry, or desire to see the pleasure of the woman that is ultimately impossible. Williams correctly identifies this move and production in hard-core cinema stating,
"The animating male fantasy of hard-core cinema might therefore be described as the (impossible) attempt to capture visually this frenzy of the visible in a female body whose orgasmic excitement can never be objectively measured." (pg 50).
This is also seen in the study and scrutiny to which the woman's body is subjected for a study of her presence (the phallus) that is always absent. This absence though is merely a reflection back upon itself.

-MG, EF, SF