Woman as Sign

Abstract

Woman as → Sign is a → semiotic construct developed by feminist scholars trying to explain the ways in which women's status in patriarchal society is understood, communicated, and acted on through institutional practices. Film scholar Laura Mulvey's (1975) application of psychoanalysis to → film theory was foundational to the construct's development. Mulvey argued that woman stands in patriarchal culture “as signifier for the male other” within a symbolic system in which men are permitted to live out their fantasies of domination both linguistically and through images they create (1975, 7). Feminist anthropologist Elizabeth Cowie (1978) coined the term “woman as sign” on the basis of her work with Claude Lévi‐Strauss on kinship systems that featured the exchange of women (e.g., a bride leaves her father's house to live in her husband's house). Woman's status in such systems, she said, is economic but also that of a sign, which conveys an understanding of subordination and enables her to be exchanged physically among men. Cowie advocated a revolution in kinship systems to create more egalitarian sex roles and the meanings associated with them.