Under Her Skin: on woman without body and body without Woman

This chapter explores the construction of femininity in two films starring Scarlett Johansson, through Jacques Lacan’s concept of “La femme” and theories of sexual difference. I will focus on the very different ways in which Johansson featured on screen in 2013: as disembodied voice in Spike Jonze’s Her, and as fleshy, material presence in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Both roles clearly draw upon Johansson’s now well-established star image – predicated upon a return to “old Hollywood glamour” and notions of the “sex symbol” – subverting it by doing away, in a sense, with the body that has made her an international icon: one by removing her physical presence from the image-track (while maintaining her “image” at the level of the soundtrack), the other by removing the idealized image-layer in order to make her own body abundantly present in the film. Such approaches, I will argue, can be related to the theories of sexual difference delineated by Lacan, and particularly the difference between his account of the phallus in the 1950s and his logic of sexuation in Seminar XX: Encore (particularly in light of Alenka Zupančič’s recent, ground-breaking work, What Is Sex?). This, I suggest, can be understood in terms of the passage from object to subject, and the difference between the Woman without body and body without Woman.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory on 11 Jun 2019, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781138500921
The Accepted Manuscript is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.