The second volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies addresses the complexities and inherent paradoxes within the expansive knowledge project known as Women’s and Gender Studies for audiences both inside and adjacent to the field. Each of the volume’s chapters identifies and critically examines a key term that circulates in this field, exploring how the term has come to be understood and mobilized within its everyday narratives and practices.
In constructing provocative genealogies for their terms, authors explicate the roles that this language, and the narratives attached to it, play in producing and limiting possible versions of the field.
Lamm's chapter examines the "gaze" as a central concept of Women's and Gender Studies and focuses specifically on Laura Mulvey's well-known manifesto "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975). Noting that "Visual Pleasure" is highly recognized but habitually dismissed, Lamm argue that it foregrounds the importance of bringing psychoanalysis into the field's discussion of images and internalization.