Reading hieroglyphs behind glass: A glimpse of reparative feminism in Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)
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2022-03-01
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This article examines Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s 1977 avant-garde essay film Riddles of the Sphinx as a cinematic text that makes the museum a site for imagining psychoanalytic feminism as a reparative reading practice. I argue that the film questions gender and race as “musealized” images that make predetermined essences present, and offers instead images of working through the damages of sexism and racism that erode the familiar poles of idealization and denigration. Focused on the psychic life of a middle-class white woman as she begins extricating herself from the narrow confines that white patriarchal culture has allotted her, Riddles revises the visual logics of castration, which opens the possibility that white women can, instead of defending themselves against shame, respond to the forms of sexism and racism that write Black women’s lives.
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Lamm, K (2022). Reading hieroglyphs behind glass: A glimpse of reparative feminism in Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). Psychoanalysis Culture and Society, 27(1). pp. 89–106. 10.1057/s41282-022-00289-x Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/32459.
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Kimberly Kay Lamm
My scholarship brings together Anglophone literature, contemporary art, visual culture, and feminist theory. I have a particular interest in the feminist engagement with psychoanalysis, the various ways language figures into feminism, and aesthetic practices such as fashion that challenge the devaluation of femininity. I enjoy teaching interdisciplinary courses that work with literature, art, and film to illuminate the feminist imagination.
My first book, Addressing the Other Woman: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing (Manchester University Press, 2018) demonstrates the significance of visual and textual manifestations of language to feminist art practices of the late 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the work of three artists –Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly—and shows that their work expressed a shared desire to transform how women in western culture are perceived. I argue that language (as system, text, and speech) was crucial to bringing viewers into that collective project. At the heart of this book is the ‘other woman,’ a figure who encapsulates the utopian wish to reach other women and correspond with them across similarities and differences. To reveal this address, I pair the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly with the writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey. By tracing the correspondences between these artists and writers, I argue we can better appreciate how together they created the imaginary conditions in which feminism could take hold as a collective practice and a shared idiom.
I recently published Riddles of the Sphinx, a BFI Classics book devoted to Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s avant-garde feminist film from 1977. I read Riddles as an essay film and explore how it utilizes voice, sound, and writing to challenge Hollywood's dominant images of women and to portray maternal care as a legitimate form of work, rich in aesthetic pleasures and feminist possibilities.
In early 2026, my book Writing in the Kitchen with Martha Rosler and Carrie Mae Weems: From Reproductive Labor to the Affective Labor of the Image will come out with Punctum Books. Along with Anna Backman Rogers, I am editing Laura Mulvey: Feminist Legacies, which will be published in 2026 by BFI/Bloomsbury. I have published my research in Australian Feminist Studies, Callaloo, Cultural Critique, Feminist Theory, Oxford Art Journal, Public Art Dialogue, Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.
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