SOURCE: DeJean, Joan. “Female Voyeurism: Sappho and Lafayette.” Rivista di Letterature moderne e comparate 40, no. 3 (September 1987): 201-15.

In the following essay, DeJean concentrates on Sappho's resistance to the objectifying male erotic gaze in favor of a poetic vision that reflects feminine desire.

«Within [the logic that has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks], the gaze is particularly foreign to female eroticism […]. [Womans] entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies […] her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation» (25-6). In This Sex Which is Not One, Luce Irigaray offers this categorical denunciation of an erotic economy dominated by the gaze. It could be objected that she follows too closely the logic that, from the time of the Greeks, has decreed that, since desire operates through the eyes, Woman should not be allowed to look directly on the male. However, Irigaray offers...