A Knowledge That Would Not Be Power

In a 1986 article in Screen, Carol Flinn examines feminization of music by analyzing way male commentators have denigrated and feminist theorists have celebrated music's association with feminine element.2 Basing her analysis on writings of psychoanalytic critics who have established certain theoretical affinities between music, unconscious, and a feminine, maternal register in their work on subjectivity, Flinn argues that the work on music in cinema maintains this same correspondence, repeatedly, and often compulsively, bringing feminized metaphor of music into play.3 After finding traces of this compulsive metaphoricity in writings of Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Georg Groddeck, and countering those examples with more positive comments from Heldne Cixous and Julia Kristeva, Flinn takes a jab at Adorno

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