Identity

Jacques Lacan: “The Mirror Phase”

Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”

Jonathan Weinberg, “Things are Queer”

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

Margaret Olin, “Gaze”

Mulvey seeks to point out these operations of cinematic illusion in order to keep people from enjoying them. To break this enjoyment, she thinks, is the first step to keep us from complacent and ignorant enjoyment of norms narrated by a patriarchal ideology.

Lacan refers to this experience as the mirror phase, where the idea of the ego is formed or recognized through a view of the self in the mirror. I question his assumptions of baby and childhood consciousness though. I wasn't sold on this idea.

What interested me more was Mulvey's distinguishing the different experience of film when enjoyed in a voyeuristic environment versus one where the viewer is reminded of his simultaneous and communal enjoyment of a movie. It reminds me of when I watch things by myself and they may have more impact, be it scary, touching, or enlightening. However, were I to have seen it with someone or with another group, it would have made me laugh, scoff, or cringe from the cheesiness, the tackiness, or the awkwardness of the film.

Weinberg's Things Are Queer reminded me instantly of this royksop video that takes the idea in the series of photos to an extreme. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl4rwMZWATs&feature=related

But I have to say, the piece doesn't really connect with its intentions. In our crit, we would have to point out that the pictures don't really show how "things are queer" It's a huge stretch.