Construction Work

The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even in a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty streets in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

                                                                                     Walker Percy, The Moviegoer 

We can apply psychoanalytic theory to hundreds of individual media texts, and I agree with Cowie's (166) discussion about derferment/lack in the Lacanian sense, but those individual texts are just single servings.

We are a consumer culture. Before we are even old enough to know it, we are taught by example to consume media as a way to consummate our relationship with our fantasy selves individually, and as a culture, with our fantasy world/country/nation.

For most people in our culture, media makes them realer, more authentic, validated. Media itself makes them full and sates them the way food and sex do. I believe that it's this overriding environment, where media/mediation of reality is as much a part of our culture's relationship to the world as food is (because our culture needs it like we need food), in which we have to frame analysis of each individual serving of media text.

Whether all that is in the bounds of apparatus theory (159), I'm not sure. I'm not at all familiar with Baudry. I'm with Aryeh re. persistence of the serious application of Freud, outside of its place in a historical framework.  Lacan is dated, agreed. Yet he retains some relevance because he's so much more grounded in a humanistic tradition.

The male and female gaze stuff has always felt overly abstract to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's invalid theoretically. It has never resonated with me personally, most likely because I don't believe in a binaried idea of gender. I get that a lot of people (even really sophisticated and well-read people) have never considered anything else other than the binary, I get that — and from an anthropological remove —I can see its importance in their world.  I just don't live in that world.

So yeah, it's all about queer theory (170) as far as I'm concerned. Like most of us, even before I became familiar with queer theory, I've had to do so much deconstructing and translating of media texts simply to interact (consume) them that it's automatic/business as usual. From the queer viewpoint, much of that banquet of text isn't designed for us, so it doesn't taste the same, is much less satisfying, much more incongruent, or to use the adjective on page 170,  "unstable."

The section "Queerness and Visibility II: the Problems with "Postive" Representation" resonated the most for me in this set of readings. 

Visibility and representation are not synonymous, and the prominence of queerness does not always guarantee an absence of heteronormativity. (205)

In a mirror of the political process where gay marriage and gays in the military have become the gateway for gay civil rights, the mainstream image of gays and lesbians (bi and trans aren't even close to being "mainstreamed" in media) is one that has for the most part had to be pre-digested for the dominant palate. The same issue has been seen with successive waves of increased media visibility of other cultures as well. Politically, to gain full rights in the dominant culture, minorities have to be "recognized" as "just like us" with respect to amplified cultural tokens that are so inherently valid that no one can challenge the validation they confer. So rather than accept "otherness," the dominate culture has to first validate with normativity. First assimilate, then appropriate.

But what can be swallowed as "pragmatic" in politics is more problematic in media visibility. The heterosexual lens reinforces heteronormative domination. An example: it's a running cynical joke in lesbian television criticism that if a mainstream show introduces an actual (non-sweeps week) lesbian storyline, it will inevitably end in the  Pregnant Lesbian Trope. Through the heterosexual lens, the only way lesbians can exist as actual people (as opposed to exotic sexual objects for heterosexual men) is to be desexualized/validated/dominated by pregnancy.

So, yeah, it's important for 9 year old queer kids to see gays on TV and in movies. But if they are seeing them through the heterosexual lens, and if that 9 year old doesn't happen to have a copy of The Culture of Desire (214) laying around, what are they learning about themselves and their place in the world?

It's the zoo animal argument. [Unfortunate metaphor disclaimer] It's important for kids to see and smell and hear wild animals, so the existence of zoos and theme parks is validated. And the kids getting pushed along in their strollers seeing and hearing and smelling are unconsciously consuming the reality that humans can imprison animals for our means. The animals they are seeing aren't wild, aren't representative of anything other than objects of domination.