Queer Eye for the Man-Cave Guy

Donald Hall, in his description of “Queer –the verb” writes “the broad social fear is always that the abnormal and degraded will not stay in their assigned place, that ‘secure’ social systems and identities will become unmoored…” (14).  Hall uses the pronoun “their” which seems to imply that he is referring to people who will not remain within the confines of their social roles.  But as readers discover with a reading of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall Paper,” notions of work can be queered as well.  Thus, it is not simply people who must stick to their social parameters; objects and ideas can be queer as well and must be kept in their own spaces.  As a result, we have the creation of the man-cave, Dad’s shed or garage or basement space that acts as a drainage basin for all his stuff.

I’m not prepared to say with certainty the reasons for the existence of the man-cave.  I posit that it originates out of a need for a space which harbors the things wives/girlfriends/partners do not deem appropriate when house guests are visiting.  Although women often require their own space, I was shocked to discover the fan fare surrounding man-caves.  There is a website (http://www.mancavesite.org/) in which men share their man-caves with others (presumably, men).  But what makes man-caves so queer is how diverse they are.  The definition of the man-cave, to employ Sedgwick’s words, traverses socio-economic  boundaries.  Brief exploration of the site shows that man-caves can be places to manifest one’s wealth; in one man-cave we find a billiards table, fine leather couches and a bar stocked with ample, high-end booze.  The man-cave can be neat and organized and simply a projection of our desires.  (Of course, if our partner allowed the man-cave to be in a different, more visible and open space, that would destroy the power relationship.  A wife cannot admit and openly display that she lets her husband purchase”frivolous” things like a big-screen TV if she herself does not have a similar space, though she may have a burgeoning purse or shoe collection, these objects do not constitute a “space” per se and therefore are not equivalent to a man-cave.)

Other man-caves are repositories for plain-old stuff: hats, stuffed –err, taxidermied –animals (which they obviously shot when they were out hunting; never would a stuffed duck be a gag gift they have kept for too long or memory from a frat party), televisions (one is rarely enough), sports paraphernalia, and (maybe even) pictures of other women (although I suppose gay men can have man-caves in which case, the pictures would be of men) etc. They are cluttered, disorganized, full things that hold memories but questionable value.  In either case, the man-cave is queer in that it transcends categorization (there is not “typical” man-cave) and crosses socio-economic borders (they can be for anyone, even middle-class serial killers from Miami).  Dexter has had several caves throughout the series, all of which threaten his un-doing by exposing his identity, if they are discovered.  The Bay Harbor discovery almost brings Dexter’s killing days to an end, though his bachelor pad apartment (pre-marriage) shares the role of the man-cave equally with the ocean as he conceals his blood samples (taken from every victim) inside his air conditioner. After Dexter marries Rita, he compromises and gets a shed which Rita acknowledges in a fashion that makes man-caves all the more normal.

There are no concretes with the man-cave.  What is in it and what is says about our identity always vary.  What man-caves have in common is their ability to threaten our security, particularly the security of marriage.

The classic and hard-boiled detective in The Moonstone

In his chapter on “Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire”, Zizek begins by outlining the parallel between the classic detective and the psychoanalyst in part one. An analyst interprets dreams in the same way that a detective interprets a case, the detective avoiding the conventional “big picture” of the case which traps the ordinary person in order to make sense of the clues, and the analyst avoiding “the search for the so-called “symbolic meaning” of its totality or of its constituent parts” (51). When interpreting dreams the analyst must “translate the objects back into words” and avoid simply translating the meanings of the symbols, just as the detective avoids translating the clues into the conventional big picture. Both are “subjects supposed to know.”

Zizek begins part two by complicating the detective figure, introducing the more modern hard-boiled detective in opposition to the classic detective from part one. Traditionally the difference between these two detectives has been explained as intellectual activity (on the part of the classic detective) opposed to physical activity (on the part of the hard-boiled detective). This explanation, according to Zizek, is inadequate; the difference between the two lies in engagement and debt: “The real break consists in the fact that, existentially, the classical detective is not “engaged” at all: he maintains an eccentric position throughout…[he] accepts with accentuated pleasure payment for the services he has rendered, whereas the hard-boiled detective as a rule disdains money” (60).

The classic detective accepting payment is closely tied to his lack of engagement; Zizek claims that “the payment enables him to avoid getting mixed up in the libidinal circuit of (symbolic) debt” (60). By accepting payment the classic detective is able to wash his hands of the case and maintain his distance. The comparison to the psychoanalyst is made here again, where the analyst also accepts payment from their patient in order to remain in the distant “subject supposed to know” position.

The hard-boiled detective, in contrast, refuses payment because of his involvement in the case; indeed, he often only takes on the case because he owes a certain debt to someone or something. He becomes engaged in his case by this debt, and it forces him to be “mixed up in a course of events that he is unable to dominate” and it is only by solving the mystery that he is able to “pay” his debt (62).

There are several examples of the classic detective at work. Zizek and Lacan both refer to Poe’s prototype detective, C. Auguste Dupin and the infamous Sherlock Holmes as examples, but more interesting are the detectives in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. The novel complicates the detective and the way we understand the difference between the classical and hard-boiled figure.

Collins’ The Moonstone has all the traits of a classic detective story. A “cursed” diamond is stolen from a locked house, the bumbling police arrive and disturb the scene before the real detective is called in. The beginning of the story is narrated by Gabriel Betteredge, the head servant who becomes fond of the infamous detective Sergeant Cuff. Betteredge acts as the classic detective’s narrator who reveals the mistakes and assumptions made by common investigators and believes in Cuff as a subject supposed to know. The plot becomes complicated when Cuff follows his clues to a dead-end and may have accidentally pushed a maid, Rosanna Spearman, to suicide; he retires with the case unsolved refusing his payment.

Later Franklin Blake assumes the role of the main detective and narrator, fitting with a hard-boiled style. Feeling indebted to the diamond’s owner, Rachel Verinder, whom he was courting at the time of the disappearance when she suddenly became cold to him, he goes to great lengths to solve the mystery. His debt increases when he discovers that the woman who committed suicide discovered evidence of his stealing the diamond, and died protecting him. Zizek claims that the solution to the mystery by the hard-boiled detective “is not just a challenge to his reason but [a] concern [to] him ethically and often painfully” (63). This also perfectly fits Franklin’s narrative, where he goes to the dangerous lengths of experiments with mixing drugs in order to recreate the theft.

In the end Sergeant Cuff reappears and comes to solve the case with the same mixture of science and intuition as that of Dupin or Holmes. The narration remains in the hands of Franklin, creating an interesting effect. The dual detectives appear simultaneously, the hard-boiled figure narrating the mystery as he attempts to solve it despite putting himself in danger, while the classic figure returns and becomes a “subject supposed to know” to the narrator/hard-boiled detective. This early detective novel thus complicates the detective figure by showing the two different types simultaneously.

Intimate Objects

I watched the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being last night and found myself putting Mulvey’s theories onto it. It was not hard to do.

The film follows the lives of three people: Tomàš, a philandering doctor, Tereza, the childlike woman with whom he falls in love, and Sabina, one of Tomàš’ mistresses. With that description I mean to imply that is a patriarchally structured film: the film begins with and centers around Tomàš, and the two women are introduced to the audience only through their relationships with him (Sabina especially, who is introduced after a title card says, “But the woman who understood him best was Sabina”). Tomàš is Mulvey’s typical male Hollywood hero, the character with whom the male viewer narcissistically identifies (and can form himself after).

And boy, is there scopophilia in this film. Tomàš spends much of the film seducing women. His technique? He looks at a woman straight-on, hard, with a devilish, smiling glint in his eyes, and says, “Take off your clothes” (in a Czech accent). It always works. Tomàš is thus an extreme example of Mulvey’s typical male protagonist. Speaking of the way the male audience member identifies with the male protagonist, Mulvey says, “the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving  a satisfying sense of omnipotence [to the male viewer]” (2187). Tomàš’ erotic look does more than coincide with his control of events, it is the way he controls events. Which I would say affects the male viewer rather strongly: I remember that for weeks after my teenage self first watched this movie I would try to imitate Tomàš’ look almost every time I looked in a mirror.

The seduction scenes also exemplify Mulvey’s split between active/male and passive/female. Tomàš’ gaze is in control; he sees the women as spectacles, and they, conscious of his objectification of them, display themselves. As Mulvey puts it, “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (2186 in the blue book). For instance, in one scene he makes Sabina put on a bowler hat, take off her robe, and crawl on a mirror in her lingerie; spectacle. She allows him to make her do this, and then, while on the mirror, conscious of herself as spectacle, asks him, “What are you looking at?” He replies, “Your eyes.”

This reply points, I think, to the way Tomàš’ pleasure in looking does not fit completely into Lacan’s and Mulvey’s theories. At one point in the film he tells Sabina that his chief erotic pleasure is in discovering the particularities of the women he sleeps with, in that part of their physical existence in the world which is unique to them, those expressions or movements which are theirs alone. He does project his desire onto them by turning them into spectacles, but he pays attention to them as spectacles. They are not simply objets a, objects that he only looks at for an outline that he can fill in with his fantasies. Rather, the beauty (and, perhaps, ugliness) of Tomàš’ look is that, in actually seeing women’s bodies for what they are, it makes their bodies special and beautiful and individual, and it makes them conscious of their bodies as special and beautiful and individual. He shows them that they have power over him, power to incite his desire, and they delight in exercising that power. This is still objectification by men of women, and thus still a subjection of women, but is there not a possibility for beauty in it? I mean to make a compromise out of Tomàš’ look which might satisfy both feminists and queer theorists: if a woman, independent, conscious of herself and her innate dignity as a human being, were to voluntarily allow Tomàš to look at her and see her beauty, there would be intimacy in his objectification. The same if a man allowed himself to be looked at in such a way. And why not make “intimacy” the trump signifier, especially in matters of sex, where objectification is the point?

 

Visual Pleasure in Millennium

A familiar and important text in film studies since the 1970s, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” argues that “the magic of the Hollywood style at its best” derives from the “skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure” (449). The film experience, especially as that experience is constructed in the classic Hollywood film, reproduces the hierarchical divisions of a male-dominated society. The traditional narrative film assumes a male spectator and structures the film-going experience with his pleasure in mind. As viewers, we identify with the primary male character in whom we recognize (or misrecognize) ourselves. We don’t so much look at him as we look with him. We share his gaze–and share in his pleasure in looking. Central to the “erotic pleasure” of that shared gaze is “the image of woman” (449). As narrative film constructs men as gazing subjects, women are “looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (451).

Of course, film is not the only entertainment medium that posits Woman-as-Object-of-the-Gaze, as the opening peepshow scene of Millennium makes clear. The very architecture of the peepshow constructs an experience sharply divided between viewing subject and looked-at object. The viewing booths are darkly lit, so that it is difficult to see into them, while the stage where the women perform is just the opposite, brightly lit and slightly elevated so that the whole body can be observed. The appearance of the women is obviously coded to have “strong visual and erotic impact,” emphasized by clothing (or lack thereof), stylized “dancing.” The filming of this scene, however, seems to be designed to undermine the “erotic impact” of the dancers ( a point that I will return to).

From a Lacanian perspective, the place of the peepshow, seemingly underground, dark, disgusting (all we need to see is someone in the background with a mop to know what the floor is like), claustrophobic, is not only a site of perverse (voyeuristic) sexuality but also a perfect illustration of the construction of “normal” masculine sexual identity. As Coats writes, “The male as a split subject couples with the objet a, that is he couples with a fantasized object that he projects onto an other who (or which) serves as a prop” (101). Of course, the difference between “normal” sexuality and the peepshow is that in the peepshow the male only fantasizes about coupling with the fantasized object before him. Also, the structure of the peepshow is such that there is little danger that the male subject might actually “encounter a woman in her particularity, a woman who is not his symptom,” whereas in the normal relationships between men and women there is at least the possibility (to think positively for a moment) of recognizing in one’s partner “her particularity” as another subject (okay, okay, Lacan would call me a crazy romantic, what can I say?)(106). The scenes of the women talking before going on stage, calling home to check on a child, etc., establish the women as subjects in their own right.

The peep show, like the black house that Zizek discusses, is an “empty space” where men “articulate their desires” (9). The contrast between the brightly lit space of the dancers and the dark booths, the performances of the dancers, assist in transforming the women from particularized individuals who have lives and problems (as revealed by the backstage conversations) into objets a. As Zizek writes the “objet a is precisely that surplus, that elusive make-believe. . . . In ‘reality,’ it is nothing at all, just an empty surface” (8). The women in the peepshow, in terms of their function, do not exist except as screens onto which the men project their fantasies–although perhaps “prop” is a better word than “screen,” as the women, in exchange for money, perform so as to enhance the fantasy. “Tell me what you want,” they say repeatedly. The desire they articulate is not their own but that of the male watchers.

The most interesting moment in the peepshow sequence is when we see the screen in one of the booths come down and block out the spectator’s view. As the television screen goes dark with the shutting out of its onscreen counterpart, we have, ironically, a moment of enlightenment, a little bit of truth in a situation otherwise devoted only to fantasy. This is the equivalent to the moment of rolling down the car window in the story Zizek discusses:

“It is as if, for a moment, the ‘projection’ of the outside reality had stopped working, as if, for a moment, we had been confronted with formless grey, with the emptiness of the screen, with the ‘place where nothing takes place but the place’” (15). The “projection of the outside reality” in this case is the projection of the watchers’ fantasies onto the bodies of the women, and what we see, for a moment, is the real: an empty screen, a nothingness, a lack, that will almost immediately be concealed by the renewal of the fantasy.

Since its 1975 publication, Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has been thoroughly critiqued and her ideas revised, expanded, and complicated. Mulvey’s article works well for describing the peepshow itself, but director Chris Carter complicates the depiction of that peepshow in multiple ways. It’s highly unlikely that we identify with any of the watching men in this scene, whose activity is clearly marked as pathetic (“they would clap, but it takes two hands”). Also, the camera shifts back and forth between two perspectives, and the watchers are also watched—by us and by the dancers. By sharing the dancers’ perspectives (both visually and from what they say backstage and to Frank Black), we are encouraged to know them in their “particularity.”

Note the difference in the exchange between male observer and female performer when Frank Black is in the booth. The music that accompanies the other scene is gone, the moving camera is gone, and the dancer’s opening comment (“hi, you caught me. I was thinking something nasty”) is delivered with evident lack of enthusiasm. We are closer to reality than fantasy here. Frank is not invested in the same fantasy as the watchers in the earlier scene, and that difference is revealed to us by the difference in the way the scene is filmed. Frank has a different fantasy, perhaps. Ultimately, the dancer does give him what he wants—the clue that he has been seeking.

Let me posit a few questions, which you should feel free to respond to via the comments function or in a blog post of your own:

Zizek discusses the story of a professor who falls asleep and has a dream in which he becomes involved with an attractive woman and all sorts of sex and violence ensues. Zizek suggests that dream and reality shift in this story, and that “the professor awakes to continue his dream (about being a normal person like his fellow men), that is, to escape the real (the ‘psychic reality’) of his desire.” The real of his unconscious is that he is a “murderer dreaming, in his everyday life, that he is just a decent bourgeois professor” (17).

Think about this observation in terms of the character Frank Black. In the episode we watched, what is dream and what is reality? Doesn’t Frank lead two lives (the gentle father, the detective tracking the most brutal of killers)? How are each of the two worlds that Frank lives in represented on screen?

Also, we might think about the episodes in terms of the way it depicts “sex in public,” the way it presents spaces organized around sexual activities (the peepshow, cruising in the park).  The peepshow doesn’t quite seem to fulfill the same function as the counterpublics described by Warner and Berlant, and although public spaces where men go to meet other men for sex certainly fits with their description of spaces where counterpublic discourses can begin to emerge, I’m not sure we see that happening in the episode.  The episode’s portrayal of gay men in some ways strikes me as problematic. They remain “other,” never emerging as subjects in the narrative; they function as the opposite against which Frank’s heteronormativity is underscored (between the straight men at the peepshow and the cruisers in the park, Frank, by contrast, appears “normal,” although his “difference” from both groups is questioned at various points). I’m not quite sure where I’m headed here in terms of a question other than, what did we think of the representation of these public spaces devoted to sexual activity?

The Balancing Acts of Mary Poppins and Mulan

In her chapter on sexuation, Karen Coats explains that  “a person has a masculine or a feminine structure according to how he or she is situated with respect to the Name of the Father” (99). Lacanian theory suggests that we are sexed by society not through biological determinants, but rather through a third term, the Name of the Father. This third term, according to Lacan, separates the Symbolic and the Imaginary worlds of a child in their psychological development, which “effectively bars the mother’s desire, inaugurating a chain of substitutions that come to signify and replace the mother’s desire” (20). Essentially, the Name of the Father, which is Law, separates the child from the imagined, but non-existent relationship with the mother, which lies within the Imaginary, and propels them into the Symbolic order, or society.

This perceived separation creates a hole of desire within the child that they wish to fill. According to Lacan, both sexes experience this separation, however men, because the Symbolic is a masculine structure (100), men cannot escape from the loss and subsequent hole created by the separation of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. A woman, on the other hand, can see this lack and “can fill the hole if she wants to, that is, she can act as if the problem of incompleteness can be solved. But-and this is the important distinction – she doesn’t have to” (100). Because of this, women are more capable of balancing between the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

To demonstrate this balancing act, Coats uses the example of Mary Poppins, the loveable, extraordinary, word-jumbling nanny of the Banks children. Poppins acts as foil for George Banks, the father of the children she nannies, challenging his role within the Symbolic, as a man who adheres and subscribes to the Law of the Father. As she rejects masculine structure, she must also, to an extent, reject the feminine role within that masculine structure. Mr. Bank’s wife and his children, act as his symptom, as do past nannies of the Banks children, but Poppins, because she is aware of the fact that the Symbolic “performs what it purports to describe,” she can choose to obey or not to obey the Law of the Father (107). By both challenging and using the Symbolic to her advantage, she is able to change the lives of the Banks family.

Disney has the propensity to support the image of women like Mary Poppins, who transcend gender roles, but also tends to support the Symbolic order. Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, for instance, must change herself for Prince Eric and ascribe to the role of lover, wife and symptom. However, Disney’s interpretation of the legend of Mulan, a story of a woman, set in the 6^th century, who joins the all-male Chinese army, supports the Lacanian theory that “the feminine position…has closer affinities with the Real than with the Symbolic” (101). Although the Mulan does support and strengthen the Law of the Father in some cases, it rejects it in others. In the beginning of the film, Mulan’s father is called to war and, although he is old and disabled, he dutifully accepts his masculine responsibility.

However, Mulan speaks up and disagrees with this law, disgracing her father in the eyes of society, but rejecting that society all the same. In secret, Mulan steals her father’s armor and his summon to war, cuts off her hair and dresses like a man, and joins the army. In doing so, she walks the line between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, not only emotionally, but physically. Much like Poppins, Mulan also uses the Symbolic to her advantage. Knowing that she would not be accepted as a woman, she dresses and attempts to act like a man, convincing her comrades that she is equal to them. She is successful at this, however, because she uses, unbeknownst to them, her knowledge of the feminine structure within the male structure. Eventually, she is able to save her father, her fellow soldiers and even China by rejecting her role as the symptom and creating a new role for herself within, but separate from the Symbolic.

 

The Master Signifier in “I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This”

In chapter six “Blinded by the White” from Karen Coats’ book Looking Glasses and Neverlands, one main idea presented from Lacan that she further examines is that of “master signifiers.” This concept discusses how one moves in the direction of the impossible concept of perfectibility. The idea of the master signifier is to work toward covering over our status of split subjects, and if we identify with the master signifier and can get others to provide support for this actually being our identity, then, conceivably, we can convince ourselves as well as others into believing its possibility: “This is precisely the way a master signifier works—by offering itself as a whole, a complete and ideal Thing, without qualities, it supports a field of signifiers in which it does not participate but that define themselves in terms of their failure to attain its ideal wholeness…Whiteness has attained this status of a master signifier” (page 124).

One example of Whiteness as a master signifier that Coats mentions is within Holes, the young adult novel written by Louis Sachar. Coats points out one particular instance within the novel in which Whiteness takes on the status of a master signifier, in relation to the main character Stanley. Stanley is a young, white male who ends up befriending a more under-privileged African American boy named Zero. Stanley starts out by denying his white privilege, but comes to assume this position when he starts to teach Zero how to read and expects some sort of payment in return. Zero realizes his lack of Whiteness and readily accepts the task of digging Stanley’s holes for him, i.e., adopting the African American role of doing manual labor for the white boy.  Zero is willing to do the extra labor to attain the secondary signifier of Whiteness, which is literacy, something Stanley seems to naturally have because of his white privilege.

Another instance of master signifier, not necessarily Whiteness, however, that could be examined using knowledge of this concept is within a reading of the young adult book I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This. This book, written by Jacqueline Woodson, seems to be the opposite of what one would expect with the societal “norm” or expectation of racism. The main character is a twelve-year-old African American girl named Marie, who goes to a school where the majority of the students are African American. The Caucasian students that do attend there are normally referred to as “white trash” and are usually poor. Both races of students stick to themselves until a new girl Lena comes to school one day. Marie is drawn to her and doesn’t know why. She is white, very poor, dirty, lives in a bad part of town and eventually reveals that her father touches her inappropriately. So in this instance we have the clear opposite of how race plays out in Holes, because the African American girl is more privileged and better educated, while the white girl is poor and abused. The African American girl has the traits, or secondary signifiers, that Coats states as typically being associated with the master signifier of Whiteness, like “achievement,” “innocence,” and “freedom” (126).

The Twilight Zone and the objet a

In Coats’ chapter on the objet a, desire, and jouissance, she states that “the Lacanian subject comes into being as a resuly of a series of inevitable losses; the intervention of language as a mediator of desire is both necessary and alienating” (80). The words we use to represent objects are merely metaphors for those objects. There is a gap between the signifier and the signified which creates a feeling of lacking something. The child uses language as a means to willingly enter into the Symbolic Order and become an “I”, but this comes with a price: “Once that ‘I’ has been attained, however, the subject is fundamentally nostalgic, positing and then pursuing a sense of wholeness that has been lost and must be recovered” (81). The sense of “lack” in language becomes a sense of overall “lack”, and the objet a is the object of desire which will seemingly fill that void.

The problem is that the void is never able to be filled, and Coats perfectly explains this in her Lacanian reading of Shel Silverstein’s “The Missing Piece”. In the story a rounded shape with a “missing piece” searches for that which it lacks, going on a long journey and meeting many interesting characters. In the end a piece which fits is found, but the round shape becomes dissatisfied with its inability to slowly roll along as it did before. The round shape’s objet a was the smaller shape which would “complete” it, but even when the object of desire is attained desire is not. Our perceived lack is never able to be filled with our objet a, our desires are instead transferred and the lack remains. The round shape was never missing its piece, the piece was representative of its Lacanian lack, and that lack remained even when the “missing” piece was found.

Similarly in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Sirius Black represents Harry’s objet a. Initially the desire is to stay away from him as he is perceived as dangerous. When this desire becomes impossible Harry comes to find that Black isn’t dangerous and desires instead to save him from his soulless fate. Harry rescues Black and realizes this desire, but only to have that transferred to the impossible desire to have Black as his guardian.

There are also countless Twilight Zone episodes that are centered on this notion of the objet a, a perfect example being “What You Need” from Season 1. In the episode a peddler named Pedott is capable of giving people anything that they will need before they need it. He initially gives a woman a bottle of soap and a baseball player tickets to another city where he finds a position, but only after he has his jacket cleaned by the woman. Then enters Renard who demands an item he needs; he is given scissors which he uses to save himself when he is almost strangled. Renard demands something else and is given a pen which wins him a bet. He continues to demand and is ultimately given shoes which kill him.

Renard desires the items he “needs” from Pedott, but after each item he receives he is unsatisfied and his desire transfers to another item. His void, like all of ours, is impossible to fill (another perfect example would be Rocky Valentine in “A Nice Place to Visit” receiving every wish he asks for only to realize he is in Hell), but we still strive to erase the sense of lack we require in order to become a part of the Symbolic Order. Also interesting is the idea that the first two characters, the woman and the baseball player, are satisfied with their items. If the story had followed them instead of Renard, they too would have been unsatisfied and their desires would have transferred to something else.

Whiteness Can Be Blue

Karen Coats discusses in her chapter, Blinded by the White, about the rules of race and how it is portrayed to children. Coats explains, “But as a master signifier, Whiteness acts as a nodal point of desire—not that we desire, as Seshadri-Crooks points out, to be Caucasian, but that we desire the ideal of Whiteness in its place as master signifier, its place of wholeness, the absence of difference and qualities” (124). Coats explain how the children see the definition of whiteness as the ideal person; the perfect height, weight, traits, hair color, eye color, etc. Whiteness is considered to be the master signifier because it is the idealist look of what a person should be outside of the outwards physical appearance. Whiteness as the master signifier is desired because it is seen as being privileged and people, including children, try to live up to the ideal prospect of whiteness.

One of the main examples Coats uses to express her idea is the story, Tangerine, by Edward Bloor. Coats uses this example to show how whiteness is portrayed in a children’s book. The upper middle class all live in a housing development made up of white upper middle class suburban families while the other classes are made up of different races. Of course, the white class is seen as better off and idealistic. Children reading this story can see the prospects of this whiteness as being ideal and the conscience of the child reading the story may want to strive for the same achievements of the perfect suburban family-life. While this is a positive look on the whiteness appeal of the book, the other races are seen as secondary signifiers. These are the races that seem to follow or surround the master signifier. For instance, all the other races described within the book, both African American and Hispanic cultures, are actually surrounding the housing development of the white culture. The other races are given strong stereotypes like how the Hispanic characters are considered to be emotionally violent, who were always suspended from school, did manual labor, and drove a pickup truck, while the African American character was poor and great at sports. Compared to the whiteness, these stereotypes, or secondary signifiers, are not really something to idealize.

The movie Avatar it seems as though the whiteness is considered to the Na’vi people not the white people who have gone to Pandora uninvited. It is interesting to see whiteness not pertaining to a white culture but those of blue humanoids. In the movie, Jake Sully, the main character, is able to walk in the shoes of both the white culture and as an avatar in the Na’vi culture. For the purpose of Coats, Sully is seen to be the child. He is able to see both the master signifier and the secondary signifier (master signifier is represented as the Na’vi and the secondary signifier is represented as the United States army). As the movie continues, Sully strives to live the idealistic life of the Na’vi people. He goes so far as to turn his back to the secondary signifier and considers himself as one of the master signifiers. Sully is so apt to becoming the ideal whiteness he manages to change completely by switching his race.

Lacan, Objet A, and a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

In our previous class discussion, we touched upon the Lacanian term, objet petit autre (objects with a little otherness, 81). Lacan and Coats describe the objet petit autre as representing “that part of himself that the individual loses at birth, and which may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object” (81). We also discussed the Shel Silverstein story, The Missing Piece, which gives a literal picture of what the objet petit autre is: A small piece of ourselves that we perceive to be missing, but even after we gain a piece to fill the whole we feel needs filling, we still desire. What we did not discuss in class was how the concept of objet petit autre works in the classic children’s book, Alice through the Looking Glass.

Coats explains that Carroll (or Charles Dodgson) looks at the character of Alice as his objet petit autre. “She, like his ideal reflection,” writes Coats, “exists as a rem(a)inder of self-alienation, as as reminder of lack, but also, in the matter of objet a, as a suggestion of the possibility of amelioration. In her, lack transcends the physical and is poignantly etched in his psyche as a great aching to preserve an impossible dyadic relationship with the Other” (83). In other words, Alice represents Dodgson’s desire to take hold of childhood, either his own or a non-fictional Alice’s, and uses the story of Alice through the Looking Glass to attempt to prevent Alice from growing up. Coats explains, “Having recognized the implications of his [Dodgson/Carroll] own Symbolic castration, he seeks to save her from hers” (84). This, of course, cannot happen, and, as Coats points out, the story is filled with a desire–either to “escape” and assume the “I” identity, in the case of the story’s Alice, or to prevent that from happening, as Carroll attempts to do in the story.

The idea of searching for one’s objet a (and whether or not you can find it or if its presence does put an end to desire for that unattainable Other) has been alluded to in other children’s stories. My example comes from Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst. Alexander is a little boy who has pretty crummy day: He doesn’t get a toy in his cereal box, he can’t sit by the seat he wants on the way to school, he doesn’t get a dessert in his lunch pack, the shoe store doesn’t have the kind of shoes he wants, and the cat won’t sleep with him that night. All this, among other things, makes up his day, but the most significant aspect of all this is the fact that he’s not getting something (anything, really) that he wants. The idea is that Alexander’s day would go better if he just could get what he wants, so essentially, all these things (cereal box toys, shoes, desserts, cats) are a series of objets a. The less that Alexander gets, the more he wants and therefore the more miserable he is.

The book ends on an interesting note. All throughout the book Alexander insists that things would probably be better in Australia, but on the last two pages of the book, that changes. “It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. My mom says some days are like that. Even in Australia.” What Alexander’s mom is suggesting is that it doesn’t matter if you get what you desire, you will still always want something, just as the circle with the supposedly missing piece still desired (though for something different) even after it got what it thought it wanted.

Ridding the Eye

Once an individual reaches the end of the mirror-stage they consider themselves lacking something through the loss of the mother. Karen Coats says:

“He has to find some way of mitigating his loss, of managing the tremendous risk of performing the assertion of anticipated certainty, for while the assertion provides him with the freedom to become someone apart from his mother, it also sets him loose from the moorings of the prior certainty of his Imaginary place in the mother.”

The quotation expresses how the individual must find a way to make the loss of the mother much easier on their psyche because even though the mother provides “certainty of his Imaginary place,” there must be a separation and reconstruction of the individual’s imaginary space.

In the act of lessening the perception of this loss, as Coat states, “children must introject the loss, take it on themselves in such a way that they assume the characteristics of the lost object. They do not become the object they have lost, but they work to preserve the attributes that made the object precious to them in the first place.” Enacting Coat’s words, the individual must then maintain the reasons they knew the object to be satisfying within them so that they feel whole again. Only to find, the sensation of desire comes from the very preservation of these attributes of what makes the object significant to their identity.

In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator had gone through the Lacanian mirror-stage only to find himself caught in the moment of separation between him and the old man whom he works. In the very start of the story, the narrator admits “[o]bject there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes it was this!” As soon as he mentions the eye he comes to realize this is why he wants to kill the old man.

First of all, all of the details established in his reflection why hit on many key terms of the mirror-stage. If there is no object, then this would mean he has yet to fully separate his desires from the old man’s. And if there is no desire, once again the narrator is treating the old man as the nurturing mother figure he learns he must free himself of. Though it is the eye of the old man which strains him to wish such. Lacan says it is when the infant realizes the mother looks beyond the infant and desires other things, the infant desire to separate.

The dramatic, and psychotic, reaction of the narrator is murder of the old man, though he has “never given [him] insult.” The instant in the story when the narrator finally takes the swift movement of killing the old man, he feels grief through the context of the old man’s heart beating. When he disposes of the body he lessens the grief through trying to return to the way at which he worked for the old man: answering the door to the police and telling them he screamed in the night and the old man is out to the country.

Unfortunately, the grief is not lessened enough to keep the heart from beating in his mind, or the grief of his loss to bring him to reaching paranoid state in his Imaginary place. The other interesting element (discussed earlier with Freud) is the narrator’s fear of the old man’s eye, and the fact he needed to rid himself of the eye. In Freud’s perspective, would this constitute as self-castration. “When [the eye] fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.”