Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Lacanian orientation“

Jungian film theory has reached a point where it has started to coalesce into a field. It is perhaps timely to take stock of what constitutes that field, and the extent to which a Jungian orientation to film and media is differentiated from Freudian and Lacanian approaches as well as those derived from traditional phenomenology and Deleuze.

El psicoanálisis es una praxis que comprende esencialmente lo que Lacan denominó el dispositivo analítico, definido como el dispositivo clínico de escucha del psicoanalista sobre la palabra del psicoanalizado. Sin embargo,el psicoanálisis no se reduce al dispositivo analítico, puesto que se constituye como una poderosa teoría crítica que abarca diferentes fenómenos del lazo social. Un claro ejemplo de lo anterior puede encontrarse en las diferentes obras, tanto de Freud como Lacan, que apuntaban a esclarecer el lazo social. En este sentido, los desarrollos teóricos que efectuó el psicoanalista francés Jacques Lacan son de suma importancia, al punto de definirse un tipo de psicoanálisis de orientación lacaniana. Como consecuencia de lo anterior, es posible pensar el psicoanálisis en el contexto educativo actual, sobre el que el psicoanálisis lacaniano ha reflexionado ampliamente a partir de la formalización de la teoría de los cuatrodiscursos, propuesta por Jacques Lacan, de la que se extraen importantes consecuencias, que se intentarán dilucidar a lo largo del artículo.ABSTRACTPsychoanalysis is a practice that comprises essentially what Lacan called the analytic device, defined as the clinical listening device of the psychoanalyst on the word of the individual psychoanalyzed. However, psychoanalysis is not reduced to an analytical device, since it is such a powerful critical theory that encompasses various phenomena of social ties. A clear example of this can be found in the various works of both Freud and Lacan that aimed at clarifying social ties. In this sense, the theoretical developments made by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan are paramount to the point of giving rise to a type of psychoanalysis of Lacanian orientation. Because of this, it is possible to think of psychoanalysis in the current educational context, on which Lacanian psychoanalysis has largely reflected from the formalization of the theory of the four discourses, proposed by Jacques Lacan, from which important consequences have been derived, and which will be dealt with throughout the article.RESUMOA psicanálise é uma práxis que compreende esencialmente o que Lacan chama o dispositivo analítico, definido como o dispositivo clínico de escuta do psicanalista sobre a palavra do psicanalisado. No entanto, a psicanálise não é reducida ao dispositivo analítico, uma vez que se constitui como una poderosa teoria crítica que abrange diferentes fenómenos do laço social. Um exemplo claro disso pode ser encontrada nas diferentes obras, tanto de Freud como Lacan, que teve como objetivo esclarecer o laço social. Neste sentido, os desenvolvimentos teóricos que fez o psicanalista francés Jacques Lacan são fundamentais, a ponto de definir-se um tipo de psicanálise de orientação lacaniana. Como resultado do anterior, é posivel pensar o psicanálise no contexto educacional atual, sobre o que a psicanálise lacaniana se refletiu em grande parte da formalização da teoria dos quatro discursos, proposta por Jacques Lacan , a partir da qual são extraídas importantes consecuências, que vão tentar elucidar ao longo do artigo.

This paper explores the principal reasons for the exclusion of Lacanian ideas from psychoanalytic training institutes in the United States. The history of Lacan’s role in the International Psychoanalytical Association, from which essentially he was expelled, occupies a central place in this story. Significant issues arose also from his practice style and technical innovations, whose rationale remains controversial today. Another major obstacle for the reception of his work is the theoretical framework of Lacanian analysis, so different from that of other schools. Inclusion of its unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts poses practical problems for training programs. At a more fundamental level, the strong antihumanist evolution of Lacan’s thought runs contrary to the increasingly relational and intersubjective orientation of American psychoanalysis. The incompatibility between the disparate languages of a scientific theory aiming at objectivity and a phenomenology of personal intentionality and meaning greatly limits the possibilities for dialogue. The tension between these perspectives cannot be resolved, but a productive exchange between them is possible if they are accepted as valid and complementary ways of speaking about human behavior.

This paper explores some of the crucial ontological implications of the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality in its Freudo-Lacanian orientation. As irreducible to different sexual practices and contents, the concept of sexuality obtains conceptual weight that makes it particularly relevant for philosophical ontological thinking. Starting from the hypothesis that something about sexuality is constitutively unconscious - that is to say, existing only in the form of the unconscious - the paper points at the singular short-circuit of the epistemological and ontological level which is at work in psychoanalytic theory, and which cannot be neglected in philosophical examination of the relation between knowledge and being.

With studies like Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich A. Kittler contributed significantly to transforming the history of media into a vital field of inquiry. This essay undertakes to more precisely characterize Kittler’s historiographical approach. When we look back on his early contributions to studies of the relationship between literature, madness and truth – among others, his doctoral dissertation on the Swiss poet and writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer – what strikes us is the significance that Jacques Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis had in shaping the orientation of Kittler’s later studies. His intensive engagement with Lacan galvanized Kittler’s concern with the question of sex and/or gender in the evolution of the humanities as well as his concern with the media history of the university. At the same time, Kittler’s reliance on Lacan led him to a kind of history that is interested above all in the internal logic of discourse. As we see, for instance, in Kittler’s anecdotic treatment of 19th-century physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, this historiography does not involve any original research in archives and/or museums. Rather, it builds upon existing historical accounts and focuses its analyses on the issue of symbolic structures. Instead of investigating the history of the material culture of science and technology, what is thereby ultimately reinforced is a philosophical idealism in which knowledge and paranoia become superimposed in and by means of an ‘original syntax’ (Lacan).

In the stories of Snow White, Narcissus, and other such tales, we see brilliant examples of identities based on imaginary features. These turn out to be narcissistic and ego-centred identities. The question for the psychoanalyst and therapist is, are there any other forms of identity? A close reading of Freud, informed by the psychoanalytic teaching of Lacan, shows us that there are. Using a Lacanian orientation in psychoanalysis in conjunction with a reading of the Samoan author Albert Wendt's book Sons for the Return Home, we see that there is a subjectivity that is also a cultural identity that is not based on a 'Westernized' idea of a strong ego.

Criticising the discourse of happiness and wellbeing from a psychoanalytic perspective, this article is in five parts. The first offers a brief philosophical genealogy of happiness, charting its diverse meanings from ancient Greece, through Medieval Scholasticism and on to bourgeois liberalism, utilitarianism and neoliberalism. The second contextualizes contemporary happiness in the wider milieu of self-help culture and positive psychology. The third explores the growing influence but also methodological weaknesses of the field of Happiness Studies. The fourth then focuses specifically on the notion of wellbeing and the impact it has had on changing definitions of health itself, particularly mental health. The fifth and final section then turns to psychoanalysis, its Lacanian orientation especially, to explore the critical resources it offers to counter today’s dominant therapeutic cultures. It also emphasises psychoanalytic clinical practice as itself an ethico-political challenge to the injunction to be happy that lies at the heart of consumer culture.

This paper presents an approach for songwriting from a Lacanian psychoanalysis’ perspec-tive based on an ongoing master's degree research. The departure point is related the rele-vance of the unconscious processes already highlighted in musical cognition research. The research establishes a conversation between these two fields – psychoanalysis and cognition – to, subsequently, address methods and theories that enable a deeper understanding of the different relevant issues on creative process in songwriting. Introducing a brief literature re-view and proposing the use of methods such as memorial and genetic criticism. Finally, we present the initial steps towards a methodology for approaching the creative process in music with psychoanalytic orientation, based on the analysis of drafts and personal reports in free association.

This article aims to formulate a notion of authority regarding the psychoanalytic treatment of Lacanian orientation. To do this, we dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s theory. First, we address the distinction between authority in the private and public spheres. Considering that authority is an effect of the hierarchy, which is established from the difference between its levels, it is presented in a natural way in the private sphere, which welcomes the differences. In the public sphere, equality is the determining factor, making it necessary to establish the difference. Then we approach the Roman strategy for establishing authority in politics, namely, its source is an external element to the relationship between rulers and ruled, in this case, the foundation of the city of Rome. Finally, we emphasize the conception of political authority established by the actors of the American Revolution, who shifted the source of authority from the founding act of the ancestors to their own founding act, which is represented by the Constitution of the United States as a result of mutual commitments established between the actors of that body politic. Thus, Arendt postulates that authority results from a hierarchy and that its source is external to the relationship between leaders and leaders, even if that source is not placed as a superior or absolute parameter, but derives from the mutual commitment between individuals acting in concert. From there, we analyze the relation between authority and truth in the Lacanian work, considering that the latter derives from the division between the grammatical and enunciation subjects, which means to maintain this notion in the field of language and to refuse the necessity of a metalanguage. In addition, we take into account the author’s propositions on the authorization of the analyst. Finally, we conclude that legitimate authority in psychoanalytic treatment comes from the manifestation of the truth of the subject of the unconscious as a third place in relation to the analyzer and the analyst, as well as the relation of truth to the transmissible knowledge that takes place at the end of the analysis. Our methodology is the bibliographical research, guided by the search for inspiration of the Lacanian-oriented psychoanalysis by Arendtian political theory.

This paper discusses three styles of psychoanalytic psychotherapy commonly practiced in Aotearoa New Zealand. Judi Blumenfeld Hoadley writes on object relations, Gustavo Restivo on the Lacanian orientation, and Sarah Calvert on relational psychoanalysis and the relational movement. Each author discusses their specific orientation towards psychoanalytic psychotherapy in terms of the historical origins, seminal theorists, and philosophical views. They also articulate the key theoretical concepts, clinical techniques, and unique links to the therapeutic relationship. Finally, the authors point out the specific organisations, training, and conferences available in Aotearoa New Zealand. Waitara Ko tā tēnei tuhinga he matapakinga o ētahi momo kakenga mahi whakaora hinengaro mahia ai i Aotearoa Niu Tireni. Ko tā Hūria Purumanawheri Hoari, arā, Judi Blumenfeld Hoadley he titiro ki ngā pānga tupua, ko tā Karitawa Rehitio, arā, Gustavo Restivo, he titiro ki te aronga ā-Rakaniana, ā, ko tā Hera Kariwhata, arā Sarah Calvert, he titiro ki te whaiaro tātarihanga me ōna pānga nekenekehanga. Ka huri ia kaituhi ki tōna ake tūranga whakapā atu ki te tūnga a te tātarihanga whakaora hinengaro mai i ōna pūnga ake, ngā whakapaenga whakahiranga me ngā tirohanga wānanga. Ka whakaarahia ake hoki e rātou ngā aroro ariā, ngā momo haumanu, me ngā here ki te piringa haumanu. I te mutunga, ka tohua ake e ngā kaituhi ngā rōpū.

In the article, on the interdisciplinary methodological basis of the classical semiotics of culture and cultural comparative studies, supplemented by the developments of Lacanism and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis of the Ljubljana school, information aesthetics and tranzaesthetics, critical theory, French structuralism and poststructuralism, a strategy of dialogue between poetry and philosophy as the phenomena of traditional Logos in postmoderism is developed. ... The main problem of the modern poetic word is the loss of ontological adequations and spiritual implications by the text as a result of the inclusion of artistic creativity in the cyberspace of global digital multicultural capitalism. A comparative analysis of the projects of globalism and anti-globalism has demonstrated the priority of commercial culture as a prestigious social model for the formation of the poet's symbolic capital and network promotion. The orientation of the free market towards the sponsor's occupation of poetic creativity increasingly deprives poetry of the semantic invariants of authentic civilizational memory, which is eroded by trends in branding, advertising, and image, and is transformed into a souvenir, simulacrum, ersatz, and trademark. The only guarantor of the actualization of the basic cultural meanings of poetry is traditionalism, but its often grotesque, ultra-conservative and nostalgic character is not able to maintain the competitiveness of the tradition, its attractiveness for the younger generation and vivid personal subjectivity. A harmonious balance between traditionalism and postmodernism in poetry is possible if new technologies are used as forms of presentation and means of promoting the classical poetic tradition in the modern world, while maintaining the primacy of the goal for poetry, in relation to which the “creativity” of managerial entrepreneurship is a secondary means. We regard poetry as a point of semiotic intersection of a static sign in space (syntagma) and dynamic meaning in time (paradigm). Inside this point, in the zero phoneme, the author resides, regaining integrity, continuity, essence and selfhood instead of gaping, alienation and lack due to the correct correlation of the ontological goals of poetry and its ontic cases. Poetry in this context is a kind of a formula for the harmony of the metonymy of the real-symbolic language of culture and the metaphor of its ideal imaginary meanings. To find harmony between tradition and innovation, metaphysics and dialectics, synchronicity and diachrony, the gene code of culture and a historically labile cultural image is capable of culturology as a science based on philosophy (ontology and axiology), philology (hermeneutics and journalism), social sciences.

My modest aim and scope in this article is to outline the present philosophical situation in Slovenia, inasmuch as it is linked with the development of Hegelian thought and influenced by the work of Hegel. I will briefly discuss some historical characteristics of its origin, with no attempt to depict “ethnographic” features of it or to show its ideological basis. Later on I will introduce some aspects of Hegel's philosophy, as understood by Slovenian lacaniens, trying to summarize their reading of Hegel and consequently point out how deeply their work on Lacan is inspired by him. My hidden and not explicitly discussed assumption throughout this paper will be that their research, although manifestly concerned with Lacan, is for the most part inspired by Hegel, and therefore Slovenian Lacanians are actually Hegelians. I will, however, try to avoid disputing and making comments on the main views of their orientation and how they concur with Hegel — this would require an extra space for comparison of both standpoints and be too complicated hermeneutically. Slovenia, which used to be a part of Yugoslavia, grew up in a-rigorous tradition of communist thinking with Marxism as a systematical ideological basis. This happened in almost all Eastern European countries, which shared the same destiny till the fall of the Berlin wall. The ideological restrictions behind the so-called “iron curtain”, so typical and easily recognizable within all these countries, caused a total eclipse of almost every non-Marxist philosophy in Slovenia up to the sixties.

Abstract Two very substantial new books by Slavoj Žižek were published in early 2020; they are at two different ends of the spectrum that runs from obscure Hegelian-Lacanian philosophical reflections (Sex and the Failed Absolute) to uninhibited short Maoist-Leninist political “interventions” (A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name). Žižek claims to have completed an intellectual system (continuing the idea of earlier essays) that, as a philosophical foundation, currently informs his political writings. The review follows the sexual problematic through Žižek's philosophy (its antihumanist ethical and political orientations) to the politics of “the impossible” act or event.

Psychoanalysis, and especially the work of Jacques Lacan, has not been adequately utilized within organization studies. This paper argues that Lacan's teaching has the potential to enrich discussions within this field and to suggest fruitful orientations for future research. Analysing some of the central concepts and theoretical logics introduced by Lacan (such as lack, desire, the symbolic, enjoyment and fantasy), it explores the desire behind identity construction (agency), the reliance of this desire on processes of subjection to the socio-symbolic order (structure), as well as the limits marking both these domains. It argues that Lacanian theory can illuminate the (negative) dialectic between subject and organized Other and account for obedience and attachment to organized frameworks of social life in two ways: first, by focusing on the symbolic presuppositions of authority and power; and, second, by exploring the role of fantasy and enjoyment in sustaining them and in neutralizing resistance.

The article attempts to trace the preconditions and the main driving forces for the formation of specific Ukrainian cinema, the relationship between the philosophical tradition of the ethnos and its manifestation in the genre of contemporary cinema art. The problem of non-commercial orientation of film production and its possible consequences for the industry as a whole is considered. The emphasis is placed on the mental features of the genre of cinema in the works of Ukrainian directors, the possibilities of the Lacanian psychoanalytic methodology in the analysis of the laws of «maturing» of the national cinema of Ukraine are explored.

What is the peculiar evocative force of the notion of the real? Rather than succumbing to the temptation of forcing appearance in order to accede to the real supposed to be lurking behind it, for Lacanian psychoanalysis the access to the real is that of the semblance. While one of our aims in this paper is to briefly outline the development of Lacan’s rather peculiar “realism”, we would also wish to emphasize the relation between the real and the semblance as being the crux of Lacan’s later teaching. Indeed, for psychoanalysis, the question of the real is inseparable from the interrogation of the semblance, a term forged by Lacan in the last period of his teaching in order to rework the relation between the truth and the real. This is why although the semblance is relevant to numerous contemporary discourses, it is only in psychoanalysis that this problem is raised to the level of one of the central theoretical and practical issues. Omnipresent, unsettling, yet unresolved, this problem comes to the fore at the critical moments in the history of psychoanalysis, thereby marking turning points at which the orientation of psychoanalysis is at stake.

In The Threshold of the Visible World, Kaja Silverman advances a subtle, ethical, post-Lacanian account of what constitutes “the active gift of love” and how this might be expressed on the screen. She argues for an orientation of subject to love object which is not merely an alternative to romantic passion, but an account of how identification of the loving subject and love object “might function in a way that results in neither the triumph of self-sameness, nor craven submission to an exteriorised but essentialized ideal”. In a move particularly relevant to our focus in this paper, she goes on to suggest that a gift of love so constituted entails an escape from conformity with culturally dictated ideals and thence a capacity “to put ourselves in a positive identificatory relation to bodies which we have been taught to abhor and repudiate” (79). Two lesbian/gay teen films of the late 1990s – Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Åmål (1998; also known as Show Me Love) and Simon Shore’s Get Real (1999) – offer an illuminating contrast in the ways they deal with the possibility of the gift of love in the conflictual contexts both of teenage gay and lesbian love and sexuality, and of small-town spaces. Space solicits desire, but the sexual frisson that is evoked through encounters in various spaces in film depicted as offering excitement, risk, and bodily pleasures seems limited in three ways. First, the progression from desire to love is severely circumscribed by cultural presuppositions about the physical and social attributes of appropriate love objects. This is particularly evident in the Hollywood teen film, with its recurrent male and female Cinderella roles. Second, the desire represented is predominantly heterosexual, so the appropriate love object is further specified by the assumption of heteronormativity. Finally, there is a persistent attribution of space to woman and time to man – as early as the late eighteenth century William Blake had written, “Space is a woman” (in Bal 169) – and although this has been questioned by feminist thinkers (see Irigaray 1987) it still pervades filmic imagery. As Sue Best notes, the bounded spaces that people inhabit – “the nation, regions, cities and the home” – often rely on feminine metaphors to describe their attributes, contours, architecture; in the case of the romantic ‘home’, its enclosures suggest a warm, uterine space and maternal care. In a related sense, the open spaces of the countryside, the city streets and solitary travel have connoted a masculine space and prerogative (182-3). Traditionally, man moves through these spaces with a sense of temporal purpose, while woman bides her time in bounded domestic space. In Fucking Åmål, the film’s preoccupation with enclosed spaces, and especially the domestic spaces of home and school, on one hand generates an intense mood of claustrophobia while, on the other, communicates the terrifying aloneness of the young person abjected by the “in”-crowd. A measure of the inanity of the teenage boys of this small Swedish community is the unexamined misogyny of their spatial thinking, as when, for example, Jessica’s boyfriend Markus asserts that boys are interested in and understand technology, like cell phones, and that girls are instead good at things like "make-up and looking good". Get Real expresses the contrast more as that of outside and inside: the male domain of the sports field set against the interior space of the room where girls and boys like Steven (“I don’t smoke or play football and have an IQ over 25”) produce the school magazine. While these binaristic notions of gender and space serve as useful means for considering the restrictive nature of masculine and feminine constructions which still exist in various contemporary societies, they are also limited and limiting when it comes to thinking beyond a heterosexual framework. The imbrication of space and woman could account for the ongoing censure, disruption, and violation of feminised movement in so-called masculinised spaces. The notion of transgressing across spaces is the underlying theme of both Get Real and Fucking Åmål. Both films, with their “coming out” narratives, move away from conventional cinematic representations of teen love. Moreover, they provide a cinematic space in which the female or male body is a source of same-sex pleasure and desire, and offer viewers a space not defined by the other gender or by a narrative progress towards heterosexual romance and fulfilment. Consequently, the characters’ sensual/sexual encounters privilege bodily pleasure, response, and the ability to go beyond “the blind spot” of patriarchal sexuality (Irigaray 1985). Where they differ is that Fucking Åmål depicts Elin (the “love object”) progressing so far in her love for Agnes that her triumphant coming out is simultaneously an affirmation of a body universally abhorred and repudiated within the dominant youth community. There is no suggestion, for example, that Agnes will need to abandon her loose, oversized clothes and her trousers in favour of Elin’s short skirts and low-cut tops (although there is a hint that Elin may find Agnes’s intellectual interests more engrossing than the belated and etiolated versions of popular culture she has up until now inhabited). In contrast to Fucking Åmål, Get Real depicts the ultimate failure of John Dixon (the love object) to acknowledge love for Steven Carter, abhorred and repudiated by male peers for his suspected (and actual) homosexuality. Space is a shifting signifier which points to, but does not anchor, meaning across social, cultural, and territorial dimensions. In a Foucauldian sense, space is often linked to concepts of power. Furthermore, space, particularly queer space, becomes both a visual and metaphorical entity which needs to be interrogated in terms of its relationship to, and representation through, the eye of the beholder. In Get Real and Fucking Åmål “looking” becomes a complex play between characters and viewers. The specular logic that operates within the conventional notions of the gaze, with its underlying structure of a dominant subject and submissive object, is thus both interrogated and undercut (Mulvey). In Get Real a hole in a public toilet wall provides a spatial site for spying on illicit gay sexual encounters as well as a means for checking out a potential sexual partner. Such voyeurism is perverse as it disrupts the visual pleasure which has become intimately tied to patriarchal ideology with its structures of looking (male) and being looked at (female). This is one instance (and there are others in both films) when looking occupies a queer space, demonstrating complicity with voyeurism, desire, and visual pleasure, and disrupting the association of the gaze with rigid gender roles. The act of looking that the characters undertake also helps to make the viewer aware of the particular quality of their own gaze. The films contrive to position the viewer in ways that focus attention on the specific nature of his/her gaze as we become witness/voyeur to the characters’ spatial trajectories across private and public spaces - bedroom, toilet, home, school. Early in Fucking Åmål the gaze is invited and dismantled when Elin goes half undressed to try on clothes in front of the mirror in the apartment block’s lift, only to find that her sister Jessica has forgotten to bring the clothes. By overtly and comically replacing the narcissistic gaze with the gaze of the camera (and hence audience) the film problematizes looking, and begins to establish the situation whereby to look at Elin is to share the looking with Agnes, effectively queering the look. Further deconstructions of the look, or gaze, occur in the contrasting femme/butch representations of Elin and Agnes. The erotic pleasure of looking (at Elin) provides a counterpoint of gazes and highlights the vicissitudes of desire. While Elin’s sexy body and conventional beauty conform to an image of female desirability and make her the object of male fantasy, she is also the love object of Agnes. However, Elin’s feisty, restless character refuses any image of passive femininity. Rather, she embodies an active, desiring female subjectivity. Thus, the space of both female and male spectatorship is open to erotic imaginings. By contrast, the film undoes the tradition of fetishisation associated with the male gaze through the character of Agnes: she wears no makeup, hides her body in oversized clothing, and her hair is unadorned and simply styled. Thus, the camera’s attention to Agnes’s silent watching of Elin undermines the male gaze, creating a female gaze and a space of female desire. A comparable effect is achieved in Get Real when Steven uses his membership of the school magazine committee to suggest that a queer community exists within the school. First, and more subtly, the photographs he takes of John Dixon as school sporting hero queer the act of looking: Steven’s father, a professional photographer, sees them as examples of photographic art; John’s father views them as a celebration of a finely tuned athletic body; girls look at them heterosexually; but from Steven’s perspective they are gay pin-ups. The ground of a love relationship, as Silverman argues, is to posit the other rather than the self as the cause of desire, and hence to perceive perfection in the features of another and to celebrate that perceived perfection. This is the work performed by Steven’s photographs of John, and the irony inherent in the fact that the significance of the photographs depends on the interpretation of the beholder exemplifies how irony operates in these films to change how people interpret the “cultural screen”, the mental picture of society which they have naturalised. In Fucking Åmål, a class photograph of Elin in a school magazine also serves to queer the act of looking as it represents the love object of both Johan and Agnes. Whereas Johan cuts out Elin’s image, effectively excising her from the others in the photograph, and stores it in his wallet, Agnes is content to contemplate the image in the privacy of her bedroom, leaving it intact. Elin’s image has a strong erotic and visual impact on both Johan and Agnes, connoting “a to-be-looked-at-ness”, and the actions by Johan and Agnes to look and to possess can be understood in psychoanalytic terms as their attempt to turn the represented image into a fetish object (Mulvey). In a related way to Steven’s photograph of John Dixon as a gay pin-up, Agnes is able to reinvest erotically in the body of another woman. Steven’s second intervention by means of the magazine is to write the “Get Real” article about youth homosexuality. Once this is banned by the school Principal, it functions as a space of absence which defines and publicises the lack at the heart of the community. Further, in so far as it is lack which makes desire possible, Steven’s manifesto on a more individual level legitimises that lack for homosexual subjects. Get Real quite explicitly seeks to overturn the heterosexist stereotype of gays as lonely and unhappy figures, and to offer a different perspective on gay subjectivity and sexuality. Fucking Åmål performs the same work for the subjectivity and sexuality of young lesbians, as Agnes works through the trauma of her initial rejection by Elin and her “outing” at home, and Elin works through the identity crisis prompted by her emerging desire for Agnes. For each, the journey from abjection to joy ends triumphantly as, with no apparent threat of retribution, they redefine the significance of key spaces, of school and home. Both films use space to articulate the characters’ joys and anguish as they struggle with the conflicting effects of love and desire for another, the taunts they suffer from others because of their sexuality, and the eventual amelioration of the restrictions of their spatial location. While the gaze offers a metaphorical space for looking in Get Real and Fucking Åmål, space is also defined in regional and sexual terms. Elin and Agnes are space-bound characters, living within the claustrophobic confines of small town Åmål (Sweden). The original title of the film (Fucking Åmål), rather than the more bland, international release title (Show Me Love), captures teenage boredom with the stifling confines of their environment. Elin’s howls of exasperation give voice to her feelings of entrapment: “Why do we have to live in fucking Åmål? When something’s ‘in’ in the rest of the world, it’s already ‘out’ by the time it gets here.” When Elin and Agnes attempt an escape by hitching a ride out of town, their make-out session in the backseat of their lift’s car is accompanied by Foreigner’s “I want to know what love is”; the interplay of song lyrics, the young lovers’ sexual play, and their eventual eviction from the car offering an ironic performance that rehearses the double meaning of the film’s title and the story’s vexed themes of subjection and subjectivity. The visual style of Fucking Åmål also adds to the pervading sense of containment that the young protagonists experience. Interior domestic scenes dominate and appear spatially constrained. Often a low-key colour scheme serves as an iconic sign indicating the metaphorical nature of the drabness of Åmål. Agnes, as a relative newcomer to Åmål, occupies the spatial fringe both in terms of her strangeness to the place and her perceived queerness. She is the subject of ridicule, innuendo, and ostracism by her peers. Agnes’s marginalisation and abjection are metaphorically expressed through camera framing and tracking – close-ups capture her feelings of rejection and aloneness, and her movements in public spaces, such as the school canteen and corridors, are often confined to the perimeters or the background. By contrast, Elin appears to be in the spatial centre as she is a popular and sexually desirable young woman. It is when she falls in love with Agnes that she too finds herself dislocated, both within her self and within her home town. The stifling confines of Åmål offer limited recreational spaces for its youth, with the urban shopping centre and park are places for congregation and social contact. Ironically, communal spaces, such as the school and the park, effect a spatial intimacy through proximity; yet, the heterosexual imperative that operates in these public and populated spaces compels Elin and Agnes to effect a spatial distance with its necessary emotional and physical separation. When Elin and Agnes finally ‘come out’, it is part of a broader teen rebellion against continuing ennui and oppressive strictures that limit their lives. Steven (Get Real) lives a privileged middle class life in Basingstoke (Hampshire, UK) although this is unsettled by a pervasive sense of homophobic surveillance, locally and immediately embodied in the school’s masculinist bullies, but networked more widely through fathers, school principals, and the police. As Foucault argued, surveillance has a disciplinary function because individuals are made conscious that they are being watched and judged from a normalising perspective. This being so, even open spaces in Get Real have a claustrophobic effect. The park where Steven goes in quest of sexual contact thus signifies ambiguously: messages are passed from within the smallest space (a cubicle within the toilet) but once outside an individual’s presence can be registered by any neighbour, and the concealed spaces of the woodland are subjected to police raids. The film neatly ties this physical surveillance to mental surveillance when Steven’s father confronts him about being seen in the park when he was supposed to have been working on his essay project about youth in the contemporary world. For Steven, the project is a sham because he is only enabled to write from within the normalised perspective which excludes himself. Communication at the highest level available to him – a prize-winning essay in a public competition – thus denies him any subjective agency. The film’s ironic chain thus entails first the winning of the prize (but only because his father secretly submitted Steven’s discarded essay) and then Steven’s subsequent use of the award ceremony to present his other, suppressed essay and to declare his sexual orientation. In both films, gay and lesbian sexualities are constructed as paradoxical spaces. On the one hand, gay and lesbian desires and identities are distanced from the heterosexual paradigm, yet firmly embedded within it and (therefore subject to) homophobic discourses. Difference is not tolerated. In Fucking Åmål, characters are marginalised because of physical and sexual difference; in Get Real, difference is defined in terms of class, sexuality, and hegemonic masculinity. Both films offer positive outcomes which affirm a resignification of the “cultural screen”. By depicting the dystopic effect of heteronormative society on the principal gay and lesbian characters, each film functions to highlight issues of access to and place within the spatial public sphere. From Fucking Åmål, indeed, we might infer that such strategies as the ironic transformation of the gaze have the potential to produce utopian visions. Despite the strategy of allowing Steven one further transformation of public space, when he seizes a public forum to deliver his coming-out speech, Get Real offers a less utopian vision, but still a firm sense that social space has undergone significant disruption. While Elin comes to accept and realise the value of Agnes’s original “gift of love” to her, John Dixon is unable to move beyond the restrictive confines of heteronormative space and therefore rejects Steven’s public and personal gift of love. Nevertheless, in both films, it is through the agential actions of Elin, Agnes, and Steven in publicly declaring their love for the other that serves as an active signifier, openly challenging the sexualised space of their school and community: a space that passively accepts the kind of orthodoxy that naturalises heterosexualised ways of looking and loving, and abhors and repudiates homosexual/lesbian desire. In this sense, there is an opening up of a queer space of desire which exerts its own form of resistance and defiance to patriarchal discourse. Works Cited Bal, Mieke. Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Best, Sue. “Sexualising space”. Eds. Elizabeth. Grosz & Elspeth Probyn Sexy Bodies: The strange Carnalities of Feminism. London & New York: Routledge, 1995. 181-194. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison. London: A. Lane (Penguin Books), 1977. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G.C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Irigaray, Luce. “Sexual difference”. Ed. Toril Moi, French Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. 118-130. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan, 1989. 29-37. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996. Filmography Fucking Åmål (Show Me Love). Dir./writer Lukas Moodysson. WN Danubius/ITA Slovakia, 1998. Get Real. Dir. Simon Shore. Paramount, 1999. Links linenoise.co.uk (Accessed 31/10/02) cinephiles.net (Accessed 31/10/02) brightlightsfilm.com (Accessed 31/10.02) hollywood.com (Accessed 31/10/02) movie-reviews.colossus.net (Accessed 31/10/02) culturevulture.net (Accessed 31/10/02) english.lsu.edu (Accessed 3/11/02) Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mallan, Kerry and Stephens, John. "Love’s Coming (Out)" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovescomingout.php>. APA Style Mallan, K. & Stephens, J., (2002, Nov 20). Love’s Coming (Out). M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovescomingout.html