Displacements of the Desiring Machine
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18952152 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jane Chin Davidson (0000-0002-0528-6277, University of Houston - Clear Lake, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 377-394 |
| Publication date | 2012-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interventions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1369801x.2012.704497 |
| OpenAlex | W1973141465 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
The ‘cinematic gaze’ can be conceived today as a kind of metaphorical practice, particularly in relation to viewing Patty Chang's video artwork In Love (2001). Chang's artistic expression theatricalizes familial love and reveals how bodily inscriptions of sexuality and ‘race’ are still predetermined by an affected gaze. The original site of the ‘cinema of displacement’ was in the substitute of film wherein the erotic fantasy elicited from the cinematic expression displaces ‘real’ sexual pleasure by arousal through viewing. The idea of an erotic, filial love (even in fantasy) confounds the heteronormative while treading precariously on US juridical laws. The cultural intelligibility of incest prohibition relies on the authority of heterosexual kinship norms, ones that were articulated by Levi-Strauss's ‘universal’ kinship rules. This essay addresses the ways in which sexual fantasy informs a particular logic and history for understanding ‘queer’ and Chineseness. The terminology of ‘queer’ can be connected to a visual relationship with the colonial exhibitions of the ‘Siamese Twins’ Chang and Eng, primarily because the freak show provides something of a visual example for the nineteenth-century system of psychiatric power-knowledge. This system legitimated and determined ‘normal’ sexuality, which eventually led to the criminalization of same-sex fornication and incest as the highest examples of ‘immoral’ sexuality. As such, historical and contemporary visual expressions of queerness and Chineseness metaphorize the social conceptions from which the sexualized and ‘raced’ body evokes meaning. And these meanings are mutually constituted from the psychic realm since both sexual and racial significations are generally assumed from fantasy and imagination. Notes 1As written in the original contract between Coffin and Chang and Eng's ‘parents’ (see Thompson Citation1977). The legality of the transaction remains questionable since, at the time, Chang and Eng's father had been ten years deceased. All negotiations were translated into English and conducted by their mediator Robert Hunter. 2Simpson identified the wives as Maria and Catherine Greenwood. 3This ruling overturned the Supreme Court's own decision upholding the law just 17 years prior in Bowers v. Hardwick, 1986 (see Lindenberger Citation2007). 4Davidson credits Freud for radically changing (if unknowingly) the belief that there is a ‘natural’ object of the sexual instinct because Freud wrote that ‘the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object's attractions.’ No ‘normal’ object exists for the sexual instinct (Freud Citation2001: 135). 5Although the reviews of Burton's work were highly critical, his audiences were part of the anthropological establishment, particularly the Cannibal Club of the Anthropological Society of London. Matt Cook in his discussion on ‘erotic anthropology’ describes the Cannibal Club as ‘a sexually libertarian but reactionary sub-group of the Anthropological Society of London’ that ‘wrote, collected and translated a range of erotic literature’ (Cook Citation2003: 91). 6Freud adopted the basic concepts of evolutionary anthropology in his psychoanalytical theory (see Wallace Citation1983: 64). 7Freud not only refuted the idea of normal instinct–object relations – ‘sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together’ – but he also replaced the concept of the sexual instinct with the notion of the sexual ‘drive’ that is independent of a sexual object. 8Record of bills of sale for slaves purchased and other financial items about the twins’ interests in Wilkes County and Surry County, North Carolina are part of the Chang and Eng Bunker Papers in Folio 2
Aesthetics · Art · Fantasy · Gaze · Human sexuality · Kinship · Literature · Movie theater · Pleasure · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Realm · Sociology · Anthropology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
| Highly cited | No |
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