Not Your Average Teen Horror: Blood and Female Adolescence in Richard Bates’s Excision (2012)

ABSTRACT

Richard Bates’s film Excision (2012) uses blood as a metaphor to interrogate how cultural constructions of femininity affect the development of adolescent girls. Contrary to other horror films, which frequently depict adolescent girls as examples of the ‘monstrous-feminine’, this film about a girl who decides to perform a lung transplant on her sister explores the horrors caused by restricting conceptualisations of feminine bodies and identities. The film’s focus on blood interrogates problematic ideological connotations between menstruation and sexual promiscuity, and questions the veracity of supposedly realistic representations of the female body in contemporary advertising. Its protagonist’s adaptation of the ‘mad scientist’ persona gradually turns her into a character resembling Frankenstein, whose monstrosity highlights her inability to either conform to or escape from femininity as a cultural construct. Teen horror, the film suggests, is not caused by blood and bodily matter, but by extra-textual stereotypes and gender inequality.     

Why Dora Left: Freud and the Master Discourse

The question of why Dora left her treatment before it was brought to a satisfactory end and the equally important question of why Freud chose to publish this problematic and fragmentary story have both been dealt with at great length by Freud’s successors. Dora has been read by analysts, literary critics, and not least by feminists.

The aim of this paper is to point out the position Freud took toward his patient. Dora stands out as the one case among Freud’s 5 great case stories that has a female protagonist, and reading the case it becomes clear that Freud stumbled because of an unresolved problem toward femininity, both Dora’s and his own. In Dora, it is argued, Freud took a new stance toward the object of his investigation, speaking from the position of the master. Freud presents himself as the one who knows, in great contrast to the position he takes when unraveling the dream. Here he is the humble scholar giving evidence of a great tolerance for not-knowing. These 2 positions run through Freud’s writings from “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900b) to “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937a). From the Dora case a line can be drawn to Freud’s metaphor of the bedrock of castration, the unsurpassable barrier to both analytical work and the theory of sex and gender.     

From the Glory of Hera to the Wrath of Achilles: Narratives of Second-Wave Masculinity and Beyond

Second-wave psychoanalytic feminism understood masculinity through theories that converge in seeing masculinity in mother-son terms. The dread of women, primary femininity, disidentification, father absence, and society without the father all portray an overpowering mother. Men’s reaction is to define masculinity as the not-feminine and as superior, to deny and deprecate femininity in themselves and in women. After Slater, I call these dynamics the “Glory of Hera.” I suggest that they more accurately describe the generic conflicts of men than Freud’s Oedipus. Here, I suggest a third classical narrative. Masculinity is equally, perhaps more basically, understood in terms of the “Wrath of Achilles.” The fundamental developmental and psychic challenge for men is how to be the senior male who humiliates rather than the junior male who feels humiliated and inferior. These dynamics are widespread clinically, and we find them not only in The Iliad but also throughout the literary and operatic canon.     

Duration,Skin, and the Ageing Subject

I read Lynne Segal’s book Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (2013) as a radical account of subjectivity in which, drawing on Freud, she proposes that what is lost, and therefore constitutive of the subject of old age, is time itself. This temporalization of subjectivity allows us to see more clearly the relation between time and materiality and more specifically between time, subject, and skin. I respond to Segal’s powerful work with some comments on Henri Bergson and Didier Anzieu.     

Katabasis,adult betrayals and liminal identities in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life

In Child Soldier, China Keitetsi recounts her experiences as a child and a soldier during Yoweri Museveni’s guerrilla war against then Ugandan president, Milton Obote. Drawing on key debates on literary representations of katabasis, this paper examines Keitetsi’s portrait of adult betrayal and parental abuse of children at home, and as child soldiers. I argue that Child Soldier is a text that lends itself to a katabatic analysis, and that Keitetsi is a katabasist who frames her experiences as a child and a soldier “within the narrative structure of a descent into Hell and return” . I argue that “hellish” elements in the memoir are more than just incidental: they point to a world where tenderness and love have long given way to cruelty and cynicism, and where madness and violence and despair are the order of the day. I also draw on Sigmund Freud and Homi Bhabha’s notions of the unhomely, to suggest that the memoir introduces interesting parallels between the unhomeliness in the home and that brought on by the civil war. Subconsciously, then, examining the memoir under the tropes of katabasis and the unhomely allows us to view her life as floating in-between the child she wishes she should have been and the abused and rejected young woman she becomes.     

The future is plastic: refiguring Malabou’s plasticity

This article investigates Catherine Malabou’s claims to have produced some form of beyond of deconstruction with her reworking of the Hegelian concept of ‘plasticity’ (Plastizität). In the light of Malabou’s critique of the unsuitability of the Derridean non-concept of ‘text’ as metaphor for neuronal functioning in her Plasticité, I turn this question back on Malabou’s own work; that is to say, this article will examine what the implications of the metaphorics of plasticity are for Malabou’s own oeuvre and its relationship with neuroscience and her critique of connexionist capitalism. To this end, this article is particularly interested in the political claims made for plasticity and how some of the ‘everyday’ meanings of plasticity, and Malabou’s decision not to incorporate them into her conceptual working through, might threaten this enterprise.     

Introduction to critical perspectives and emerging models of inter-American studies

Abstract

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) has been the subject of much critical attention, but the original story upon which it was based and its author, Cornell Woolrich, less so. This article examines ‘Rear Window’ (1942) in the context of Woolrich’s writing and his life more broadly, in order to reveal the privileged role of fenestral imagery in his work. Through a process which starts with surveillance through glass, and a creative interpretation of ‘real’ events consumed in terms strikingly similar to mass media entertainments, Woolrich’s marginalized protagonist assumes the role of the detective and, in doing so, his identity is enhanced. The Woolrichian window reifies abstract social boundaries. It serves, simultaneously, as a symbol of urban alienation and a fantasy of social integration. It also becomes a trope of consumption and popular culture. Hitchcock’s film has sometimes been praised for the self-conscious way in which it aligns the image of the window with the cinema screen in order to implicate viewers in the protagonist’s voyeuristic practice. This article extends such an analysis to Woolrich’s story, but also takes it a step further, to reveal the ways in which reading similarly might be regarded as a voyeuristic form of cultural consumption.     

Abelove’s Historical Vision: Gentle Warnings Against Moralism,Colonialism, and an Apolitical Identity Politics

Henry Abelove’s insightful and carefully researched book, Deep Gossip (2003), creatively opens up many important topics for exploration. I address 3 of these topics: Abelove’s appreciation of Freud’s refusal to moralize about homosexuality, the crucial difference between moralism and a hermeneutic vision of moral understandings, and Abelove’s discussion of the historical shift from gay liberation to a more recent postmodern identity politics and with it the loss of a more explicitly political anticolonialism. Compulsory heterosexuality can be understood as a key element that holds in place current arrangements of gender and the military-industrial-educational-surveillance state, which is currently justified by and in step with neoliberal economic theory and subjectivity, colonial wars of occupation, and the use of at-a-distance airpower.     

My Freudian Cocaine Fantasia: Altering Consciousness,Theorizing Desire

This paper speculates that Freud’s use of cocaine during the formative years of his theorizing shaped a particular conception of the nature of desire. One can draw correspondences between the phenomenology of cocaine intoxication and certain aspects of Freud’s ideas about desire: desire as appetitive, solipsistic, focused on discharge, defined by a quality of “drivenness,” subordinating of pleasure. Although relational reconsiderations have expanded our conception of desire, many contemporary people remain stringently Freudian in our experience of desire, as I use some clinical material to substantiate. In this sense we are all heirs to Freud’s cocaine consciousness.

In an imaginative leap, I link the wide cultural currency attained by psychoanalysis to its consilience with the logic of a coincident expanding capitalist economy—a mode of political economy that has now brought us to the brink of environmental destruction. I conclude that the future of civilization will depend on our ability to find other ways to live our desire.     

A Beginner’s Mind: On Beginning Psychoanalytic Schooling … Bion,Keith Jarrett,and the Primal Scene

ABSTRACT

Free associations structure … and loosen … what follows. In midair, having sprung from a high dive of 20-plus years of psychoanalytically informed professional work, the author free-falls into formal psychoanalytic training—meditating on the memory that his father was a jazz musician. The meditation strays to the author’s own jazz education … then wanders to a consideration of a primal scene interpretation emerging from Bion after he listened endlessly to a psychotic patient’s vamp—”I don’t know what I mean.” Bion’s (2013) stance of waiting for O links associatively to jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s solo improvisations, what Jarrett calls his “epic journeys into the unknown.” The author hears a fugue in Bion’s primal scene interpretation—back to Freud and Klein and forward to Bion’s psychoanalytic students invited to compose using Bion’s unsaturated concepts. The author worries how he will communicate with his new psychoanalytic colleagues and considers the usefulness of origin myths (such as the primal scene) in such lateral communications. And, finally, the author loops back again to consider repetition when listening to Jarrett … repetition when listening to Bion … and repetition when listening to patients.     

Cultural workers,pedagogy and the politics of difference: Beyond cultural conservatism

‘Odor di Femina: Though you may not see her, you can certainly smell her’, articulates the primacy of visualism in the history of psychoanalysis. In the first half of the study Mavor reveals how both the photographs of mentally ill women made under the direction of Freud's teacher Jean-Martin Charcot and the use of the visualist rhetoric in the writings of Charcot and Freud were regarded as proof of an always already diagnosed and conceptualized vision of sexual difference. Charcot's and most emphatically Freud's conception of the senses conventionally marked vision as masculine and the others (touch, hearing and especially smell) as feminine. Mavor then turns to Lacan to undo this historically gendered, power-hungry split between sight and the othered senses through his theory of the gaze as objet petit a, which reticulates the gaze and its conventional singular authority. Taking a cue from Lacan's provocative claim that ‘a wild odour emanates’ from the‘function of seeingness’, Mavor pushes Lacan's theory of the gaze (which, she argues, has often been sorely misrepresented in feminist film theory and art history) towards an expanded constellation of the senses. Her excavation of Lacan loosens the gaze's hold on the site of seer/seen, subject/object and, especially, sight/smell. As a result, sight loses its historical pride of place among the senses.     

Victims and Vamps,Madonnas and Whores

This article explores how the US ‘war on drugs’ depends on certain notions of femininity and womanhood. In particular, I examine how female drug couriers from the Americas are constructed at US border sites of international airports in the 1990s. I find that female drug couriers are described in terms of victims and vamps – a take off of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The victim and vamp discourses, I argue, are the performative enactments of a security state that operates according to a racialized logic of masculinist protection. I hold in tension the circulation of the victim/vamp discourses with the story of Paula, a Colombian woman who was caught trafficking heroin in hidden compartments of her suitcase. I use Paula's story to call attention to the political work in dismissing women as agents in the international drug trade.     

JUNO (JASON REITMAN, 2007): A PRACTICAL CASE STUDY OF TEENS,FILM AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Jason Reitman's Juno (2007), the story of how a teenager handles her pregnancy, is the kind of film that leaves no one indifferent. Released at a time of conflicting discourses on sexual education, Reitman's film addressed the confusion experienced by teenagers as they came of age in a context where patterns of masculine and feminine behaviour were rapidly changing. In this essay I argue that Juno offers a complex understanding of the disorientation suffered by adolescents during the 1990s – a time when anti-sex discourses coexisted with an increasingly sexualized youth culture. This said, my intention is to move towards the film in a roundabout way by focusing, first, on why so many, supposed ‘cultural criticisms’ of films turn out to be so superficial. In this introductory section, the argument will be made for an approach in film analyses that takes full account of cinema as a visual medium. After exposing my critical stance, I shall draw nearer to the film itself by examining various of the overlapping contexts that, together, created a conducive space for its success – namely, the political scene; changing attitudes towards sex and gender; and most importantly, cinema's aesthetic dimension and the impact of genre conventions in the film-viewing experience. Once the complex diagram of differing (and sometimes contradictory) forces at work in Juno has been mapped out, my aim is to link these conjunctures to a detailed analysis of a key scene in the film as a means of demonstrating how the combination of film studies and Cultural Studies can operate as a method that eschews too easy, ideologically oriented, assumptions.     

Henry Abelove’s “Freud,Male Homosexuality,and the Americans”

This is the first in a set of papers to revisit Henry Abelove’s “Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans” (1985–1986) 30 years after initial publication. By way of introduction I describe the social and academic context of the early 1980s and Dr. Abelove’s search to find a receptive audience. For those unfamiliar with the work I briefly outline some important arguments made by Dr. Abelove and reflect on the changing social environment—politically, socially, and within psychoanalytic thought—since initial publication. With my colleagues Dr. Cushman and Dr. Layton, we reflect on Dr. Abelove’s scholarship and prescience and pause to give it the belated recognition from psychoanalysis that it has long deserved.     

Maisie’s Spasms: Transferential Poetics in Henry James and Wilfred Bion

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a reading of Henry James’s midcareer novel What Maisie Knew (1897) as a study in group psychology. Maisie, James’s child heroine, is at the center of an expanding and transforming family group that includes various governesses as well as her divorced parents’ multiple new partners. I set James’s novel beside Bion’s Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (1961) and its Kleinian approach to the continuities and discontinuities between individual and group experience. Rather than insisting (as Freud tends to) only on a narrative of individuation and adaptation, Bion emphasizes the necessity and difficulty an individual inevitably experiences in making contact with the emotional life of the group in which she lives. James casts the frustrating necessity of group experience in entirely theatrical terms, figuring Maisie from the start as a spectator to, and eventually an active participant in, the affective circuits of those around her. In my reading the transferential poetics of James and Bion make available the affective, transindividual nature of knowing as a contingent activity that takes place between persons and other objects. The essay concludes by unfolding some of the surprising televisual aspects of James’s late style.     

Commentary

It is a privilege to be invited by your editor to comment upon Mrs. Chamberlain's excellent paper. Her finding that the typology has potential for use in the process of objectifying student evaluation is naturally of great interest to me. Most educators would agree that we are very much in need of a firmer base for objective evaluation, especially in the area of field performance. I find myself in complete agreement with Mrs. Chamberlain's interpretations of her findings as presented in her article. To begin with one of the statements in her concluding paragraph, I would support wholeheartedly her opinion that objective measurements are no substitute for “an evaluation arrived at in collaboration with the student in a supportive supervisory relationship”. This, however, in no way lessens the importance of underpinning such an evaluation with as much objective data as possible.     

Greedy Institutions,Overwork, and Work‐Life Balance

Teresa Sullivan, President of the University of Virginia, offered her thoughts on “Greedy Institutions” and the work‐life balance in her AKD Distinguished Lecture at the August 2013 meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York City. We appreciate Dr. Sullivan's willingness to revise her address for publication in Sociological Inquiry. In the age of smart phones and 24/7 accountability, her thoughts on these issues—particularly at American universities—are timely and instructive.     

The psychoanalytic structure of trauma: Spellbound

This essay engages in a close analysis of two films, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), in order to examine their approaches to trauma, especially in relation to the psychoanalytic notion of Nachträglichkeit (“afterwardsness”). A complex notion of afterwardsness is proposed whereby it is predicated on a relationship between two events, but where the importance of afterwardsness is not seen to lie in the nature of the events but rather on what determines the relationship between the two events. This determining relation thus leads to a notion of the structure of trauma and the argument that the crucial factor in a psychoanalytic approach to trauma lies not in an uncovering of traumatic events, but rather on the structure that retrospectively makes events traumatic.