Published Books by Dr. jan jagodzinski

The Anamorphic I/i : Finding My Own Step Through The (My)Nfield of Pheminism and Art  

Art / Sexual Politics / Body

Issues surrounding sexual and gendered identity politics remain a heated area of debate in the culture of postmodernism. Feminism(s), men's studies, queer politics, gay and lesbian representations, and the transgendered bodies of transsexuals and cross-dressers form a destabilizing matrix of constant semiosis as these bodies struggle for their rights and recognition against a patriarchal and homophobic society. The 'anamorphic I/i' presents an 'impossible' attempt at seeing oneself in this complex of events by stepping onto the playing surface of this (my)nfield where there is no net of safety. Writing in this area virtually guarantees that someone will take offense to what is being offered as it is read from various subject positions. The result of putting the body at risk is (hopefully) to cast the reader into a hall of theoretical mirrors, to experience a mise en abyme effect where oblique glances present odd glimpses of familiar problems as to what is 'normally' perceived as the masculine/feminine and male/female binaries.

Anamorphism refers to this skewing of 'normal' perception to 'see' the world 'otherwise.' The 'impossibility' of such a position is (re)presented by a divided self; i.e., my two eyes (I/i). This alineal narrative relies on a fractual imagination that invests heavily in making the most of anecdotal knowledge. Pheminism, as the title suggests, is a particular skewing of sexual politics that forms the sub-text for the very foundation of this hall of mirrors. Written over a ten-year period, this book forms a labyrinth of passages that leads in, around, and about the mirrored effects created by a personal search which began by asking what relationships might be possible for a straight male to various forms of feminism, queer theories, and gay and lesbian issues of representation as they are played out in the author's chosen fields of visual art&art education, film, and cultural studies. The reader will find that this written 'scriptease' leans heavily on recent development in post-Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse where fantasy as ideology is of central importance.

 

 Table of Contents

The Pretexts of the Title

The Play of Intertextualities: The Figure of the (My)nefield
Tactics of the First Tacky "Step" Taken: My two (I)(i)'s
Lacan's "Formulae of Sexuation": woman as the Sinthome of Man- or "Woman Does not Exist"
Feminine Non-universal Logic
Standing on the Bridge over the Crack or S(p)(l)ace in the Mirror
And now...Écriture Masculine, Écriture Homosexuelle...you don't say!
M(asking) Myself
Impossible Positionality
Autobiographical Confessional Vignettes
Feminism or pheminism - perhaps Fe(man)ism?

The Text Scriptease in Eight Tacky Steps

THE FIRST VIGNETTE

Castration Anxieties

LIBERALIST FEMINIST ARTISTIC FORMATIONS

The "High" Response
Liberalist Follies
Women and Crafts
The "Low" Response
Psychoanalytically Framing the High & Low Arts

THE SECOND VIGNETTE: MY BRUSHES WITH COLLEGE ART

The Question of Essentialism
The Voyeur Drops "in"
Essentialist Religiosity
Spiritual Materialism

THE FRENCH "CON"-NECTION

Écriture féminine-writing the body
What then is écriture féminine?
The Hetero/Homo Matrix of Écriture Féminine
Luce Irigaray: The Undutiful Daughter
Julia Kristeva: The Dutiful Mother
Hélène Cixous: The Hysterical Daughter
Monique Wittig: I'm not your Daughter!

GIVE ME A LITTLE SIGN

but make it Intelligibel....if you can?
Can You Fuck with Sex? The Antinomies of the Transgendered Body
Lacan with Baudrillard: Simulations of Sex or Simulating Sex- What's the Difference?
Art in the Wake of Poststructuralism
Kelly is to the Phallic Child as Jo Spence is to Her own Shit

THE MASCULINE DESIRE OF THE IMAGINARY

Are Males Simply Desiring Machines?
Le Viol/Le Voile: In Search of Magritte's Desire
Defending Magritte
Magritte's Deconstructive Moves
Gazing Traditionally
Masculine Desire Modified
Vermeer meets Silverman on a Fassbinder Set with Lacan Looking On
The Perverted Gaze of the Possessed Eye/I
The Male Gaze: Alive and Well, But Living in Horror

THE FEMALE GAZE AND ITS VICISSITUDES

Woman as the Copula of Desire
The Varieties of the Female Gaze
Visual Technologies and the Female Gaze
After the fort /da Game:
The Danger of a "Simulacred" Perverted Gaze

CONUNDRUMS OF THE GAZE

Tripping over Medusa's Head
The Disputes of Representation: Gauguin, Salle, Picasso...and so on, and so on...
Fucking Marilyn Over...and Over...after 1962: The Necrophilic Practices of Psychiatry
The Proleptic Installations of the Exotic Gaze
Gentrified Tourism: I like you...I mean, I like your money!
Optical Tactility: The "Nervous Gaze"

THE THIRD VIGNETTE

The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism & Feminism
Its Splendor No Longer Glitters
Materialist Feminist Collaborations

THE FOURTH VIGNETTE

Radical Alterity and Identity Politics
My Backyard
Slippery Signifiers of Race: The Case of /Black/
The Aporial Limit of Imperialism; Thinking About the First Nations

The Machinations of the Pluri-cultural Gaze
More Complications: The Ranking of Oppression!

THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

Art in An Age of Identity Crisis: Between Essentialism and Constructivism
The New Globalism
The Uses of Difference: Essentialist Tactics
Gains and Losses of Essentialist Tactics

Postmodern Racism
Pastiche Multiculturalism
Anti-essentialism and Hybridity

THE FIFTH VIGNETTE

Splitting Ourselves Apart:The Constradictions of the Pornographic Body
Pornography as Art's Other: The Domestication of 'Smut'

TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A HARLEQUIN SOFT PORN EATER:

Or, What's a Heterosexual to do?
Hysterical jitters: School days, School days
Soft Core/Hard Core
My Undergarmet 'Thing': What Level is this?

THE PORNOGRAPHY DEBATES

Violence/Rape
Roped Tight: The Contradictions of Maculinity

S/M

The Lesbian Bar as the Dildoed Body
Identity Problems: the Sex Wars
Some Pornographic Conclussions: Sex in an Age of an Epidemic

GENDER B(L)ENDING AND THE POLITICS OF THE SCULPTURED BODY

Foucault and the History of Sexuality
Michel Foucault and His Retractors
Sculpting the Body
Whose Dress is it Anyway? Madonna is to Michael Jackson as Pornography is to Childhood
Back To Orlan

THE SIXTH VIGNETTE

Deconstructive Contortions
Deleuze and Guattari's Postmodern Desiring Machines

THE SEVENTH VIGNETTE

The Find de Millénium and the End of Ends
The End of Avant-garde Feminism and The Problems of Postmodernism
The Direction of Popular Culture
Further limitations: The Two Jocks/Jacques
Some More Doubts, Poststructuralism Revisited
Shoo-ing/Shoeing Out the "Ladies" Man
The 'High' Art of Cindy Sherman and 'Low' Art of Madonna: The Material Girl Meets the Affirmative Woman

HONEY | SHRANK ...!

Male Hysteria
Hypermasculinity: The Penile Body "Pump" or, It's Not Just in the Shoes
Queering
Freak Shows: Making Bev Francis "Figure"
The Mutant is Not the Cyborg and It's not Crying
The Tears of the softened Male: General Schwarzkopf Cries with Robert Bly On the Planes/Plains of Television Land
Masculinity on Parade: A Review of the Jitters

THE EIGHT VIGNETTE

The Last Garment
The Body in Question
Performative Non-discursivity: Lacan with a Post-Kantian Twist
Melancholic Drag and Masculine Balls
Gentrified Anti-homophobia?

THE GRAND FAILURE? 1989-1990

APPENDIX

The Dilemma of Discipline: Schooling and Resistance
Discipline/Disciple; The Choreography of the punished body reading foucault through the voice of our son Jeremy
Other voices

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Voices Cited/Sighted/Sited and Summoned

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Last updated on May 26, 2006