#presubject

[thisisgraceunderpressure]

the subject, self-experience, fantasy, the Unconscious

In order for me to recognize myself in an other (say, my mirror image), I must already be minimally acquainted with who I am. To be able to exclaim in front of a mirror “That’s me!” I must have an idea of who this “me” is. Lacan’s answer to this is that two levels are to be distinguished here. The identification with a mirror image is the identification with an object that effectively cannot ground the dimension of subjectivity; for that reason, this identification is alienating and performative: in the very act of recognizing myself as that image, I performatively posit that image as “me”—prior to it, I was nothing, I simply had no content. Who, then, is the “me”that recognizes itself as that image? The point is that this “nothing,” previous to imaginary recognition is not a pure absence but the subject itself, that is, the void of self-relating negativity, the substanceless X to which attitudes, desires, and the like are attributed. I cannot be acquainted with it precisely because its status is thoroughly nonphenomenological. Any act of “self-acquaintance” already relies on a combination (or overlapping) of two radically heterogeneous levels, the pure subject of the signifier and an object of imaginary identification. Dennett is thus right in emphasizing how our conscious awareness is fragmentary, partial, discontinuous: one never encounters “Self” as a determinate representation in and of our mind. However,is not the conclusion to be drawn from this that the unity of the subject, that which makes him a One, is unconscious? Again, this subject is not some positive content, inaccessible to our conscious awareness, but a pure logical function: when the subject conceives himself as One—as that One, to which acts, attitudes, etc. are attributed (or, rather, imputed)—this One has no positive content that would guarantee its consistency. Its unity is purely logical and performative: the only content of this One is the operation of assuming as “mine” a multitude of acts, attitudes, and so on. One is thus tempted to claim that, while Dennett may well succeed in “explaining” consciousness, what he does not explain, what awaits to be explained, is the Unconscious, the Freudian Unconscious which is neither the presubjective (“objective”) neuronal apparatus, the material vehicle of my mind, nor the subject’s fragmentary self-awareness. Where, then, is the Freudian Unconscious? Again, Dennett is right in undermining the phenomenological attempt to “save the phenomena”; he is right in demonstrating how what we take to be our direct phenomenal (self-)experience is a later construct, based on a mixture of discontinuous perceptions, judgments, and the like. In short, Dennett demonstrates the reflective status of our phenomenal self-awareness: it is not only that phenomena point toward a hidden transphenomenal essence; phenomena themselves are mediated, i.e., the phenomenal experience itself appears (is materialized-operationalized) in a multitude of its particular phenomenal vehicles, gestures, and so forth. A multitude of actual phenomena (fragmentary phenomenal experiences) point toward the Phenomenon itself, the construct of a continuous “stream of consciousness,” a Theatre, a screen in our mind in which the mind directly perceives itself.

...one is tempted to conceive this level of the “objectively subjective” as the very locus of the Unconscious: does the Freudian Unconscious not designate precisely the way things appear to us without our ever being directly aware of them? In this sense, as Lacan points out, the subject of the Unconscious is not a given but an ethical supposition, that is, there has to be an X to whom the“objectively subjective” unconscious phenomena are attributed.

...There is, however, a final misunderstanding to be dispelled here: the attribution of the “objectively subjective” fantasy to the cogito does not mean that, beneath the everyday subject that we are in our conscious lives, one has to presuppose another, “deeper” subject who is able to experience directly the unconscious fantasies inaccessible to our conscious Self. What one should insist on, in contrast to such a misreading, is the insurmountable gap between the empty subject ($, in Lacan’s “mathemes”) and the wealth of fantasies

...The dimension of fantasy is constitutive of the subject, which is to say there is no subject without fantasy. This constitutive link between subject and fantasy, however, does not mean that we are dealing with a subject the moment an entity displays signs of “inner life,” that is, of a fantasmatic self-experience that cannot be reduced to external behavior. What characterizes human subjectivity proper is rather the gap that separates the two. Fantasy, at its most elementary, is inaccessible to the subject, and it is this inaccessibility that makes the subject “empty.” The ultimate meaning of Lacan’s assertion of the subject’s constitutive “decenterment” is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms that are “decentered” with regard to my self-experience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist), but rather something much more unsettling. I am deprived of even my most intimate “subjective” experience, the way things “really seem to me” (the fundamental fantasy that constitutes and guarantees the kernel of my being), since I can never consciously experience it and assume it.

-Slavoj Žižek, The Cartesian Subject without the Cartesian Theatre

[adorablediscourse]

the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego.The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to perceive it(I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of that presubjective moment of image recognition.

Amelia Jones

[slavojquotes]

Judith Butler pointed out that the Foucauldian ‘body’ as the site of resistance is none other than the Freudian ‘psyche’: paradoxically, ‘body’ is Foucault’s name for the psychic apparatus insofar as it resists the soul’s domination. That is to say, when, in his well-known definition of the soul as the ‘prison of the body’, Foucault turns around the standard Platonic-Christian definition of the body as the ‘prison of the soul’, what he calls ‘body’ is not simply the biological body, but is effectively already caught in some kind of presubjective psychic apparatus. Consequently, don’t we encounter in Kant a secret homologous inversion, only in the opposite direction, of the relationship between body and soul: what Kant calls ‘immortality of the soul’ is effectively the immortality of the other, ethereal, ‘undead’ body? This redoubling of the body into the common mortal body and the ethereal undead body brings us to the crux of the matter: the distinction between the two deaths, the biological death of the common mortal body and the death of the other ‘undead’ body; it is clear that what Sade aims at in his notion of a radical Crime is the murder of this second body.

Disparities, 2016 - SLAVOJ ZIZEK

[womens-studies-degree-blog]

Lesbian Representation in “The L Word”

December 2007

           Showtime’s television series The L Word centers on a group of girl friends living in Los Angeles. All but one of the women are lesbians; the show is made by, about and, presumably, for lesbians, a concept unprecedented in mainstream television. With complex and varied lesbian representations, the series serves as an important site for lesbian identity-formation. By virtue of being an explicitly and thoroughly lesbian show, The L Word forces its female viewers (and even male viewers in some ways) to reconfigure the psychic process of identification/ objectification. Thus, in spite of some problematic representations in the show, it ultimately disturbs previous understandings of the lesbian gaze, such as that prescribed through a Lacanian perspective rooted in binary notions of sex and gender.

           In many ways The L Word produces problematic representations reflecting the misogynistic pornographic conventions that Annette Kuhn delineates in her article “Lawless Seeing.” Kuhn discusses the “pleasure of power” (272) in voyeurism (whereby the pleasure of looking is one of power as the object cannot see the viewer [272]) that traditionally implicates a male subject and a female object. Kuhn argues that “the photograph speaks to a masculine subject, constructing woman as object” (273); traditionally gazing upon the female through a masculine lens, this vantage point thus constructs “femininity as otherness” (273). The L Word repeatedly adopts this cinematic technique. In the episode “Lifeline”, Shane approaches Cherie’s house in darkness, following her movements in a stalker-like manner while Cherie, well-lit inside her home, remains uncertain about Shane’s approach. This voyeuristic foreplay mimics the objectifying pleasure power described by Kuhn; initially, the femme Cherie represents the female object while the androgynous Shane, sheathed in darkness, represents the male subject hunting his prey. Upon their meeting at Cherie’s front door, and once both established as women engaged in lesbian sex, they both become objects viewed through the windows. The viewer no longer adopts Shane’s perspective and thus assumes the position of a third-party voyeur.

           Similarly, various sex scenes in The L Word are interrupted by a third character: Shane interrupts Carmen and Jenny in “Late, Later, Latent”, and Jenny’s then-fiancé, Tim, walks in on Jenny and Marina in “Lawfully”. Seemingly staged for a spectator and, notably, often a male one, such scenes mimic the feminine “to-be-looked-at-ness” (274) typical of pornography. The L Word exemplifies its incorporation of the male voyeur with its Season Two character Mark, a man who installs hidden cameras in the bedrooms of his lesbian roommates.

In addition to constructing an implicit male voyeur, The L Word encourages the heteronormative male gaze, paradoxically, through its use of camera angles that fragment the female body into bits and pieces, a pornographic convention Kuhn describes as “dehumanizing” (274). According to Kuhn, shots of thrust bosoms, raised buttocks and open legs construct woman as feminine and therefore different (275), and thus “reducible to a sexuality which puts itself on display for a masculine spectator” (276). The L Word’s publicity shots alone epitomize the show’s breast fixation, with all of its characters elegantly and unnaturally clad in plunging necklines. Furthermore, the “V” shape of the open-leg angle proves a popular closing shot for sex scenes, such as those between Shane and Cherie (“Lifeline”), Helena and Dylan (“Late Comer”), and Shane and Carmen (“Life, Loss, Leaving”), to name a few.    

           By insisting on sexual difference (Kuhn, 277) and, by virtue of photographic convention, equating visibility with truth (Kuhn, 275), pornography “as a regime of representation…constructs a social discourse on the nature of human sexuality” (Kuhn, 271). By adopting many pornographic conventions in its sex scenes, The L Word thus reflects this discourse which posits the feminine as object in a subject/ object binary.

According to Laura Mulvey, the psychoanalytic implications of this binary serve to perpetuate the patriarchal order. In a Lacanian reading of the voyeuristic tendencies of cinematic conventions, the two pleasures in looking are scopophilia and narcissistic identification, the former reserved for the female object and the latter for the male subject, or voyeur. Film and television reproduce sex-driven scopophilia through the voyeuristic separation of a glowing screen in darkness (Mulvey, 216). As with the “presubjective moment of image recognition” (Mulvey, 218) in the Lacanian mirror stage, the viewer then conceives of the screen’s image as the ideal ego to identify with. Because film traditionally constructs male characters as voyeurs in the stories themselves, much like The L Word’s Mark, audiences narcissistically identify with males as the “bearer of look” (Mulvey, 219) and females as the “image” (Mulvey, 219). As the image, and therefore the signifiers of sexual difference (as discussed above), females then produce castration anxiety in males, a problem cinematically conquered in one of two ways: either the voyeuristic demystification of the female character or the fetishistic scopophilia of her (Mulvey, 225). The L Word adopts the latter strategy in its pornographic reproduction of the male gaze, discussed above. Furthermore, the show’s problematic opening sequence reduces the characters to dolls: the cast, plasticized and shining with gloss, pose in choppy sequences that mimic the awkward movements of a Barbie doll. This snapshot of The L Word thus promotes a fetishistic playground of pretty lesbians.

Mulvey describes the former strategy for “handling” women as sadistic; the film must investigate, demystify, punish and save the woman (225). Despite the uncontested centrality and complexity of The L Word’s lesbian characters, the show’s storylines create the sensation of an omnipresent, lesbian-hating world to battle. Carmen’s family disowns her when she comes out (“Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way”), Dana’s parents continually struggle with her homosexuality, and Max and Bette repeatedly encounter homophobic characters in the workplace. The episode “Last Dance”, in handling Dana’s death, juxtaposes the Christian, homophobic service provided by Dana’s parents with the illicit memorial that Dana’s friends conduct at a secluded waterfall. At the Christian service, the priest delivers a eulogy in which he muses that, given more time on earth, Dana “would have settled down with a loving partner, someone to care for her, a strong, devoted man, a loving man…” at which point Alice interrupts with, “What are you talking about? Dana was gay” and storms out of the church. Substantive and moving, the latter scene, in which the ladies commemorate Dana’s life and scatter her ashes, suffices to explore Dana’s death. Therefore the first scene, a homophobic tragedy, solely serves the sensation that The L Word zooms in on a lesbian world from outside rather than representing a lesbian world in its own right. The show thus reflects the Lacanian demystification of woman-as-object, illustrating the ways in which this woman-centered show in fact reproduces the patriarchal symbolic order underlying cinematic conventions.

           The L Word’s overrepresentation of femme lesbians further incurs the notion of heteronormative representation. According to Claire Whatling, femmes are traditionally read as the object-choice for masculine-identified butch lesbians and as not “committed” (64) to homosexuality. The L Word promotes this reading with a constant teetering towards heterosexuality: Alice is bisexual, Jenny enters as a straight woman who “becomes” a lesbian (and, along with Shane, suffers from father-related psychological issues) and Tina temporarily “returns” to heterosexuality. Because the equation of lesbian with butch “doubly erase[s]” (Whatling, 60) the lesbian femme, her prominence in The L Word raises an interesting question: does the series serve butch scopophilia or femme narcissism?

           Whatling addresses this issue through her deconstruction of the masculine/ feminine binary which stresses the limitations of psychoanalysis for understanding lesbianism. In a Lacanian reading, women must identify narcissistically “and hence masochistically” (Whatling, 56) with objectified women in film. This stems from the psychological process whereby the male identifies anaclitically with the mother as the Other, lacking what he wishes to possess (the phallus), while the female identifies narcissistically with the mother and thus the self as the Other, or that object which is striven for (Whatling, 37). With lesbian desire, however, the relation is both narcissistic and anaclitic as both oneself and one’s object of desire become the sexual object; “female homosexuality is, in this sense, not a failure of Freudian femininity, but, on the contrary, an excess of it” (Whatling, 43). Thus, psychoanalysis renders lesbianism a logical impossibility. Given this fact, Whatling reflects that “to argue that the cinema allows for a proliferation of lesbian scopic pleasure beyond the rigours of either the narcissistic or the anaclitic is a profoundly banal conclusion to come to” (71). This banality then calls for a more complex reading of lesbian representation and identification, a task that begins with an understanding of the lesbian gaze.

           In their analogy of women’s fashion magazines to pornography, Reina Lewis and Katrina Rolley argue that fashion magazines are implicitly lesbian with women as their intended viewer. The vantage point then becomes “a lesbian gaze in which the pleasure of looking is experienced simultaneously with the pleasure of being looked at by a woman” (182), and is thus a uniquely female position without recourse to and in subversion of the male gaze. Free from the constraints of a masculine/ feminine binary, femme lesbians can identify with the butch and the male hero (Whatling, 75), among other characters; essentially, the lesbian viewer re-imagines herself as the subject in unconventional ways. Hence, in response to the previously posed question, “the frame of vision” (Whatling, 74) of any female viewer watching The L Word “remains tied to the economy of the lesbian” (Whatling, 74) and therefore resides beyond binary notions of the male—or masculine— gaze upon the feminine object. Indeed the lesbian gaze introduces a viewing pleasure logically inexplicable through a Lacanian reading.

           Further complicating the male scopophilic reading of lesbian representation, David Loftus’ interviews with heterosexual men who enjoy lesbian pornography reveal that men can in some ways adopt the lesbian gaze. Some men interviewed envision experiencing a female type of sexual pleasure while watching lesbian pornography (56) and some envision being a “gay woman” (58), even the subservient one, a concept that disturbs notions of male dominance in pornography (58). One interviewee states that, in lesbian sexual relations, “a man is not necessary” (Loftus, 59). The transferability of the lesbian gaze suggests that, even with men watching, The L Word becomes solely lesbian terrain. Thus, the lesbian gaze challenges traditional psychoanalytic readings of lesbian representation in The L Word which reduce the show to an ascription to heteronormative codes.      

In deconstructing masculine/ feminine binaries, The L Word in fact engages in bricolage, as Judith Butler’s writings on sex and gender support with various ideas pertinent to a revised understanding of lesbian identification/ objectification. Firstly, in her chapter “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Butler challenges the notion that butch/ femme role playing in lesbian relationships reproduces heterosexual norms, arguing instead that drag and these roles in fact highlight the non-existence of an essential heterosexuality. According to Butler, drag proves that “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (21). The character development of The L Word’s Max reflects Butler’s argument. In the episode “Lobsters”, Max enters the series as Moira, Jenny’s stone butch girlfriend from small-town California, and feels rejected by Jenny’s friends from the outset. Having assessed nothing but Moira’s flannel-clad appearance, Carmen and Shane immediately act coldly towards her. Later, Carmen justifies disliking Moira by criticizing her seemingly rigid attitudes towards lesbian roles: Moira tells Carmen and Jenny, “you girls just relax, let us butches unload the truck,” referring to Shane. Carmen, amused and mocking Moira’s assumptions, slaps Shane’s arm and says, “big butch, go unload the truck.” When all of Jenny’s friends discuss the newcomer at a dinner party that night, Carmen more harshly reprimands Moira for her statement, and the ladies proceed to contemplate the pairing. “Maybe she’s Jenny’s type,” Dana muses, to which Alice sarcastically replies, “Because Carmen’s such a stone butch too” (Carmen and Jenny previously dated). Bette then states that Moira “comes from a place where you have to define yourself as either/ or. It’s probably the only language she has to describe herself.” Tina, reverting to the question of Jenny’s choice, wonders why Jenny “would want to role-play like that.” This conversation appears oddly hypocritical: Alice dates both femme and butch women throughout the series, and Carmen and Shane consistently role play, most notably at their entirely heteronormative wedding (“Left Hand of the Goddess”). Interestingly, when Moira begins her transition to Max and appears at a party in fashionable men’s clothing, the ladies warm up to her, gushing that she “looks like a hot guy” (“Lifesize”). Still role-playing but now Los Angeles appropriate, Moira temporarily overcomes her ostracism. Thus, a class issue disguised as a gender issue, the ladies’ initial, hypocritical treatment of Moira highlights the constraints of a gender-binary system.        

Ultimately, The L Word condemns Max for his choice to transition. He becomes a ragingly jealous boyfriend and Jenny leaves him. He then suffers throughout the fourth season as being different and confused, juxtaposed with the lesbian characters secure in their identities. In a pivotal scene during Max’s transition, Kit, a black woman, seemingly emerges as the show’s critical voice. “What if,” she asks Max, “I lived my life feeling white inside, and then the next day I woke up and I could change the color of my skin, the features of my face to become white? Would you encourage me to do that? What’s white inside? What’s male inside? What’s female inside? Why can’t you be the butchest butch in the world and keep your body?” (“Late Comer”) Here Kit challenges the notion that sexuality resides in an essentially sexed body. By condemning Max and trumpeting the emotional failures of his transition, The L Word thus reflects Butler’s argument that “the parodic or imitative effect of gay identities works neither to copy nor emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization” (23).

Butler’s semiotic analysis of the lesbian phallus and its ability to deprivilege the dominant order (“Bodies that Matter”) clarifies how lesbian representation such as that of The L Word disrupts and therefore “exposes” the hegemonic imaginary of heterosexual morphology. Butler explains that the psychic subject is internally constituted by the Other and is therefore never self-identical and always disrupted by the Other (“Imitation”, 27). Thus, contrary to a Lacanian reading, as Whatling argues, identification and desire must not be mutually exclusive. “If to identify as a woman is not necessarily to desire a man, and if to desire a woman does not necessarily signal the constituting presence of a masculine identification…then the heterosexual matrix proves to be an imaginary logic that insistently issues forth its own unmanageability” (“Bodies”, 239). Likewise, the privilege of the phallus as signifier is reproduced through a symbolic order in which the phallus “gains [its] privilege through being reiterated” (“Bodies”, 89). In the same way that heterosexuality must constantly repeat performances of itself to justify its essential nature, the connection between signifier and signified frays when women exchange the phallus amongst themselves. As a symbol, the phallus only exists insofar as something represents it; thus, the lesbian phallus deprivileges the masculinist, heterosexist phallus (“Bodies”, 90). Importantly, Butler notes that:

To speak of the lesbian phallus as a possible site of desire is not to refer to an imaginary identification and/or desire that can be measured against a real one; on the contrary, it is simply to promote an alternative imaginary to a hegemonic imaginary and to show, through that assertion, the ways in which the hegemonic imaginary constitutes itself through the naturalization of an exclusionary heterosexual morphology (“Bodies”, 91).    

The very presence of the lesbian phallus then further complicates notions of female objectification/ identification: as with the lesbian gaze, this symbolic process supersedes the dominant order underlying a masculine/ feminine binary and challenges the priority of heterosexuality central to Lacanian theory. As Butler states, origins such as essentialized heterosexuality “only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives” (“Imitation”, 22). This tautological nature of sex and gender binaries thus renders them limited in comparison to the bricolage of the sexual derivative present in The L Word. The “hyperfemmeininity” (Whatling) of the series, paired with the relative marginality of traditional role-playing to the characters’ relationships, ultimately challenges the many, related binaries: butch/ femme, masculine/ feminine, subject/ object. The show’s characters rarely feel compelled to justify their desire; thus, by consistently ignoring the request for an explanation of femmeininity, The L Word denounces the very binary upon which such a concept depends.    

Although many critics of The L Word thoroughly examine the potentially problematic elements discussed earlier, the subversive psychoanalytic approaches that Whatling and Butler adopt allow for the bricolage of sex and gender binaries. Given this reconfiguration of pleasure power, even the show’s pornographic conventions can be re-read in a subversive manner: The L Word includes many more face shots during sex scenes than pornography does, challenging the dehumanizing reading of bits and pieces. Moreover, the third-party “voyeur” created by the camera lens could suggest equality of power between the two lovers, rather than the duplicated object of the male gaze. Such readings, rooted in a lesbian framework, allow for alternative representations of female sexuality. While Foucault might argue that the affirmation of homosexuality is an extension of homophobic discourse (Butler, “Imitation”, 14), and while The L Word can symbolically reproduce the patriarchal order, one needs not consider such notions when reconfigurations of the lesbian gaze subvert heteronormative discourse altogether. Given that only sixteen years ago Butler described lesbian subjects as “abjects…who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of the law” (“Imitation”, 20), the recent introduction of complex lesbian subjects in mainstream representation suggests that there is yet much future direction to be taken. At the risk of tokenizing (Season Four simultaneously introduces the show’s first two lesbians of color and the first lesbian with a physical disability), The L Word continues to expand its representations. Perhaps with time, the show and other artistic endeavors will further challenge the cinematic conventions underlying a history of representation that has rendered the lesbian invisible.            

 Works Cited

Butler, Judith, 1993, Bodies That Matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”, Routledge, London and New York.

Butler, Judith, 1991, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, Diana Fuss (ed.), Routledge, London and New York, pp. 13-31.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Anders, A. (Director). (2006). Last Dance [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Chaiken, I. (Director). (2006). Left Hand of the Goddess [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Hughes, B. (Director). (2006). Lobsters [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Kaufman, M. (Director). (2006). Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. and Lam, R. (Executive Producers). (2004). The L Word [Television series]. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Minahan, D. (Director). (2005). Life, Loss, Leaving [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Peirce, K. (Director). (2006). Lifeline [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Robinson, A. (Director). (2006). Late Comer [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Kuhn, Annette, 1995, “Lawless Seeing”, Gender, Race and Class in Media, Gail Dines and Jean Humez (eds.), Sage Publications, pp. 271-278.

Lewis, Reina and Rolley, Katrina, 1996, “Ad(dressing) the dyke: lesbian looks and lesbians looking”, Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, Peter Horne and Reina Lewis (eds.), Routledge, London and New  York, pp. 178-190.

Loftus, David, 2002, Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New  York.

Mulvey, Laura, 1984, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, B. Wallis (ed.), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, pp. 361-373.

Rapp, A. (Writer), & Brock, T. (Director). (2006). Lifesize [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Stenn, D. (Writer), & Goldwyn, T. (Director). (2005). Late, Later, Latent [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Troche, R. (Writer), & Minahan, D. (Director). (2004). Lawfully [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Whatling, Clare, 1997, Screen dreams: Fantasising lesbians in film, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York.