Foster: Feminism

Foster: Feminism Presentation

Lacan’s Mirror Stage

1.       A stage that occurs as a young child identifies with his own image (“ideal ego” or “ideal-I”).

2.       This act marks the primordial recognition of one’s self as “I” before entrance into language and the symbolic order.

3.       The Mirror stage establishes the “imaginary order” which still influences the subject even after the subject enters the symbolic order. The imaginary order is basically narcissism; the subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire.

Ideas

1.       Strap a hero camera via head mount to a baby and record the baby’s day from his perspective. Go through the footage afterwards and look for objects the baby focused on. Possibly relate the video to fetishes to represent the imagery order that gets established in the Mirror stage.

2.       Record video of a baby in front of a mirror. Record his facial expressions, via actual face and the reflected image. Juxtapose both images together.

3.       Take baby toys and compare them with sexual toys. Ironically, many sexual toys are similar to baby’s toys, which suggest the imaginary order that gets establish. When babies are around certain objects in the mirror stage, for some unexplained reason later on life those objects somehow influence that same human’s fetishes through the imaginary.

Foster: Gender Identity

Gender Identity

1.       Gender Identity refers to a person’s private sense of and subjective experience of their own gender. It usually consists of a person being accepted into a category of either male or female as and the traits for each category are defined by society. Though some feminist theoriest argue that these gender categories are impossible to define, thus does not exists since often a person would possess both traits from either gender.

2.       Gender is often referred to as a social or learned behavior, not the biological trait. To Lacan, Identity is built up as a composite of images and effects (mental representations) taken from the outside world from the start of life, which are developed in relation to the Desire for recognition and later social requirements for submission to an arbitrary law. Basically, identity is based on early life experiences which develop to Desire and submissive by social norms/laws.

3.       The biological gender (sex) doesn’t always match a person’s gender identity. Usually the gender identity is determined by age 3, and usually doesn’t change after that.  Other aspects of the identity influence gender identity such as race, social class, sexuality, etc.

Ideas

1.       Create a gender identity generator. Either by random or a participant answer a few questions, the program will take common gender traits to create a gender identity for the participant. They can specify what part of the world they are in, and It may change depending on cultural norms.

2.       Create a binary portrait series of men and women with their face split portraying both gender identities.

3.       Create surreal like portrait paintings displaying strong opposite gender traits to challenge the viewer on the gender identity. The portraits can also be done in environment settings, maybe changing roles of the gender identity.