Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Camera Obscura, 47 (Volume 16, Number 2), 2001, pp. 1-229 (Article)
Sianne Ngai
177
178 • Camera Obscura
namely “penis envy”? “Envy” is the other side of the “violence” of which
Fanon speaks as the fundamental part of the native’s formation. But both
affects — the one of wanting to have what the other has; the other, of
destroying the other so that one can be in his place — are affects
produced by a patriarchal ideology that assumes that the other at the low
side of the hierarchy of self/other is “lacking” (in the pejorative,
undesirable sense). . . . The fate of the native is then like that of Freud’s
woman: Even though she will never have a penis, she will for the rest of
her life be trapped within the longing for it and its substitutes.2
aside from the fact that the statement above drastically elides the
substantial difference between “totalization” and the treatment
of two abstract qualities as one (as seems fitting when such quali-
ties are acted upon or engender effects in tandem), isn’t the com-
bining of dual or multiple subjects into a single force or agency
precisely the way in which group alliances (even fraught or
uneasy ones such as feminism) are formed? If such a transition
“bespeaks a quandary,” Gubar’s complaint about Butler’s gram-
matical enactment of the transition might be said to bespeak
uneasiness about the compound subject in general. Since Gubar’s
argument links poststructuralism and ethnic studies as complicit
together in causing the demise of feminist criticism (thus “creat-
ing a confederacy among knowledge formations that are not
often seen as collaborative culprits”27), one might also ask how
the discursive threat of the paradoxically doubled-yet-single sub-
ject associated with poststructuralist feminists, relates to the psy-
chological threat of female aggression associated with feminists of
color. In other words, what is the relationship between aggression
and the grammar of de-singled subjects? Or between the subject
of emotion and the subject of language? Oddly enough, these
questions are ones that Single White Female directly addresses. But
to see how requires some initial working-through of the terms in
which the film’s dynamics of aggression and compounding are
most frequently conceived.
walk, talk, eat, think, sleep,” Margot replies, “I’m sure that’s very
flattering, Birdie [i.e., deferential, an act of homage], and I’m sure
there’s nothing wrong with it [i.e., hostile, aggressive].” Since, in
Single White Female, emulation is explicitly posited as the act that
facilitates this anticipated transition from deference to enmity,
Allie’s growing distrust of and “disturbance” by Hedy begins when
she discovers signs of emulation, all of which involve acts of
appropriation or progressively forceful claims to property: Hedy’s
unasked borrowing of her clothes, duplicates of these clothes in
Hedy’s closet, Hedy’s change of hair color and style to match her
own, her own letters hoarded in Hedy’s shoe box of personal
momentos.
According to the film’s narrative logic, then, Hedy’s emu-
lation of Allie is an accurate indication that she “envies her,” and
that this mimetic performance is enabled through, if not synony-
mous with, a process of acquisition. But is it equally synonymous
with, as Brinks and Paulin claim, a process of identification?
Given the variety of circumstances in which emulation might
occur, it seems incontrovertible that emulating someone does
not necessarily entail that one wishes to be that someone, nor
even that one fantasizes approximating the symbolic position he
or she occupies in order to enjoy the social privileges that site
offers. In fact, it seems fairly easy to imagine antagonistic situa-
tions in which emulation is performed for reasons entirely other
than a wish for adequation; here one emulates the other in order
to overtake or eclipse her, even “dispossess” her by claiming
exclusive recognition for the attributes that define her. Instead of
being a form of altering oneself in deference to another, emulation
can thus be a form of aggressive self-assertion: performed solely for
the hostile purposes of causing the other anxiety or distress, to
“spoil” her by rendering her own self-identity unstable, even to
destroy her. In Hitchcock’s Vertigo (US, 1960), Judy’s second
assumption of the role of Madeleine (under direct pressure from
Scottie) provides an example of how emulation can also be per-
formed reluctantly or ambivalently, without genuine desire for
adequation with the subject being emulated, or complete willing-
ness to alter one’s own identity according to the other’s model.
194 • Camera Obscura
locates his theory away from the original paradigm of male het-
erosexuality, the easier it becomes to equate identification with
mimeticism. Thus, by the time we reach the fourth example, one
of “the genesis of male homosexuality,” things have become
“transformed” indeed: “Things have taken a sudden turn: the
young man does not abandon his mother [at the onset of adult
sexuality], but identifies with her; he transforms himself into her, and
now looks about for objects which can replace his ego for him,
and on which he can bestow such love and care as he has experi-
enced from this mother.”47 As a phantasmatic trajectory initially
allocentric, or directed toward the other, identification is now the
direct agent of a egocentric trajectory whose destination is the
self : “identification . . . remolds the ego.”48
The increased proximity between identification and
mimetic acts of self-transformation, which we can now see coin-
cides with a shift in the gender of Freud’s examples, thus also
strategically coincides with an increase in the exemplarity — or
exemplificatory effects — of these very examples. In other words,
once Freud turns to cases involving female subjects as well as
“feminizing” relationships to illustrate his theory of identification,
the proximity between identification and mimesis increases
because the “examples” within these examples (the ideals or mod-
els providing the “fashion” after which subjects like the little girl
mold themselves) increase in their exemplariness — that is, their
capacity to encourage or induce imitation. 49 The more “femi-
nine” the example, the more exemplary the example. As if “femi-
ninity” itself were a hyperbolic mode of exemplarity? Or struc-
tured like an example?
The logic underlying Freud’s own use of examples thus
suggests that in the case of social relationships involving women,
not only is identification more closely bound up with emulation
than in male-male configurations, but the subjects involved have
a closer relationship to exemplarity in general. An extension of
this logic implies that to become feminine (acquiring subjectivity
through identifications with female others) is to become an exem-
plary example: an entity actively inducing imitation in others
200 • Camera Obscura
transform herself into Allie, or even to take her place, but rather
as an attempt to transform Allie. As the film’s plot reveals, it is the
emulated subject’s life (Allie’s sense of self-definition and her
relationships with others) and not the emulator’s that most radi-
cally changes as result of the latter’s actions. Defined in terms of
its ability to shapeshift, Hedy’s persona remains comparatively
consistent. In contrast, by being “copied,” Allie is transformed by
Hedy’s mimetic behavior, and is transformed, moreover, into a
replication or duplicate. If Freudian identification is a process
“where the subject makes himself one with the other person,”
Hedy’s emulation of Allie could be described not as an endeavor
at achieving “oneness” but a process of making “twoness.”58 In
their semiotic study of rivalry, which posits envy and emulation as
indissociably linked, Greimas and Fontanille describe the latter
as implying “an unfinished process, S 1’s process, in relation to
another subject, S2, whose process is treated as finished.”59 Para-
doxically, however, here the “unfinished” subjectivation is not so
much the emulator’s (Hedy’s) but is that of the person emulated,
since Allie is the one ultimately altered. In one of their final
encounters, Allie herself acknowledges the success of this intended
outcome: “I’m like you now.”
Allie’s comment thus indicates that Hedy’s mimetic behav-
ior may have little to do with identification, either in the sense of
a fantasy about her own transformation (becoming “like” Allie)
or a fantasy of replacing her in her relationships with other peo-
ple. The film makes the latter particularly clear: though Hedy
deceptively seduces Allie’s boyfriend, she does so precisely in
order to force him out of both their lives (using the seduction as
blackmail to get him to return to his ex-wife), nor does she
express any interest in the only other social relationships Allie
seems to have: her friendship with Graham, the gay upstairs
neighbor, and her disastrous business alliance with Mitch. Rather
than attempting to take Allie’s place within these relationships
(both with men), Hedy’s aggressive emulation actually aims at dis-
solving them. Allie’s “I’m like you now” further indicates that nei-
ther is Hedy ultimately trying to mold herself, qua “unfinished”
Rethinking Gender and Envy • 205
allie: Well . . .
The initial conflict over who will end up owning the shoes is dis-
pelled by Hedy’s encouragement that Allie should be their taker,
while also confidently asserting her own right to receiving and
returning them. This claim is met with no objection. In the very
next scene, however, when Allie is awkwardly caught rifling
through Hedy’s possessions in Hedy’s room and Hedy attempts to
ease tension by saying, “Anything of mine you want is yours, go
ahead: share and share alike,” Allie’s response is notably hesi-
tant.63 And she explains or attempts to legitimate this hesitation
by reasserting her status as a female oneness: “But I don’t really
know about that. I’m an only child.” It is at this point that Hedy
reveals her own single (white) femalehood, but by defining it in
terms of the loss or absence of a former female twoness (“I was
Rethinking Gender and Envy • 209
Bad Examples
If femininity, the category of difference from which feminism
begins but which remains its most contentious point of reference,
can be thought of as structured like an example (which is to say,
like an inducement to imitation, or particular instantiation of
some idea X ), this exemplariness can be precisely what chal-
lenges the stability of the idea it would appear to reflect as some-
thing already established or in place. All the more so if X is
already defined as a kind of exemplarity; that is, something by
definition never self-identical, since “the proper place of the
example is always besides itself.”77 Insofar as the example is never
fully universal to begin with, there can be examples that, while
being “unable to serve in their particularity,” must point to some
general or universal category, but without actually exemplifying
this universal as a determinate value. If femininity can be imag-
ined as a form of exemplarity, the act of exemplifying femininity
would involve becoming an example of an example, that is, an
example of something radically external to itself.
In this sense, it seems possible to imagine an example
emptied of its exemplarity: in other words, something that becomes
the constitutive site of the idea it is supposed to secondarily reflect.
This happens to be the way examples most often function in phi-
losophy and other kinds of speculative discourse. Thus referring
to a rhetorical strategy used by Immanuel Kant, as well as one
informing his reading of Kant, J. Hillis Miller writes: “The choice
of examples . . . and their ordering, is never innocent. Does not
my choice of examples load the dice, predetermine the conclu-
sions I can reach and, like all examples, in fact form the essence
of the argument it is apparently only meant to exemplify?”78 Simi-
larly, Andrzej Warminski shows how G. W. F. Hegel’s attempt to
explain the difference between an example and the idea it exem-
plifies (as the difference between a secondary, passive mode of
representation and a primary and active one) actually rests on the
use of a example, leading to a reversal of the hierarchical roles
initially assigned them.79 It is interesting in this regard to note
that in “Identification,” Freud conspicuously does not refer to his
own examples as such, but as “theoretical sources” or “cases”—
216 • Camera Obscura
Notes
5. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 135.
13. Susan Gubar, “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” Critical Inquiry 24.4
(1998): 880.
14. This debate takes place across the following texts: Gubar, “What
Ails Feminist Criticism?” and Robyn Wiegman, “What Ails
Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion,” Critical Inquiry 25.2
(1999): 362 – 79. See Susan Gubar, “Notations in Medias Res,”
Critical Inquiry 25.2 (1999): 380 – 96, for her response to
Wiegman.
30. Scott Paulin, “Sex and the Singled Girl: Queer Representation
and Containment in Single White Female,” Camera Obscura 37
(1996): 52.
37. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans.
James Strachey (New York: Bantam, 1965), 79.
38. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 67.
51. This link is also established in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in
order to associate the operations of homophilic idealization with
worship of a political leader and fascism. When her prize student
Sandy (Pamela Franklin) “puts a stop” to Jean’s (Maggie Smith)
ability to transmit or reproduce her theories of ideal femininity
(putting a stop to her ability to copy as well as be copied), Jean
equates this with “assassination,” hence linking the end of
transmissibility with the death of a feminine ideal, but also with
the death of the fascist political leaders Jean admires. The
relation between the mimetic production of “compound” female
subjectivity in this woman’s film and Freud’s postwar analysis of
the “libidinal organization of groups” in Group Psychology is a
worthy topic for an essay on its own.
72. Rather than seeking to “preserve and spare” the object, “envy is
the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys
something desirable — the envious impulse being to take it away
or to spoil it” (Klein, The Writings of Melanie Klein, 183), that is,
change the status of the object with respect to its ownability, and
thus convert one’s relation to the thing originally admired and
desired. Envying interferes with the subject’s ability to accept,
assimilate, possess, or internalize the “good object” (which it
subsequently transforms by challenging its value), as well as its
ability to distinguish between objects “good” and “bad.” See
Klein, The Writings of Melanie Klein, 185,192.
75. This is not to argue that one has to go through envy to recognize
persecution, but that envy in the Kleinian sense might provide a
particular strategy for doing so — particularly when what is at
stake is the ability to recognize an idealized object (what the
dominant culture admires and strives toward) as persecutory.
82. See Butler’s response to being publicly criticized for her prose
style in the New York Times: “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back,” editorial,
New York Times, 20 March 1999.