goto Appendx main menu Three Boys and Their
Growing-Up Performances :
Benton Komins
text | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | notes
  1. Herculine Barbin, "Mes Souvenirs," Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B. Presented by Michel Foucault (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 9.
    1. I have suffered much, and I have suffered alone! Alone! Forsaken by everyone! My place was not marked out in this world that shunned me, that had cursed me. Not a living creature was to share in this immense sorrow that seized me when I left my childhood, at that age when everything is beautiful, because everything is young and bright with the future [translated by Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 3]

  2. Sigmund Freud, The Sexual Enlightenment of Children. Translated by James Strachey (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 18–19. In this section I note all subsequent citations from this text by page numbers.
  3. Through the course of the case study, Freud traces the etiology of each of Hans's phobic symptoms.
  4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol.1. Translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 113.
  5. Strachey mistranslates the German Wiwimacher (weewee maker) as widdler. Both mother and son emphasize the penis's excretory function.
  6. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), footnote, pp. 84–86.
  7. Kate Linker, "Representation and Sexuality," Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Edited by Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), pp. 394–395.
  8. Michel Tournier, "Tupik," Le Coq de Bruyere (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 69. In this section I note all subsequent citations from this text by page numbers. The translation is mine.
  9. While the word "prick" in English suggests a myriad of lexical possibilities (to pierce, poke; a colloquial term for penis; a miserable individual, etc.), the French "piquer" suggests penetration, irritation, and piercing.
  10. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore is known not only as one of the great nineteenth-century woman poets in France, but her biography functions as something of a legend: "The youngest surviving child of a family impoverished and separated by the economic and social upheavals of the Revolution, Marceline Desbordes was put to work as an actress at age eleven to help her mother make ends meet. Never financially secure, she learned to eke out her own living from then on. An unmarried mother at twenty-four, she raised her son alone until his death in 1816." Michael Danahy, "Poete Maudite," A New History of French Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 736.
  11. The Mme. Mamouse episode brings to mind Jacques Lacan's illustration and discussion of two identical yet differently labeled doors (LADIES, GENTLEMEN), which structurally counterpoise Saussure's arbitrary paradigm of the tree (ARBOR and image).
    1. [In the door diagram] where we see that, without greatly extending the scope of the signifier concerned in the experiment, that is, by doubling a noun through the mere juxtaposition of two terms whose complementary meanings ought apparently to reinforce each other, a surprise is produced by an unexpected precipitation of an unexpected meaning: the image of twin doors symbolizing the solitary confinement offered Western Man for the satisfaction of his natural needs away from home, the imperative that he seems to share with the great majority of primitive communities by which his public life is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation. [Jacques Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud," ECRITS; translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 151]

  12. Michael Worton, "Michel Tournier and the Nature of Love," The European Gay Review, Vol. 3 (London: Verlaine-Rimbaud, 1988), p. 43.
  13. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 57.
  14. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Film Theory and Criticism. Edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford, 1985), p. 809.
  15. The Law of Desire (La Ley del Deseo) produced by El Deseo S.A. and Lauren Films; executive producer, Miguel A. Perez Campos; writer and director, Pedro Almodovar. I cite the Lauren subtitles.
  16. Constance Penley, "'A Certain Refusal of Difference': Feminism and Film Theory," Art After Modernism, pp. 387–389.
  17. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 57.
  18. Barbin, "Mes Souvenirs."
text | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | notes
appendx inc.©1997