... themselves as the optical proof of Jenner’s transition; they reveal and, ostensibly, dominate what Lacan refers to as the fundamental misrecognition at the heart of all scopic scenarios of recognition. Almodóvar’s film imagines the reverse scenario in which the body-as-image exerts violent control over...

... Watson. The trick is to get us to enjoy this misrecognition, an enjoyment intensified by our being able to project our least wanted attributes onto the sidekick. We have already covered the obvious basis for this contempt toward the sidekick in the peplum — the sidekick’s comparative...

... that the function of fascination is precisely to blind us to the fact that the other is already gazingat us.20 The audience's cooperation in this depends upon a fundamental misrecognition; like the child before Lacan's mirror, we overestimate our power. We see Alii; we see Alli...

... her mother and father. The film cannot be simply 229 descriptive, however; the moment of recognition and misrecognition put in play is not definitive, nor “biological,” but opens a process of placing the child within desire (of her mother, of her parents), within sexual...

... Pinky for a white woman, they defend her. Rozelia mockingly points out their mistake, and they arrest all three. As in most of the scenes with Pinky, there is a play between recognition and misrecognition of her race and her identity. Rozelia knows CO 43-3, 94-121 6...

... of the general dynamic of misrecognition that constitutes the subject in Lacanian theory. It is in each case a socially and culturally specific gap that has to be negotiated by the viewer, as are the imaginative strategies de- veloped in response to it. In their specific...

... the apparent instability of Billy’s racial and gender identities that keeps him in power in this movie. But what is more significant still is that it would seem to be black men’s misrecognition of Billy’s identity that gives him such a competitive edge. Strikingly, the first words we hear...

... of language, it constitutes desire in the very movement which delimits it. Further, the Imaginary does not entail the (imagined) fulfillment of a wish, but rather an extreme form of narcissism. A process of identification fraught with ambivalence and misrecognition, it would seem...

... of the self so as to transform their damaging potential. Disidentification, he argues, is a “tactical misrecognition” of self and other that coun­ ters the identity-eradicating effects of participation in the public sphere. Not simply directed at exposing racism or healing the sham­ ing effects...

..., identification with the image is of course a kind of misrecognition, but it would be better in this context to refer to the French méconnaissance. Lacan distinguishes between connaissance and méconnaissance —  w h i c h are delusory in their implications of mastery, integrity...

... own body.”11 At this point, voyeurism and exhibitionism overlap: the subject is simultaneously the looker and the looked-at. Lacan elaborates this paradox of primary narcissism with his theory of the mirror stage, the moment of misrecognition that inaugu- rates subjectivity as split. For Lacan...

..., an emblem of her desire for a separate identity: “Now everything would be her way.” Clearly we are in the Lacanian Imaginary, the sphere of the ego, and the site of misrecognition, illusory coherence and alienation, in short, a paranoid delusional system. This lies...

... of misrecognition that would not be out of place in The Awful Truth (a film based on the assumption of infidelity), this accident ultimately permits the reca- libration of their affective dependencies so that the right degree of acknowledgement can enable the right degree of separateness between mother and child...

... misrecognition of the subject’s talent, rather than as the star’s failure to obey the culture’s injunction to be a particular kind of subject. However, a recent subgenre of experimental films or videos relying on stars’ biographical narratives (Sheila McLaugh- lin’s and Lynne Tillman’s 1984 film about Frances...

... has been discursively repressed and how we can prevent such ignorance and misrecognition from being repeated. My interest here is in understanding how the racial, eth- nic, class, and national borders were conceived in Wong’s time, two decades before the emergence of the term Asian...

... on which the Imaginary coherence of the subject is based: ‘ ‘Surrealist film dramatizes the human subject’s relation to the image by working against the lure of the Imaginary, revealing the misrecognition of identification rather than, as in the fiction film, reproducing its effect...

... of White’s name, and the rec- ognition and misrecognition of her image. The tensions in this local-global transplantation are further complicated by the Chi- nese translations of the very name Pearl White. Her first name, Baolian, was in fact transliterated from her character name, Pau- line...

... which there could be no “me”- she assumes the image of the other. The human subject’s identity is as illusory and as second-hand as its memories, for it is finally nothing but the result of a ceaseless series of misrecognitions, initially sustained through a mirror imago, but promoted over...

... filmic representation is a symp- tomatic misrecognition -and one which Blade Runner explicitly ex- poses. The filmic metaphor of the “empathy test” frames the question of the relationship between “human” subjects and the moving pictures that purport to reproduce and represent...

... (of misrecognition) whereby they are continually interdependent, as in the film-strip and the film-projection. " If I [plug] the psychical apparatus [into] the filmic one, I obtain two [similar] mechanisms mirroring each other."8 And the desire is reformulated, the desire for a theory which...