Footnote #61 - The Gaze

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return to psychoanalysis in order to make sense of the world through gazing and gaze theory. Alex once again takes the lead in discussing Laura Mulvey’s seminal work on the gaze but also how it offers just one way of thinking about the topic, drawing instead on Lacanian psychoanalysis to distinguish between the qualities of looking and gazing. Topics include the conscious and unconscious processes involved in Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’; the politics of cinema and the illusion of mastery; how the gaze both affirms identity through our engagement with the cinematic object and emerges as something not that we have but that we react to; and how ‘gazing’ represents a way of seeing the world through the paradigm of consciousness, concepts, and ideas.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

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