Photography of Jane Bown A review by Tim Maul

Heir Apparent (from page 1)

sophisticated dialogue to address clinical, cultural, political, and aesthetic questions and controversies that are pertinent to psychoanalytic clinicians and other communities engaged in our field.

In this inaugural issue of my editorship, I am grateful for the assistance of Jamieson Webster, who generously served as guest issue editor. This issue was inspired by the 51st Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, which addressed the topic of femininity. To address femininity is to evoke the question of difference, which is intrinsic Jane Bown: A Lifetime of Looking By Jane Bown (edited by Luke Dodd) London, England: Guardian Faber, 2015 Exposures By Jane Bown (edited by Luke Dodd) London, England: Guardian Books, 2009

The light administrative duties (downloading files, having welcome exchanges with my London-based curator/editor friend Luke Dodd) required to curate this issue of DIVISION/Review cannot detract from the gravity and honor of introducing Jane Bown’s (1925-2014) images to a highly specific audience such as ours. Although little known on this side of the Atlantic, Bown is familiar to older readers of London’s The Observer with her portraiture and reportage growing in reputation as the specialized role of photojournalist becomes redundant in the continued democratization of the imaging device or camera. A “Wren” (Women’s Royal Naval Service) during World War II, Bown’s life path was radically diverted by wedding photography and she was soon contributing to the The Observer in that black and white postwar decade of deprivation, enforced austerity, and delayed PTSD on a national level. There is a brief scene in the 2017 film Phantom Thread where the neurotic fashion designer played by Daniel Day Lewis is photographed gazing upon his most recent muse in a bustling Cecil Beaton-esque studio of the same period. Bown operated in an opposite world. Her portraiture had a job to do and a deadline to meet, necessitating immediate productive encounters with limited access to her subjects, a “who’s who” of politics, entertainment, literature, and other cultural personages. Bown acknowledged that her conventional appearance and mild manner allowed her subjects to drop their reserve to the psychoanalytic field and its practice. Psychoanalytic thinking, arguably, has always been a way of thinking of the maladies of the discontent with difference, whether through repression, disavowal, expulsion. Feminism, critical theory, and postcolonial studies have revealed the psychic and material coupling of the repudiation of femininity and other marks of difference, whether they be race, class, or other representatives of the social abject.

As a practice of speaking the unthinkable, psychoanalysis is one antidote among others to the erasure of the other, though it has not been exempted from the ailments of group psychology. Despite longstanding and to give her what she needed, unlike our Diane Arbus, who disliked commercial assignments and psychically exhausted her sitters into submission. Bown was beloved by many. Andy Warhol’s assistant in the 1960s and the Factory doorman poet/photographer Gerard Malanga (while not quite in Bown’s league) stated that rather than ject, an exchange continually recognized in reviewing Bown’s extensive corpus. I am personally intrigued by the mythic characters that populated Londons debauched 1950s bohemia, which Bown, both the insider, and the outsider documented. The Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon was the only assignment that frightened her unlike queer icon Quentin Crisp (I met him once, we talked about Boy George, another Bown sitter), the libertine grandson of you-know-who, painter Lucien Freud; and Britain’s forgotten “answer” to the Hollywood bombshell, Diana Dors. The momentum picks up in the 1960s with the young nicotine addicted Beatles, goggle-eyed artist David Hockney, and the elfin Rita Tushingham star of the kitchen-sink drama A Taste Of Honey (1962) and soon after Richard Lester’s kooky The Knack and How To Get It (1965), both films in gritty black and white. Bown continually reminds us that prior to social media and the iPhone, the liminal intimate physical encounter required an agreement, like being vaccinated, brief and mostly painless, opening a fleeting window of trust, which Bown could summon on a daily basis. Everyone looks their age. We are provided a good hard look at someone that either confirms or contributes knowledge to our formed opinion of them. In public life, it helps when an individual knows how they appear and can send whichever signal needs to be transmitted or attempts to define the commonality of psychoanalysis as theory and technique, the field remains unyieldingly multifarious. The sustaining of a space for such differences to be exchanged and contested without leaning on diluted appeals to standardization and sameness has been the bedrock of DIVISION/Review, and perhaps of psychoanalytic ethics itself. z

REFERENCES

Freud, S. (1955). Totem and taboo. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 13, pp.1-164). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1913)

Freud, S. (1964). An outline of psycho-analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 23, pp.139- 208). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work

taking an image, one is given it by the subpublished 1938) performed through what critic Max Kozloff called “‘the theatre of the face’.” Models, actors, and public figures have it while the rest us can acquire it over time or learn it via a media consultant.

Moving someone closer to a window in light-deprived London may have had a sedating effect upon Bown’s subjects. One cannot imagine improvising a studio shoot and ordering around a Samuel Beckett, Edna O’Brien, Rudolf Nureyev, or a wary Bernadette Devlin the activist and former Mid Ulster MP, here in a skirt she knitted in prison. Bown’s London has passed, but with Brexit done, the exportation of a one-dimensional Britishness feels more urgent than ever, and PBS watcher that I am, I remain struck by the plethora of bonnet romances, cozy murder mysteries (exceptions: Prime Suspect, Shetland) and monarchy-centered docudramas coming our way. Perhaps they are simply cheaper to license. Jane Bown’s achievement offers an antidote to much of this, consider her image of the elderly former Blackshirt pinup girl Lady Diana Mosley smiling tolerantly like Norman Bates in the final scene of Psycho (1960). She wouldn’t hurt a fly but Bown, unusually so, maintains her distance. z

REFERENCES

Aird, C., Collins, E., & Bartlett, K. (Executive producers). (2013-present). Shetland [TV series]. ITV Studios.

Anderson, P. T. (Director). (2017). Phantom thread [Film]. Annapurna Pictures; Ghoulardi Film Company; Perfect World Pictures.

Bown, J. (2009). Exposures (Luke Dodd, Ed.). London, England: Guardian Books.

Bown, J. (2015). Jane Bown: A lifetime of looking (Luke Dodd, Ed.). London, England: Guardian Faber.

Head, S. (Executive producer). (1991-2006). Prime suspect [TV series]. Granada Television/ITV Productions; WGBH Boston/Masterpiece Mystery.

Hitchcock, A. (Director). (1960). Psycho [Film]. Shamley Productions.

Lester, R. (Director). (1965). The knack...and how to get it [Film]. Woodfall Film Productions.

Richardson, T. (Director). (1961). A taste of honey [Film]. Woodfall Film Productions.

Does the (Fantastic) Transwoman Exist? Oren GOZLAN A Commentary on the Film A Fantastic Woman, a Chilean Drama directed by Sebastian Lelio, and the Question of Psychoanalytic Pedagogy

We now live in a time when there are different ways of thinking and representing gender, and in this regard, the transsexual subject represents a new kind of subjectivity, that along with other individuals subjected to exclusion, such as autistic or indigenous groups, is oriented by a desire for social change. There are multiple realities that are at stake, and there is a question of how far we can go when we think about what is possible or the human’s determination, and this comes to a boiling point on the matter of gender. The attempt to change the nature of how to make meaning also involves the capacity to face difficult questions and to have the courage to tolerate anxiety and frustration without falling back to compliance or destruction. There are new demands being made from LGBTQ groups for a different way of approaching discourse on gender, including demands for recognition, inclusion, and, recently, an apology for a history of willful disregard.

The slow-moving creep of discourses about gender now involves a move from looking at transsexuality towards examining the cisgender reception of trans subjectivities and demands for recognition. In turn, trans communities are making demands from within for education about their own subject position in relation to transsexuality. There is an intensity that belongs to the topic of education, because it is a site to which we bring our own desires, our hatred of dependency and development, and our tacit fantasies of what it takes to change minds. This paper engages with the question of film as one site of education, in which the central question is the viewers’ reception. The question of reception is crucial, because clinicians are now beginning to think more deeply about their own work in relation to gender demands, and about their own education in matters of gender. In this paper, I offer a brief reviewing of the film A Fantastic Woman (2017), a passionate melodrama by Sebastian Leilo, a Chilean director, with the question of reception in mind. The use of the melodrama, I suggest, animates a particular kind of passion, and if as analytic viewers, we also study passion when we study this film, what sense can we make of melodrama in relation to the film’s reception? What do we think about the film’s effect of addressing mentalities towards gender? The larger question I attempt to address in this paper is this: what do we think about the film as a pedagogical tool in affecting people’s minds?

A Fantastic Woman is a film about inexplicability. It presents us with a geometry of what would be the stakes for the aftermath of a transgender love affair. Yet it is a fiction taken at its tragic dimensions. The movie begins with Marina and Orlando celebrating Marina’s birthday. Orlando presents Marina with an envelope containing a missing object. In a piece of paper, there is a promise of a trip to Iguazu Falls. The “would-be” tickets themselves are lost. Soon after returning from the restaurant, Orlando collapses. Marina rushes him to the hospital, where he dies. It is at this point that the movie leaves the transgender scene and moves into the trauma of the society: there is no time for grief for Marina, who is confronted with an onslaught of humiliations and attacks. She is misgendered, believed to be a prostitute, suspected of committing murder or of having engaged in bizarre and deadly sex. She is asked by her lover’s wife and son to leave the apartment she shared with her lover and is violently attacked for attending her lover’s funeral. In a normative rule-governed reality, there is no freedom even when you die.

The film opens up the clichés of the mistress’ story. The new narrative, involving a love affair between a young transwoman and an older man, challenges the fault line of the old story because it opens up the repressed qualities of an affair, its enigmatic desires for escape and entrapment, the enigmatic qualities of attraction and its persecutory anxieties. It presents a different, non-normative narrative of old conflicts, burdened by new additions like questions around identity and escape from heterosexuality. Yet as I was watching the film, I wondered, does the transwoman exist in the fantasy of the society? Judging by the film, the trans body is imagined as having no interiority: how does Marina make sense of her lover’s family? Of her lover? Of her situation? It is the family who takes the center stage, while the audience watches a transsexual being beaten. The family cannot believe that a husband and a father would fall in love with someone they could not anticipate. They are the persecutory face of the society that disavows the capacity of someone to decide what they want to do or be.

The story of transitioning, one could argue, is one of taking ownership. One of making meaning of an intricate story, whose traces one is unable to capture or undo. It is a story that is never-ending, whose consequences are unknown. The advent of transsexuality has opened for us a new position of gender as it raises the question of whether femininity and masculinity, as they are conceptualized, are the extremes of gender, and yet are not the whole of gender’s capabilities. A broad story of transsexuality, where the center of a question is not physical violation, aggression, or rape, however, is hard to come by. It is precisely this difficulty that brings the film A Fantastic Woman so close to the trauma of gender, and in this way, it is traumatic and hard to watch. In essence, the film is not so much about the transsexual, of whom we know very little, or their affair, of which we know even less, or about Marina’s relationship to life, of which we know nothing at all. A Fantastic Woman is a film about the experience of the scorned woman, who is betrayed. And so, we may wonder, why are we seeing it as emblematic of the trans experience? After all, how well does anyone do with an affair? Would it be different if we placed any other disclaimed person in Marina’s place (e.g., a young boy, a gay man)?

The space of the disclaimed subject, I suggest, is interchangeable. Yet, the radical moment in the film, I believe, is sexuality, not trans. It is about two people who surprised each other and had sex. That disrupted the normative marriage, the age relation, and gender. The normative is disrupted not so much because of who Marina and Orlando are, but because of what they did in bed. Yet, what did they do in bed? The big question of the sexual act is not asked. The voyeuristic fixation about the genitals is an extremely veiled curiosity in the film. And yet, like Poe’s purloined letter, it becomes evident through the question of how unbelievable the relationship is felt to be. It is the relationship between Marina and Orlando whose impossibility is at the heart of the movie and that remains alienated in the film. Why is Marina and Orlando’s relationship so unimaginable to the heteronormative family? Partly because they thought they knew. So, the fantasy of mastery is the defense against the anxiety of not knowing the other. The viewer may experience a torn loyalty, see an impossible paradise, or feel anger towards the couple. The film, I suggest, is made from the point of view of the society that cannot make sense of the transsexual, at the same time that it does not make sense. The central question of the film becomes the ways in which the body is addressed by normalcy, and so we are witness to the brutality of the society and what it does to the transsexual.

A Fantastic Woman is also a film about adolescent fantasies and is steeped in ideality: Marina and Orlando’s ideality of the affair and the viewer’s ideality, that if we could only explain the brutal reality, there will be tolerance. These idealities present a dilemma that also belongs to psychoanalysis: can there be an address to the normative