Revolting Doubles: Radical Narcissism and the Trope of Lesbian Doppelgangers

Abstract

This article is concerned with a repositioning of popular culture images and narratives that are, and have been, highly unpopular among queer audiences. This involves a re-engagement with the visual representation of lesbian lovers as doubles, ubiquitous in popular culture. It argues that by positioning the trope of the lesbian doppelgangers as it appears in popular culture on a continuum of visual representations of sameness and likeness that also includes feminist and queer art its qualities of radical or “absolute” narcissism are brought to the fore to be enjoyed as a subversive statement of highly self-referencing, auto-erotic, and self-sufficient economy of desire. In a reading of Black Swan (2010), a film that has attracted notable negative responses from feminist critics, it discusses how radical narcissism disturbs the heteronormative matrix through a refusal of its underpinning organization of desire and identification as exclusionary. It closes by engaging with contemporary artworks drawing on the doppelganger motif.

KEYWORDS:

• queer uncanny
• doppelganger
• popular culture
• visual culture
• sameness
• narcissism

Notes

1. The reality television format gives full rein to an exploitation of our fascination with lesbian bodies performing sameness but also, because of the twin sisters' genetic resemblance, ties in with current media debates on the origins of homosexuality–another cultural anxiety that haunts. Twinship brings to the fore the “nature versus nurture” debates not least on issues of sexuality. See: http://www.mtv.ca/tvshows/doubleshot/about.jhtml. For a recent example of a (biological) lesbian twin act from queer subculture see The Topp Twins comic and musical duo from New Zealand featured in The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls (Pooley 2009). http://topptwins.com/

2. My discussion here draws mainly on Freud's final paper on narcissism, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914). However, Freud's ideas about narcissism first emerged some ten years earlier in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1977 [1905]), and were important to his “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood” (1963 [1910]) and Totem and Taboo (2001 [1913]).

3. Most exceptionally played out in Patrician Highsmith's thriller The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) where Tom Ripley murders the man he desires and whose identity he subsequently appropriates.

4. See for example “A Kiss in the Glass” by Antoine Magaud c. 1885, reproduced as postcard c. 1910, thus putting it into circulation in popular culture, cited by Tirza True Latimer (2003: 135) as an example of a prevalent clichéd representation of narcissistic femininity.

5. Cahun had throughout her career a longstanding engagement with the trope of the double and mirroring surfaces in her photography. In one image Cahun and Moore stage a reversed Narcissus by turning the subject's back to the camera and the pool of water in front of her, in which we see the reflection of her back (Image reproduced in Downie 2006: 58) suggesting a rejection of the association of narcissism with women and queers. But as discussed here, in other images there is more of an involved engagement with narcissism.

6. Juliet Mitchell (2003) proposes early gender formations are constituted through sibling relations and siblings’ negotiations of sameness and difference, rather than through a parent and child relation (the structure of the Oedipus scenario) according to a “logic of seriality.”