Looks: Subjectivity as commodity

abstract

Looking at, seeing, being looked at or being seen by certain people can afford libidinal excitation,1 but it also can be a source of psychical2 displeasure. Reading a series of events, texts, and images, this Article traces why and how we are excited or moved by the way we or others look. The Article argues that seeing or being seen by a sexual object3 is an important source of libidinal pleasure around which a self and culture is built. Consequently, in late racialised capitalist culture, looking, being looked at, and generally looks (and inevitably subjectivities), cannot but become commodities, given that scopophilia4 lies behind the commodification of culture. The Article employs two cases as emblematic of commoditisation in late global capitalist culture: a research fragment about a father who disapproves of his dead son's dress choices; and second, the media-conveyed controversy around the athlete Caster Semenya. These are approached through constructionist and psychoanalytic registers, here taken as complementary approaches to a critical project on sexualities and gender. The Article demonstrates that the father seems to have looked upon his son as a man in the ‘wrong’ clothes, while Semenya is consciously or otherwise constructed in the media to be a woman in the “wrong” body. These constructions are grounded in the pleasure of looking or being looked at.

Keywords:

• Commodity
• look
• see
• Semenya
• subjectivity

Notes

1. Libidinal excitation is taken to mean the generation of energy associated with the libido, where libido means the psychical energy and desire derived from biological drives, specifically the sexual drive.

2. Psychical means that which has to do with the psyche which in turn refers to the human faculty for thought, perception as well as emotion.

3. Here, after Freud, the sexual object refers to the party at whom sexual feelings are directed.

4. In simple terms, the love of looking.

5. Also variously referred as advanced, transnational, multinational, post-industrial, consumer or postmodern capitalist culture (see eg Bauman, 1992; Jameson, 1991).

6. Symptomatic means something that has to do with symptoms, signs or indications, which implies that the cases used in the Article are taken as signaling some, and not all, forms or functions of commoditisation.

7. That is, the discursive constructions function as part of an order which guides us as to what to look for on individuals’ bodies or faces so as to categorise them as, for example, part of one or other gender, sex, race, culture or nation.

8. By fetishisation it is meant any process which imbues a thing, activity or part of body with magical powers, more specifically sexual powers.

9. What attracts me to the story of Linda are the themes it contains. However I am deeply aware that the story told about Linda and his father is mediated by the perspective of the researcher who wrote about the story in ‘Freeing South Africa: The “modernisation” of male-male sexuality in Soweto’ (Donham, 2005), which the space here constricts me from doing.

10. Young orphaned Sarah or Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan slave under colonial South Africa, was taken under false pretexts to Europe where she was exhibited as an oddity because of her bodily features (eg, see Abrahams & Clayton, 2004; Gqola, 2008).