The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

The Book of Imaginary Beings

Abstract: Few readers will want, or be able, to resist this modern bestiary. Here you will find the familiar - Gryphons, Minotaurs and Unicorns - as well as the Monkey of the inkpot and other undeniably curious beasts. Borges' cunning and humorous commentary is sheer delight.

Queer as Folk: Producing the Real of Urban Space

Abstract: This paper is about the construction of space and place in the urban imaginary. It draws on multidisciplinary empirical research—on Violence, Sexuality and Space—conducted in a place that was simultaneously represented in one of the most controversial programmes ever to be screened on British television—Queer as Folk. As the television programme intervened in the responses from the interviews and focus groups, we begin, through an exploration of spatial referents and characterisation, to explore the `authentic' underpinning for the queer imaginary. We examine the sexual politics of place and space as a politics of verisimilitude, affectivity and political claims-making.

Where's the Difference? The Heterosexualization of Alterity in Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan

Abstract: It has been largely overlooked that Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space draws heavily upon Lacanian psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of subjectivity in theorizing political r...

Thinking in the space between Winnicott and Lacan

Abstract: The author, following Andre Green, maintains that the two most original psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud were Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. Winnicott, it has been said, introduced the comic tradition into psychoanalysis, while Lacan sustained Freud's tragic/ironic vision. Years of mutual avoidance by their followers (especially of Lacan by Anglophone clinicians) has arguably diminished understanding of the full spectrum of psychoanalytic thought. The author outlines some basic constructs of Winnicott and of Lacan, including: their organizing tropes of selfhood versus subjectivity, their views of the "mirror stage", and their definitions of the aims of treatment. While the ideas of Winnicott and Lacan appear at some points complementary, the goal is not to integrate them into one master discourse, but rather to bring their radically different paradigms into provocative contact. A clinical vignette is offered to demonstrate concepts from Lacan and Winnicott, illustrating what it might mean to think and teach in the potential space between them.

Die Tryin': Videogames, Masculinity, Culture

Abstract: Die Tryin' traces the cultural connections between videogames, masculinity, and digital culture. It fuses feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory to analyze the social imaginary that is produced by -- and produces -- a particular form of masculinity: boyhood. The author asserts that digital culture is a culturally and historically situated series of practices, products, and performances, all coalescing to produce a real and imagined masculinity that exists in perpetual adolescence, and is reflective of larger masculine edifices at work in politics and culture. Thus, videogames form the central object of study as consumer technologies of control and anxiety as well as possibility and subversion. Moving away from current games research, the book favors a game-specific approach that unites visual culture, cultural studies, and performance studies, instead of a sociological/structural inspection of the form.