EPFF - Biographical Information:

Mandy Merck is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she directs the MA programme Gender and Sexuality on Screen. Her most recent book is In Your Face: Nine Sexual Studies (NYU, 2000) and her next is a collection, co-edited with Chris Townsend, on the work of Tracey Emin (Thames and Hudson, 2002).

Abstract: In her 1988 study, The Acoustic Mirror, Kaja Silverman described the theatre sequence from The Gold Diggers (directed by Sally Potter) as 'its most crucial syntagm'. Returning to both the film and Silverman's reading from the perspective of 13 years of queer theory, I want to re-examine her connection of the erotics of female spectatorship to 'a narcissistic desire for the mother... the girl's love for an object which represents both what she was, prior to differentiation, and what she aspires to become'.

epff@psychoanalysis.org.uk