56 BODACIOUS BODIES AND THE VOLUPTUOUS GAZE: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF ANIMATION SPECTATORSHIP by Joanna Bouldin Cartoons have always constituted an important and pleasurable part of my life. As botha child and an adult, I have delighted in the dazzling feats performed by those outrageous and colorful creatures that visit my television every weekday afternoon and Saturday morning. I have never ceased to be amazed and thrilled by the indomitable resilience of Wile E. Coyote, the lanky springiness of Olive Oil, the limitless musculature and superpowers of Batman, Plasticman and the She-Hulk, or the impossible yet provocative figure of Jessica Rabbit (“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”! ), What is it about these incredible creatures that holds my attention and keeps me coming back for more? In this paper I will argue that the allure of the animated medium lies not solely in its ability to provide fun and fantastic narratives, but also in its ability to thrill our senses as our fleshy bodies respond to those fantastic bodies on screen. I will argue that this ability to thrill is a product of qualities inherent in the medium that allow it to provide a spectatorial experience impossible through other media, such as film or video. This paper was inspired by a desire to understand this enduring attraction to cartoons and to account for the curiously satisfying somatic spectatorial experience provided by the medium of animation. Although there are copious semiotic and psychoanalytic models of spectatorship and scopic pleasure, these theories are inadequate for the purposes of this paper because they fail to acknowledge the fact that viewing is not simply an ocular phenomenon, but rather it is a fully embodied experience. These theories ignore the degree to which our materiality responds to the materiality of and on live-action film or, in our case, animation. It is precisely this issue, the material basis of spectatorship, that is taken up by Vivian Sobchack in her unpublished manuscript, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision inthe Flesh.” Sobchack’s semiotic phenomenology of film spectatorship deals with the problem of coming to grip “with the carnal foundations of cinematic intelligibility.“ Working out of Sobchack’s theories, this paper proposes a phenomenology of animation that can begin to account for the embodied relationship between viewer and cartoon. Furthermore, it delineates certain media specificities that distinguish the ‘carnal foundations’ of the ‘animation’ spectatorial experience from the cinematic. Although lacking Animation Journal, Spring 200057 the immediacy and indexicality of film or video, I will argue that the unique, law-defying materiality of animated bodies offers viewers amusing, exhilarating and potentially radical embodied experiences. I am particularly interested in thinking about a phenomenologically informed model of animation spectatorship in terms of the politics of gender and desire in animation. In order to illustrate the potential for such a model, I will provide a brief discussion of the classic cartoon character Bugs Bunny, whose copious performances of an animated drag provide an excellent springboard for thinking about the embodied, eroticized animation spectatorial experience. Vivian Sobchack’s semiotic phenomenology of film spectatorship provides an excellent theoretical basis for a discussion of animation spectatorship. In an attempt to disrupt the hegemony of vision that still characterizes much film theory, her essay grapples with the fact that “contemporary theory has had major difficulties in comprehending how it is possible for human bodies to be, in fact, really ‘touched’ and ‘moved’ by the movies.” In her effort to reintroduce the body into theories of spectatorship, Sobchack turns to phenomenology. Although phenomenology, or certain phenomenologies, have been critiqued for being subjectivist, essentialist and apolitical, phenomenology is a method that has much to offer the theorization of media spectatorship. One of phenomenology’s basic claims is that objects cannot be considered independent of consciousness, but rather human consciousness involves the active, “intentional” constitution of our world. Positing a challenge to those models of spectatorship that assumes a passive, powerless viewer, phenomenology privileges the role of the spectator’s subjectivity in the production of meaning. Relying specifically on Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, Sobchack applies Ponty’s concept of embodied vision to an analysis of cinema’s “somatic intelligibility,” that is, the sensual legibility of the cinematic image. She asserts that “our vision is always already ‘fleshed out’—and even at the movies it is in-formed and given meaning by our other sensory means of access to the world. . . . The film experience is meaningful not to the side of my body, but because of my body.” In other words, vision is never experienced in isolation from the other senses, it is always embodied vision. Sobchack names this embodied film viewer the cinesthetic subject: In sum, the cinesthetic subject names the film viewer . . who not only has a body, but is a body and through an embodied vision in-formed by the knowledge of the other Animation Journal, Spring 200058 senses ‘makes sense’ of what it is to ‘see’ a movie...” In ‘viewing’ a movie, the cinesthetic subject may experience tactile, gustatorial, and other non-visual responses. One consequence of this embodied viewing is a dissolution of the strict binaries of subject/object, off screen/on screen, body/ image. Sobchack poses the question: “Whose body do we feel when we are reeling from the tactile shock of ‘seeing’ flesh touch flesh on the screen?” This ambiguity or uncertainty, the ability to be both the subject and the object of perception, is a phenomenon that has been described by Elizabeth Grosz as the “flesh’s reversibility.” This “reversibility” is predicated on the fundamental phenomenological notion that the subject and object are inseparable insofar as it is through the subject’s perception that the object becomes meaningful. Clarifying the theory of Merleau-Ponty in her book The Address of the Eye, Sobchack explains: “Perception is the bodily access or agency for being-in-the-world, for having both a world and being. Perception is the bodily perspective or situation from which the worldis present tous and constituted in an always particularand biased meaning . . . the lived-body is both a subject in the world and an object for the world and others.3 Thus in cinema, and toacertain extent in all viewing situations, locating subjectivity in the perceiving lived-body is to challenge the “mutual exclusivity of the categories subject and object, inner and outer, Land world.” What makes the observer’s relationship to the cinematic image different from her/his relationship with ‘real’ objects is the degree of mediation. One can taste and feel objects existing in their own space, but one can only almost taste or almost touch objects depicted on screen. Sobchack characterizes this relationship as being an oscillation between the real and the “as if real,” and argues that this reflects the relationship between body and language (which includes the language of the film image.) This is a relationship in which “the body and language . .. do not simply oppose or reflect each other, but more radically in-form each other inanon-hierarchical and reversible relationship . . .” In other words, our experience of the cinematic image is neither purely literal (through our bodies) nor purely figural (metaphorically ‘sensed’ through vision), but is constituted by a mutual informing of words and senses, the figural and the literal, which occurs in the “single system of flesh and consciousness synthesized as the lived-body.” Sobchack’s arguments regarding the “somatic intelligibility” of the cinematic image have interesting applications in terms of theorizing animation and cartoon spectatorship. Is it possible that, despite dramatic differences Animation Journal, Spring 200059 between the live-action filmed and the animated image, the cartoon viewer has a similarly embodied experience of the animated image? And if so, in what way is this experience different from that of a live-action film viewer? In the next section, I will identify the principal specificities of the medium of animation which distinguish it from live-action. My analysis will focus on images/bodies/spectatorial experiences produced by classical 2-D cartoon and contemporary entertainment animation. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, it is my hope that the basic premise behind the model of embodied animation spectatorship I will describe could apply, with modification and specification, to a much broader range of animated images and techniques (computer-generated images, clay animation, etc.). The primary differences that exist between live-action and the cartoon images I discuss in this paper are those that emerge from their radically different processes of creation. The filmed image is a product of essentially automatic photographic processes, whereas the traditional cel-animated image is the result of a highly mediated process. Animation, whose process and product often resemble painting more than photography, tends to lack the verisimilitude achieved in the world produced in/on/by live-action media. 4+ One of the primary pleasures of live-action cinema spectatorship is rooted in the ontological relationship that exists between the photographic image and the inal object. Bazin describes this pleasure as a sense of “shared being”, i.e. the ‘presence’ or ‘thereness’ of the original object in the photographic image. In animation there is no possibility for such a relationship because there is no original object. Animated bodies are automatically more foreign and unfamiliar to the viewer than a filmed body, whichis able to call upon the presence of the ‘real’ or ‘natural’ body of the actor. The cartoon viewer is always aware of the mediation of the animator’s hand and thus is constantly aware of the fiction of the animated body. In contrast, most evidence suggesting the constructed nature of the filmed body is erased through the illusion of automaticity/objectivity created through the live- action cinematic apparatus. This lack of verisimilitude embedded in animation, which complicates the possibility of a one-to-one somatic identification on the part of the cartoon viewer, is merely enhanced by the often ‘impossible’ bodies of many animated characters. These animated bodies are often mutated (hands with four fingers), distorted (Elmer's unusually large cranium), or they might not even be human at all! Furthermore, even within traditional Hollywood animation, there lurks the potential for a more Animation Journal, Spring 200060 radical kind of physical abstraction that goes beyond a mere difference in species; take, for example, Chuck Jones’s famous cartoon Duck Amuck (1953), in which the body of a spluttering Daffy Duck is subjected to continual metamorphoses and even dismantling at the hand of an unseen animator (who ultimately is revealed to be Bugs Bunny). Despite these significant differences between live-action and animated bodies, I would argue that a version of the bodily engagement described by Sobchack is still possible for the cartoon viewer. There are, in fact, a number of ways in which common practices and qualities in animation solicit the viewer’ s somatic involvement with the animated image. Marshall McLuhan's now (in)famous distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media offers us one way of addressing this possibility (i.e. that the medium of animation itself actively demands a kind of physical engagement on the part of the spectator). In Understanding Media, McLuhan claims that a hot medium is one that provides high density information, wherea: ol medium provides less information. The difference in definition and resolution between a photographic image (hot, high density) and a comic strip (cool, low density) illustrates his point. McLuhan asserts that, because so little information is given to the viewer in cool media, these media require greater audience attention and participation (in essence, they require the viewer to fill in the gaps). In “Technology as Ontology: A Phenomenological Approach to Video Image Resolution,” Steve Lipkin borrows from McLuhan and argues that the ‘cool’ nature of the televised image “necessitates greater physiological, perceptual, and possibly creative viewer involvement.” This argument would be even more applicable to a discussion of animation, which is an intensely ‘cool’ medium that provides relatively little visual data to the viewer. Even more than with live-action film or television, in order for the cartoon viewer to make sense of, and make sensible the animated world, s/he must resort to her/his own ‘body’ of experiences and experiences of the body. As Harald Stadler explains, itis the viewer’ s primary experience of the ‘real’ world, that informs her/his interpretation and experience of the live-action film world—and, I would argue, the animated world.” © The familiar narrative structure of the traditional Hollywood cartoon, as well as the common use of anthropomorphism also assists to make animated bodies accessible to the viewer. Not only do the animated characters appear in stories that we, the viewers, can identify with, but Bugs and Daffy, a rabbit and a duck, walk upright and their paws and feathers function as fingersand toes. Weare able to recognize the anthropomorphized Animation Journal, Spring 200061 animated body asa body, one that can be related to our own and, moreover, upon which we can project our somatic knowledge of the world. We impose the laws that regulate our sensuous flesh upon the animated flesh and thus it can make ‘sense’ to us. Finally, I would argue that the use of sound in cartoons also helps to facilitate this ‘fleshing out’ of the animated body. Sound not only engages the viewer literally (in terms of requiring additional perceptual involvement) but it also lends a sense of three-dimensionality and corporeality to the animated body that the live-action image alone does not possess. As Mary Ann Doane asks in “The Voice in the Cinema”: “Who can conceive of a voice without a body?” She argues that “the addition of sound to the cinema introduces the Possibility of re- presenting a fuller (and organically unified) body.”® She refers to the filmed body as the fantasmatic body, one that has been “reconstituted by the technology and practices of the cinema.” This fantasmatic body is endowed with “presence” through its appearance of organic unity and sensory coherence. The notion of the fantasmatic body seems to be a profitable concept for thinking about the animated body, however it is important to be aware thata crucial alteration in Doane’s model has taken place. Whereas the filmed fantasmatic body is a reconstruction of an original body, i.e. the body of the star to which both the image and the voice were once anchored, the animated body is truly a construction, or a composite. The voice of the cartoon character is anchored to an always unseen human body separate from the animated body on screen, I would argue, however, that, as with Doane’s fantasmatic body, the use of synchronous sound in animation helps instill a sense of ‘presence’ in the fictional and fantastic body of the cartoon character, The fantastic animated body achieves the qualities of the filmed fantasmatic body: i.e., unity through coherence of the senses and ‘presence’. In an article on the use of sound in early Warner Bros. cartoons, Scott Curtis notes that although the voice in the cinema functions indexically, as a trace of the original event or body, in animation it often functions iconically, or by analogy (for example, a cymbal crash sounds when someone gets hit on the head), Thus, Curtis argues, cartoon voices are analogous to cartoon bodies: Why do cartoon characters always have funny voices? Certainly, itis because they have funny bodies. Following the pattern of indexical relationships in live-action films, the voice matches the body. But given that indexicality is impossible in acartoon, no match between sound and image is required except by analogy .. . the “distorted” voice of cartoon characters are analogous to their “distorted” and “elastic” bodies. Animation Journal, Spring 200062 Although these bodies may be “elastic” or “distorted,” thus less believably ‘real’, the presence of a correlating voice lends a sense of legitimacy and corporeality to those bodies. Goofy voices create a sense of coherence and ‘organic unity’ in goofy bodies. I would like to suggest, however, that this sense of corporeality is further enhanced through the connection of the cartoon body to that other, ever-present body: the unseen body of the voice actor. Although on one level the viewer’s awareness of the separate, and unquestionably ‘more real’ body of the voice actor could undermine the illusion of organic unity and fullness created for the cartoon body, it also could be argued that it actually augments the somatic correspondence or recognition stimulated in the viewer. Cartoons not only present the viewer with the animated body on screen, but they also summon up the physicality of those bodies associated with their production. Once the animated body is made legible to the viewer, a physical engagement like that experienced by the film viewer may beenacted. Applying Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied vision, we can understand that the viewer experiences the wacky, unnatural world of the animated cartoon not simply though her/his eyes, but literally in the ‘flesh’. The gap is closed between the relatively stable, biological body of the viewer and the animated body—a body that is lithe, malleable, resilient, age-defying and full of infinite potential. Of course, accompanying this engagement is a substantial degree of detachment enforced by the strange and ‘unnatural’ quality of the medium. Not only do animated characters lack the verisimilitude of live-action characters, but the genre’s tendency toward excess (excessively funny, excessively violent, excessively weird) also exacerbates our potential disengagement from the ‘unreal’ animated image. As Sobchack herself indicates, the “relational structure [between body and image] can, of course, be refused and broken—and, indeed, often is when the reflexive turn becomes too intense orunpleasurable.” Although the viewer’s body is lured by the liberatory possibilities of the animated body, it will resist the violence and mutilation that toons often experience. _ _Theduality of this relationship—the simultaneous pleasure and horror, engagement with and detachment from the animated image—parallels Sobchack’s coupling of the literal and the figural. Like the live-action film viewer, the animation viewer’ s experience is constituted by a mutual informing of the literal (or embodied) and the figural (or metaphoric). The highly metaphoric nature of the animated image, however, suggests that the animation viewer will undergo a more tortured Animation Journal, Spring 200063 negotiation. The degree to which the cartoon viewer’ s experience will be embodied can never be as complete as that of live-action media. The varying degree of spectatorial engagement provoked by live-action film and animation can perhaps be more easily understood in terms of the location of these media along what Harald Stadler calls a “continuum of * realities’.”! ° Citing the work of R.D. Laing, he argues, “perception, imagination, fantasy, dreams, and memory are simply different modes of. experience, all of which constitute a sense of reality. “ll The difference among these modes is that some are “simply less imaginary than others.” Perhaps animation should be seen as part of this continuum, more imaginary than its live-action neighbor, but constantly engaged in processes of representing and promoting embodied experiences. Although a thorough spectatorial engagement with the animated image may be more difficult than with the live-action image, animation does offer its viewers more interesting and unusual payoffs. Accepting the applicability of Sobchack’s cinesthetic subject to animation, and considering the outrageous and plastic world of cartoons, it follows that the cartoon viewer will have—to a certain extent—a similarly outrageous and plastic embodied spectatorial experience. Although clearly I am not suggesting that the body of the viewer literally alters in response to the animated body, I am proposing that there is a way in which some of the plasticity and strength of the utterly impossible animated body resonates with, or sends ripples through our own, more gravity-constrained flesh, The animated body can perform feats and take forms that the live actor’s body cannot, thus animation extends the possibilities of the viewers’ embodied responses. Animation allows viewers to both identify with or desire different kinds of bodies, and creates the space for polymorphously perverse spectatorial experiences. America's favorite drag queen, the classic cartoon character Bugs Bunny, provides an excellent illustration of how this phenomenologically informed model of animation spectatorship permits a new understanding of the politics of the body in animation. This furry fairy, whose appearances in drag range from momentary lapses to extended scenes of cross-dressed seduction, offers an excellentexample of how animation expands the types of bodies available for both spectatorial identification and spectatorial desire. The fact that Bugs Bunny likes to dress up in women’s clothing has not gone unnoticed by avid fans and it has, in fact, drawn the attention of numerous animation scholars, Although critics vary in their assessment of how successfully subversive Animation Journal, Spring 200064 Bugs’s queering outbursts truly are, it has been widely observed thatthis wascally wabbit’s performances in drag self-consciously manipulate traditional gender constructions and challenge normative heterosexuality. An excellent example of this ‘challenge’ can be seen in Bugs’ Bonnets (1956), in which a truck carrying theatrical hats loses its cargo and, as the various hats fall onto Elmer and Bugs, the characters’ roles switch. Ultimately, Elmer ends up in a wedding dress and Bugs ina tux, and the two get married in, as Sam Abel describes it, “‘a brilliant subversion of the superficial stereotypes of romantic love.”!2 At other times, Bugs-as-Babe engages in an exaggerated performance of femininity which draws attention to and parodies gender stereotypes. As Eric Savoy, in his article, “The Signifying Rabbit,” observes: “Bugs Bunny parodies “woman” in order to insert himself into Elmer Fudd’s heterosexual fantasies and heterosexist compulsions; in order to sabotage this script he offers duplicitous signs of femininity, signs which are patently transparentand constructed to us, but entirely opaque to Elmer’s gendered (il)logic. 13 Furthermore, I would suggest that Elmer’s inability to read these performances as drag indicates, as Judith Butler notes, the “failure of heterosexual Tegimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals.”!4 In these scenarios, heterosexuality is not only unable to control subversive/disruptive elements within its regime, but it cannot even recognize them. Whatis significant about Bugs’s drag in terms of this paper, however, is not necessarily how his performances signify gender and desire within the cartoon narrative, but rather how those performances register on the bodies of both Bugs and his viewer. Although existing analyses cogently argue for the subversive (or not so subversive) function of Bugs' drag within the narrative, they have failed to acknowledge the degree to which Bugs's animated body allows him to perform a kind of drag that no human or filmed queen can, In human performances of drag, the subversive, gender-bending transformation takes place on the surface of an otherwise unaltered body. In animation, however, the body itself is allowed to participate in the transformation. Rather that simply adding clothes and Temoving hair, when this hare does drag his furry flesh is able ‘to rearrange itself to provide him with full, pouting lips, perky tits and a sumptuous ass. Furthermore, I think it is important to acknowledge the degree to which Bugs takes delight, not only in the chaos that his transformation incites, but also in the subversive bodily transformation itself. Although examples of this abound, it is aptly illustrated in Rabbit Fire (1951), directed by Chuck Jones. In this cartoon, Animation Journal, Spring 200065 Bugs attempts to allude Elmer Fudd by appearing as a seduc- tive, blonde female hunter. In addition to the overt signs of femininity that can be adopted by all drag artis the promi- nent bosom, the red lips, the lustrous hair—Bugs also displays more subtle and convincing signs that he has adopted a female physiognomy, such as a softening and filling out of the face and eyes, as well as a voluptuous figure not typically sported by Bugs-as-Boy. Finally, I believe we can witness, in the tangible glee emanating from this giggling huntress, that Bugs is taking pleasure in his social transgression, but at a more basic level he is reveling in the corporeal liberation made possible by the animated nature of his body. Following the model articulated previously, which asserts a type of embodied spectatorial engagement with the animated image, I would suggest the possibility that viewers are allowed to participate—in at least a limited sense—in the intense physicality of Bugs’ transvestitism. The viewer’s embodied experience of the cartoon allows her/him access to the almost auto-erotic pleasure Bugs takes in his corporeal transformation. The viewer is temporarily able to transcend the limits of her/his own corporeality and participate in the pleasure and freedom of this sexless, or rather, sex-full, polymorphous and truly gender- bent body. This animated drag is able to carry drag’s critique of normative heterosexuality a step further than drag in ‘real life’ and conventional live-action film worlds because it not only demonstrates the fluidity/multiplicity of genders and desires, but also suggests that fluidity extends to the body itself. Highlighting the performativity of the gendered animated body, animation offers usa somatic understanding of the performative nature of our own gendered bodies. Harald Stadler’s articulation of a dialectical model illustrating the relationship between filmic experience and everyday experience is helpful for conceptualizing the intimate connection among viewer, image, and the production of meaning. Stadler argues that although everyday experience constitutes the initial groundplane, or “horizon of experience” upon which filmic experiences will be interpreted, the two existina “mutually constitutive relationship.”!> The ‘experience’ of viewing a film expands the viewer's inventory of experience, thus modifying future interpretation—both of the filmic and the everyday world. Applying this to Bugs Bunny, I would argue that animation not only allows an embodying of the quite literally gender-bent animated body, but further, that this experience alters the viewer’ s ‘horizon’ of experiences, opening her/him up to new interpretations of gendered scenarios—both as spectators and as participants in the drama of daily life. Animation Journal, Spring 200066 Finally, as I have indicated earlier, the embodied spectatorial experience has implications not only in terms of identification, but also in terms of desire. The viewers’ somatic engagement with the animated i image allows her/him to experience Bugs’ physical pleasure in gender-bending, but it also permits the viewer to take physical pleasure in him. Bugs’ gender anarchy functions not only within the cartoon narrative, but it has the potential to wreak havoc in the ‘real’ world. We, like Elmer Fudd, are often seduced by the alluring body of Bugs-as-Babe. Although we are aware that he is still that same ol’ wascally wabbit, Bugs’ new body can become the object of our own erotic designs. This explains why, when Garth asks his buddy Wayne, in the 1992 comedy Wayne’s World, “Did youever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put ona dress and played a girl bunny?,” we are amused, but not entirely surprised. Clearly, Bugs successfully manipulates and confounds heterosexist economies of desire on both sides of the screen. Clearly, this project represents only an initial effort to account for the phenomenological allure of the animated image, and it has been limited in quite a few respects. This analysis has conceived of animation in a very technically restricted sense (traditional cel animation) and it has addressed only those types of bodies produced by commercial Hollywood animation. Despite these limitations, it is my hope that this paper offers at least a rough theoretical explanation of the somatic sati on one experiences watching the limitless bodies of cartoon characters. The medium of animation allows us to imagine the impossible—identities, capabilities and bodies that exceed the limits of the flesh. I would suggest, however, that the superpowers of our cartoon heroes allow us not simply to see beyond the limitations of our physiology or our society, but to feel beyond them. The degree to which our bodies respond to animated bodies can create significant, even potentially radical, viewing experiences and these experiences allow, encourage, and perhaps even force us to feel our bodies, and our desire, in different ways. Sadly, despite my desire to label my thrill and exhilaration with, (for example), the She-Hulk's boundless emerald musculature or the Batgirl's grace and prowess «radical re-embodiment, I must moderate the celebratory tone of this conclusion with an important observation. Despite their political potential, the fantastic bodies of most current commercial animation are still fettered by the same, disempowering narratives of gender, desire, class, and race that confine the human body. Animation Journal, Spring 200067 Sincere thanks to Vivian Sobchack for the use of her forthcoming essay, to Rhona Berenstein for her guidance and support, and to Beth Rayfield for being a continuous source of inspiration and sanity. ! Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed by Robert Zemeckis, 1988. 2 Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh” in Carnal Thoughts: Bodies, Texts, Scenes, and Screens (U California P, forthcoming). Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Sobchack will be from this source. 3 Sobchack, The Address of the E) Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 40. This similarity between painting and animation not only reinforces the lack of verisimilitude, or analogical perfection in animation, but it raises another important issue: the tactility of the animated image. I would argue that, despite the fact that animation shares the decorporealizing methods of projection used for film or video, the animated image often seems to retain a kind of residue of the tactility present in the initial stages of its production. It is as if the viewer can, at times, sense the consistency and texture of the pigments used to draw the image, and this residual tactility lends a kind of density to the image. > The fiction of the filmed body in conventional narrative cinema is masked through techniques such as continuity editing and special effects: © Steve Lipkin, “Technology as Ontology: A Phenomenological Approach to Video Resolution” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12:3 (1990), 97. MeLuhan’s theory is explained in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT, 1964), 22. 7 Harald Stadler, “Film as Experience: Phenomenological Concepts in Cinema and Television Studies,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12:3 (1990), 46. Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space” Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elizabeth Weis and John Belton New York: Columbia UP, 1985), 162. ° Scott Curtis, “The Sound of Early Warner Bros. Cartoons,” Sound Theory, Sound Practice. ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 202. 10 Stadler, 46. 'I Stadler, 46. 12 Sam Abel, “The Rabbit in Drag: Camp and Gender Construction in the American Animated Cartoon,” Journal of Popular Culture 23:9 (Winter 1995),193. '3 Eric Savoy, “The Signifying Rabbit” Narrative 3:2 (May 1995), 191. '4 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” (New York: Routledge, 1993): 237. Despite the disruptive effects produce! by the figure of the cross-dressed Bugs, it is important to acknowledge the level at which his drag actually performs a reverse function, namely, to re- confirm the binarized categories of gender and desire. This point is aptly discussed in Kevin Sandler, “Gendered Evasion: Bugs Bunny in Drag,” Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation, ed. Kevin Sandler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998). '9 Stadler, 45. a Phenomenology of Film Experience Joanna Bouldin is a graduate student in the newly formed Visual Studies PhD programat the University of California, Irvine. Her primary area of scholarly interest is the construction of identity in popular visual culture. ©2000 Joanna Bouldin Animation Journal, Spring 2000Fi University Library H 1 Saar Universiteit tee ea Dit is een elektronische levering van het door u aangevraagde document. Uitsluitend voor persoonlijk gebruik. Bij vragen over de levering mail: bibliotheek@uu.nl ; tel. 030-2536612 Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, Postbus 80124, 3508 TC Utrecht This is an electronic delivery of the document you requested. For personal use only. 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