phoenix /danm 201 /jennisroom

“Jenni's Room” Response

In “Jenni's Room” Victor Burgen attempts a pointless, and honestly disturbing, exercise of infantilizing and trivializing the behaviour of Jenny of jennicam, using Freudian psychoanalytic techniques that have been largely discarded as quaint and inadequate by modern cognitive-behavioural psychological theory.  If it weren't that this was an assigned reading, and that I am required to write a response to this pointless waste of time, I would have assigned this reading to the one place it deserves to be, the waste basket.  Finishing this piece of pablum was akin to being forced to choke down a bitter tea made by a witch doctor; you may do it to avoid offending the witch doctor, but you know the brew is more likely to make you sick than to cure you of any ailment.  But I digress.

The psychoanalytic techniques used by Burgen largely disregard the ideas, thoughts and goals of the subject of his diatribe, Jenni.  In fact, Burgen's techniques largely paint a picture of someone acting not out of her own interests or initiative, but rather suggest that she is the victim of a pathological disorder, acting out the symptoms of this disorder in a “perverse tableau [that] is staged in a place of transition between home and the outside world.” (p 232)  Personal agency does not play into Burgen's analysis.  In fact, if the subject of his wonderment expresses anything that resembles agency, Burgen largely dismisses the statements as incidental or irrelevant to the discussion, or manages to fit the statement into his larger painting of pathology.  In fact, Jenni's statement that she “sometimes likes to give show's” (p. 219) is used by Burgen as an example of Jenni's “perverse” (he uses this word several times) pathology.  He gives select examples of her “show's”, emphasizing the sexualization of the object.  Using problematic examples from other psychoanalytic theorists, and a particular comparison to a tv comedian, he suggests that she is acting out “ solitary child's play … performed to an invisible audience to some person, who is 'felt to reflect back what happens in the playing”.  Burgen's entire analysis does more to betray a paternal obsession with the sexuality of young girls and women, than it does to reveal anything of real substance about Jennicam.   He infantilizes her behaviour, trivializes her agency, and suggests (but does not explicitly state) that she is acting out as a victim of a societal sickness; a pathological obsession with exhibitionism and voyeurism.  He neglects that he is a player in the disturbing tableau he paints; that perhaps it is his voyeuristic obsession that we should be concerned with, rather than Jennifer Ringley's supposed “perverse” play acting.