“I THOUGHT IT LOOKED A LITTLE QUEER”: TURNING REALITY INTO FANTASY AND VICE VERSA IN LEWIS CARROLL’S THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE

Abstract

The aim of this article is to establish a dialectically reasonable approximation of Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There (CARROLL, 1871) with Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1977) through queer theory in order to discuss the problematisation of normative identity constructs. People who are inserted in the queer condition are forced into a model wherein there is no possibility of future, since they are intrinsically part of something that, different from the hegemonic normative pattern, has no possibility of thriving nor evolving. Therefore, in order to provide a new epistemological approach to such queer sociality, we are persuaded by the writings of Lewis Carroll (1871) because of his geniality in providing alternative structures for the human psyche by deconstructing normative definitions and functioning for such psyche. His ability to talk about the repressive states of identity his characters face, and how this search for recognition and self-assurance is portrayed in his books, give enough food for thought concerning the liberating idea that our fantasies allow us to be “who we really are.” The necessity of social reorganization in political movements throws queer into the marginalized space of constitution (institutionalization and control), bringing into meaning a closer relation between fantasy and reality. “Fantasy,” says Butler, “is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside” (Gender Trouble, 1999, p. 29).