Jennifer Friedlander is an American cultural studies scholar.
Friedlander received a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh, and also a Ph.D. Certificate in Cultural Studies.
She is the Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California and chair of the Media Studies Department.
Friedlander describes her academic work as being heavily informed by Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, critical theory, and the work of Roland Barthes, expressed in her book Real Deceptions: The Contemporary Reinvention of Realism. Earlier, she had focused more on feminist film theory and had written Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion.
In the first half of 2021, Friedlander was Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, where she worked on a new monograph ("Powers of Pleasure: The Psychopolitics of Enjoyment in Media and Popular Culture") and taught a Master's seminar at the University of Vienna.
Real Deceptions contends, in opposition to many enduring understandings, that realism’s radical political potential emerges not by revealing deception but precisely by staging deceptions – particularly deceptions that imperil the very categories of true and false. Deception, Friedlander argues, does not function as an obstacle to truth, but rather as a necessary lure for snaring the truth. Rather than seeking to unearth the truth behind fiction, this book argues that we would do better to turn our attention to the truth of fiction. Friedlander draws upon insights from a range of cultural theorists, most notably Jacques Rancière, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard.
Friedlander examines how the Lacanian concept of sexuation provides a context for a new understanding of the interactions of feminism, psychoanalysis, and spectatorship.