The static formulation of "being or doing," however, gestures toward the complex nature of the consumptive process of identification. Whether situated as a cine matic spectator and/or an interpellated subject, we are left: "...as viewing subjects, caught in the bind between specular cannibalism and scopic bulimia, between the introjection of an imposed other and the rejection of what the eye has taken in" (Friedberg, 45).

Identification or specular cannibalism is the process of ingesting the Other, of "taking on" the Other. Scopic bulimia is the process of consuming and then rejecting, of binging and then purging, of connection and then repudiation. Though identification is always already problematic, as a trope it operates within female impersonation to testify both to the desire and hatred associated with identification (which radical feminist critiques do not account for), and the rejection of the woman impersonated (which postmodern critiques do not account for). Identification is a "process which [both] commands the subject to be displaced by an other...and demands sameness, necessitates similarity..." (Friedberg, 36).