i can't go off critical studies cold turkey.

"...The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, i see myself there where i am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; i am over there where i am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where i am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does not exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that i occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror, i discover my absence from the place where i am, since i see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed towards me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, i come back towards myself; i begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where i am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that i occupy at the moment when i look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with the space that is around it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be percieved it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there."

- Michel Foucault, "of other spaces"