Just a little Gender & Race...

Gender and race is a massive subject that one cannot seem to ever escape from. Again, we are met with the ideologies of our friend Freud and his work with the psycho-sexual acquisitions of gendered identity that are (supposedly) fundamental to the question of identify itself. He addresses the polymorphously plural infant, and repression through the Oedipal complex. Which defined basically as the complex of emotions aroused in a young child (applying to boys), around the age of four, by an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex, wishing to exclude the same sex parent. He states that two currents occur to ensure complete normalness in someone to occur: the affectionate current and the sensual. The first is formed in the earliest years of childhood on the basis of self-preservative instinct and directed at the family members who give the child affection and care. Freud declares the this is erotic interest, constituting the child as an ‘erotic plaything’ which I’m assuming he, the child, then chooses his primary objects of choice and has sexual instincts in them, erotic interests, and he attaches himself to these objects.

Ok, so clearly putting it, I’m assuming is what Freud means is the parents give the child love (in their own sexual, erotic ways) and since its probably the mother that’s giving more of the attention to the child, he then develops this erotic interest in her, just as he does for certain objects, like his toys. Upon growing older and into puberty his ‘sensual’ current catches up and this is when he gets the sexual feelings that we all know to well. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but he continues by saying that a young man’s sensuality becomes tied to incestuous objects in the unconscious, becoming fixated to unconscious incestuous phantasies, and results in impotence. So this is why half the guys out there can’t perform? Because they’re fixated with motherly love? But there is a way out and that is coming to terms with the idea of incest with their own mother and sisters.

My favorite lines though, (which I instantly thought of you, Sally and how heated you must have been to read this) was when he said that males don’t venture to satisfy their sexual aims with women they respect, such as their ‘well-brought-up-wife’ but rather an ‘ethically inferior’ woman. To me this sounds as if all men needs a prostitute to truly release their sexual potency off on, so good little wife at home, mistress on the side, interesting theories, but as we all know a little outdated in contemporary times.

Although I could go on and on with Freud, there are too many others to note in the Gender and Race section. In both the Cixous and the Mulvey essay, I got that one of their main arguments was that woman exists to differentiate man. Cixous says, “woman admits there is an other,” like in semiotics there must be an opposition, something to compare against what is. In her ‘becoming-woman’ she does not erase the bisexualness in her as the boy has. She declares that Femininity and bisexuality go hand-in-hand. For man it is much harder to let the other come through him. Why is this? It is because males are constantly attempting to prove something, he must ‘show off,’ showing up the others for their masculine profit.

Mulvey, discusses how woman is objectified in the cinema. Looking as a source of great pleasure and scopophilia, the pleasure in looking. That we love to look and we there is sexual thrill in being looked at. That is what the cinema does, we look and we fantasies that this is reality and we place ourselves into this pretend reality and therefore we achieve the desired effect of being looked at as well. This produces the obsessive voyeurs and the Peeping Toms, whose sexual satisfaction is watching, thus being the controller and objectifying the other. In films the woman is that objectified other, she is displayed as the sexual object, playing to signify directly to the males desire. Women are styled accordingly to create fantasy for the male. This is how the imbalance is created, women are objects for males to mold, dolls to dress according to their stimulate them sexually. What does this create? Pure corruption with in our society, because it is male-centric, women act and do according to these male standards to be looked at, but this is not correct, due to the fact that today we’re just creating plastic Barbie dolls, no longer real but merely constructed to satisfy our ‘other.’