Freud
Freud's analysis of the incestuous fixation on the mother or sister brings to light the internal struggle for affection and sensual pleasure. I find it interesting that sensuality and affection are opposed in the sense of desire and affection. In a relationship, one cannot find full pleasure in the sensuality provided by a life partner because they cannot fulfill the incestual desire in the exterior world. From what I gained, the sensual desire can never be fulfilled in the conscious world and affection is the love that can be attained. It appears that only in the unconscious can one fulfill the sensual desires of fantasy in order to gain pleasure that is absent. We see it in more recent cases in which Bill Clinton received the affection from Hillary but seeked the sensual desire from mistresses such as Monica Lewinsky. On the other hand, one can look at the portraits that Stieglitz had made of Georgia O'Keefe and realize the great affection he had for her. However, Freud points out that women lack the ability to fulfill sensual pleasure because society forces women not to debase the object as men are allowed to. It is a sexist comment per say but it does go along with the ruling class's ideology of what women supposedly should do or are not supposed to do in terms of the sensual desires in terms of intimate, social relationships. However, to say that men are more capable than women because of never being able to satisfy this sensual pleasure is I think false IMO. On the other hand, because women are oppressed because of not being able to debase the object, I think this would make women stronger in terms of achievements of affection and sensual satisfaction because of acting with stronger morals.
Cixous
The bisexuality of women allows them to be masculine and feminime because of not having to live up to the phallic order. Unfortunately, society forces men to live up to the phallic monosexuality, deterring the male from grasping their unconscious feminity along with the conscious masculinity. However, it appears that men have a choice in bringing their feminity to light by rejecting the phallic order of the exterior world and brining the unconscious feminime to the I. However, the I, as imago, would be in a constant struggle of having to live to the phallic symbol of authority. Whereas the male supresses feminity, women are oppressed by the ideology of masculinity of not being able to have her feminity understood. The feminity of women is expressed only with the unconscious I and is not made visible because of the ruling class's repression. Therefore, it seems the phallic symbol represses not only women but men as well. Feminity needs to be not only apart of the unconscious I but the imago as well.
Mulvey
I found Mulvey's example of the narrative film to be closely tied to Freud's writing in section 5.1. Because the narrative film is empowered by the masculine narrative, the women are debased not only as objects of sensual pleasure but as being on the lower class of the hierarchy because of the patriarchal order. A viewer's repression results in the women's oppression in the masculine-driven narrative films. Because of the hierarchal order of the phallic ideology, the man cannot be a debased object because of the ego libido whereas women are categorized as erotic objects because of the scopophilic instinct.
Mercer
Mapplethorpe's photographs of naked black men have been attacked by the ideology of the White Man as being pornographic. Hence, most of the controversy surrounding Mapplethorpe's finely crafted black and white photograph, of rich silver and abundant tonalities as being pornographic, has not considered the issues of these images as they pertain to race. As Mercer points out, Mapplethorpe represents the White Man's Ideology of looking at a black man as an aesthetic and erotic Other. Instead of the tension caused by the gaze of object and subject of male homosexuality, Mapplethorpe's premeditated subjection of the black man represent the white gay male's fantasy of the eroticness and aesthetic of the black man. By Mapplethorpe subjecting his own desires of sexuality, he represses the black man into a fetishized object which represents the death of the black man as subject. I really enjoyed Christian Metz's statement associating photography, silence, and death results in the person who has been photographed as being dead (181). While many have thought that Mapplethorpe's images of naked black men are considered Other in terms of homosexuality, Mercer makes an eloquent argument that the Otherness of the naked black men is simultaneously being subjected as well.
Butler
In Foucault fashion, Butler points out that the juridicial system of power produces a feminism that does not have a defnitive identity. Because of society's subjection of the I (imago) of feminism, the patriarchal order has consciously avoided the representation of feminism. Unfortunately, society fails to bring to light the universality of feminism and so feminism's history is based upon the patriarchal order that subject's its identity.
I will not be attending class this tuesday so I will see everyone next week. So, I am now clear that I am masculine and feminime so screw the phallic order. I am a FEMINIST!!!!
Friday, October 19, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Am I scarred for life?
The more I read of Freud and his theories, the more I begin to question who I am and the world around me. Now that his theories are floating around in my head, have I been scarred for life? What was life like before I became aware of all these Freudian concepts? Can I ever get back to that point in my life or will I forever be looking at things and analyzing them with Freud in mind?
According to Freud when men are infants, they fall in love with their mothers. They resent their fathers because they have the type of relationship they want to have with their mothers. As a result, they want to kill their fathers. Men love their mothers but since they can’t have them sexually, they focus their desires onto someone else. In addition, at a very young age we learn to repress feelings and thoughts because of social taboos and as such we develop fantasies. So we go through life with all these things going on inside of us most of which we are unaware of unless we are familiar with Freud.
Laura Mulvey’s article discusses the movie industry and how it’s full of Freud’s theories. After reading her article I can’t help but wonder how true it is that Freud’s concepts underlie every single movie I’ve ever seen. Is Debbie Reynolds in “Singing in the Rain” really fetishized? Does she really fall under the concepts expounded by Freud? Will I be able to view movies in the future and not think about Freud?
A few other rambling thoughts about the other readings:
I do not enjoy reading articles like Mercer's in which he speculates about Mapplethorpe's intent. Unless an artist tells us what his or her intent is behind their artwork, I don't think we should speculate. Perhaps I shouldn't be in the art history program, but whenever I read article like Mercer's I always want to counter with other theories. I don't know enough about Mapplethorpe's series Black Males and the Black Book to fully comment so I may be off here, but what if Mapplethorpe was intrigued by producing b&w photos with good contrast. Could it be something as simple as that? Why do we always have to read more into things?
Rajan's article was interesting; debating tradition and modernity and where women fit in. However, it's not a discussion that's exclusive to women. I think that both male and female roles are constantly being evaluated and changing.
According to Freud when men are infants, they fall in love with their mothers. They resent their fathers because they have the type of relationship they want to have with their mothers. As a result, they want to kill their fathers. Men love their mothers but since they can’t have them sexually, they focus their desires onto someone else. In addition, at a very young age we learn to repress feelings and thoughts because of social taboos and as such we develop fantasies. So we go through life with all these things going on inside of us most of which we are unaware of unless we are familiar with Freud.
Laura Mulvey’s article discusses the movie industry and how it’s full of Freud’s theories. After reading her article I can’t help but wonder how true it is that Freud’s concepts underlie every single movie I’ve ever seen. Is Debbie Reynolds in “Singing in the Rain” really fetishized? Does she really fall under the concepts expounded by Freud? Will I be able to view movies in the future and not think about Freud?
A few other rambling thoughts about the other readings:
I do not enjoy reading articles like Mercer's in which he speculates about Mapplethorpe's intent. Unless an artist tells us what his or her intent is behind their artwork, I don't think we should speculate. Perhaps I shouldn't be in the art history program, but whenever I read article like Mercer's I always want to counter with other theories. I don't know enough about Mapplethorpe's series Black Males and the Black Book to fully comment so I may be off here, but what if Mapplethorpe was intrigued by producing b&w photos with good contrast. Could it be something as simple as that? Why do we always have to read more into things?
Rajan's article was interesting; debating tradition and modernity and where women fit in. However, it's not a discussion that's exclusive to women. I think that both male and female roles are constantly being evaluated and changing.
The Multifaceted Enigma of Race and Gender
It seems that we revisit the same issues week after week approaching them from slightly different angles adding layer upon layer of complexity with the addition of each new concept.
We’ve returned to Freud this time to examine what he calls the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. I found this excerpt to be depressing. I should have followed Julia’s lead and skipped it entirely. Again we are conceptualized as damaged, this time due to the divided nature of our gendered identity. In Freud’s view men can’t have sex with those they truly love (their mothers, sisters, their first love objects) and can’t truly love those with whom they have sex (substitutes for the first objects of desire). Women, according to Freud don’t need to debase their sexual partners (objects!) but instead substitute secrecy or the element of the forbidden. In either case it is necessary to overcome some obstacle in order to attain sexual pleasure. Even so, it seems we have to settle for less than full satisfaction because the original object of desire is not attainable and must be replaced with a socially acceptable substitute.
Helene Cixous proposes a feminist alternative. She replaces male/female oppositions and the patriarchal hierarchy it engenders with a more encompassing concept of bisexuality in which male and female characteristics coexist in a fantasy of a complete being. It sounds like Lacan’s Real before it is cut into by the symbolic, by language, the phallus and the realm of law and the father. Instead of female being subordinate to and always defined in reference to male, difference and diversity is celebrated. Instead of a closed system that can only be interpreted in one way, open-endedness and fluidity would predominate. Last week Colette asked if a male could successfully capture an unmasked female in a photo. In Cixous’ world the answer would be yes if the voice and truth of the other are allowed to flow through the self.
Laura Mulvey uses the tools of male patriarchy to deconstruct the pleasure to be found in traditional Hollywood narrative cinema. She uses Lacan’s mirror phase and Freud’s voyeurism and fetishism to explain how the cinema uses both the male protagonist and the female star to deal with the male fear of castration. Our excerpt leaves out Mulvey’s descriptions of the Hitchcock movies including Rear Window in which James Stewart plays Jeffries, a photojournalist confined to his apartment with a broken leg. He amuses himself by voyeuristically looking in on the people in the apartment building opposite his rear window. Grace Kelly plays his girlfriend Lisa who doesn’t interest him much erotically until she goes into the opposite building to find evidence against a suspected murderer. When he views her through his camera lens, sees her threatened by the murder suspect and ultimately saves her, she becomes the center of his attention. So the movie is voyeuristic, pleasure comes from watching and objectifying others. It focuses our attention on the human body and, as in the mirror phase, the audience identifies with the male protagonist, trapped in his wheelchair but still capable of saving his girlfriend and solving the crime at hand. The film also makes the female star an icon of ravishing beauty. As a female interested in clothes and fashion, she is doubly intended to be the object of the audience’s gaze. In Freudian terms, when Jeffries views her through his camera lens, she is demystified, threatened and punished. Both her beauty and her punishment dispel the unconscious castration threat Mulvey says is brought up by her presence. Audre Lorde, a black feminist lesbian writer would not approve of Mulvey’s methods. Quoted in Mathew’s article, Lordes says “you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” But Mulvey’s goal is to make us aware of the status quo, “the patriarchal order in which we are caught” and to show how this is encoded in visual culture.
Kobena Mercer applies Mulvey’s theories to Mapplethorpes’ photos of nude black males.
Mercer describes 3 codes applicable to Mapplethorpe’s images by which the artist turns the black male into a sexualized object aestheticized as work of art.
1. The sculptural code in which the black male body is idealized like Greek sculpture. This calls to mind the popular media stereotypes of the black male as powerful athlete and as dangerous criminal. Turning the male into a passive and thus feminized art object tempers this threat.
2. The portraiture code with emphasis upon the face. This humanizes the photos but also recalls tribal masks, criminal mug shots and the Negro minstrel, all used in the past as symbols of black inferiority. The photos also make clear the distance between the viewer and the object of desire. The gaze returned by the objects of the photos is detached and makes them less rather than more accessible to the viewer.
3. Cropping and lighting serve to fragment the body. They focus attention on a fetishistic examination of the details instead of the gestalt of the whole. Mercer likens this to pornography, seen by feminists as acts of violence against women. Mulvey also describes fragmenting of the female image in cinema as one of the defenses used against male castration anxiety. Except in this case it is the black penis that is the object of colonial fantasy.
Rajan, in Real and Imagined Women, examines the “Third World Woman” as the site of a power struggle and as a symbol of universal patriarchy, religious fundamentalism and colonial, national and regional considerations. Who this woman is is totally lost in the plethora of discourses that are laid upon her.
Butler generalizes by saying a definition of woman can’t be fixed for all time. What women are understood to be is a constructed concept that varies at different points in time and in different contexts.
And Bhabha undermines a universal definition of Man by insisting on the positive difference of the Black Man. By positioning his argument within the realm of modernist/postmodernist debate, he prepares us for next week’s topic.
We’ve returned to Freud this time to examine what he calls the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. I found this excerpt to be depressing. I should have followed Julia’s lead and skipped it entirely. Again we are conceptualized as damaged, this time due to the divided nature of our gendered identity. In Freud’s view men can’t have sex with those they truly love (their mothers, sisters, their first love objects) and can’t truly love those with whom they have sex (substitutes for the first objects of desire). Women, according to Freud don’t need to debase their sexual partners (objects!) but instead substitute secrecy or the element of the forbidden. In either case it is necessary to overcome some obstacle in order to attain sexual pleasure. Even so, it seems we have to settle for less than full satisfaction because the original object of desire is not attainable and must be replaced with a socially acceptable substitute.
Helene Cixous proposes a feminist alternative. She replaces male/female oppositions and the patriarchal hierarchy it engenders with a more encompassing concept of bisexuality in which male and female characteristics coexist in a fantasy of a complete being. It sounds like Lacan’s Real before it is cut into by the symbolic, by language, the phallus and the realm of law and the father. Instead of female being subordinate to and always defined in reference to male, difference and diversity is celebrated. Instead of a closed system that can only be interpreted in one way, open-endedness and fluidity would predominate. Last week Colette asked if a male could successfully capture an unmasked female in a photo. In Cixous’ world the answer would be yes if the voice and truth of the other are allowed to flow through the self.
Laura Mulvey uses the tools of male patriarchy to deconstruct the pleasure to be found in traditional Hollywood narrative cinema. She uses Lacan’s mirror phase and Freud’s voyeurism and fetishism to explain how the cinema uses both the male protagonist and the female star to deal with the male fear of castration. Our excerpt leaves out Mulvey’s descriptions of the Hitchcock movies including Rear Window in which James Stewart plays Jeffries, a photojournalist confined to his apartment with a broken leg. He amuses himself by voyeuristically looking in on the people in the apartment building opposite his rear window. Grace Kelly plays his girlfriend Lisa who doesn’t interest him much erotically until she goes into the opposite building to find evidence against a suspected murderer. When he views her through his camera lens, sees her threatened by the murder suspect and ultimately saves her, she becomes the center of his attention. So the movie is voyeuristic, pleasure comes from watching and objectifying others. It focuses our attention on the human body and, as in the mirror phase, the audience identifies with the male protagonist, trapped in his wheelchair but still capable of saving his girlfriend and solving the crime at hand. The film also makes the female star an icon of ravishing beauty. As a female interested in clothes and fashion, she is doubly intended to be the object of the audience’s gaze. In Freudian terms, when Jeffries views her through his camera lens, she is demystified, threatened and punished. Both her beauty and her punishment dispel the unconscious castration threat Mulvey says is brought up by her presence. Audre Lorde, a black feminist lesbian writer would not approve of Mulvey’s methods. Quoted in Mathew’s article, Lordes says “you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” But Mulvey’s goal is to make us aware of the status quo, “the patriarchal order in which we are caught” and to show how this is encoded in visual culture.
Kobena Mercer applies Mulvey’s theories to Mapplethorpes’ photos of nude black males.
Mercer describes 3 codes applicable to Mapplethorpe’s images by which the artist turns the black male into a sexualized object aestheticized as work of art.
1. The sculptural code in which the black male body is idealized like Greek sculpture. This calls to mind the popular media stereotypes of the black male as powerful athlete and as dangerous criminal. Turning the male into a passive and thus feminized art object tempers this threat.
2. The portraiture code with emphasis upon the face. This humanizes the photos but also recalls tribal masks, criminal mug shots and the Negro minstrel, all used in the past as symbols of black inferiority. The photos also make clear the distance between the viewer and the object of desire. The gaze returned by the objects of the photos is detached and makes them less rather than more accessible to the viewer.
3. Cropping and lighting serve to fragment the body. They focus attention on a fetishistic examination of the details instead of the gestalt of the whole. Mercer likens this to pornography, seen by feminists as acts of violence against women. Mulvey also describes fragmenting of the female image in cinema as one of the defenses used against male castration anxiety. Except in this case it is the black penis that is the object of colonial fantasy.
Rajan, in Real and Imagined Women, examines the “Third World Woman” as the site of a power struggle and as a symbol of universal patriarchy, religious fundamentalism and colonial, national and regional considerations. Who this woman is is totally lost in the plethora of discourses that are laid upon her.
Butler generalizes by saying a definition of woman can’t be fixed for all time. What women are understood to be is a constructed concept that varies at different points in time and in different contexts.
And Bhabha undermines a universal definition of Man by insisting on the positive difference of the Black Man. By positioning his argument within the realm of modernist/postmodernist debate, he prepares us for next week’s topic.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Gender and Race
Freud
Freud’s theory as to the cause of psychical impotence is enlightening in the respect that it illustrates why he has been seen as ahead of his time. This does not mean that I agree with his arguments, but I found him to be convincing and slightly more open-minded than I had originally assumed. The open-minded quality that I am referring to is visible in his assessment that the sexual “holding back” that women were (and are) subjected to inevitably has a negative impact.
Regarding men, Freud theorizes that in order to properly fuse sensuality and affection they must somehow debase their “sexual object.” Here we have an eerie psychological description of the gaze and the object of the gaze. The woman who has classically been the object of the male gaze has been debased. She is the passive object while the male is the powerful and active viewer.
Cixous
Cixous’ essay is a complete stylistic departure from Freud. And I think this is her point, not necessarily Freud in particular – but she offers an alternative to patriarchic ways of writing. She says, “I will say: today, writing is woman’s. Her monologue is so strikingly filled with metaphor and therefore expects to be understood almost intuitively.
An especially beautiful piece of her essay was the description of “bisexuality.” I took this to mean that women, unfortunately more than men, have the unique power of existing in both the realms of masculinity and femininity. They can do so, because they don’t feel the societal threat of emasculation and this gives them the power of multiplicity in addition to enabling women to experience and learn more.
Mulvey
Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to show how film has been structured by patriarchal society. She states that she is using psychoanalysis in order to use a patriarchic system or deconstruction and thus begin to create an alternative language. By analyzing the structure of film she aims to destroy current methods and make way for the conception of “a new language of desire.”
She begins with Freud’s theory on scopophilia and points out that the scopophilic gaze is an active “taking of other people as objects.” The separation of the audience or the voyeurs results in a repression, which is in turn projected onto the performer. But, the audience also identifies with the performer or has a narcissistic reaction to projected image.
Both of these can happen within the scope of a narrative film. The male viewer either recognizes himself in the protagonist or identifies his object of desire in the main female character. So, what happens in so-called “chick flicks”? I would guess that some women identify with and see themselves in the female protagonist and see the main male character as their object of desire. This is of course very basic and hugely stereotypical, but it goes back to Cixous’ argument of bisexuality in women. Men generally tend not to like chick flicks (possible due to a fear of emasculation) whereas women tend to accept and even like the typical Hollywood film where the male is the usual protagonist. Is this because women are more able to be “bisexual” or because women have adapted too well to the idea of woman as object? And this is what I think Mulvey is trying to destroy in a way: the only identifiable character for women is the “woman [who does not have] the slightest importance.”
Mercer
Mercer deconstructs the sexual and racial components of Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men by using three codes. The first is sculptural and relates to classically idealized statues as well as the Greek athlete and the modern day athlete - doubly so because the subject is black and thus a reminder of the heroic “black man’s body.” Unfortunately, the other stereotype of the black male criminal is a component of the sculptural as well. Either way the subject is seen as an object. The second code is portraiture, which is non-confrontational and therefore plays into old rules of colonialism and thus the portrait is passive in relation to the active viewer. The third code is cropping and lighting, which serve to break apart the body of the subject and is seen in some feminist theories as an act of violence. These three codes act to “aestheticize” stereotypes into works of art. Mercer says that the “visual codification...reveals more about the desires of the hidden and invisible white male subject behind the camera, and what “he” wants to see, than it does about the anonymous black men whose beautiful bodies we see depicted.” Does this mean that Mapplethorpe’s photographs somehow serve to de-rieify the fetishization of the black male by revealing the character of the desire behind the object?
Rajan
Rajan says that she aims to explore “how a western meditation on the subject of the body in pain may be appropriated for and contested by a specific historical and feminist project in the interests of the female subject as agent.” What I found in her discussion regarding Sati is the problem in separating what is considered tradition and what is considered modern. The act of sati can’t be placed in either realm because its practice has changed over time and because it is tradition that exists in the modern. The western initiated attempt to outlaw sati has not been entirely successful and may have in fact been cause for the act to be seen in higher regard. Thus, imperial laws or laws meant to control or repress don’t necessarily result in the “correct” actions of those they are meant to effect. Therefore, Rajan argues for an investigation into the “subjective pain” and “objective spectacle.” These terms can be directly related to a feminist interest in agency as well as objectification.
Butler
Butler discusses the ways in which it is difficult for a language of feminism to emerge due to the origination of the subject “woman” from a patriarchal discourse. Additionally, it is impossible to define “woman” within a feminist discourse because the defining would serve to work against the aims of feminism in the first place. She says, “if one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive...because gender is always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities.” In some ways this is a political weakness of feminism because it makes it impossible to define it within political, cut and dry terms. Yet, it is also strength because it allows for and calls for an evolving definition, somewhat akin to Couxis’ description of bisexuality. However, here, feminism takes on the multiple identities. So, the possible inability of feminism to have a political representation is conversely a strength because it refuses to be locked into one definition.
Bhabha
Bhabha was the most difficult to understand, but it seems that he is concerned with moving past modernity into postmodernity unconsciously - or in a way that doesn't acknowledge the mistakes of the past and thus continues on without a full understanding of self and therefore an ethnocentric perspective of discourse.
Freud’s theory as to the cause of psychical impotence is enlightening in the respect that it illustrates why he has been seen as ahead of his time. This does not mean that I agree with his arguments, but I found him to be convincing and slightly more open-minded than I had originally assumed. The open-minded quality that I am referring to is visible in his assessment that the sexual “holding back” that women were (and are) subjected to inevitably has a negative impact.
Regarding men, Freud theorizes that in order to properly fuse sensuality and affection they must somehow debase their “sexual object.” Here we have an eerie psychological description of the gaze and the object of the gaze. The woman who has classically been the object of the male gaze has been debased. She is the passive object while the male is the powerful and active viewer.
Cixous
Cixous’ essay is a complete stylistic departure from Freud. And I think this is her point, not necessarily Freud in particular – but she offers an alternative to patriarchic ways of writing. She says, “I will say: today, writing is woman’s. Her monologue is so strikingly filled with metaphor and therefore expects to be understood almost intuitively.
An especially beautiful piece of her essay was the description of “bisexuality.” I took this to mean that women, unfortunately more than men, have the unique power of existing in both the realms of masculinity and femininity. They can do so, because they don’t feel the societal threat of emasculation and this gives them the power of multiplicity in addition to enabling women to experience and learn more.
Mulvey
Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to show how film has been structured by patriarchal society. She states that she is using psychoanalysis in order to use a patriarchic system or deconstruction and thus begin to create an alternative language. By analyzing the structure of film she aims to destroy current methods and make way for the conception of “a new language of desire.”
She begins with Freud’s theory on scopophilia and points out that the scopophilic gaze is an active “taking of other people as objects.” The separation of the audience or the voyeurs results in a repression, which is in turn projected onto the performer. But, the audience also identifies with the performer or has a narcissistic reaction to projected image.
Both of these can happen within the scope of a narrative film. The male viewer either recognizes himself in the protagonist or identifies his object of desire in the main female character. So, what happens in so-called “chick flicks”? I would guess that some women identify with and see themselves in the female protagonist and see the main male character as their object of desire. This is of course very basic and hugely stereotypical, but it goes back to Cixous’ argument of bisexuality in women. Men generally tend not to like chick flicks (possible due to a fear of emasculation) whereas women tend to accept and even like the typical Hollywood film where the male is the usual protagonist. Is this because women are more able to be “bisexual” or because women have adapted too well to the idea of woman as object? And this is what I think Mulvey is trying to destroy in a way: the only identifiable character for women is the “woman [who does not have] the slightest importance.”
Mercer
Mercer deconstructs the sexual and racial components of Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men by using three codes. The first is sculptural and relates to classically idealized statues as well as the Greek athlete and the modern day athlete - doubly so because the subject is black and thus a reminder of the heroic “black man’s body.” Unfortunately, the other stereotype of the black male criminal is a component of the sculptural as well. Either way the subject is seen as an object. The second code is portraiture, which is non-confrontational and therefore plays into old rules of colonialism and thus the portrait is passive in relation to the active viewer. The third code is cropping and lighting, which serve to break apart the body of the subject and is seen in some feminist theories as an act of violence. These three codes act to “aestheticize” stereotypes into works of art. Mercer says that the “visual codification...reveals more about the desires of the hidden and invisible white male subject behind the camera, and what “he” wants to see, than it does about the anonymous black men whose beautiful bodies we see depicted.” Does this mean that Mapplethorpe’s photographs somehow serve to de-rieify the fetishization of the black male by revealing the character of the desire behind the object?
Rajan
Rajan says that she aims to explore “how a western meditation on the subject of the body in pain may be appropriated for and contested by a specific historical and feminist project in the interests of the female subject as agent.” What I found in her discussion regarding Sati is the problem in separating what is considered tradition and what is considered modern. The act of sati can’t be placed in either realm because its practice has changed over time and because it is tradition that exists in the modern. The western initiated attempt to outlaw sati has not been entirely successful and may have in fact been cause for the act to be seen in higher regard. Thus, imperial laws or laws meant to control or repress don’t necessarily result in the “correct” actions of those they are meant to effect. Therefore, Rajan argues for an investigation into the “subjective pain” and “objective spectacle.” These terms can be directly related to a feminist interest in agency as well as objectification.
Butler
Butler discusses the ways in which it is difficult for a language of feminism to emerge due to the origination of the subject “woman” from a patriarchal discourse. Additionally, it is impossible to define “woman” within a feminist discourse because the defining would serve to work against the aims of feminism in the first place. She says, “if one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive...because gender is always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities.” In some ways this is a political weakness of feminism because it makes it impossible to define it within political, cut and dry terms. Yet, it is also strength because it allows for and calls for an evolving definition, somewhat akin to Couxis’ description of bisexuality. However, here, feminism takes on the multiple identities. So, the possible inability of feminism to have a political representation is conversely a strength because it refuses to be locked into one definition.
Bhabha
Bhabha was the most difficult to understand, but it seems that he is concerned with moving past modernity into postmodernity unconsciously - or in a way that doesn't acknowledge the mistakes of the past and thus continues on without a full understanding of self and therefore an ethnocentric perspective of discourse.
Embrace Your "Other"
This week I was most interested and excited by Freud's "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement" and "Sorties" by Helene Cixous. For me, I think it is always interesting to read about the opposite sex, of both sexes for that matter, because it is generally something you can relate to or have seen. As for race, Rajan's "The Subject of Sati: Pain and Death in the Contemporary Discourse on Sati" was really a question on ethics and morality. When does the law jump in? Should it? Is it an imposition on someone else's beliefs, or it is forced suicide?
What I found most interesting about Freud and Cixous was their claim on the ways males identify themselves, resulting in a preoccupation with the phallus and a fear of castration. In both writings, the males' identifying source of manhood is the penis. If he's psychical impotent or is open and accepting of the "other" ( the "other" being female and associated with female traits which Cixous suggests that all of us have bits of the "other" in us) then he is threatened with castration. Freud goes into detail about how psychical impotence occurs when the affectionate and sensual currents do not unite. Psychical impotence therefore can affect the way a man loves. For example, there are those men whose sensual current avoided the affectionate current, and although they may be physically successful when it comes to sex, they do not get any particular pleasure. Then Freud brings up another problem, "the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his sexual activity, and only develops full potency when he is with a defaced sexual object." (152) This insinuation goes along with Laura Mulvey's article about women in the cinema, and also Matthews essay from last week on how women portrayed on the screen and in art allows for the male to project his own fantasies upon them, granting them sexual gratification and pleasure.
Cixous states that "pairs of oppositions are couples" (158), for example, "active/passive," "male/female." She then states that "sexual difference is treated by coupling it with its opposite." (158) According to Cixous the "other" is in all of us, referring to this as "bisexuality." Once one can accept the other within, one can create and be free. She uses the example of writing, and how when women write, it is a true expression of self and body because of their ability to embrace their "other." The man, however, in some cases is socially fated and can only embrace the "I" of the phallus, making him horrified of homosexuality and castration. Again, going back to Freud. Cixous poses the question that she says stumps Freud, "Why the refusal?" She already said that man has the "grotesque and unenviable fate of being recluded to a single idol with clay balls." (161) This fate causes an obsession with the phallus, as it is what men use to identify themselves as men. Man fears the acceptance of the "other" (femininity) because he feels that with the acceptance he will lose his identity and then is no longer man resulting in castration. If they cannot identify themselves as man, then they are in their eyes "reduced" to the "other"- feminine. Identity for man is seen through the phallus. If castration occurs, resulting in femininity, identity is lost. So, I think it is something within a man that causes the fear of castration and the "other." I do not think it has to with society since most if not all are patriarchal, and not all men have this trouble, so I think it must be something innate within that causes this refusal.
What I found most interesting about Freud and Cixous was their claim on the ways males identify themselves, resulting in a preoccupation with the phallus and a fear of castration. In both writings, the males' identifying source of manhood is the penis. If he's psychical impotent or is open and accepting of the "other" ( the "other" being female and associated with female traits which Cixous suggests that all of us have bits of the "other" in us) then he is threatened with castration. Freud goes into detail about how psychical impotence occurs when the affectionate and sensual currents do not unite. Psychical impotence therefore can affect the way a man loves. For example, there are those men whose sensual current avoided the affectionate current, and although they may be physically successful when it comes to sex, they do not get any particular pleasure. Then Freud brings up another problem, "the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his sexual activity, and only develops full potency when he is with a defaced sexual object." (152) This insinuation goes along with Laura Mulvey's article about women in the cinema, and also Matthews essay from last week on how women portrayed on the screen and in art allows for the male to project his own fantasies upon them, granting them sexual gratification and pleasure.
Cixous states that "pairs of oppositions are couples" (158), for example, "active/passive," "male/female." She then states that "sexual difference is treated by coupling it with its opposite." (158) According to Cixous the "other" is in all of us, referring to this as "bisexuality." Once one can accept the other within, one can create and be free. She uses the example of writing, and how when women write, it is a true expression of self and body because of their ability to embrace their "other." The man, however, in some cases is socially fated and can only embrace the "I" of the phallus, making him horrified of homosexuality and castration. Again, going back to Freud. Cixous poses the question that she says stumps Freud, "Why the refusal?" She already said that man has the "grotesque and unenviable fate of being recluded to a single idol with clay balls." (161) This fate causes an obsession with the phallus, as it is what men use to identify themselves as men. Man fears the acceptance of the "other" (femininity) because he feels that with the acceptance he will lose his identity and then is no longer man resulting in castration. If they cannot identify themselves as man, then they are in their eyes "reduced" to the "other"- feminine. Identity for man is seen through the phallus. If castration occurs, resulting in femininity, identity is lost. So, I think it is something within a man that causes the fear of castration and the "other." I do not think it has to with society since most if not all are patriarchal, and not all men have this trouble, so I think it must be something innate within that causes this refusal.
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.’
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.’
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