Gaye Tuchman: Symbolic annihilation of women
"largely ignoring women or portraying them in stereotypical roles of victims and/or consumer, the mass media symolically annihilate women"
Source: Book Lane Crothers, Charles Lockheart, "Culture ans Politics: A Reader"
David Gauntlett: Gender representations in the media
Laura Mulvey: Male Gaze
Laura Mulvey's article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" argues that in classical Hollywood cinema there is a difference in the viewing experience for male and female spectators
Mulvey's uses psychoanalysis (Freud) as a political weapon to uncover the ways in which patriarchal society has structured the sexual subject. This article takes as a starting point the way in which cinema Hollywood style represents sexual differences and sexual pleasure.
According to Mulvey, the patriarchal society is a phallocentric society. This means that it recognizes the male gender and the sexuality of men are the dominant one. But phallocentric depends, in Freudian terms, on the image of a castrated woman. This image gives order to the world, that is to say, the male dominated conception of society, suggests a masculine subject at the core of all social interchanges. Since women represent the absence of a penis, she embodies the fear of castration, which is so fundamental for the constitution of the male subject.
"The paradox of phallocentric in all its manifestation is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world."
She adds that the idea of woman as lack (of a phallus) drives the production of meaning. The symbolic order of phallocentric culture defines itself through the image of the castrated woman.
Women exist only in relation to castration, or to castration fear. Mulvey says:
Women then, stands in the patriarchal culture as a signifier for
the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out
his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing
them in the silent image of woman still tied to her place as a bearer of
meaning. (140)
Cinema as a system of representation poses the question of the form and manner in which the collective subconscious structures ways of seeing and pleasure of looking. Mainstream Hollywood cinema has represented the erotic realm using the language and images of the patriarchal culture. It satisfies and reinforces the masculine ego and represses the desire of women.
Therefore, Visual Pleasure and Cinema Narrative, talks about how society revolves around the male dominance. Mulvey talks about the castrated feeling of the males towards females, it talks about how women are perceived just as a males gaze, they are there to be looked at. It ends as; Mulvey talks about how Hollywood cinema has represented the sexual aspects of the patriarchy society, and how it is this aspect, which enables everything to revolve around the male.
Mulvey's uses psychoanalysis (Freud) as a political weapon to uncover the ways in which patriarchal society has structured the sexual subject. This article takes as a starting point the way in which cinema Hollywood style represents sexual differences and sexual pleasure.
According to Mulvey, the patriarchal society is a phallocentric society. This means that it recognizes the male gender and the sexuality of men are the dominant one. But phallocentric depends, in Freudian terms, on the image of a castrated woman. This image gives order to the world, that is to say, the male dominated conception of society, suggests a masculine subject at the core of all social interchanges. Since women represent the absence of a penis, she embodies the fear of castration, which is so fundamental for the constitution of the male subject.
"The paradox of phallocentric in all its manifestation is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world."
She adds that the idea of woman as lack (of a phallus) drives the production of meaning. The symbolic order of phallocentric culture defines itself through the image of the castrated woman.
Women exist only in relation to castration, or to castration fear. Mulvey says:
Women then, stands in the patriarchal culture as a signifier for
the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out
his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing
them in the silent image of woman still tied to her place as a bearer of
meaning. (140)
Cinema as a system of representation poses the question of the form and manner in which the collective subconscious structures ways of seeing and pleasure of looking. Mainstream Hollywood cinema has represented the erotic realm using the language and images of the patriarchal culture. It satisfies and reinforces the masculine ego and represses the desire of women.
Therefore, Visual Pleasure and Cinema Narrative, talks about how society revolves around the male dominance. Mulvey talks about the castrated feeling of the males towards females, it talks about how women are perceived just as a males gaze, they are there to be looked at. It ends as; Mulvey talks about how Hollywood cinema has represented the sexual aspects of the patriarchy society, and how it is this aspect, which enables everything to revolve around the male.
"Mainstream film satisfies especially the male spectator by projecting his desires on the screen. Women are regarded as objects of fetishistic display for male viewer's pleasure"Source: Book, Carolina Hein, "Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Judith Butler: Gender and Sex
"When the relevant "culture" that "constructs" gender is understod in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation"
Source: Book, Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble: Feminism and subversion of identity"
Stuart Hall: Marxist theorist/Cultural Representations
"the media appear to reflect reality whilst in fact they construct it."
"In a key paper, 'Encoding/Decoding', Stuart Hall (1980), argued that the dominant ideology is typically inscribed as the 'preferred reading' in a media text, but that this is not automatically adopted by readers"
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism11.html
Antonio Gramsci: Hegemony
"The term hergemony has come to be synonimous with the idea of domination of one group over another"
Gramsci at the margins: subjectvitity and subalternity in a theory of hergemony by Kyle Smith, 2010, http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/research/gramsci-journal/articles/6-Smith-Eng.pdf
"Hergemony is a more sensitive and therefore a more useful critical term that "domination" which fails to acknowledge the active role of subordinate people in the operation of power"
Antonio Gramsci By Steve Jones, 2006, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PULFz85FDMYC&dq=antonio+gramsci+hegemony&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Anthony Giddens: Structuration
"Structuration theory: the concepts of "structure", "system" and "duality of sturcture"".
"the basic domain of...social sciences...is neither the experience of the actor nor the existance of any form of societial totality"
"Human actitvities are recursive...They are not brought into being by social actors butcontinually recreated by themselves as actors."
The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration By Anthony Giddens, http://www.s-as-p.org/files_workshop/lausanne_whittington.pdf
Manuel Alvarado
"Television is... the most rewarding medium to use when teaching representations of class because of the contradictions which involve a mass medium attempting to reach all the parts of its class-differentiated audience simultaneously... Its representations of class can perhaps best be approached by teaching how class relations are represented and mediated within different TV genres and forms" (Alvarado et al. 1987: 153)
"Four Key Themes in Racial Representations: exotic, dangerous, humorous, pitied" (Alvarado et al. 1987: 153)
"Television is... the most rewarding medium to use when teaching representations of class because of the contradictions which involve a mass medium attempting to reach all the parts of its class-differentiated audience simultaneously... Its representations of class can perhaps best be approached by teaching how class relations are represented and mediated within different TV genres and forms" (Alvarado et al. 1987: 153)
"Four Key Themes in Racial Representations: exotic, dangerous, humorous, pitied" (Alvarado et al. 1987: 153)
Nick Lacey: Media Concepts and semiotics
"At the heart of semiotics is the study of language and how it is the dominant influence shaping human beings' perception of and thoughts about the world."
Image and representation: key concepts in media studies By Nick Lacey
Richard Dyer: Representations of gay people in our culture
Marshall McLuhan: "The Medium is the message" and "globall village"
"If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?"
"To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points, which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hip . . . she knows that a "long-legged girl can go places." As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grille on a car. They are date-bated power levers for the management of the male audience"
Todd Kappelman, "Marshall McLuhan: "The Medium is the Message"",http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html#text7
Theodor Adorno
"NEGATIVE DIALECTICS: Adorno believes that the standard mode of human understanding is identity thinking, which means that a particular object is understood in terms of a universal concept. The meaning of an object is grasped when it has been categorized, subsumed under a general concept heading. In opposition to identity thinking, Adorno posits negative dialectics, or non-identity thinking. He seeks to reveal the falseness of claims of identity thinking by enacting a critical consciousness which perceives that a concept cannot identify its true object."
"CRITICAL THEORY: Critical theory is based on the understanding of society as a dialectical entity, and the conviction that "teaching about society can only be developed in the most tightly integrated connection of disciplines; above all, economics, psychology, history and philosophy" (O'Connor 7)."
"AESTHETIC THEORY: Adorno asserts the "priority of the object in art," or what is called a materialist aesthetic, in contrast to the idealist aesthetic of Kant which privileges the subject over the object (Jarvis 99)."
"NEGATIVE DIALECTICS: Adorno believes that the standard mode of human understanding is identity thinking, which means that a particular object is understood in terms of a universal concept. The meaning of an object is grasped when it has been categorized, subsumed under a general concept heading. In opposition to identity thinking, Adorno posits negative dialectics, or non-identity thinking. He seeks to reveal the falseness of claims of identity thinking by enacting a critical consciousness which perceives that a concept cannot identify its true object."
"CRITICAL THEORY: Critical theory is based on the understanding of society as a dialectical entity, and the conviction that "teaching about society can only be developed in the most tightly integrated connection of disciplines; above all, economics, psychology, history and philosophy" (O'Connor 7)."
"AESTHETIC THEORY: Adorno asserts the "priority of the object in art," or what is called a materialist aesthetic, in contrast to the idealist aesthetic of Kant which privileges the subject over the object (Jarvis 99)."
"The composition of the image had such a textbook “sexist ad” dimension that one could be forgiven for supposing some familiarity with both cultural studies and with feministcritiques of advertising (Judith Williamson 1987)."
"It was, in a sense, taking feminism into account by showing it to be a thing of the past, by provocatively “enacting sexism” while at the same time playing with those debates in film theory about women as the object of the gaze (Laura Mulvey 1975) and even with female desire (Rosalind Coward 1984;Teresa de Lauretis 1988)."
"It was, in a sense, taking feminism into account by showing it to be a thing of the past, by provocatively “enacting sexism” while at the same time playing with those debates in film theory about women as the object of the gaze (Laura Mulvey 1975) and even with female desire (Rosalind Coward 1984;Teresa de Lauretis 1988)."
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