I’m not sure if it’s in the BBC’s charter, but the venerable public broadcaster is allegedly trying to reach out to people with disabilities, and to increase social awareness of disability issues. Through such charming initiatives as their online Paris Hilton like trash celeb persona – “Disability Bitch”:
“Hi, I’m Disability Bitch. I’m disabled and I love it. Everyone should be disabled. Everyone should be like me.
“I own an extensive collection of colour-coordinated wigs and an even more extensive collection of colour-coordinated mobility aids, all of which complement my natural beauty…
Whatevs, darl. But there’s more. She’s not an all purpose disability bitch, but part of a reality tv franchise. In pursuit of its social inclusion agenda, the BBC is running a reality tv show – “Britain’s Missing Top Model” – the premise of which is that chicks missing limbs or in chairs can also be teh hotness and get to be in glossy fashion mags. It’s “Stylish, sassy, chic … disabled?”… The idea, I guess, is supposed to be that disability is no barrier to objectification. Colour me unimpressed.
The reality show Britain’s Top Missing Model” has been heavily publicized in the UK, (and I don’t get the relationship to the online persona “Disability Bitch”) but the whole thing is targeted at what the BBC thinks the youth of Britain wants to see and is broadcast on the digital youth channel BBC Three.
I have seen bits of it and I guess it shows that having a disability is no barrier to behaving badly on television.
Perhaps the most curious thing is the presence of a deaf woman. In what I saw, she was the most excluded from the group, who made no effort to accommodate her disability (looking directly at her to allow her to lip read, etc, as she requested). As a model, her disability is invisible, so to speak, and possibly irrelevant, and one of the other contestants criticized her for looking “normal”.
Anyway, some complex issues not one of which was meaningfully explored.
If you follow the link, MH, “Disability Bitch” is a persona who interacts with the contestants on the website.
I probably won’t bother.
There’s no need! The excerpt gives enough information!
Although having read the rest of it, I wonder if I’m meant to feel bad if I don’t colour coordinate my crutches and/or prosthetic with my outfit de jour.
Kim, a disability does not excuse you from your social duty to perform the FHM-approved appearance of hottness so as not to offend the dudez by looking, you know, different. And no that doesn’t mean that society should reciprocate by accommodating people with disabilities, you raving lefty, you.
Helen’s right, come on Kim.
Does the show feature a woman in an iron lung in a bikini? Mmmm, perhaps that wouldn’t work.
It seems the female form is always to be objectified, critiqued and all that.
Having said that, some of those knickers are very nice.
Is the Beeb really involved in yet another attempt to out-crass all previous contestants?
And we dare to laugh at the bread and circuses of those terribly uncouth ancient Romans. Pshaw!!
Darlene wrote:
It’s not just about teh hawt, it’s about reinforcing that ideal of constant sexual availability. Although, I do wonder how you go about matching your frilly, revealing knickers with your colostomy bag.
I blame Heather Mills McCartney.
Everything I’ve read about BBC3 is depressing. T’other day Graham Lineham wrote on his excellently-titled blog about paying a visit to their headquarters and seeing on the wall an apparently irony-free list of the traits of their Ideal target audience, which included the phrase “she smokes Marlboro Lights.”
I just hope ABC2 doesn’t end up going this way. So far, it seems to be doing OK.
Yes, Laura
So far ABCTV has stayed above most of the dross. But that Shier bloke wanted the ABC to buy the rights to “The Biggest Loser” a few years ago, didn’t he? Was it Shier? Is that a typo for Shi*e?
Well, “the Biggest Loser” is probably several steps above this crap.
Yes, some nice undies, Darlene, I will grant you that!
“The idea, I guess, is supposed to be that disability is no barrier to objectification”
The is exacting what I was thinking as I read your post, Kim and I get to the second last line and find that you’ve captured it neatly.
So next season will we be seeing males with disabilities for our viewing titillation?
Yeah, and they’ll be wearing sexy undies.
What, because anorexia and bulimia aren’t disabilities already?
I agree with Helen. Just because there are three billion females in the world doesn’t mean we can’t all look the same.
Is objectification always a bad thing? If so why and how can it be stopped?
I don’t know whether its always a bad thing, but the basing of someone’s worth or one’s self esteem on objectification is definitely a bad thing.
Wanders past…
http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/faq-what-is-sexual-objectification/
…wanders away.
Ummm… I don’t really know how to react. I’m profoundly ambivelant. Except I really wish people would give the word ‘bitch’ a rest. It’s really boring.
Try reading The Amazing Kim’s link, Adrien!
Oh come on…. men have been ‘gazing’ at women since time began and will continue to ‘gaze’ everytime a good looking sort wanders by – especially if she’s only wearing a nice set of silk underwear!
Whether or not she’s got a ‘disability’ is irrelevant.
Objectification happens… when I glance admiringly at a good looking blonde with large norks who wanders by… I’m reacting to her as an sexualised object. Yep sounds bad I know – but it’s part of what makes us men and women.
I’m happily married, have been for 17 years and have never once been unfaithful to my wife… but I’ll still ‘gaze’… even when it does result in a ‘gaze’ from my wife that’s the equivalent of a slap!
Shorter Andrew: I’m on the privileged side of the equation, so for me, what’s not to like?
No Helen: Shorter Me: I’m just your typical average bloke who likes looking at good looking sheilas… one leg or two.
I think we all like to “gaze” so we shouldn’t get too precious about that (at good looking sheilas and/or bonza blokes). However, it’s the constant use of the female form as a commodity and as a way to sell commodities that’s the big problem – and also that pesky old lack of equality thing.
Darlene – as someone who works in a male dominated industry I’m well aware that remains a lack of equality for women in many aspects of life. In many areas that’s a problem that needs to be addressed – but is some it’s not. In some areas, inequality of the sexes is something to be thankful for and literally embraced (unless you’re gay of course!)
Call me odd – but I think that men and women have very different views on sexuality and how its portrayed in the media.
Men are far more motivated by sex than women. Therefore, sexualised women appear far more often in ads than sexualised men. If you want to sell a man a fast car or new deodourant – then having a scantily clad sexy woman on the ad will help grab his attention. I doubt that having a scantily clad sexy man on an ad selling shoes would have the same impact for women (well unless its Denzel Washington and the target audience is my wife).
As a bloke – I don’t have a problem with that. I can see that some women do. I guess my point is that you’re never going to change it – blokes will always be ‘gazing’.
Viva la difference.
Shorter Andrew: I don’t understand the nature of the argument, can’t see that I’m being offensive and wouldn’t care if I could, can’t see that I’m completely outclassed here, and wouldn’t care if I did. I’m Blokety Bloke de Bloke, so shut up.
Thanks I’m well aware of the male gaze and objectification aspects of feminist discourse. If I was inclined to be tedious I could drag up some stuff from one of the three papers I wrote on Klute and the argument over its status as a ‘progressive’ film way back when. I believe that, um what was the name of that paper?, the question of ‘visual pleasure’ is oversimplified by the classic texts and would hope that some kind of progress has been made.
.
I don’t think ‘visual pleasure’ is morally wrong. I also think that objectification in the basic sense of the regarding of human features or form as an aesthtically pleasing object is probably part of being human. It doesn’t have to be dehumanizing. There are many women who agree with me. I know cause I know ‘em: they are intellgient, successful, brave and literate in feminist theory as well. Try giving one of them a link to Fem 101 and see how far that gets you.
.
My only regret is that I’ve lent my volume of Anais Nin interviews to someone. She had some very interesting things to say about the early 70s tendency toward problematizing the ‘male’ gaze. I can’t recall her eloquence but in sum she said: it’s a pointless exercise, it’s a pain in the arse, it’s no fun and it’s not just a male gaze.
.
My ambivelance is to do with the fact that on the one had I tend to think it’s okay for people to be sexy especially those who for one reason or another are not supposed to be. On the other hand I think, yes, it’s tacky and emblemic of 8 drunken lads at the Men’s Gallery Fri nights. Boring.
.
It would be nice if occasionaly I wasn’t assumed to be a male chauvanist ignoramus who think Simone de Beauvoir was the chick who washed Sartre’s dishes ’cause, like, I’m not and I don’t.
As a man, it’s quite a pleasure to speak up with women in mind who’ve lost limbs or have been otherwise physically disabled. I say “as a man” because these women were and are well aware of their femininity and were and are pleased to share it. That’s been given from their perspective openly and freely to me for one and gender differences are included.
Capable and confident and inspiring (and yes of course variously challenging) these women are, I do believe much in this post and thread would upset them if they saw it. Obviously I can’t speak fully from another person’s behalf like this, least of all to do them any justice on the internet as a blog comment to represent them as a person, and even the word ‘them’ which I’m using doesn’t suit. To speak personally of or for or about another is fraught, in blogs.
But from my own perspective, holding regard for these “disabled” women, something here seems amiss. I don’t know what it is. It’s a bit shocking to find something quite wonderful having been hijacked one way or another.
Re Darls’s coment re “gaze”, am actually going to try something sensible. The Gaze is indeed shorthand for a cultural process involving thousands of words, that does indeed go to commodification gone mad, when it comes to actually conditioning to people to be physically inactive, antiintellectual and prone to eccentricities etc, just to fit and operate within an atavistic ideal with no real relation to human need and efficacy.
Cultural? Entirely? There’s certain aspects to the way humans ‘gaze’ at each other. Certain universals viz what makes a beautiful body etc. It’s not entirely cultural. And it’s not entirely male either.
“It would be nice if occasionaly I wasn’t assumed to be a male chauvanist ignoramus”
a day to await with eager anticipation, when glib, judgemental and intolerant characterisations of others are no longer tossed around with abandon….
when I was a lad, a sub-section of “student politics” used to taunt policepersons and Liberal MPs with “fascist!”; inaccurate then and ignorant and shameful
it’s a pity to find outbreaks of very similar slack and ridiculously unfair abuse, not uncommon on teh blogs
a pity indeed
I’ve reached the conclusion that issues of gender, sex and feminism are almost impossible to discuss in a mature fashion in blog comments. People always end misunderstanding each other and getting upset.
Absolutely wrong ambig.
I know (smell) a fascist when I see(smell)one.
Same with scabs.
Funny ambi, I don’t believe that any one accused Adrien of being anything of the sort, but he has a tendency to personalise everything, to which my reaction is get over yourself, it’s not all about you, much as you’d like it to be.
You had a very different reaction, so maybe the above is a little harsh!
“Cultural? Entirely? There’s certain aspects to the way humans ‘gaze’ at each other. Certain universals viz what makes a beautiful body etc. It’s not entirely cultural. And it’s not entirely male either.”
I’d agree with that, Adrien. It’s cultural and it’s nature, I would’ve thought. If we didn’t have the “gaze” not sure if the reproduction of the species would’ve got very far. The “gaze” of itself isn’t a bad thing.
Andrew, I think your assumptions about females being less driven by sex than males is just that an assumption. Yes, sure there are difference between men and women, but these differences are often overstated in the interests of keeping the status quo intact.
Ambigulous, the sort of people who used to yell out “fascist” were just trying to be all so radical and hip (many of them are probably corporate lawyers or members of the ALP Right now). That sort of nonsense is just a kind of rites of passage thing that most people grow out of.
As has been noted before, blogs do seem to encourage some people to act like ill-mannered sods, but there are ill-mannered sods all over the place.
Don’t hear the word scab much anymore, Paul. Last time was when my mum was reflecting on the shearers strike of 1956 (?), which my late granddad took part in. It’d be interesting to know the origins of the word.
“I’ve reached the conclusion that issues of gender, sex and feminism are almost impossible to discuss in a mature fashion in blog comments. People always end misunderstanding each other and getting upset.”
I understand what you’re saying there, melaleuca. Of course, the history of the feminist movement itself is rife with misunderstandings and people getting upset. Here’s a link to a book about just that topic:
http://www.amazon.com/Sisterhood-Interrupted-Radical-Women-Grrls/dp/140398204X
Through all those misunderstanding and upsets, a lot of change was still made.
Darlene,
Thanks for putting this in perspective.
Yes, out of the fog of misunderstandings, personal hurt, anger and the occasional rational debate, what really matters ultimately is concrete improvements for women. I can see those everywhere, slow though the changes have been. Conditions are generally better for my daughters than they were for my wife and my mother.
And both my daughters are actively involved in working for concrete improvements, rather than kicking back and assuming things are OK. Which makes their Dad proud.
LP is a good forum.
“Don’t be too polite, girls,
don’t be too polite!
Show a little fight, girls,
Show a little fight…”
Glen Tomasetti circa 1969 http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE0600b.htm
PC,
My apologies if you were offended. That was not my intention. I’m just calling it as I see it – I’ll just go back to being a blokety bloke de bloke and shut up. I’m comfortable with who I am… no angst here!
Andrew
The way I read PC, she asserted that you thought everyone else should shut up. It seems she may have been mistaken about your attitude. On that occasion her mind-reading ability wasn’t up to scratch??
just sayin’
Correct. I was paraphrasing the great Marg Downey from her D-Generation and Fast Forward days, in her incarnation as a tough TV front-woman: ‘I’m Gina Hardfaced-Bitch, so shut up.’
Sorry, my cultural references tend to get a bit over-obscure, I know.
Bring back the D-Generation!
I love Australia.
You can be sexist, and racist, and it won’t affect your social life.
No – I don’t think everyone else should shut up – far from it. As I said above – Viva Le Difference….. what a boring place the world would be if we only ever heard from people who hold the same views!
All I’m saying is that most blokes like looking at good looking girls – the male ‘gaze’ is a much a natural phenomena as…. well…. sex?. The main point (and to address the original post) is that disability has nothing to do with it.
Andrew, your version of ‘difference’ is a total cop-out. To say ‘viva le difference’ or ‘to each his own’ has quite different implications when it is you that is being held to account. Here it’s just being used as a code word for being uninterested in examining your own privilege or taking responsibility for the effects of your actions (alongside their intent): it amounts to a moral relativism, which I doubt you would accept in other arenas.
sorry PC,
I missed your humorous intent. Marg Downey was great. I loved Chenille too, from the House of Waxing was it?
Ambi – L’Institut de Beauté and House of Hair Removal.
merci FDB, vive la beaute, et vive le depillation
KK – not quite sure what you’re saying. Moral relativism?
My ‘difference’ refers to two things. One – that men and women are different, and thank heavens for that. Two – different people have different views, and thanks heavens for that as well.
I would respectfully suggest that anyone who takes offence at the notion that men like looking at women has deeper hang-ups than will be solved by a debate on LP.
Andrew – [some] men like looking at women. Some women, at men.
The way they do it, what else they do to each other, and what it all means are perfectly debatable topics. If they don’t interest you, perhaps this is not the discussion for you.
At my slightly ripened age I’ve come to think that perhaps, one person’s prison is another’s liberation. Having grown up tomboy, feminist etc, I don’t think it hurts to question the enthusiasm for presenting the female as a walking work of art & artifice, but having a daughter who embraces so much of what I rejected, I’ve had to pull my head in a bit. Some people love to ‘display’ and to strut their stuff… trouble is that at a certain age girls are vulnerable to seeing themselves through the eyes of others and forgetting that they should please themselves. I have just read the Amazing Kim’s link to Feminism 101 and put it in the favourites list under ‘girlstuff’ for my daughter to read.
Perhaps they could follow up w/ one of those Japanese “torture the participants” shows. Get the disabled women to work their way out of a box of worms…or swim across a crocodile infested pool? I’m sure plenty would laugh, be thrilled. And eventually the disabled women would be seen as hip &/or abusable as anyone else.
Then we could all return to our caves, drooling, and have one big mighty shag.
Heck, if people wanna make bloody fools of themselves, put their self-confidence at risk & reach for the glitzy stars, then a lack of limb or deafness and such should be no barrier…provided we don’t start hearing the carny calling out that cheap tickets are available for tonite’s special show at the Carnivale. Altho, I guess a gal has gotta find a job somewhere.
Fortunately, some ladies w/ mobility aids &/or alternative physical structures, have the nouse to get educated, demonstrate their courage & willpower…& imagination & sense of humour…& make a path for themselves in careers like journalism/blogging…eh Kim?…:)
N’
“provided we don’t start hearing the carny calling out that cheap tickets are available for tonite’s special show at the Carnivale”
Endomol are the new carnies.
Discuss.
FDB wrote:
I won’t believe it until I see “Big Brother: Pickled Punks” on channel nine.
I love pickled punks, but nobody drags them around the show circuit any more and they’ll probably lose their appeal on TV.
“I won’t believe it until I see “Big Brother: Pickled Punks” on channel nine.”
Now that would be sweet. Bit hard to vote out the pretty one though.
FDB, as long as you don’t vote out the siamese twins in a jar, I’ll be happy.
Didn’t Sandilands express an interest in turning BB into a proper freak show this season? What stopped them, given that morbid fascination is the new hawtness. Have our entertaining overlords detected a kind of neo-victorian mood amongst us that we haven’t quite acknowledged?
The Return of the Revenge of the Ghost of Comedies of Manners Past?
I like it.
To the Manor Born, Absolutely Fabulous, Keeping Up Appearances, FDB?
Andrew, you are using ‘difference’ in two (interrelated) ways. Firstly, you are suggesting that sexual difference (ie at the biological level) explains both feminist criticism and the male gaze. But you are also (@43) citing ‘difference of opinion’ as a legitimate response to the request that you examine your privilege and also learn a bit about the concepts under discussion (as opposed to the everyday definitions of words like ‘gaze’). I take both of your uses of difference as being something of a cop-out – on the one hand by gesturing to unchangable nature, and on the other by gesturing to the inessential nature of opinions.
Ambi – my C of M exemplar will always be The Good Life. So amazingly insipid, unutterably cute, adverbly adjectivey… The Young Ones nailed it nicely.
FDB, “My Family” on the ABC is worse than The Good Life. Watch it if you dare.
I dare.
I assume the premise is along the lines: “my family is just like everyone else’s – like, totally crrraaaaayzeee!!!”
Andrew, I hope you groomed yourself appropriately before writing that comment. Just in case I want to know if you’re hawt or not before deciding how to respond to anything you say.
/runs away
Kim,
Sorry to disappoint you – but I’m definitely not ‘hawt’ but always well groomed. In fact I’m so uncool and unsexy that I had no idea what HAWT meant!! I had to google it and came up with the following definitions –
HAWT Have/Having A Wonderful Time
HAWT Horizontal-Axis Wind Turbine
I doubt you’re asking whether I generate electricity – and I’m not sure you’re worried about my happiness. So on deeper delving (and dodging of antiporn filters) I gather that ‘hawt’ means ’sexy hot’!!!
But if it helps you respond – just imagine me as Clooney or Pitt.
KK,
I know exactly what is meant by the male gaze….. you know… those shots in movies that linger on the cleavage of the heroine for just a moment too long for example.
I still don’t know why referring to biological differences is a cop-out. Surely that is the heart of the issue – not a cop-out. I’m saying that as a heterosexual man, I’m biologically hard-wired to react the way I do to good looking women (disability or not).
FDB, you’ve hit the show’s premise in one. I read with horror that it’s now in its ninth season, which just goes to show that the English will put up with anything if you present it as middle-class and Anglican.
If it helps anyone do anything, you can imagine me as Marty Feldman riding a postie bike down the F3 in the nude.
Further to my last comment: What can I say? I’m biologically hardwired to take my clothes off and ride puny motorcycles.
“If it helps anyone do anything, you can imagine me as Marty Feldman riding a postie bike down the F3 in the nude.”
It helped me guffaw and retch simultaneously. Does that count?
Andrew – the male gaze is not merely a literal description of light bouncing off titties into the eyeballs of men. Your failure to grasp this is exasperating, and I’m sure it’s not too late to bail out as per my suggestion above. http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/07/17/disability-and-body-image-and-reality-tv/#comment-488306
The only time I’ve ever had success with a cheesy pickup line is perhaps pertinent here. The line was “I’m sure there’s a lot else to like about you, but by jove you’re exquisite to look at”.
You had me at Hello, FDB.
Exasperate no longer FDB… I’ll bail out now.
/ picks up club, knocks-out good looking girl, drags her back to cave.
Chuckle.
Is this thread dead yet? If not I’ll do the honours – any person puzzled by the way the phrase ‘male gaze’ is being used by some people as if it means something more particular than just (to quote FDB) ‘a literal description of light bouncing off titties into the eyeballs of men’ could read this epoch-making article published in Screen in 1975 by Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ http://wam.umd.edu/~mquillig/20050131mulvey.pdf If you want you can skip striaght to part III.
(For the academics amongst us I will observe that the ERA draft rankings have said Screen is a C journal, which… is…. just…. crazy….)
For those of us who aren’t academics, a male (aka a bloke) is:
And a gaze is:
Laura:
Screen has a ‘C’ ranking?!?
Am struggling to come up with the appropriately confounded expletive.
Admittedly, it’s harder to come up with the right words when you’ve banged your head on your desk in dismay a few times.
“(For the academics amongst us I will observe that the ERA draft rankings have said Screen is a C journal, which… is…. just…. crazy….)”
Indeed. Worked my arse off to get in it, and now they don’t want it to count for anything. The ERA draft rankings for the humanities were all over the place.
Poor Laura, et al.
Breathtaking, aint it?
I want to say two things about the way this thread has gone:
1) That it’s inappropriate for people to say that a thread is “dead” because they don’t like what others are saying on it; and
2) That just because a commentator has a different awareness of something (say the “male gaze”) that mightn’t accord with an academic view doesn’t mean their view isn’t valuable and worth reading.
Thanks for linking to the Mulvey, Laura. It’s an oldy but a goody. However, it’s worth noting that it’s 30 years old and been subject to much criticism since. Personally, I don’t like the way it prescribes very narrow viewing positions for women (the trannie, the masochist etc), because it sems to rob women of all viewing agency. For instance, it doesn’t gel with my lived experience of film viewing. Neither does it talk about how women can use images for their own purposes. It also compltely discounts the pleaure that may come from being looked at. But it’s useful to realise that when the phrase the ‘male gaze’ is used this is what’s being referred to, strictly speaking.
What Fine said. (Except that the question of whether or not Mulvey was accurately describing actual experience is a different issue, I think. You could say the same about Marx, Freud etc etc, but their terminology would still mean what it means.)
The term ‘the male gaze’ was introduced into this discussion indirectly by The Amazing Kim at #11 when she linked to a page of the Finally a Feminism 101 Blog (a site I really cannot recommend strongly enough to anyone who is actually interested in understanding feminism), which featured the FAQ ‘What is the male gaze?’ and a link to an explanation.
In that context the term was being used as something that means something quite specific in both feminist theory and screen theory and especially, of course, in feminist screen theory.
The borrowing of terms in common usage to mean something much more specific happens across all conceptual frameworks and bodies of knowledge. If the discussion were about economics and someone said ‘market’, if it were about medicine and someone said ‘free radicals’, if it were about Marxism and someone said ‘alienation’, the effects would be the same.
Given that the term came into the discussion in its specialist sense, and that within a discussion of feminism or film it does have that specific meaning, then the discussion can really only collapse into incoherence if some people are using the phrase in its specialist meaning and others are not. If you went over to Catallaxy or Club Troppo and start chatting about the dream-catcher and incense you bought at your local Sunday street markets, I think they would give you very short shrift.
This is not to be exclusivist about this for a minute, only to reiterate that many ordinary-looking terms are also part of some specialist vocabulary and have different meanings in different contexts. As a wise man I know once said: ‘What we scornfully call “jargon” is actually just somebody else’s technical vocabulary.’
Sorry, #19.
*Wanders off sadly to fetch her glasses*
Very well put, Dr Cat. A shared recognition that terms are being used differently by different participants is a precondition to actual discussion, as you suggest. I would also like to stress that the feminist use of the concept has a life outside of academia, as the initial link demonstrates.
Ahem, I wasn’t expressing a view on Mulvey’s essay (though if I had to I’d say it describes very well a certain tendency and moment of classical cinema and was never meant to be used as an umbrella description for all kinds of films.) It was clear that not everyone here was on the same page and that’s never very conducive to equable discussion.
Darlene at 76 – what’s wrong with giving people the background? Knowledge is power and all that. You needn’t get so very defensive about it.
Paul Walter @ 75, yes, it is. Breathtakingly f*cked up.
Thanks Darlene & P’sC.
Yes, some ‘ordinary’ terms have technical meanings, and someone adept in the area will know the technical meaning (and likely also the debates around the term and its applicability) ….. but ….. another person may in fact reject the theory the term is used in.
e.g. I might be aware of Marx’s term “alienation” and yet believe that his focus on alienation made him miss (say) three other factors I think are important in analysing industrial capitalism. I might not be misunderstanding his terminology, I may simply be rejecting his theory.
So in agreeing with Darlene, I’d suggest that it’s not very useful to assume ignorance in one’s interlocutors. Try to help the ignorant, don’t be unkind to them (us). Laura, I don’t think Darlene’s being “so very defensive”. Someone is entitled to put their viewpoint. Even to defend their viewpoint staunchly. To call someone “defensive” is not always helpful, I think; just saying.
I know you weren’t laura. I just thought I’d express a view. Even though I think Mulvey’s essay is an essential one in terms of thinking about looking at films, I actually don’t agree with her in terms of classical Hollywood narratives. But that’s probably a whole different conversation.
Yes, ambi, but to reject the theory the term is used in you first have to have a grasp of the theory. Take your example of Marxism; if you reject the Marxian worldview as is your right, and you use “alienation” contrary to its use in that field, you’re not engaging.
If someone were to say for instance “I’m not alienated at work, there’s nothing alien at all about it” it’d be clear they had no idea about the term, though their use of the actual word was gramatically valid.
Invite you to see the obvious parallel to the abuse of the phrase “male gaze” here etc. etc.
Yes, Liam: fair point. Before rejecting Marx’s concept of alienation it is necessary that I understand it. And it’s unfair if I misrepresent his views.
***
What I find troubling about the characterisation of person B by person A as “defensive”, is this: A is unlikely to be in a position to assess correctly the motivation of B; the motivation or mood of B is usually irrelevant in any case, and the diagnosis of alleged “defensiveness” does not advance the debate.
A could say, “I see, B, that you disagree with me. I have other reasons for my position. They are: 4, 5 and 6. Do you find them unpersuasive also? And to return to my 2 & 3, there’s an interesting book/article/theory/blog by C. Here it is. [LINK]”
Instead, B tells A they’re being defensive. End of story? I think discussion leads to knowledge. And “Knowledge is power and all that.”, as Laura said.
cheerio
Sorry Ambigulous for troubling you.
Just to explain myself. I felt that there was some intellectual snobbery on display, but I think I was wrong about that.
There was an attempt to clarify what a term means (i.e. the male gaze).
I am coming from the position that there is an academic concept of the “gaze”, but there are also concepts that the layperson holds. Not everybody is going to understand Mulvey (and I hope the blog is an inclusive place, which I think it is).
I think everybody’s contribution has been worthy. While I disagree with Andrew about his ideas about female and male sexuality, I think he was saying what he believes to be true, and he wasn’t being rude about it, so his view had worth.
Having thought more about this, I also realise that every field has its own language. It’s interesting that I find the “jargon” of the social sciences easier to dispense with or challenge or say there are other understandings of terms than I would if we were dealing with, say, mental health issues. I guess I would presume that a psychiatrist would have knowledge that a layperson wouldn’t. However, I would also think a patient of a psychiatrist would have insights that the doctor wouldn’t about an illness or disorder.
I think I’m rambling, but thanks everybody.
Oh and apologies to Laura.
no worries, laura
Shorter Ambigulous: calling someone “defensive” doesn’t advance a debate, imo.
FFS Ambigulous, going on and on about the same minor point doesn’t advance ‘debate’ either. Bangs head against desk.
“Shorter Ambigulous” That’s something I’d like to see more of!
OK
Heh.
Well played, Ambi. Well played.
ta, L
/ pokes head back out of cave
Thanks Darlene – appreciate the support, even if you do disagree with me! I do understand the concept of the ‘male gaze’…. but there are many prisms through which ‘gaze’ can be seen. I was deliberately choosing the prism that most fit with Kim’s original post. The sexual objectification of women.
/ heads back into cave for rumpy pumpy with sexual object… I mean chick… I mean one legged woman.
Can I just remind fellow sufferers that Andrew himself is, by his own admission, not hawt?
Colin Firth is, though. Phwoar.
There’s a series of assumptions at play here. The first is that there is a ‘male gaze’ as if there isn’t a female gaze. That’s not true according to studies of the brain:
The girls can do it too y’all – http://mednews.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/7319.html
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Also the brains of lesbians in some ways bear more resemblance to the brains of straight men – http://www.webmd.com/news/20060508/women-respond-pheromones
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Surprise?
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No-one mention science. I did once but I think I got away with it.
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The fact of the culture is that whilst the Humanities Academy has been busy rendering the male gaze immoral out in the world a whole generation has grown up accepting the sex industry, its products, services and aesthetics as normal, even desirable. ‘Round 1990 I heard many cry out against the male gaze and from that moment forth I saw most simply reject the battle call.
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There’s a series of assumptions built into discussions of the male gaze. First that it’s male. This is bollocks. The second is that this gaze renders those gazed at a powerless object. I wonder what some nervous geek would say to that if you should interrupt him in the throes of awe at some passing goddess?
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What is the point of this discussion? Is it on whether the image at the top of this thread is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Is the woman behind it all an active agent seeking to challenge this notion that a disabled woman is neither capable of desire or being desired. Or she a brainwashed patriarchally dominated automation? Neither? Both?
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I merely seek information.
Ambigulous and Adrian #32/#35 -
Funny when I was being glib and hyperbolous – using the male chauvanist pig riff – you seem to know that. Adrian didn’t..
No. It was a joke.
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But I do find that in discussing race or sex with persons of the Left generally, I am often required to go into lengthy digression re I am not a bigot. I am required to do this because one who does conform to an orthodoxy is assumed to be such. This can happen with the Right as well. I’ve been accused of being an anti-Semite for not regarding everything Israel does as Righteous.
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Often here when I discuss issues pertinent to feminism I am directed to that Feminism 101 site which summarizes certain aspects of introductory topics on the subject with which I was quite familiar by the time I entered my second year of university. I may be a heretic but like most heretics I know the scripture. In fact I was the first here to refer to Mulvery’s rather outdated and over-simplistic essay – http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/07/17/disability-and-body-image-and-reality-tv/#comment-487869
Mmmm. I should like it Adrian if you would quote me personalizing anything (this comment doesn’t count). I should also like Ambigulous to quote instances of my intolerance. These descriptions are simply not true.
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And I am over myself old sock, perhaps you should get over me too.
Ah Adrian to possess one-tenth of your sophistication. I don’t agree in the least that Mulvey’s essay is outdated or oversimplistic. I think it’s pretty demanding stuff actually, like most genuine psychoanalytic criticism, not because of the jargon (which is a bit faded) but because it is very difficult to overcome one’s resistance to what it suggests about almost everyone’s (decent kind normal people) enjoyments and pleasures taken in watching narrative films. And I still think Laura Mulvey’s essay is quite startlingly relevant to the topic of Kim’s post, actually, because among other things it argues that one aspect of fascinated pleasure in the look of a woman is that a woman can be seen as castrated.
That’s fair enough. I didn’t say it was easy to understand. It isn’t. Psychoanalysis generally is demanding (altho’ I don’t have much time for it). I’m also not saying that it’s irrellavent either.
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However it is theoretical conjecture. Even by the time I got to university there were various empirical studies that suggested that the rigidly gendered modes of ‘viewing’ that the essay suggests are a simplistic reduction of what goes on. That there’s a whole kaleidoscope of ways in which people see things.
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Moreover there’s the realms of other disciplines. It seems to me that if you want to understand ‘male gaze’ then you can’t simply apply psychoanalysis and be done with it. Psychoanalysis has never been demonstrated to provide evidence of anything. SO what do you do? You have to combine studies of the physical brain, data about emotional responses, sociological information etc and you may generate interesting perspectives.
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At base this is really a discussion about aesthetics and ethics. There is an assumption that this idea that Mulvey advocated – objectification – is solid. But it isn’t. I remember one fellow student on being introduced to the notion say that it was rubbish – what else can you do but objectify said she.
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We have a disposition to aesthetic assessment. This person is nice looking, this one is not. Does that process dehumanize by itself or is something else at work as well? Does the process dehumanize at all even?
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I don’t think that these matters are simply rubbish. However I do think there’s a whole slab of stuff that is inadmissable in these discussions. I find that most frustrating. It appears to me that if this subject matter was open to pluralistic inquiry we would not be talking about “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” we would be talking about something else that had already already superseded it.
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For my part I think the essay combines a few notions fashionable in the 70s but outmoded.
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One such is that ‘narrative cinema’ is ‘bourgeois’ and/or ‘patriarchal’. There was a whole slew of avant-garde attempts to ‘liberate’ film from the narrative at the time. A range of critics used the anti-narrative proclivities of filmmakers as a litmus test of their progressiveness. I remember one such lauding 2001: A Space Odyssey for its challenges to narrative form and then bemoaning the ’sell-out’ of A Clockwork Orange. The critic like many such, seemed completely oblivious to the fact that artists don’t care that much about theory.
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Kubrick himself,as far as I’m aware, only commented on this issue once. In an interview promoting The Shining he agreed with the journalist that Literature had abandoned the story and that the mythology and motifs that such stories supply were now the province of popular generic fiction. He thought this a shame. I agree.
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I tend to find that that anti-narrative cinema or anti-psychological characterization – as much fun as they are in discussion – are tedious generally in the viewing or reading. Raymond Chandler will be read a hundred years hence. Robbe-Grillet will not. (My prophecy which is mine). I also find the notion that these avant-gardes somehow precipitate revolutionary dispositions onto audiences fanciful twaddle unless one means that a viewing of Tout Va Bien in Muncy, Illinois is likely to inspire riots.
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As to the other aspect of Mulvey’s essay: that the Woman in cinema is not the Agent of the Action (ie the hero’s always a guy) and that that limits the purview of what women believe possible and the rest. (Yes I know I’m over-simplifying it but this comment’s already too long)…
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That has validity. How important these images are, how important the images at the top of this post are – is a matter for debate. But it would be nice if we dealt with some first principles and asked some basic and pertinent questions: what’s the good, what’s the harm, what does it actually do? And in answering let’s go beyond a purely theoretical speculation from Screen magazine’s halcyon days inspired as they were by Truffaut and Godard holding up the Cannes film festival.
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La lutte continue.
To cut to the chase, Adrien (you don’t half bang on): you seem to be arguing that Mulvey’s hypothesis was that only the male gaze exists. That is a misrepresentation of Mulvey’s work. I posit that her argument was far more that the male gaze is uniquely socially privileged in our cultures, and that all of us are surrounded by an overwhelming majority of images seen through the lens of a a male gaze, which has thus become the norm against which other gazes are weighed and measured. Those of us who are not heterosexual males end up nonetheless filtering our own gaze responses in reaction to the societal acculturation of the male gaze, and responding accordingly.
Pure analysis of science doesn’t take us very far here – biological fictions such as “race” can still be sociological facts.
Still nothing involving Foucault and his Panopticons
Duh!
Too
snobby, I suppose?
“Kubrick himself,as far as I’m aware, only commented on this issue once. In an interview promoting The Shining he agreed with the journalist that Literature had abandoned the story and that the mythology and motifs that such stories supply were now the province of popular generic fiction. He thought this a shame. I agree.”
I wrote an essay on Kubrick & The Shining once. I can’t remember it.
Still can’t get that horrific typing scene outa my mind. Now that was OCD.
Adrien,
I wasn’t accusing you of intolerance. Sorry you took it that way.
Thinking about Mulvey’s essay and the ‘male gaze’ in relationship to reality tv, I think there’s a problem to which I don’t know the answer yet. Mulvey was writing, not just about cinema, but quite a specific sort of cinema, classic Hollywood narrative. She’s writing about how we’re sutured into viewing positions through the shot/reverse shot syntax and that those positions are always ‘male’ regardless of actual gender. Given the specificity of what she’s talking about, (a specific sort of cinema and certainly not television), I wonder if this argument can be mapped onto reality tv easily. I’m not sure. I don’t think the language of this sort of television is the same language as classic Hollywood narrative, so there is a problem to be solved, for me anyway. Any takers?
tigtog, I think your summation of Mulvey is accurate and that Adrien is misreading her. And I really don’t know what Kubrick has to do with it, except as a form of idol worship. But, I still don’t agree with Mulvey in the way she talks about these viewing positions. It doesn’t take into account how women can use them for their own purposes. It also doesn’t take into account how active, feisty and wonderful the women were in these films. I still have my doubts that women who watched them and and watch them now, are so tightly sutureed into these positions. Certainly, there’s been a great deal of feminist film theory since Mulvey that argues effectively against her. My understanding is that a lot of scholarship going on now is about specific female audiences at specific historical moments and how they used going to the movies.
Thanks fine,
so one poster treats Kubrick as an idol, while another reveres Mulvey? It must all be in the gaze.
Golly, perhaps every filmgoer “uses” a Kubrick film in her own way, just as every reader reads Mulvey in a unique way. Could I construct a whole THEORY out of that basic observation? Naaahh, surely not!
Wasn’t having a go at you Ambi. More curious about what Kubrick’s opinion of avant-gards cinema had t do with e discussion. As we all gaze curiously at these problems.
Oh gawd, just saw how badly typed that response was. Where’s my brain today?
“And I still think Laura Mulvey’s essay is quite startlingly relevant to the topic of Kim’s post, actually, because among other things it argues that one aspect of fascinated pleasure in the look of a woman is that a woman can be seen as castrated.”
And thats a brilliant observation.
Until I read your comment Laura, I was more inclined to see the anxiety that the missing limbs might generate as coming from Kristeva’s idea of the Abject. However the castration complex is much more applicable. The starkness of the missing limbs, amdist the comforting traditional objectifications in this picture would indeed provoke the sorts of anxieties which come from the idea of woman as the symbolically castrated male. Well argued, as always.
Wish you would come back and post sometimes.
Okay. But how else was I supposed to read #32?
I cite Kubrick as an example of a filmmaker with probably unequalled control over his product – Mulvey’s hopes for ‘artisanal cinema’ come to mind – who disregarded the various assertions of film theorists arguing that narrative is somehow political. Yet he, during the course of his entire career, experimented with film narrative.And did so in a way that did not alienate audiences: The Killing, Lolita, 2001, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut all diverge from the classic 1, 2a,2b, 3 structure of Hollywood cinema.
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In many other ways he challenges the assumptions of the 70s film theorists viz ‘Hollywood’ cinema and emotional v intellectual cinema. I suspect that’s why he isn’t popular with those who set the curricula. I dig his work but the citation was in aid of the argument.
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The argument was that there is divergence in artistic practice from the theory which is more or less irrellevent to it.
On brilliant observations.
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Mulvey’s essay is based on the post-Lacan reading of Freud popular with certain film theorists. She made this branch of theoretical specualation popular with those who wished to look at cinema from a feminist perspective.
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Central to her thesis is the assumption that Freud’s theory of castration complex (the male equivalent of ‘penis envy’ which she does not mention) is correct:
I wonder what Katherine Hepburn would have to say about that. Well perhaps her characters are exceptional. Perhaps Mame Denis in Auntie Mame is exceptional. Perhaps Gloria Swanson’s last film role is likewise an exception. I could go on with these exceptions all day. But then I’d be banging on.
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Mulvey reduces the female actors, the writers, the (very few) directors, their characters and stories – to ’sexual objects’. She reduces female audience members to conduits of male oppression and male viewers to bludgeoned gorillas who use their willies for thinking with. She seems oblivious to the fact that according to the best knowledge of the market available during the classic Hollywood era – it was women who decided which flick to see. She might read Hitchcock by Truffaut for an articulation of this. She’d also find a very insightful discussion on Rear Wondow.
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Is Greer Garson’s Elizabeth Bennet merely decoration for us the viewers? Does she merely serve to give something for Laurence Olivier to look at while he strolls about proudly in his classic Dandy finery dismissing any suggestion that he should indulge the middle-classes at play?
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That’s an insult. I’m sorry if I were Greer Garson or Tallulah Bankhead or Audrey Hepburn I’d throw a glass of claret in Mulvey’s face. Women are more than ornaments. Mulvey is plain wrong there. Likewise:
Which is why Arnold Schwarzanegger, Sylvester Stallone, Steve Segal (whince) and the rest all cover up their glistening torsos onscreen. It’s why boxers always wear a head to toe shroud.
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Oh wait they don’t.
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But anyway. This notion that men need to control women because the fact of their bodies is somehow productive of an anxiety that they will lose their willies is nonsense. There are much more basic materialistic and psychological reasons for patriarchal dominance. Likewise the notion that little girls are psychically clouded with envy on becoming aware that todgers abound. I’ve seen little girls looking at statues of male figures in art galleries. Their reaction to the todgers they are s’possedly so envious of is almost always hysterical laughter. Freud’s theories in this regard are unsubstantiated swill. There has never been a single skerick of evidence backing any of ‘em up.
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Now to be sure cinema was and is still a male dominated industry. To be sure likewise it is conventional (I would not say traditional) for the female star to be treated as an ornament. However that’s simply not the whole story. There were, and are, female actors who labour an artistic vocation. Be nice if they got a little respect; especially from feminists! That said it’s simply beyond me how one can address the issue of male dominance, of sexual stereotype, of derogatory ideas about women by reference to a theory that is sexist tosh.
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What any of this has to do with the above is a good question. Disability Bitch is not part of the matrix of a male-dominated industry, she’s doing this of her own volition. Now what happens? Is it because she’s brainwashed by dominant male codes or is she simply doing it to express herself? How does this theory get applied? Does it? Ever?
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Of course not. Because if it did we’d realize that it’s a load of cobblers.
Amazing isnt it? Visual Pleasures was written in 1973 and published in 1975 at the height of second wave feminism. It was and remains a foundational text for those first approaching feminist film theory.
Surprising but true, since then, the essay has been endlessly critiqued, and responded to. Mulvey herself offered her own response to these criticisms in 1981 and this can be found here:
http://afc-theliterature.blogspot.com/2007/07/afterthoughts-on-visual-pleasure-and.html
wiki provides an overview of some of the critiques here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_film_theory
So none of the objections to Visual Pleasures raised here are new. I read that Mulvey did say Visual Pleasures was written to provoke.
Which is what it has done here. Beautifully. Even, if you like, brilliantly.
I just don’t understand why all the young people on this thread are making such a big fuss about “the male gays.” Honestly, I thought all you left-leaning people were in favor of the male gays! I’m constantly being told on this blog about how all the male gays should be treated as individuals, and not stereotyped like they were all the same — so how can you turn around and say now, that there’s only one theory of the male gays? And then what about all the female gays? They probably exist, too, you know. It just doesn’t make any sense!
[Emily, they're talking about "the male *gaze*," not the male gays.]
Oooohhh.
Never mind.
at 32 “a day to await with eager anticipation, when glib, judgemental and intolerant characterisations of others are no longer tossed around with abandon….” by which I meant folk were glibly regarding you as a chauvinist, and displaying thereby their own intolerance,
cheers
It’s great that a 33 year old essay should prompt such debate.
I first read it about 15 years ago when I was doing post-grad cinema studies, which I loved. I think Mulvey’s essay is a useful provocation. I don’t think it’s a case of Mulvey being wrong, but I do think it’s a case of Mulvey looking at films in a very specific post-Freudian way. This opens up a interesting ways of thinking about classic Hollywood film, but it’s only part of the story. Basically, I’d agree with Adrien here. Actors such as Hepburn, Lombard, Davis, Crawford, Stanwyck etc. were used by women viewers in a variety of ways. But they were such livewires and so much more interesting than the bulk of the male actors that Mulvey’s essay does do the way they were viewed a disservice. Male actors such as Grant and Cooper were also objectified in similar ways. Who were the viewers of these images? Women. And I’m sure a great deal of visual pleasure was taken in the viewing.
Bu of course, Casey is right. None of this is new. I just wish women in mainstream Hollywood films now had such strong roles as they used to. Now it’s teenage boys who drove the box-office and the films are pitched mainly to that market.
It would be interesting to see where the social constructionist feminists locate the gay gaze in their framework.
A starting point might be the work of Richard Dyer, who has drawn on Mulvey to answer exactly that question.
Male actors such as Grant and Cooper were also objectified in similar ways. Who were the viewers of these images?
My mother. In fact I’ve had so much Cary Grant pushed on me I should hate him.
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But he’s just sooooo cool.
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So is my mother objectifying him? Well he was a fine lookin’ chap. In Charade Audrey Hepburn asks him: You know what’s wrong with you?
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He says: What?
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And she bats those beautiful eyes and purrs: Nothing!
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My mother concurs. But am I objectifyng Hepburn.
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The reason I ask is that I have a problem with this notion objectifying. If I see someone and think they’re attractive; if I check them out – if I gain visual pleasure looking at another person am I objectifying that person? Does my gaze hit the side of her face?
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Well not literally. In reality the light is reflected off her and reaches my eyes. My brain processes the image. I imagine what is referred to in the popular lingo as ‘pleasure centres’ light up. She is an object – in the sense of being of material substance. But do I render her, in my mind, a thing – as in a lifeless object. An object without feelings or thoughts or interests? I don’t think so.
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Doubtless people do. It’s hard to read about that nasty business in Werribee last year and not think of objectifying. It’s also quite impossible to totally disregard the omniscience of pornography as a factor in that very unpleasant occurence. History is crammed to the brim with humans denying humanity to other humans and often on the basis of difference: sexual, racial, social, economic.
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But I’m not certain that that is what happens when we fancy that someone’s nice looking. Or that we’re inviting that to happen when we dress or act ’sexual’. In fact the reason that Cary Grant, that Audrey Hepburn are so attractive goes beyond their pleasantly shaped ‘meat n bone’. It’s inextricably wrapped up in who they are, how they talk, dress, move and crack a joke.
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So back to the picture above are these women inviting us to ‘objectify’ them. In one sense yes. They appear in a manner that is suppsed to invoke sexual desire: they’re in lingerie. But I don’t think they’re intention is to have us dehumanize them I think it’s quite the contrary. They’re saying they are human, they are sexual. They are resisting the notion that their disabilities render them otherwise. Of course there is, in these costumes, some imlpied sexual stereotype; but is this because of their servility or their lack of imagination. Or perhaps our lack of imagination generally?
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Unfortunately we deploy classifications that are harsh and puritan. If you see someone and think ‘yum’ that’s objectification. If you like looking at pictures of people with their clothes off, that’s objectification. If it’s not, what is. When does that sort of thing become objectification?
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Perhaps instead of treating the ‘gaze’ (of straight guys or otherwise) as morally nefarious we might instead seek to develop a new version of the age-old solution to this reality: ettiquette. Just a thought.
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And now back to the castration complex.
Actually the principle objection to the essay was made before it was written. Castration Complex is a speculation that is founded on nothing.
No she didn’t. She made a response to one criticism. That criticism was that she’d positioned the viewer as male and didn’t adequately address the female viewer. She does so in the afterword by reference to Freud’s theories on sexual development.
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Freud’s theories on sexual development have been widely excavated to be the purest shite. However they persist. Why? Because when a really elegant doctrine proves completely ungrounded in anything life on the planet Earth actually does well we stupid monkeys turn it into a quasi-religious dogma. A perfect little circle of the most eloquent and beautifully rendered twaddle.
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Why Freudians always crap on about the Oedipus complex and not about the ideas of his that were, like, good. I’ll never know. Maybe it’s genetic. A genetic predisposition to read books and come away with the bollocks. That’d explain the Trots I ’spose.
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Mulvey writes:
See again – nonsense. There is not one libido. There are as many libidos as creatures who harbour sexual urges. Also it appears if one refers to, y’know, the brain n stuff, that males and females have differently structured libidos. That libido in heterosexuals is different from taht in homosexuals and so forth.
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But forget that. Let’s talk about little girls, their phallic phases and penis envy and why that’s why Pride and Prejudice adaptations are always so successful.
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Discussions like this always remind me of clerical objections to Columbus’s voyage. Always on the basis of something Aristotle wrote.
So, Adrien, what Freud have you read?
A bit PC.
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The only books I really like are Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents. And The Uncanny sorta. I think his case studies are dull. His theories of sexual development are interesting but subject to critical reflection. And being such have proved to be merely speculative.
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Also if he did today, as a clinician, what he did then. They’d lock him up.
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He’s a 19th century European male suffering from the Hegallian delusion. No I don’t mean he was an Hegallian.
Adrien at 121
Any time you want to bang on about twaddle you’ve discerned, feel free. That’s what I like at LP: someone challenging a widely accepted corpus.
I thought Freud’s “Leonardo” was amazingly crass. ‘Analysing’ a bloke who’d been dead for centuries, for Pete’s sake; Sigmund never met him. Flimsy. Trite. Twaddle.
cheers
“Any time you want to bang on about twaddle you’ve discerned, feel free.”
The problem is that there is no evidence or alternate readings provided, to back up these mysteriously intuited discernments.
No one here is suggesting Freud is spot on then, now and forevermore. He was the founder of psychoanalysis. He was a patriarch who lived over 100 years ago. People would do well to read his case studies as they reveal just how much of a patriarch he was. eg, A contrast of Hans and Dora illumine this, er, brilliantly.
It would be helpful to understand that when Mulvey used Freud to underpin Visual Pleasures in 1973, it was a subversive act.
Feminists had considered Freud untouchable because of his inherent patriarchy. It would be useful to read Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” here. She argued that his theory of sexuality functioned to confirm and sustain masculine dominance and prescribe women’s inferiority. This was in place until Juliet Mitchell came along in 1974 with her book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. She argued that psychoanalysis is a description of the patriarchy rather than a prescription from the patriarchy. So when Mulvey used Freud, it was still controversial. It was akin to raising patriarchy’s own weapon against it. People need to do some reading on the history of feminism and its use of Freud and psychoanalysis and why it chose to go this way. That way the argument could develop a little nuance.
BTW how do your prove a psychoanalytic theory is wrong? What proof is there? There are developments on theories, and counter theories, but there is no proof regarding socialisation. Unless someone has found the gay gene, or the girl gene, or the boy gene?
anyways for those who seem to be struggling there is this great blog which explains feminism:
http://finallyfeminism101.blogspot.com/
Applying pure freudian principles in therapy today would be equal to bleeding people when they get an illness.
“the girl gene, or the boy gene? ”
in terms of libido, that is….
Good points Casey…. but you characterised Adrien’s judgements as “these mysteriously intuited discernments”.
This is where we depart from each other, I think. He made several judgements. How do you know they were simply intuited? Reading them, it seemed to me they were based on his observations, his understandings of film and film critique, his intelligence, his weighing of many social and psychological theories…. etc. That’s what it sounded like to me.
I think Adrien is a thinker rather than a disciple. But his mind is not a tabula rasa: he has done some reading. Of course it’s not either/or as thinker/disciple. But I’m interested in his judgements. I don’t take him as an authority, I read him as a thoughtful contributor.
If his statements don’t “fit” into a 1970s feminism or a 1990s feminism or a noughties feminism or a Lacanian filmcrit schema, well what of it??
If refined and ground-breaking theorists can’t find a way to talk to the unwashed, then so much the worse for both the theorists and the unwashed whose taxes help support the theorising.
I’m very old-fashioned. I still cling to a belief in empirical grounding of theories, and to a hope for effective popularisation of new ideas. Sorry to bang on. Cheerio.
I don’t think that castration complex is widely accepted at least by psychologists. Literary/cinema critics tend to use it. I think it’s alright in a way to do this. But to apply it as an authoratative way of understanding the psychology of film viewing goes a bit far. It’s a little like the collective unconscious; as a basis for a work of literature like The Sandman it’s fab. As a means of understanding the workings of the human mind well it’s a bit on the nose.
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I don’t hate Freud and Jung. They started a discussion we had to have. I just don’t think it ends there. I also find it a little obstructive to demonize the ‘male gaze’ if for no better reason then it prevents honest discussion. I’m a male, I gaze; I don’t think it wrong. It can be wrong hence my point viz ettiquette. But I’m always aware that women are people quite capable of gazing back. I know this from experience some of the most ruthless gazers I’ve ever met are women.
Indeed. I did spend a semester wrapping my head around the application of psychoanalysis to cinema which of course included Mulvey. Funnily enough a lecturer in English Lit/Philosophy once advised me ‘not to listen to the feminists’ and dismiss Freud – she wasn’t anti-feminist per se but she did have problems with some of the tendencies attendant to feminist intellectual discourse.
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Psychoanalysis isn’t patriarchy’s weapon really. The unsurprising fact that the founder of psychoanalysis advocated the sexist notions commonplace in his time doesn’t rule this out. Aristotle was sexist that doesn’t mean that a feminist can’t make use of the notion of catharsis or some such. Patriacrhy existed well before psychoanalysis and many of the conservative custodians of patriarchy were amongst Freud’s most hostile opponents.
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My point is that the Freudian theories Mulvey uses are fanciful. We should move beyond that. I’ve attempted to do this by asking the question: is Disabled Bitch really ‘objectifying’ hereself? And if so what does that mean exactly?
Wow. I think the premise of this show may even be more retarded than the American show “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here!”
This is just plain disgusting.