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.