Special Third World Women's Issue," and Black
It’s true: in this country when we say women’s issues we often really mean white women’s issues because we see whiteness as the baseline
35 Matching Annotations
- Nov 2020
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Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street.
This right here highlights a large body of the failures of 2nd wave feminism. It was so exclusionary in its focus on white, heterosexual, upper class women’s issues and that lead to a lack of unity and some disturbing implications about what are and are not valid women’s issues
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Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women
It’s like the child as a phallic symbol thing!!
Also on a more serious note, trying to get power by playing into systems that are built around disenfranchising those same people is just not the way to go.
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What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.
I’ve never thought about it that way. The phrase “modern problems require modern solutions” comes to mind, except this is far from a modern problem
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I stand here as a Black lesbian feminis
Would this paper have been written by a white straight feminist? Or would it not exist at all because no one would’ve noticed the disparity?
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The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.
Can I get a hell yeah for intersectional feminism
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- Sep 2020
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The male unconscious has two avenues of escape
Or the secret third option: Have enough security in your own masculinity/worth as a human being that you don’t need to oppress women to make yourself feel powerful
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hows in a striking case how the strength of this female protagonist is more apparent than real.)
God if I had a dollar for every time there was a “strong” female character whose strength was constantly proclaimed but never shown I wouldn’t have had to do community college to afford higher education
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As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.
It’s like porn but instead of sexual gratification you’re getting a weird power fantasy (which also corresponds to aspects of the id)
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male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.
Still like that today. Images of male sexuality are often centered on notions of power, and anytime a man takes a passive sexual role it is usually as a form of parody/as a spectacle in it of itself since that’s not how men are “supposed” to express their sexuality
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Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end,
LOVE this wording
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as soon as fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the erotic image on the screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishisation, concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from
If this is what happens with the presumed heterosexual male audience, what about other viewers (women, queer people, etc who may have a different relationship to the female form/its portrayal)
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It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged.
Yes. This. All of this.
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women in represen-tation can signify castration, and activate voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent this threat.
Women = castration Castration = emasculation
Therefore man must dominate woman to negate the threat of emasculation
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patriarchal superego.
A sense of morality based on a male-dominant worldview (active man, passive woman)
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Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to.
YIKES I wish I could say this is a bygone trope, but sadly not. When you think of it that way too, isn’t the notion of “love at first sight” kind of a red flag?
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In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the audience.
Hard to comment without seeing these films for context, but it seems that the female characters’ stories end with the end of the film, while the male characters are implied to go on to bigger and better things after the fact within the film’s universe
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Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being projected upside-down so that story and character involvement would not interfere with the spectator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image. This statement is revealing but ingenuous: ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the woman
This just makes me think of how in fantasy video games they will do practically any ridiculous thing to their female characters EXCEPT make them not conventionally attractive. That’s just too far apparently. But it’s for art apparently so that makes them immune to criticism
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the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude.
The key problem
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homosexual eroticism
Isn’t calling buddy movies gay sexist/homophobic in it of itself? Guys should be able to be close without having their sexuality and masculinity questioned.
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buddy movie
Before buddy movies were a staple in film
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The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simul- taneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness
What’s even more insidious about male gaze though is the passive female role. It makes the woman a sex object who is passive in her own sexuality, and therefore has no control. Sexualizing just the state of being a woman
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The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identifi-cation with the image seen.
So for example if women are portrayed in a sexually objectifying way, then the audience is made to identify with the male protagonist who is benefitting from that structure, they are more likely to project that into their own world views
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penis and secondly thereby raises her child into the symbolic.
Penis = object symbolizing power Child = only way women can typically attempt to gain power/a place within society Child also = another burden keeping women out of society since they are expected to stay home and take care of them (ex: I feel like I hardly ever see other women when I go on public transit)
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the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing it.
Reference to Freud’s theory about id, ego, and superego. Id = primal instincts (ex: sex drive). Constantly seeking pleasure
Ego: Judgement, mediator b/n id & superego. Serves to obtain desires of the id, but in a way that fits within superego’s moral framework
Superego: Morality. Responsible for controlling id’s impulses and forming aspirations
So essentially by removing the ego you’d have the raw desires for sex and violence of the id paired with the idealized version of reality of the ego, and nothing to keep them in check. So bad.
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Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer.
I still don’t quite get this.
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Peeping Toms
A paraphilia that focuses on the non-consensual objectification of others is colloquially given a masculine name
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At this point ( he associated scopophilia with_ taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.
Sounds familiar. Kinda like how women are shot in movies. Crazy I know.
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Written in 1973 and published in 1975 in Screen
Written not long before Rocky Horror Picture Show was produced. Reinforces her point about how alternative cinema can serve as a counterpoint to patriarchal visual language
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It is no longer the monolithic system based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.
It’s that and so much more!
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the sexing of the female infant
Literally so many expectations are put on kids before they even have a concept of who they are, all based on whatever genitals they happened to be born with
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Woman then stands in patriarchar culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning.
This resonates so hard with me and makes me think of literally every time I’ve been catcalled on the street (men actively putting their own sexual desires above the fact that I am a person with rights and feelings)
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An idea of woman stands as linchpin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies.
Oppressive systems cannot exist without an oppressed population. In this case it’s women
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Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.
Reclaiming a school of thought that has been weaponized against women in order to demonstrate the inherent sexism in visual rhetoric in film
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him
Already assigns male pronouns to audience
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