Unit 10: Constructing Subjects

Question 1

Evaluate how the media represents aspects of human relationships.

Answer 1

• Soap opera concentrate on the slow development of relationships and characters over the lifetime of the series. Carefully crafted domestic settings create an air of realism, but this is secondary in importance to the characters and their dialogue, actions, and appearance. Dialogue focuses obsessively on relationships, plot twists are often improbable, and romantic twists and turns take on epic proportions.

Question 2

Describe and analyze the kinds of messages we receive from our media about who or what we should be.

Answer 2

• Television shows often present traditional gender stereotypes and gender wars.
• Movies must, at various times and for various types of people, show us what we are, what we wish we could be, and what we probably ought to be.
• We enjoy the spectacle of such entertainment and the excitement and resolution they offer, and we are at the same time learning what to expect and how to perform in our personal lives
• If our visual pleasure as a viewer is contextualized by our social experiences, our visual fascination with film reflects that social position.
• The visual structure of the film thus teaches us what groups we, as the viewer whose eyes are under the control of the camera’s frame, must accept as like or unlike us.

Question 3

Analyze the ways in which mass media products interact with social change, using particular instances as examples.

Answer 3

• In Maxine Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, she presents women’s evolving social roles in a third wave feminist perspective.

Question 4

Determine the degree to which the media reflect, lead, or follow social and political changes.

Answer 4

• Media influence is the actual force exerted by a media message, resulting in either a change or reinforcement in audience or individual beliefs.
• The “Arab Spring” is noted for the young protesters who took to the streets, utilizing social media during the uprisings to organize, create awareness around the political issues, and document the experience on the ground. The use of social media in political uprisings, documenting violence, exercising freedom of speech, and creating space for civic engagement has reinforced the importance and relevance of citizen journalists today.
• The Black Lives Matter movement began as an online community that worked to combat anti-black racism and police violence that targets African Americans in particular, using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Through the use of the hashtag and social media platforms, the online community has been able to organize, mobilize, and improve its visibility, eventually becoming an organization with more than 40 chapters that work to support black lives.

Question 5

Pretty Woman

Answer 5

• Pretty Woman teaches viewers to yearn for and demand the fairy tale each time it is rerun on television.
• In Pretty Woman, the audience could accept a prostitute who became a high status wife, as long as she remained confined to her new domestic role and reflected the racial dynamics most common in her society.
• For Soyini Madison, as a black woman, watching the film is discomfiting. All the prominent black characters die, and they are presented using camera techniques that conveys to viewers that it is somehow incorrect to understand the film from the position of a black woman.
• Based on third wave feminist perspectives, Madison reminds us powerfully that gender does not exist in isolation from other components of social identity, and audiences will have varying (and important) reactions to a film such as Pretty Woman and their ability to fit themselves into the norm that it constructs.
• Madison points to the social ideals the audience is trained to naturalize, particularly those related to race, class, and gender.
• Madison adds the vital challenge of the audience’s identification, such as men’s identification of masculinity with wealth and dominance and women’s identification of femininity with class and passivity.
• Laura Mulvey, in her classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” contends “the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him.” Recall the Marxist language here of social formations that shape our consciousness

Question 6

Reading - “A Generation of Men Without History’: Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom.”

Question 7

Reading - “Gendered Television - Femininity”

Answer 7

• Soap Operas are never in a state of equilibrium, but one of perpetual disturbance and threat.
• A wife’s extra-marital sex is evaluated both patriarchally as unfaithfulness, but also as a woman’s independence and right to her own sexuality.
• The dominant ideology is inscribed in the status quo and soap operas offer women viewers the pleasure of seeing this status quo in a constant state of disruption. Disruption without resolution produces openness in the text to be read dominantly or subvert the dominant ideology.
• Deferment is a process in soap operas whereby there is no climax to close off. The pleasure of them lies in seeing how the events occur rather than in the events themselves. The emphasis on the process is constitutive of a feminine subjectivity in so far as it opposes masculine pleasures and rewards.
• Close-ups provide training in the feminine skills of “reading people,” and are the means of exercising the feminine ability to understand the gap between what is meant and what is said.
• A “good” male character speaks about his feelings and rarely expresses his masculinity in direct action. He still has masculine power, but that power is given a “feminine” inflection.
• The “macho” characteristics are often given to the villain who are both loved and hated.
• The woman’s power to influence/control men is not legitimatized by the dominant ideology, and can thus exist only in a continuous struggle to exercise it.
• The struggle of women viewers to create a feminine space within patriarchy is paralleled by the struggle in these texts between feminine pleasure power on the one hand, and patriarchal control on the other.
• The villainess uses traditional feminine characteristics as a source of power. She reverses male and female roles and embodies the female desire for power which is both produced and frustrated by the social relations of patriarchy.
• A defining characteristic of soap opera is its denial of a unified reading position and of a coherent meaning of the text. Its texts and its reading subject are decentered. The multiple reading positions is the textual equivalent of woman’s role in the patriarchal family.

Question 8

Reading - “Gendered Television: Femininity,” and “Gendered Television: Masculinity.”

Answer 8

• The typical reading strategy is one of negotiation, as male subcultures, situated differently in the social system, seek to accommodate their social situation with the dominant ideology.
• The masculine characteristics relate to similarities and differences of authority and self-control in social and physical behaviors. The A-Team is a composite structure embodying those contradictions of masculinity.
• The gap between imaginary and the real which desire strives to close is caused not just by the human condition, but by social conditions which ensure that the material experience of masculine subjects never measures up to their ideologically produced expectations.
• Women, as embodiments of the feminine, threaten the masculine by bringing with them the male’s guilt and fear of castration. Women stand for the repressed in the male and the devalued in patriarchal society, that is, vulnerable, the sentimental, emotion, commitment, nurturing, caring.
• The “breadwinner” role may be a source of power, but it also forms a prison which denies masculine independence and freedom.
• Capitalism needs the gap between the material experience of men and the ideological construction of masculinity to keep men striving for more in order to maintain the “naturalness” of the ideological concept of progress, which is so central to capitalism.
• James Bond defeats the villain because he is a free individual (capitalism), whereas the villain loses because he is too bureaucratic (communism).

Question 9

Reading - “Pretty Women: The Romance of the Fair Unknown, Feminism, and Contemporary Romantic Comedy.”

Answer 9

• Written by Elizabeth Scala
• This reading should remind you of the theoretical readings in Marx while drawing your attention to the importance of how a work is consumed, not only the context within which it is produced. Moreover, by comparing to very different social formations, the medieval and the modern, Scala makes us consider the different functions kindred narratives might serve to different people.
• To Madison, the film reflects aspects of society’s changing attitudes concerning women’s autonomy, sexuality, and class differences. But it also takes these same issues and resolves them by ultimately upholding traditional, hegemonic conceptions and practices regarding marriage, chivalry, and consumer capitalism.
• Scala asks the question from a medievalist’s point of view, in order to bring the issues of history and historicism to bear on our understanding of the film’s romance genre.
• Argues Pretty Woman is based on the fair unknown. In that medieval romance, the hero ultimately discovers his aristocratic origin. The adventures affirm a hidden noble birth that is co-terminous with gentle deeds.
• the fair unknown is a fantasy of social mobility that ultimately works to reaffirm the status quo and the assumptions and prejudices of the noble class. The gentle deeds are performed by a gentlemen.
• A protagonist with no identity, no surety of inherited worth, attempts to prove his own value and gain a particular status through adventure.
• In Pretty Women, the fantasy of social mobility turns out to be a falsity in the same way of the fair unknown. Vivian’s blonde wig and revealing clothes is her disguise all along. When her red hair is later revealed, one forgets her initial role as a prostitute.
• In the opera scene, the music’s effect on Vivian is the discovery of the fair unknown. She tears up during the opera we can conclude that it is apart of her soul (through Edward’s description). Vivian essentially passes the test of nobility by enjoying the opera. We find that Vivian understands the Italian opera well without help.
• By saying “we both screw people for money,” it makes its first gestures toward leveling hero and heroine.
• In Pretty Woman, Vivian plays the role of the knight and experiences the acquisition of her identity and plays the hero’s part. This reveals a reverse of conventional roles. The transformation scenes show that there was already transformed status of the heroine by making apparent to everyone that she was all along, a wonderful person.
• Pretty Woman recognizes and emphasizes its performance as romance, as a dream only Hollywood could sustain, mitigates the reaction to the film and explains somewhat the acceptance of the film by its female.