Week 23

Question 1

Feminism

Answer 1

-Feminism and patriarchy- from analysis to political change
-“First Wave”: The Women’s Suffrage movement
-“Second Wave”
Simone DeBeauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
The constructed nature of the “feminine” (One is not born a woman)
-Woman as “Other”
-Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Question 2

“Images of Women” Criticism

Answer 2

Sociological approach
-Rosen, Popcorn Venus (1973)
-Haskell, From Reverence to Rape (1974)
-Female stereotypes in the cinema
-marriage as fulfillment of woman’s desire
-Hollywood vs. “feminine self-determination”

Question 3

Challenges to the “Images” Approach

Answer 3

-Naive and limited approach
-Rests on questionable assumption:
-“False” representations will be replaced by “true” ones owing to intervention of enlightened few.
-Descriptive approach only
-Fails to account for how patriarchal ideology is produced or sustained

Question 4

Cinema-Specific Approaches

Answer 4

-Influence of psychoanalytic theory
-“Scopophilia” pleasure in looking
-Film viewer as licensed voyeur

Question 5

Laura Mulvey , “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

Answer 5

-Feminist application of psychoanalytic theory
-Cinema and the male psyche
-the male gaze
-Active/ male vs. passive/ female
-Woman connotes “to be looked at ness”
-“Narcissistic” & “fetishistic” scopophilia.

Question 6

Narcissistic Scopophilia

Answer 6

-Male identification with a masculine “ego ideal”
-Idealized image of ourselves
-Human face/ body similar to our own, but more perfect.

Question 7

Fetishistic Scopophilia

Answer 7

-Involves use of another person as erotic object
-Women on screen= objects of the gaze.
-Play “traditional exhibitionistic role”
-Occasional suspension of narrative for erotic spectacle.

Question 8

Male Erotic Pleasure vs. Castration Anxiety

Answer 8

-Freudian “castration anxiety”
-Countered in several ways:
-Eroticizing gaze (shared by male viewer and male characters on screen), gives viewers feeling of power, control
-Women on screen often dominated, disempowered, humiliated
-Extreme idealization of women on screen
-Ultra-perfection disavows “lack”

Question 9

Some Problems with Mulvey’s Argument

Answer 9

-Exclusively centred on the straight male viewer
-Female gaze?
-Heterosexist
-Gay/ lesbian/ queer spectators?
-no cross-gendered identification possible?
-Still, a very influential essay.