Be t ween Gazes Camelia Elias

1. Between Gazes Camelia Elias

2. 1. wave feminism • V. Woolf: “A Room of One’s Own” • socio-historical condition • Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex • sex/gender distinction

3. 2.wave feminism • French feminism vs. North American liberal feminism • focus on sexual difference and women’s experience: • biology • experience, • discourse, • the unconscious, • social and economic conditions

4. 3. wave feminism • pluralism • questions the validity and relevance of white middle class feminist discourse for different ethnic and racial groups • “English feminist criticism, especially Marxist stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression” (Showalter)

5. feminist film theory • GOALS: • to disempower film’s powerful misfiguring of the female (Humm) • to appropriate the power of dominant images • deconstruct the dichotomy: • man as subjects identifying with agents • women as objects for masculine desire

6. concerns • the spectator/screen relationship • processes of identification and pleasure in film • the relationship between narrative and desire

7. gaze theory • the camera, operated by men looking at women as objects • the look of male actors within the film • the gaze of the spectator (male) Men act, and women appear

8. assumptions • gender is a social construction that oppresses women more than men • patriarchy fashions these constructions • women’s experiential knowledge helps us to envision a non-sexist society

9. new trends Annette Kuhn: ‘Women’s Genres’ • considers context as well as text • considers the social audience as well as the textual spectator • moves the emphasis from the text to culture • emphasizes pluralistic approaches

10. emotion and the arts • traditional aesthetics: focus is on disinterested pleasure • psychoanalytic theories of emotion: • emotion is a matter of the unconscious • feminist aesthetics: • perception and appreciation do not have a single standpoint  the viewer’s dynamics

11. the dynamics of the viewer • active, not just passive • cognizing, not just reacting • critical, not just absorbing

12. feminist influences • liberal feminism • socialist feminism / feminism in cultural studies • postmodern feminism • postfeminism

13. Sunday in New York

14. representations • isolated • glamorous • on display • sexualized to-be-looked-at-ness (Mulvey)

15. close-ups • destroy the illusion of depth • create flatness • create icons rather than verisimilitude POINT: the body is a function of discourse

19. man-handled

22. lessons in morality • “a man deserves the right to make a choice” • “morality never changes” • “the pendulum always swings back”

23. identifications mirrors • “As the narrative progresses she falls in love with the male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her to” (Mulvey)