| Work | Observation (Summary of Quote) | Location (Quote w/ Citation) | Analysis (Commentary) |
| Ways of Seeing, John Berger | In essence, this quote explains how the male gaze and the way women are presented in art cause them to internalize their own objectification, viewing themselves as an external vision of an experience or action rather than a person. | “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. … One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” | This point rings very true for me, and is reminiscent of a Margaret Atwood quote I adore from The Robber Bride, “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” |
| Ways of Seeing, John Berger | This quote explains how men tend to represent themselves in art as powerful through material, external means (whereas women draw power from within). | “According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual – but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others.” | Having taken Objects as History alongside this class and having that inside, one can clearly make note of the excess of portraits of royalty and the wealthy in relation to Berger’s point. Every last tiny bauble they were painted with was chosen to embody their wealth and power. |
| Ways of Seeing, John Berger | Men size women up in terms of their appearance in deciding how to behave with them. | “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. … Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.
Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.” |
John Berger goes the fuck off with every word of Ways of Seeing. This speaks to such a real double edged sword of the female experience, of how appearing more feminine/conventionally attractive affords you nicer treatment by men. |
| Rhetoric of the Images, Roland Barthes | Basically, what we experience as our reality doesn’t have any inherent symbolic meaning, but cultural meaning is imposed upon it as we apply our ever-growing vernacular of symbols to it. | “It can thus be seen that in the total system of the image the structural
functions are polarized: on the one hand there is a sort of paradigmatic condensation at the level of the connotators (that is, broadly speaking, of the symbols), which are strong signs, scattered, “reified”; on the other a syntagmatic ‘flow’ at the level of the denotation-it will not be forgotten that the syntagm is always very close to speech, and it is indeed the iconic “discourse” which naturalizes its symbols. Without wishing to infer too quickly from the image to semiology in general, one can nevertheless venture that the world of total meaning is torn internally (structurally) between the system as culture and the syntagm as nature.” |
I mean like, go off. Roland Barthes has to chill though, brain machine broke reading this. |
| Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others | Someone who is shocked by the existence of human depravity is not psychologically mature of nuanced. | “Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.” | Her remark that someone who is surprised by depravity is not morally mature stood out to me: Those who have the privilege of being in disbelief of cruelty have no impetus to disavow it. |
| Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey | When female desire is portrayed in film, she is not given the agency to make the image from an empowered state; rather, she embodies an ingenuine vision of desire that is imposed upon her. | “Woman’s desire is subjugated to her image (…) as bearer, not maker, of meaning.” | Majorrrrrrr echoes of Berger here. These visual culture people might just be onto something. |
| How Do We Define the Female Gaze in 2018?, Tori Telfer | The female gaze is an untapped, largely unexamined lens through which to cinematic narratives. | “What is the female gaze, then? It’s emotional and intimate. It sees people as people. It seeks to empathize rather than to objectify. (Or not.) It’s respectful, it’s technical, it hasn’t had a chance to develop, it tells the truth, it involves physical work, it’s feminine and unashamed, it’s part of an old-fashioned gender binary, it should be studied and developed, it should be destroyed, it will save us, it will hold us back.” | I think this definition of the female gaze is kind of crap: male cinematographers have been able to have empathy for their male subjects for years. I think before we start trying to act upon the buzzword of destroying the binary (which I am for, but I digress), we should define whether or not the female gaze has more empathy specifically for women or is just the world through a more “gentle” or “soft” lens. The playing field needs to be even before we destroy it. |
| We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs, Lauren Michele Jackson | White people using gifs of black people performing in a black- caricatured manner to react to things is a racially charged act. | ““[T]o be looped in a GIF, to be put on display as ‘animated’ at the behest of audiences,” as Monica Torres describes for Real Life, is an act with racial history and meaning. These GIFs often enact fantasies of black women as “sassy” and extravagant, allowing nonblack users to harness and inhabit these images as an extension of themselves. GIFs with transcripts become an opportunity for those not fluent in black vernacular to safely use the language, such as in the many “hell to the no,” “girl, bye,” and “bitch, please” memes passed around. Ultimately, black people and black images are thus relied upon to perform a huge amount of emotional labor online on behalf of nonblack users. We are your sass, your nonchalance, your fury, your delight, your annoyance, your happy dance, your diva, your shade, your “yaas” moments.” | I’m thinking about Barthes and how, in the use of these GIFs, white people kind of establish a symbolic language around blackness that further alienates black people. |
| Bluets, Maggie Nelson | Maggie Nelson feels as though her sadness controls her, but she is trying to find the beauty in it nonetheless. | “Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.” | I feel as though this quote captures the essence of the book more than any other: Bluets itself is an attempt to find the beauty in sadness and longing, or “blue”. |
| How to Do Things With Memes, Eric Thurm | Memes are a valid lens through which culture can be examined. | “If it seems dubious to claim that memes as a form do important philosophical work and do it better than many who are paid to produce long-form opinions, consider the source: Wittgenstein, who allegedly said that “a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” At the outset of Philosophical Investigations, he writes that most of the problems of philosophy emerged because “a picture held us captive.” He could not have known another picture — a near-endless series of pictures — could free us, and that those pictures just might be stock photos of an abstracted human form moving through the cosmos, unceasingly seeking enlightenment.” | Eric Thurm is doing the lord’s work. Memeology is real, valid, and should be studied way more than it is. Period. |
