Intro to Visual Culture Class Notes: Race & Gender
The class started by a reminder about what we previously discussed on the notion of “gaze” and of the “commodity self”
The Gaze: enter into a relational act of looking (involving other people)
Ex: Las Meninas by Velasquez
“You are never looking completely alone”
- The role of looking in the formation of the human subject
- Looking = relational activity/not simply a mental activity
- The role of unconscious and desire in looking and viewing practices
Commodity self = our selves are mediated and constructed in part through our consum[tion and use of commodities
The term was coined by Stuart Ewen, historian of cultural studies
Race & Gender – Discussion about the assigned readings
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
This essay has launched a new way of looking at film, and visual culture in general. The idea of gender intersecting with visual culture, with notions such as that of the male gaze. She uses many concepts of the psycho-analysis to propose a read of this film.
She brings into the scene the unconscious and subconscious – they structure the way we view cinema: we experience it through a patriarchally-conditioned gaze, the male gaze.
She talked about three main terms throughout the text:
- Scopophilia: the pleasure of looking
- Exhibitionism: deriving pleasure from being seen
- Voyeurism: deriving pleasure from looking without being seen
Discussing the notions of power dynamics as to the relationship between seeing and being seen, the reciprocate factor or lack thereof, the notion of consent.
The cinema is in a way a form of voyeurism:
- The characters on the screen cannot return the spectators gaze
- Their relationship is not equal: power play
- The camera is a tool for that voyeuristic relationship
The core film which Mulvey uses to lead her analysis is Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (1954).
In the movie, the protagonist watches his neighbors. He is an injured photo-journalist, he’s confined in his apartment, and through his window he watches his neighbors. The whole concept behind it is a notion of voyeurism. Shift/evolution from curiosity leading to obsession. The retraction of himself from reality. He seems alienated from the rest of the world while observing it.
He only sees his neighbor through a delimited frame: their window frame. He is peeking into people’s lives and just seeing a portion of their environment. It is both inciting the viewer to know more all while restraining him.
It could be interpreted as a metaphor for the cinema: the window frame would represent the screen, insinuating that one does not know what is happening outside the frame, behind the scene. The filmmaker carefully chooses what we are allowed to see. Generates desire to see and to know more.
Lisa, his mobile girlfriend, are his private eyes. He sends her to look for him, as he is unable to move.
Going back to the film poster:
Jeffery is in disposition of the male gaze, imposing the notion of gender and of the questioning of who is looking.
He represents us as the cinema: our vision is restricted by the camera.
He is frustrated but also punished.
Grace Kelly on the poster, who is represented as a main figure, taking up one of two rather big images on the poster, only has her name in a small font at the bottom of the poster, going back to that notion of gender and the male gaze, as she is represented and displayed as an object of desire.
Around the time Mulvey’s writing came out, some artists looked to push boundaries as to the representation of gender, sexuality and race, such as Robert Mapplethorpe (see: Self-Portrait, 1980).
Large audience of women going to see these Hollywood films, having a good time, and not feeling offended/exploited. We can identify with a certain gender and identify with another gender. Mulevy does not take into account the pleasure of the female viewer, or the female gaze.
The gender viewing relations are not fixed: viewers can derive fantasy when identifying with another/the opposite gender while viewing something.
Gender is not dictated by biological sex and sexual orientation.
One of the main films that has been brought up as being the complete opposite to the male gaze is Ridley Scott’s “Thelma and Louise” (1991).
The film is about a road trip, taken by two women running away from the authorities after killing one of the two women’s assaulters.
It is all about these women taking power over their own lives. It presents the women’s gaze with agency: they are not just objects being looked at, they are taking their own actions and being perceived on their own terms.
Even in the poster, they are not being watched/captured by someone else, they choose who they are represented: they took a “selfie” polaroid shot of themselves.
They control the camera, they control with which gaze they are perceived and represented.
Visual fantasy is not a blueprint for reality, bringing in this idea of pleasure and desire. It is recognized that we have an unconscious mind, pulsations and fantasies.
Rethinking our relationship with image, it is not necessarily logically related/representative of our identity.
Queer Theory (90s)
- Gay and Lesbian Studies
- Moving away from this identity based reading of spectator relations or looking practices
- Looking practices and the pleasure of looking are not tied by logical sex or a certain gaze
- Michel Foucault: defending the point that sexuality is socially constructed, something that Queer Theory based itself on
- It allowed for much more nuances for understanding the ways that an image speaks to or is interpreted to and by the spectator, human subjects are more complex than a specific gaze.
- More self-conscious of the act of looking: we need to revise the voyeurism/exhibitoinsim that we can see in today’s tendencies of new medias
- This puts in question the question of power (ex: given a sense of power when granted with access to social media, ‘freedom of expression’)
- Jacques Lacan Mirror Stage (ad for Givenchy): man and woman dressed and accessorized the same, raising questions about gender expression
- Mirror stage: the stage when a child begins to discover the reflection of self (i.e. in mirrors). It is theorized that the ego starts to be constructed around the image. Evolution of the realization that an image is a representation of oneself.
- This creates a split between who we are and the projection (the image, what we think is who we are). The ego is split in two: who we are and the projection, the fantasy, the image of who we are.
John Berger, chapter on Female Nude, Ways of Seeing (1972)
- Representation of women through the history of nude in western paintings
- Nude vs naked
- “Men act, women appear” – to surveil and to be surveilled
Commenting on images of mainstream visual culture, either reinforcing the male gaze or raising questions and concerns about it:
- Guerilla Girls discussing the representation of women in the Met Museum in a poster, including statistics, raising the question about the necessity of the nudity element in the representation of women.
- “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art section are women, but 85% of the nudes are female” – these statistics from 1985 were revised in 2012.
- Burger King ad with heavy sexual innuendo, representing the woman in a derogatory and dehumanizing manner. The burger is an intentional phallic symbol and the woman looks like she is about to engage in fellatio.
- Backlash about Barbara Pompili, a French politician, portrayed in the French magazine “Libération”. She received a lot of criticism about how she was represented in the image accompanying the article as she wears a rather short white dress displaying her cleavage. It sparked a debate about the relationship between professionalism, success, clothing, gender and sexuality.
- Does one have to wear the gender-coded traditional suit in order to be taken seriously in industries such as politics? Does one have to compromise their sexuality and femininity in order to gain respect from the public eye? What defines professionalism and how is it rooted in subconscious and collective patriarchal values?
Intersectionality: coined by black scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989)
Structural, political, representational
The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.
The class ended with the weekly student image presentations.
