COMM395/F11/Class notes

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COMM395

  • Alison Trope
  • Fall 2011
  • TA

Contents

August 23

Materials

Course reader from magic machine

  • Changed readings are on blackboard

Thursday readings are on bb

Weekly work

Attendance required

  • Roll call taken every lecture, section

Laptops allowed but be respectful

Journals

Reading

  • "So what?"
  • Why are we reading this?
  • Take one quote that really sticks out

Media entry

  • Open-ended

Beauty Culture

Annenberg Space for Photography

Reviewing syllabus

  • Gender & media as "cultural artifact"
  • Literature under the umbrella of cultural studies, gender, communication

Gender as something we do

  • "Engage gender", "practice gender"

Gender constructed from the outside world

  • Not biology, genetics
  • Media shapes gender identities we see around us

What is the "right way" to be feminine/masculine?, e.g.

  • Old spice commercials
  • Housewives (Real and Desperate...)
  • Sex and the City
  • Prince/Princess in kids' media

Challenges of "grey areas"

Questions of challenge, resistance

Course intro

Contrast these dichotomies

  • Masculinity/Femininity
  • Male/Female

"Free to be you and me" from 1970s (video)

  • "Social norms"
  • "Physiology"
  • Which professions are gendered in this vid?
    • Firefighter, cocktail waitress
  • Which else?
    • "Mailman"? "Congressman"? "Handyman"?

Beauty?

  • "A bald girl! Yechh!"
  • Few images of male beauty in the Beauty Culture exhibit

Sex

  • Classification of people as male or female. Assigned sex based on combination of physiological, bodily characteristics (chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, genitals)

Gender (Sometimes used interchangeably with sex)

  • Socially constructed identity of what it means to be male, female, transgender

Gender as social construction

  • What does it mean to say gender "constructs" our identities?
  • How?

Re: (Lorber 20)

Commercial examples

  • Wildroot
  • Vitalis
  • Lustre Cream
  • Groom & Clean
  • Clairol - Picture perfect
  • Respond (hairspray)
  • Miss Clairol, Natural Wear
  • Schick styler, spray

Aug 25

Media representation

  • How are particular constructions represented/translated in popular media?
  • Advertising and narratives
  • Historical conventions

Why study media?

  • Offers visual, aural representations of gender
  • Frequency, volume, repetition
  • Stories, narratives, symbols repeat over time, history
    • Why do we re-tell the same stories?
    • Genre, character types
  • We respond to, engage with media

Historical ads

Recurring themes?

  • Humiliation for choosing the wrong product, having the wrong hair, shame
  • Competition (among women pictured)

"Are you the blonde you became blonde to be?"

  • Setting up hierarchies within an ideal

Interaction with other trends

  • Value of looking "natural", ungroomed/groomed

Science-based appeals

  • Sexy voice goes away momentarily
  • Male needs rationality + sex appeal

More recent hair ads

Herbal essences

  • "Totally organic experience"
  • Dr. Ruth

Sunsilk

  • Hair whipping
  • Humor
  • Competition
  • Reprimand from concerned male doctor

Axe hair action

  • "I want to bury my face in your backside"
  • Humor

Head and shoulders

  • Sports appeal
  • Thick hair
  • Humor

Just for men

  • DivorcĂ©, children
  • Effect of hair on family, incl. children
  • How is the dad feminized?

What do we look for?

  • Narrative
  • Setting
  • Humor
  • Characters
  • Things people say
  • Ideals
  • Comparisons
  • Hyperbole

Power of images

"analyzing the social processes that construct the categories ... uncovers the ideology and power congealed in these categories" (Lorber, 13)

With analysis, we can come to understand

  • power dynamics
  • meanings

Gender as a practice, process

Gender as ideology, symbolic system

Ideology

  • Shared set of beliefs, values
  • Taken for granted, naturalized

Categories define inside/outside

  • Useful for understanding, managing complex systems

Relationship to media and media effects

  • Participation, engagement
    • (Co-production)
  • Production and consumption
  • Text and context
  • How do viewers participate?

"norms and expectations built into their sense of worth and identity ..." (Lorber, 20)

Categories, attributions, assumptions

"Neither sex nor gender are purse categories" (Lorber, 13)

Seeing as truth/knowledge

"We selectively 'see' aspects of social reality that tell us a truth that we prefer to believe" (Messner, 771)

Predominance of sight

  • Obscures interdependence of senses

Knowledge and power

Does "seeing" justify certain social inequalities?

  • "are men's social bodies the measure of what is 'human'?" (Lorber, 20)
  • Try to be objective but the hierarchy slips in

Hierarchy

  • One category is culturally, socially superior

In spite of this, being called "masculine" is not generally considered a compliment

  • Crossing is transgressive
  • More widely accepted to appear butchy female than femme male
    • "Metrosexual"

Jump offs

Aug 30

What does it mean to talk about gender as an ideology?

"Social bodies"

Masculine/men's bodies are norm

  • "Are men's social bodies the measure of what is 'human'?" (Lorber, 20)

How did this occur?

  • Power of experts, science
  • Biblical story, Eve brought men down, Adam's rib

What are the stories that are told?

  • Hunter, gatherer stories
    • But how are these activities given social meaning?
    • Western interpretation is that hunting is more highly valued but shouldn't they be equally valued?
  • Biological differences?
    • Child bearing, domesticity
  • Evolutionary component?
    • Multiple partners

Biological differences are only meaningful with social value

Title IX

Title IX as a clothing line...

Controversy:

  • Adding/subtracting men's sports in favor of new women's teams

Children and gender

Is there such a thing as a gender neutral toy?

How is gender internalized?

"Barbies for boys"

Stores in the Grove:

  • Pottery Barn Kids
  • American Girl

Accessorizing the boys' rooms only with maps

  • Why are maps not also available for the girls' rooms?

September 1

Opening image from JC Penney sweater

  • "I'm too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me"

"Gendered messages and consmer culture"

AYSO

Picking up on "boy cultures" and "girl cultures" from last Tuesday

  • Is the end goal to make boys and girls the same?
  • Or is it to resolve the animosity between the perceived genders?
  • Why do parents emphasize the differences rather than looking at how they are the same?

Gender institutionalized

Institutions "making"/prescribing gendered roles

"the institution of sport historically constructs hegemonic masculinity as bodily superiority over feminity and nonathletic masculinities" (Messner 778)

"Hegemonic masclinity"?

Factors:

  • Interaction (doing gender)
  • Institutions/ structural context/ "gender regime"
  • Popular culture/ cultural context

Messner talking also about coaching and other administrative, leadership roles

What is the role that "moms" are designated when they volunteer for youth sports?

  • "Team Mom", snacks/drinks
  • re: sarcasm, "THANKS MOM" to sober advice

AYSO

Institutional power (Messner)

"Informally structured sex segregation"

  • e.g. males are coaches, females as team moms
  • Naturalized
  • Not questioned

"Formally structured sex segregation"

  • e.g. boys/girls teams

Even while appearing "gender neutral"

  • Perhaps "neutral" is still geared toward masculinity

Toys as gendered commodities

Ellen Seiter

Toys as determinant in gendering of children

  • Ideology inscribed in toys

Assumptions and expectations about gender norms

Analyzing advertisements

What are some of the things we want to look at in a print ad?

  • Composition, foreground, background
  • Pose
  • Color
  • Lighting
  • Facial expression
  • Location, setting
  • Clothing
  • Gender, race, visual identity

LEGOs

Starting as basic blocks of different colors, shapes

Transitioning toward branded kits and worlds

  • Belville
  • Dinosaurs
  • Co-branding, tie-ins

The branded worlds incur more explicit gender dynamics

Barbies

Boys ads tend to have sfx, heavy metal Barbies all have theme songs, more poppy

Satirical Barbie from SNL

  • Amy Poehler, Britney Spears

Barbie imagined to be queeny

  • Ken is a draft dodger, a wimpy guy
  • GI Joe is fighting in Vietnam

"Action guys" v. "collectible hobbits"

"He's not even the same scale!"

Sep 8

Announcements about Beauty Culture and Jenny Holzer

Soap as civilization

  • Ideology, cult of domesticity
  • Ideologies of purification & cleanliness
  • "Commodity racism" v. "scientific racism"

Commercial redemption

"White nigger" as a term used to put down new immigrant groups

  • Othered despite "white" appearance

Fetishism

"the primate body became a symbolic space for reordering and policing boundaries [...] between humans and nature, women and men, family and politics, empire and metropolis" (136)

Fetish icon of transformation, metamorphosis

Current ads tend to use idealized human bodies

  • Why would these advertisers use "denigrated" bodies?

Looking at race in ads

We conclude that these are "badly designed", "poorly composed"

  • Likely not racist intent
  • But is intent the overwhelming factor

Why is it so hard to advertise the douche?

Colonialism and modernity

Orientalism, exoticism

Sept 13

Picking up on the GUESS rice paddy ad

  • Orientalism

Power of representation (in photo, illustration, painting)

  • Orientalist gaze
  • Harem images: the hyper-sexualized images

The Other isn't just "apples, oranges"

  • Hierarchies of power
  • Objectification
  • Subordinate, dominant positions

Some more examples:

  • Ajee, Revlon, "Experience the essence of Africa. Feel the power of woman."
  • Similar to "Out of Africa" -- colonialist narratives

Subjectivity

Rethinking Descartes and modern theories of subjectivity

  • (Sturken & Cartright, 106)
  • "Cartesian" dualism

Discourse is a means through which human subjects understand themselves through institutions and practices

Sturken and Cartwright, discourse:

  • "body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something" (105)
  • institutional, law, medicine, criminality, religion, sexuality, technology, etc.

How are you positioned as different kinds of subjects?

Spectatorship

Sturken & Cartwright set up the traditional theory of the gaze (psychoanalytic)

  • Re: Laura Mulvey, 1973
  • End by calling for a rethinking of this approach
  • No abstract or "ideal" spectator

Mulvey theory:

  • "Male gaze"
  • Media addresses the audience with a normative expectation of male eye
  • Why?
    • Industrial: males in dominant positions
    • Actors, characters: males were in lead positions, females subordinate, objectified sexually
    • All audience members are put in the position of identifying with the male character
    • Technique: camera angle, shooting the female body from the male perspective
      • Women only have exhibitionist role

Example: hp "You and your camera see eye to eye"

  • Peeping tom, voyeurism
  • "Determining male gaze"
  • "creepy"

Revisionist account of the gaze

Multi-nodal, interactive, relational

Power is not necessarily top-down

  • Constantly shifting
  • Dynamic
  • Relational

How might students take away Alison's power?

  • Ignore, go on internet
  • Leave
  • Challenge

Theories of address vs. reception

  • Relational

Media produces subjects

  • Consumer
  • But we are responding, co-producing, this media

Inverting the gaze?

  • Ad: "Diet Coke break"
  • Female empowerment?
  • Women objectifying a man
  • Diet Coke Man retains power by structuring the schedules of the women
  • Gendered jobs: outdoor construction, indoor office work
  • How does this reading reflect the conventional gaze? Do women retain power by holding the man gaze?
  • Is there an awareness that the women are looking? Is the man preening? On display?
  • Man doesn't return the gaze, look back
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Vanous

Knowledge and power

  • How are knowledges validated by discourse?
  • How does state or other institutions regulation individual bodies?
    • Who has the social power to label, categorize, value?
  • Gender constructed through power

Foucault

Inspecting gaze (106)

  • Panopticism
  • Self-regulation and cooperation (v. coercion)

Impact: normalizing functin

  • Produces particular kinds of subjects (disciplined)

Sept 20

Beauty Culture due next Thursday instead of this Thursday

Desire/ Motivation to discuss sex

  • Are we really "repressed"?
  • If so how, do we account for the 'steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex'?
  • How and why is sex 'put into discourse'? (11)
  • Why might we deliberately transgress?

"Sex sells"

  • Beyond accepting this clichĂ©, what can you do?
  • Think about relationship to repressive hypothesis
  • What is it so widely accepted?

Putting Sex Into Discourse

History and contemporary examples

  • Sex, abstinence ed
  • Condom commercials
  • Sex for voters
  • Votergasm.org
  • Celebrity, scandal
  • Prop 8
  • DSM
  • MPAA ratings

Construction of difference / abnormal

  • What kind of subjects (subject positions) did the discourse around sexuality create?
  • How did this discourse set up binaries (normal/abnormal)?
  • Who is constructing this discourse?
  • Who has the power?

Participation/collusion

  • How do we participate in the discourse?
  • How do we buy into the repressive hypothesis?
  • How does the media function in the deployment of the discourse on sexuality?

"Double impetus" (45)

Pleasure (transgressive), power

Saying you're going to do one thing, actually doing the other

  • Climb out the bedroom window

Coding your language, slang

Negotiation, circulation, power in motion

"Collusion"

  • Conspiring to do something together
  • "Going along with", status quo

What resistance practices exist short of full-scale revolution?

  • Strikes, voting, breaking the law

Confession

"A singularly confessing society..."

Confession and history, power, everyday life, procedure, ritual, technique for producing truth

Sex and the city

What about an anonymous Confession? 4chan?

  • Online: Fb, tweets, etc.

Reality TV "confessional"

Confession unfolds in a relationship of power

Transformation of desire - affect, act, sensation - into discourse

  • More easily shaped, controlled

Sept 22

"Repressive hypothesis"

  • Myth
  • Doesn't account for how power operates in this society
  • Only in a top-down model
  • Actually, we're operating in a different, circulating model

Subject positions

  • Structured by discourses
  • Naturalized, taken for granted

Confession (as a technique)

  • Create fractures within the larger system of power

Applying Foucalt to Sex and the City

Sept 27

Women as body (Bordo)

"even when women are silent (or verbalizing exactly the opposite), their bodies are seen as 'speaking' a language of provocation" (Bordo, 6)

Women have been constructed historically as

  • Femme fatales
  • Temptresses
  • Sirens
  • Who use their bodies to gain advantage over men

Expectations regarding dress

  • Professionalism
  • On the Row
  • Invitation/ provocation

Don't want to divide interior/ exterior selves

  • This is a loss

Reading bodies

  • Universal norms v variants
  • Construction of normal-abnormal dichotomy
  • Constructing relationships based on difference , based in power

Paying attention to difference, sameness

  • Homogeneity

White v Non white bodies

Racist ideology, imagery

  • Constructs non-European as
    • Primitive, savage, (sexually) animalistic
  • More 'bodily'

(Bordo, 9)

Colonialism

  • Colonizer / colonized
  • Dominant / subordinate
  • Slavery

What about savage/ sexualized?

  • "Prudish"

More "bodily"

  • Not associated with the (civilized) mind
  • Distinction of body/mind
  • Justification with slavery

How are these "feminized"?

  • Aren't they "hyper-masculine"?
  • What kind of feminine?
    • Non-rational, tied (down) to the earth (childbirth, labor, menstruation)

How is masculinity re-coded?

  • Irrational brute
  • Non-elite
  • How do we map this out?

Romanticizing, exoticizing the black body

Black men in pop culture

Conspicuous display

Greater comfort with accessories, accoutrement

  • But are they "feminine"?
  • Fur, chains, "fastidious" dress
  • "Pimp"/"gangster" imagery

"Ghetto fabulous"

Conspicuous displays of wealth

  • Purchasing expensive things

Performers use of phallus: guitar, mic

On-stage/ off-stage performance

  • Backstage
  • Authenticating hypermasculinity in movement, behavior - even in contrast to less masculine modes of dress

Contrast flamboyant men to more hyper-masculine thuggishness

  • 50 Cent
  • DMX

Example: Terrence Howard (310 footwear ad)

  • Powerful posture
  • Scrutiny, judging
  • If he weren't black, would this appear gay/dandy?
  • Channeling his pimp role from Hustle & Flow
  • 310 is bev hills, wealthy/sophisticated
  • Maintaining some amount of savagery (shark tooth necklace) while being upper class

Example: The Bohemians: "easygoing elegance and ethnic touches create this season's most exotic looks"

Historical images: historical narratives

Bodies, images have a history

Savagery

  • Out of control
  • "Bodily" == emotional, irrational
  • Images of slave uprisings

Bordo + Foucault

Oppressor-Oppressed model

  • Context (feminism)
  • Historical/ cultural explanation
  • Problems?

Utility of the O-O model

  • Oppressed are interpolated as passive
  • This may spur them to uprising, fight
  • Why might feminists have used a "man hater" model as instigation?

Collusion, voluntary participation and self-discipline

Revisionist models of power

  • Sovereign power vs. modern power
  • Top-down v. network model of power

Defining/ re-defining power

  • Relationship between power and resistance
  • What is the feeling of "power"?
    • Affect
    • "the heady experience of feeling powerful or 'in control,' far from being a ..." (Bordo, 27)

How does this "feeling" of power manifest in our lives?

  • Having a drink bought for you?
  • "Naive celebration of female power"

How is male/female power imagined differently?

Recap Bordo

Challenge practices where we see power unfolding

"Normalizing discipline"

  • Disciplinary practices can make the body docile
  • Even when they make us "feel" empowered

What kind of power is not "real"?

  • Questioning power

Don't over-invest those acts with a power that is not really there

Sept 29

Housekeeping

  • 2nd round of journals due
  • Midterm delayed
  • Starting to think about final papers

Post war masculinity

"The US came out of ww2 with a sense of itself as a masculine nation" (Faludi, 16)

Soldiers, bravery

  • Representations in film

Frontier mentality

  • Manifest destiny
  • Conqueror, colonized become colonists

Masculinity and nationhood

How does gender discourse shape/impact other types of discourse (e.g. national security)?

"the decision for war, the willingness to use force, is cast as a question of masculinity - not prudence, thoughtfulness, efficacy, rational cost-benefit calculation or morality - but masculinity" (Cohn, 236-7)

  • Flips some of our expectations re: masculine/ feminine

Gender as a symbolic system

Gender as ideology

Dichotomies and hierarchies:

  • "the system of dichotomies is encoding many meanings that may be quite unrelated to male and female bodies" (Cohn, 229)
  • ...yet tied to expectations and instructions

Wartime images - use of the flag

  • Flag over the face of Saddam statue
  • Flags on caskets returning from war
  • Hillary nutcracker doll

Historical constructions of masculinity

"essential to the myth (Daniel Boone) of his journey into the wilderness was his return from it to retrieve his family and establish a new community"

Set up binary: two types of masculinity

  • Boone v Crocket
  • Common man v American Century
  • Useful, working for community v domineering
  • Die Hard
    • Planning v. street smarts, "yippee kayayay"
    • Other side of macho: wounded, emotional, still joking in pain
    • Overcoming fear of using the gun, "manning up"/"cowboy up", Lethal Weapon

Industrial revolution

  • Shifting masculinity from pure mind to include some amount of physicality
  • Shifting the ideal manhood

Faludi's historical narrative

Context, industrial revolution, social competition

New value system, ideological shift

Idea of "real" manhood

  • Defined against old constructinos of masculinity

Oct 4

Faludi's interpretation of WWII

Context: WWII

  • Victory
  • Mastery

Context: post-war crisis

  • New frontier (Space)
  • Consumerism

Stuck in an office all day

  • Making money - but just pushing paper around
  • Lost sense of usefulness

Consumerism

  • Historically coded as feminism
  • Passive exchange, money for goods

Feminism

  • Women have different expectations of men

Faludi's narrative

  • Sweeping
  • Not historian but a journalist, critic

Masculinity crisis in popular media

Newsweek: Man Up!

  • "Traditional male is an endangered species"
  • "It's time to rethink masculinity."

Childcare?

  • Stay at home dads
  • Vs being dads at all

Dodge: Man's Last Stand

  • Embattled man, "I will do ..." things they don't want to do
  • OK to submit to all of the other things as long as they have a muscle car

Is the crisis real?

  • "Doing battle with phantoms and witches that only exist in their overheated imaginations" (Faludi)
  • Culturally constructed crisis
  • Narrative, media representations of crisis (e.g. Fight Club)

Consumerism and Violence

"If men are the masters of their fate, what do they do about the unspoken sense that they are beig mastered in the marketplace and the home, by forces that seem to be sweeping away the soil beneat their feet?" (Faludi, 13)

"Men feel 'downsized' - both economically and emotionally. They feel smaller, less essential, less like real men" (Kimmel, 18)

Fight Club clip:

  • Workplace:
    • Meaningless
  • Home, Ikea catalog:
    • "We used to read pornography"
  • Support group, tears:
    • Bob's big breasts (from steroid abuse) releases narrator's masculinity from crisis
    • Bob punished for trying to inject masculinity

Violence

  • Restorative, (restores entitlement)
  • Violence the only acceptable form of emotional expression allowed guys?
    • Disappointment, humiliation
    • "It's better to be mad than sad" (Kimmel, 56)

Fight Club clips:

  • Confession in the barroom
  • Freedom from consumerism: "What you own owns you"

Fighting

  • Never been in a fight? How can you know yourself if you haven't been in a fight?
  • Fighting offers knowledge, power
  • Fight and sex, "foreplay... we should do this again sometime..."

Oct 6

The new macho is a paradox

Guyland and the guy code

Guyland as "culture" v. intellectual

  • Who is in this culture?
  • Culture of entitlement, silence (Collusion), protection (excuses)

Avoiding the crisis of masculinity by staying free of responsibilities

Guyland rules and limitations

  • Guys pitted against other groups
  • "Be a man" v. "that's so gay": surveillance, self-surveillance, and self-censorships

"Bros before hos"

  • Silence, protection, collusion

"CEOs and office hos" "Barbarians and librarians"

Bordo: Questions of gender reversal

Cultural images of masculinity (femininity)

  • Power

Review: masculinity (femininity) as a cultural ideology

Masculine characteristics:

  • Unemotional, successful, competent, aggressive, active, sexual

Instructions on how to be in the world - inspecting gaze/ normalizing gaze

"men ad women are still generally subject to different instructions on how to be in the world" (155)

Contradictory instructions:

  • Dominating subjectivity v anxiety over being object of gaze
  • Hard v Soft masculinity
  • Faludi's "crisis"

What are the rules?

  • No showing emotion
  • Sex with many people...
  • Heterosexual, straightness
    • Can also be asserted among gay men through preference for "masculine guys"

Men's magazine covers...

Ralph Lauren on Men's Vogue

  • Sitting in the collector car
  • "Soft" masculinity
  • Looks like a nice guy
  • More bright colors

Benicio Del Toro on Esquire

  • "Hard" masculinity
  • Looks more menacing
  • All black and white

Details with Joaquin Phoenix, Brad Pitt

  • Phoenix in black + white formal
  • Pitt in soft colors

GQ shirtless guy covers

  • Dual appeal?
  • Male spectatorship, gay
  • "Guys guys" celebrities
  • Dominating subjectivity, phallic armor

Reading male bodies

  • Are these male bodies sexualized?
  • Are they objectified?
  • Are they dependent on the look of another?
  • Bordo's distinction: phallic armor v fleshy exposure

Ad analysis (Print)

  • backstory
  • setting
  • character
  • color scheme
  • text (what does it say? phrased? address? font?)
  • framing of figure in ad space / vis composition
  • pose of figure
  • facial expression, eyes
  • clothing style (how clothes are worn)
  • accessories (if relevant)
  • age, race, class of figure

Oct 11

Talking about midterm

  • 2 separate essays
  • Stick to the questions

Early hardcopies ok in section

Harassment and power

  • Harassment is about relationships and power
  • Distinction between bully v. sex fiend
  • Media discourse and cultural images of harassment: "discursive explosion ... in which dirty words, body parts and gropes are continually given center stage..."

Gaze, subject-object position

  • Who is in the dominant position in a given relationship?
  • Even when man is in the position of object, he retains power
    • Holding the gaze, appearing powerful

Male sexuality

What does it mean when me are recipients of gaze?

  • Men, as recipients of the gaze, giving in to illusions of beauty ...
  • Differet trajectory for male body v. female body
  • Male posture: sexuality, race, class, age
  • Men and dancing

Saturday night fever

Being a "woman's man"

  • Caring about the opinions of women

Cues and contrasts

  • Masculine job (hardware store)
    • Pizza on the street, hitting on strange women
    • Self possessed
  • Feminine self-care (Obsessive grooming)

Camera depicts him from below

  • Larger than life
  • Statuesque
  • Objectifying the crotch

Class status

  • Lower middle class, italian
  • Eating pizza on the street
  • Living check to check

Does this "take away" something from women?

Father-son encounter

  • Unashamed to groom himself in front of his dad
  • Posters of Bruce Lee, Farrah Fawcett, Rocky
  • These everyman characters aren't necessarily supposed to be dancers, primping

Risky business

Voyeurism

  • He's only behaving this way because he thinks he's alone

Music genre: rock as masculinity

In and out

Masculinity is a performance requiring repression

Perhaps the film is supposed be critical but...

  • What or who is the butt of the joke?
    • Gay male stereotype

Norm of the gay male stereotype is the most flamboyant performance

Other clips to consider?

Glee?

  • Championed for its presentation of sexuality, gender
  • But aren't musicals stereotypical gay interests?

Silver lining:

  • Minstrelsy gives people a part in mainstream popular culture, albeit a very limited, demeaning part

Oct 13

Rock Hudson

  • Male pin-up
  • "Women's film" star, romantic lead
  • Safe, guy to take home to mom
  • Embodying a 'fantasy of sanitization'

Visibility, invisibility

Hudson's homosexuality was evident in his image:

  • "Women could count on him to maintain his erotic distance" (Myer, 281-2)

What is on the surface, what is beneath the surface?

Commodifying diversity and reading institutions

Hollywood

  • "Ideal heterosexuality" as "compulsory heterosexuality"

Michael Jordan

  • Embodying family values
  • Recuperating the reputation of NBA
    • Dangerous black masculinity

Midterm

Part I

Ad 1: Davidoff

  • Traditional masculinity, outdoor setting
  • Product is called adventure, but it's a fragrance
  • Rough unshaven
  • Star persona, past roles/image
  • Details in appearance: sleeves up, scarf

Ad 2: Phat Premium

  • Black masculinity, race
  • Scar
  • Gangster imagery (Bonus)
    • "Scar face"
  • Hat, hankerchief, class
    • Audience? Phat...
  • Black & White- old (crime, gangster) movie feel?
  • Some will argue that he is soft for looking out of the frame

Part II

Foucault

  • Homogeny
  • Normalized
  • Discipline

What is "discursive explosion"?

  • Key: "Putting sex into discourse"

Define "Repressive hypothesis" Explain relationship between these 2 Which passages do they select?

  • How do they use them?


Sex City

  • Repressive hypothesis
  • How is sex put into discourse in diff ways?
  • Show appears to work against the repressive hypothesis (middle of discursive explosion)
  • Illicit delight

Fight Club

  • Beyond summary
  • How confession / secrets are framed
  • How FC itself is putting something into discourse (sex, or not; sex/fighting)
  • Repression more broadly
  • Crisis of masculinity
  • Rules, discourse of FC

Oct 18

Queer eye for the straight guy

Gay visibility?

  • Numbers vs. type of representation
  • Gay "minstrelsy" (133)
  • "Self-ghettoization"

Using gay male bodies

Neoliberalism and the discourse of individual choice

Queer eye:

  • Solving a historical problem related to the male consumer

Defining femininity

Values/desires

  • Self-improvement
  • Self-modification

Display and ornamentation

Resistance

Female body

Medium/site of culture

"locus of social control"

  • Normal/abnormal binary
  • Docile, regulated, managed, disciplined

Sites of struggle, possible sites of resistance

Disciplianry practices & everyday life: Producing the feminine ideal

  • Size and configuration
  • Gesture and movement
  • Ornamentation
  • What are the practices we engage in?
  • Why do we engage in them
  • What is at stake for women who don't engage in practices?

"Taking up space"

  • Women: legs crossed, minimal
  • Men: swinging arms, laying about, spreading out

"Economy of smiles"

  • Hey, why don't you smile?
  • Almost every woman in the class does it

Beauty

  • Ornamentation, gesture, movement
  • Consumption ("right hand ring")

Halloween

  • Sexy ____

Role of media: Constructing and perpetuating ideals

Star system: Emulation and role models

Advertising: Selling discipline

Oct 20

Resistance through performance: Performing gender/ Performing sexuality

Madonna & Vogue

  • Appropriating drag ball culture to her own ends, seeming cool
  • Brining visibility to an underground style

Gender play

  • Jean Paul Gautier, Cone Bra + double brested suit

Corporate responsibility, resistance from within

Dove and the rhetoric of "real femininity"

  • CSR, philanthropic capitalism

Resistance as "embodied protest" (Bordo)

Historical crisis moments and their female pathologies

  • Hysteria, agorophobia, anorexia

Why this path?

  • "Through embodied rather than deliberate demonstration, she expresses and indicts those ideals, but pursuiing the feminine ideal to the point that destructive the destructive potential is obvious to everyone else" (Border, 176)

Bordo's conclusion (review p 180-184) understanding the "useful" and "intelligible" body

Oct 25

Key issues: Defining Femininity

Values/ideologies of femininity

  • Self-discipline, disciplinary practices

Resistance?

  • Unreliness and conscious acts of "inversion"
  • Resistance thru performance
  • Resistance in mainstream society
  • Resistance in user-generated content
  • Embodied protest

Embodied protest (Bordo)

  • Anorexia (present day), agoraphobia (50s), hysteria (19th c)
  • Shows a kind of collusion
  • At the same time that it represents a protest
  • Do you agree: "Anorexics are in protest but they don't know it"?

Resistance and Art/Editorial Content

"women learn to suffer to be beautiful ... they occupy a territory whose only signposts, whose only values would be those generated by advertising and fashion"

Unruliness

Tradition and history of 'unruly' woman

  • "Taming of the shrew"
  • "10 things i hate about you"

What is 'unruliness'?

How is Roseanne unruly?

  • Taking up space
  • Spectacle, over the top
  • Calling attention to herself in a different way

Why is unruliness important?

Unruliness is...

  • Mode of resistance
  • Place of inversion, reversals
  • Empowering

Roseanne as unruly

  • Refuses norms
  • Writes herself
  • Returns gaze ("splays legs")

"through body and speech the unruly woman violates the unspoken sanction against 'making a spectacle of herself'" (Rowe, 202)

Re: lesbian kiss in Roseanne

  • ABC legal rep: "not the lifestyle that most people leave"
  • Roseanne production team hinted at moving the entire show to CBS
  • ABC aired the ep with a disclaimer
    • Highest ratings, repressive hypothesis

Other unruly women?

  • Brett Butler, Chelsea Handler, Rosie O'Donnell, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes
  • Nicki Minaj, woman from Bridesmaids?, Missy Elliot

Connection between unruly / lesbian

Is there a shift to Handler and Silverman?

  • More conventionally attractive?
  • Humor? Comedy?
    • Commercial structure of E!, Comedy Central
  • Chelsea uses alcohol to explain her unruliness
  • Sex themed humor - the female chauvinist pig

Relationship to family, Roseanne was a wife and mother

  • Does being single, non mom give them more freedom to be unruly

Origin in stand up comedy

  • Space of comedy as a safe realm

Nov 1

Prospectus

Not about effects

Start from your artifact

  • What can you argue from this artifact?

Avoid broad strokes

"This is reflective of ..."

Validating consumption

Consumption as self-expression:

"The rhetorically constituted subject of MSLO's discourse similarly recognizes herself as a consumer who can use purchasing decisions to express her personality and style" (357)

Consumption as stand-in for political action

Word association exercise

Feminism/ feminist Equality Radical Riot Man-hating Hairy Bra burning No bra Reject stereotypes Angry Bitch Lesbian Sexually free Riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna Gloria Steinem

Feminism doesn't have a very clear meaning

  • Mixed associations, connotations

Feminists were not satisfied with an umbrella definition

  • Variants: eco-feminism, cybor-feminism, marxist-feminism

Inequities persist

  • And require address

But how to protest, resist, highly inequities is increasingly confusing

  • Should it look like Occupy Wall Street? Something else?

Post feminism

Since we've achieved equality, we're free to do stereotypically "female" things (making wreaths) instead of dealing with politics.

  • But is feminism REALLY over? Is equality really achieved?

Erases the persistent wage gap, inequal treatment, harassment in workplace...

"MSLO taps into existing post-feminist sentiments to _cultivate and define_ its audience." (339)

What is postfeminism?

  • Is feminism over? Are its goals still relevat?
  • Is it a problem? Why? What does it erase? What happens to politics?

Not a term that people apply to themselves

  • But a term that is used by academics/critics to describe phenomena they observe

Self v. collective

Rosie / Martha

Martha

  • Contained: not going to eat the dog on the show
  • Composed
  • Selling
  • All-knowing, teaching, authority

Rosie

  • Unruly, exaggerated, moving around
  • Taking up space, touching Martha

Martha/Rosie may be from same/similar class background

Key questions

"What are the impliciations for women of accepting the subject positions offered by MSLO's discourse?"
"By framing the home as a 'choice,' Stewart encourages women to participate in their own subjugation, and to experience a sense of guilt for not 'choosing' the home (or not committing enough energy to its organized operation" (363)

Encourages implies something more ideological than effects

Production, consumption

Dichotomous terms (M/F)

  • Production: active
  • Consumption: passive

Rethinking consumption

  • Tupperware:Tupperware parties
  • Magazine:Fanzines
  • Spice Girls:Riot Grrrls

Current TV "Ladyfriends"

  • Suggestion that women's private discourse is constructed around consumption

Stepford wives

Retrieved from "http://www.kevindriscoll.org/wiki/COMM395/F11/Class_notes"
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