Patriarchal Forces in Pop Culture

I thought this was an interesting blog to read because i had just attended Kyley Ann Caldwell's senior presentation which she titled, "A New Patriarchy: Bidding for Agency in 1980's Romantic Comedies." This blog, feminist allies, deals with women in media as well. It is written by a man and i thought it was great to see that he notices patriarchal issues in pop culture all the time now. It is true there are these issues prevelent in media stories, films, novels etc that a lot of us dont realize or chose to ignore. Kyley's presentation used three examples of films from the 1980's that i had seen but never really noticed ALL the patriarchal forces in them. I really enjoyed her presentation and as she concluded i realized that although there have been advances and freedoms for women we are still not anywhere near where we should be.
The blog discusses the movie '300' and how it doesnt address the issues of women and how they were viewed as wives and mothers first then people second. The author of this blog is upset by this because he says the film deals with issues of democracy but leaves out that women had any problems from society that they had to deal with at the time.
It is a very interesting blog to read and there are some other posts by him that are great too!

Cixous

I thought that feminism was very interesting to read. Cixous in particular interested me. She pointed out things that I had never thought about before but I completely see where she gets her thoughts from. She points out that society and philosophy is male dominated. When she simply discussed how things, words, are coupled she said like a marriage (R&W 229). I never realized but it is true. In a marriage the man’s name comes first and in coupling of ‘things’ the dominant ‘thing’ comes first as well. Her examples were father/mother…. head/heart…. intelligible/sensitive…. activity/passivity. All of these as one can notice, have the more dominate and mostly male associated ‘thing’ listed first in the coupling. Society has made all these words and ‘things’ become more dominate and labeled to the male.
Also when she discusses in philosophy how the female is passive she gives the example of, “a will to say something.” She then points out that a “will” is an active, authoritative desire equally male. She says that the world of being can function without the mother all it needs is a something maternal. She then says that a father who can act as a mother is just as good as the real mother in the world of being (R&W 230). This really shocked me when I read it. I do see her point though and where she is coming from. A lot of times the female is viewed as not needed or not needed as much. The copy of the original is just as sufficient as the original.
Another very interesting thing she discussed was when she said, “What does she want?” She explained that there is no place for a woman’s desire in the world. She ends up not knowing what to do with her desire, where to put it, if she should hide it, or if she even has any at all (R&W 233). I agree with this. We see it every day in society. A woman wants to go out and have a career before having a family and people think there is something wrong with her, that her priorities are mixed up. Should she really feel bad for wanting to be successful on her own? ...of course not. Also take a woman who does have a family but also has to juggle a career, people think she should stop trying to be “super mom” that the task of both is too much. Desire can be anything from wanting to be successful, wanting to have fun, wanting to do anything. In society a lot of women have to hide these wants though because they will be labeled with a negative name or looked at as being different. This is where the desire gets lost. You don’t know what to do with it because you don’t know what is right anymore. You want something that society says no to. I am sure there are instances when men feel this way too but it’s not as difficult for them. They are the “stronger”, more “stable” people who can make the correct choices. Yes it must be hard to always live up to that expectation but it makes it easier when society backs you up.
I was offended when she talked about Freud (who I’m not sure I’m much of a fan of) and he said “‘fatality’ of feminine situations is a result of anatomical ‘defectiveness’” (R&W 232). I’m sorry I had no idea being a woman was a defect. Also when he talks about how both the young boy and girl desire the mother, he feels that since the boy is loving the opposite sex his love is the ‘natural’ one (R&W 232). Not only does that offend females but also homosexual relations. How does Freud explain those? I felt that Freud is very narrow-minded in his thinking and in many instances is completely wrong. He makes assumptions about things that he has no experience with. I do not think a male can speak for a female’s feelings or desires. One person should not think for another person or even try to explain their thoughts the way Freud does. Freud really aggravates me and I am doing a Freudian and Lacanian reading on a movie for my final paper so we will see how that goes and if my views on him change at all…..

feminism

I know that this blog is to deal with stories currently in the news but there is one that happened at the beginning of the year that did not get as much as play as the story now about Don Imus and his awful remarks about the Rutgers girls basketball players.

http://wbztv.com/local/local_story_059081604.html
A Boston Celtics radio analyst, Cedric Maxwell made some very rude and sexist comments about one of the few female referees in the NBA when he disagreed with one of her calls. It is said that he was doing an impression of Tommy Heinsohn (who is a commentator on the Celtics' television broadcasts on Fox Sports New England) who used to yell out inappropriate things. Some feel that since he was only doing an impersonation he should not be so harshly punished, let me see how you feel…. He said, “Go back to the kitchen” and then if that wasn’t enough he followed that remark with, “Go in there and make me some bacon and eggs, would you?” I guess he thought that was a funny impersonation. Strange how he decided to impersonate him when a female referee made a bad call. If a male referee were to make a call he disagreed with he would not insult his manhood but simply state that he disagreed and it was an awful call in his opinion.
He later issued an apology, if that’s what you can call it, where he said, “If I said anything that might have been insensitive or sexist in any way, then I apologize because she worked extremely hard to get where she is now […].” First of all he starts off by saying IF I said anything insensitive or sexist…please…IF…obviously it was. He then goes on to say how she has worked so hard to get where she is which in my opinion is just saying that to get her job as a women is something that is not an everyday thing, it is primarily a male job even though women are obviously capable of it. He did not make his initial comments any better by apologizing. In my opinion he made them worse by making her out to be some poor female who he should not have said anything about because it upset her. This comment fits right into feminism and how they tried to pull women out of the housewife role and Cedric Maxwell is putting her right back. As we read in Barry, feminists pointed out that in nineteenth century fiction, very few women worked unless they absolutely had to (Barry 122). Eventually as the years went on feminism expanded its issues to more then just literature but this was a huge problem they saw. Even today women are still sometimes viewed to put a husband and kids before a career. Cedric Maxwell’s comments proved that some people are still stuck in this mindset today.
Going back to the comments that Don Imus made on his morning show, I think that he should be punished. He called COLLEGE ATHLETES nappy headed hoes. He also said that these girls looked roughed because they had tattoos on them. Has he ever seen any male basketball games? They all have tattoos as well does that make them rough looking pimps? ....I didn’t think so. The problem I have here is what I have with the story I wrote about before. Both these men claimed to apologize for what they said but neither apology was actually an apology. They say they are sorry but follow it with another more subtle sexist remark about how females have worked so hard to get where they are and how their remarks were insensitive to them. Please! They are totally saying that women either shouldn’t be where they are, in so-called male roles, and they are calling us the typical female by saying they were insensitive to our feelings.
I think all these men need a refresher in apologies and also need to learn what a woman really is. Their view of feminine is the typical socially constructed one that limits what we actually are.

Baudrillard

I thought that Ken Rufo’s lecture was great. I liked how he used real world examples to explain the ideas he was discussing, it made me understand him so much more. I also like learning about Baudrillard because I had known very little about him. I thought it was interesting to see how he started out criticizing structural Marxism only a little bit and as his ideas progressed he started to criticize him even more.
I understood the four simulation stages that Baudrillard wrote about. When Ken talked about them I understood them because of his great examples. I got that the first stage is standing in for reality When he talked about the cow and the hay and how eventually if you replace their value for money you don’t need to trade you can just buy what you need but then stage two comes in and the value you assigned is not always going to be the same all the time. Here simulation hides the absence of reality. His example of the stock market was also a good one even though I usually don’t understand the stock market I did grasp what he was saying! The third stage then produces its own reality. Here he got into simulacrum, which he said means a copy without an original, which is what we had been discussing in class recently. His examples here of the ET ride or Epcot not only made me laugh but it made me understand exactly what this means. You are made to believe that what you are seeing in these places is the real thing when in fact it is just a copy of nothing that’s actually real. The hyperreal that Baudrillard talks about made perfect sense as well. It’s when, “the real you discover will always be an effect of the simulation, a copy or non-copy of it,” because you will always see the simulation as really correct. Baudrillard then adds a fourth stage he calls “integral reality.” It is where simulation is everywhere without models and means everything and nothing all at once. Ken explains it using credit and virtual banking. He says you can buy something on a credit card and the money is automatically taken out of your account. You never see this actually happen though so you don’t realize what you are spending. The fact he put about how much debt Americans are in really shocked me. But it totally made sense to his point about capitalism being about the consumption and not the production.
At the beginning of his lecture he talks about how Baudrillard added sign value to structural Marxism. Structural Marxism talks about things in terms of its use-value and what the object does or its exchange value. Baudrillard felt that this was a too limited way to look at things. He wants to look at what the object represents and make this more important then the above mentioned ways structural Marxism looks at objects. I thought it interesting as well how Baudrillard feels that theorists say they discovered something new when in fact they invented or created the model for which this so called discovery has come from. I agree with him here I feel that a lot of theorists want to complicate matters and do so by saying they discovered a loop hole in someone else’s work when they just made up the whole basis in the first place.
I thought this was a great lecture as I said in the beginning. I really liked his examples and I thought Baudrillard was a different kind of theorist. He was not trying to say he knew it all like I get from some of the others we have read. He is relating things to life and attacking things that just don’t make sense to him and gives reason to back it up. I thought it was a refreshing read!

branching out in the blogging world- author function

I found this blog about the new movie “300” and the idea of the author function. I found it interesting because it tied into my personal life. My father wanted to see this movie very badly but my mother refused because she heard that it had had the same director who did Dawn of the Dead in 2004, which my father watched as well. She immediately thought both films were too violent for her and did not go see it. She is doing what we talked about, associating the piece art with the author. She can not get away from tying the author to their work. And in the other sense neither can my dad because his reasons for wanting to see “300” were the fact that it had the reputation to be violent and action packed.
This blog also discusses Foucault and Barthes. He writes, “As Barthes wrote, “the author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’”(DA 143). Basically, modern society ties text to the author.” I feel that this is true. We as a society strive to know who wrote anything that we read and consider work. We even need to know the author in things outside of text such as music, paintings etc. As we read in Foucault and the blogger points out that in earlier times if a piece of work had an anonymous author we did not view it as true. We even then needed to tie the author with their work to make it have any meaning.
He then discusses what Barthes says about what happens once the author is gone; “ […]the single meaning of the text attributed to the Author (what Barthes called the theological meaning, since it is unitary and absolute), is replaced by a multiplicity of meanings, which depends on the reading. In another essay in Image-Music-Text, From Work to Text, Barthes claims that the reader gives the text its meaning, not the Author.” He talks about this in relation to critics. He uses critic’s comments on the movie “300” in the beginning of his blog and then talks about how irrelevant they are based on this idea. Since the reader is giving the meaning there are multiple meanings that one can come to. If there are multiple meanings the blogger says that there is nothing to criticize because it is a decentered text. I have a question about this though….is not a critic a reader as well? I feel that the critic can come up with an opinion because they are a reader who gives meaning to the text.

"What is an Author?"

According to Foucault an author is very important and differs from a writer. An author is given a name and the name means something, it has importance. You can link a piece of work to an author through the way it’s written, the style, phrases used, ideas and also the timeline like if historical dates are mentioned do they coincide with the life span of the author. He also says that the name of an author is a description which I understand. Once you have the name of an author it is not only their name but it describes who they are and their thoughts. He used the example of Aristotle. When one hears that name you automatically think a great thinker and philosopher and it determines what kind of work you will be reading.
Foucault then discusses the word, ‘work’ and what it actually means. When we call something a work it is because it is written by someone and that someone is an ‘author’ (p 1262). He is saying that for something to have credit as being a work of literature or a work of art it needs a name, an author to go with it. He also says, “[…] if some have found it convenient to bypass the individuality of the writer or his status as an author to concentrate on a work, they have failed to appreciate […] the word ‘work’ and the unity it designates” (1262). Again he is saying that for a work to be a work it needs the author to be recognized.
He also discusses the idea of ecriture which indicates writing as the interaction of presence and absence. I didn’t quit understand him until he said that you see references to the author in his absence. I do understand what he is trying to say. It goes back to being able to link different works to the same author through using the language, ideas, and phrases used. Even if a text’s author is unknown you could link it through clues that the author would use even though his/her name is absent.
I thought it was interesting to read about how works were only called scientific once they had the name of the author to go along with them (1264). By giving the name of the author it “marks a proven discourse” (1264). It is true because when we see an anonymous author we immediately want to know who it is that wrote what we just read so that we can think it to be more believable and real. I don’t know if this is the best example but it is all I can thin of at the moment. When the Harry Potter books first came out and you found out that the author was J.K. Rowling, yes you had a name but you had also found out that it was a pseudonym. Immediately I know I wanted to know who it really was and I had originally thought is was a male author but later found out it was a female who picked an ambiguous alias because she thought it might help the sale of the book. I think in our society we always want to know everything and we won’t stop until we do or we will not believe something until we get the answer.
I also thought how Foucault talked about more then literary texts having authors. It is true that art, music even theories have authors. Homer and Aristotle as he uses as examples are authors of theories. He feels that to be a “great” author one needs to not only write their own text but also make it possible for others to write about the subject and write about differences they see. I agree with him on this I feel that a great author needs to influence others and create controversy as well.

Freud and Lacan

I thought Freud and Lacan were very interesting to read and I definitely understand the material more and more as the semester goes on. I think I have trained my mind to be more open and less rigid when reading this type of material. I do think that some of Freud’s thoughts are a little bizarre but he makes good points. When he talks about dreams being an outlet for our repressed desires or fears that want to make their way into our conscious mind I agree (Barry 99). I feel that dreams always have meaning whether it is blatantly obvious or disguised; there is a reason behind it. I thought the way in which he tied the unconscious to literature was interesting as well. He says, the unconscious is like a play, poem or novel. They all can not speak directly and explicitly but they do so through images, symbols, emblems, or metaphors. Literature as well expresses and shows experience in these same ways. (Barry 102).
Where I started to think he went a little of-the-wall with his ideas was when he discussed Dora. I do not feel she wanted what happened to her to happen. I feel Freud is male oriented in his thoughts and a sexist especially in this case. It just aggravated me that he would say it was her fault that an older man came on to her, because she obviously suffered from this experience and his so called help was definitely no help to her at all. I did however see where he was coming from when he said that Hamlet had the Oedipus complex. I mean I have read the story before and he does hesitate to kill his uncle to avenge his father’s death. I do not know if he did in fact hesitate because he wanted to sleep with his mother but I can see why Freud may think this and I feel his thoughts are more justified here then in Dora’s story.
Lacan was very interesting as well. His thoughts made me think just like Freud’s did. When he changed Descartes’ famous saying of, “I think, therefore I am” to “I am where I think not,” I thought that was very clever of him. I agree with it too. I do believe that our true selves lie in our unconscious and we let those thoughts and feelings out every day in some way whether we are aware of it or not. Our unconscious affects our conscious life.
Lacan feels that language is a system that is already complete before we enter into it. He says that characterization (which needs to be rejected) must be viewed as assemblages (a collection of people or things) of signifiers. When the story by Edgar Allen Poe is discussed I understood what Lacan was getting at. The letter in the story is a symbolic object of the unconscious self because we never find out what the letter says just that is very important and effects all the actions of the story. Just like the letter’s contents being unknown so is our unconscious contents. Our unconscious effects our behavior just as the letter affected the characters behavior in the story. Psychoanalysis which deals with repetition and substitution is represented in the story by the investigation of the crime by Dupin. It is repetitive because Dupin steals the letter from the Minister who stole the letter from the Queen. His theft is achieved by substituting the real letter with a fake one.
When he says that all words are put away letters I understood the idea of the signifier having no simple connection to the signified. The signified is always lost he says. In this story we see the significance of the letter but not what is signified within it. The analogy he uses with the envelopes being the signifiers that can not be opened leaving the signified to remain hidden I thought was a good way to explain this idea.
I really enjoyed reading Poe’s story through Lacan’s ideas. It helped me understand Lacan better and I thought it was interesting. It also made me realize what I want to do for the essay!