INTRODUCTION “…the eyes widen to a stare and begin to feast” - Samuel Beckett, Words and Music The disconnected Word, the pervasive Name of the Father, and the motionless Law all become manifest in the patriarchal gaze that, in the very terms that Foucault conjectures in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, serves to reinforce absolute surveillance and discipline. According to Sigmund Freud, specular gaze is anal and obsessive, and conceals a sadistic will to power. This obsessive love for looking, which he calls Scopophilia, is essentially an active foray into the vicissitudes of erotic impulses. The subject of this study, Samuel Beckett has been accused by many feminist critics of reinforcing gender hierarchies by …show more content…
The woman is not only stratified into passive possibilities of the author’s permutative imagination but also takes on the status of a spectacle or what Sharon Willis has called “spectacular aestheticization” (Willis, Special Effects: Sexual and Social Difference in ‘Wild at Heart’ 276). The spectator or the listener (as in the case of Beckett’s radio plays) takes the woman actor as an event-in-process, anchored on the substratum of his masterly constructivism (or, so he would like to believe!). The woman, in the conception of the male audience, must be denied any access to the overall setup and the structural setup and the structural center of the full drama unfolding on the stage- the woman must not transgress her role; she must not aspire for knowledge on the core process of creation or its cultural execution. The truth, however, is that she is the embodiment of the enigma and the diegetic interference of prohibited …show more content…
As per Freund, “becoming immersed in a film detaches the viewer from it and that, as a result, the viewer comes to resemble a reflection in a mirror looking back at its facing admirer” (Freund, The Eye in the Object
Rather than focusing on naturalism, which was the universal surge during that time period, Rostand glorified clever trickery and whimsy. During that “era,” Cyrano de Bergerac uniquely revealed an artistic aspect aloofness and stood out among several works of art. “There is something gratifying about that kind of artistic aloofness in an age, like our own, when everyone else was metaphorically wearing pins and subscribing to one ‘school’ or another” (Beauty and the Beast 60). In other words, the play has a new artistic characteristic that allows it to look more satisfying than other “humdrum” works of art. The poet’s jovial, sinuous, and artistic verses occasionally produce “major”
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pseudonym, bell hooks, is a black woman who is often cited for her work as a writer, feminist, and cultural critic. As a passionate scholar, she is a leading intellectual of her generation and has published dozens of books and articles that discuss topics such as masculinity, patriarchy, feminine consciousness, representation, and politics. In 2004, hooks wrote her essay, “Understanding Patriarchy” in which she explores her understanding of patriarchy in American society and proposes a call to action to improve gender issues. hooks is able to develop her ideas through her complex rhetorical choices that all add to the overall effect of the essay. hooks is able to make and maintain claims that
This is suggested by Helen Simpson who stated that Carter centralises ‘latent content of fairy-tale’ is that women are objects of male desire hence patriarchal discourse establishes male supremacy to which Carter does this to challenge contemporary perspectives on the place of women by revealing the oppression that society inflicted. The Marquis is an overt example of male ownership of female bodies. Similarly, where Atwood exposes the harsh realities of oppressive patriarchy through the female body, Carter utilises the construct of the Marquis in the eponymous story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as a grotesque embodiment of patriarchal control. In her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Laura Mulvey coined the feminist term ‘male gaze.’ She argues that men are the audience and women are to embody the male perspective of women as objects of satisfaction.
Patriarchy presents the roles of men and women in a distinct form. Men are expected to be the dominant leader, strong, protector and sole provider where as women are subverted to the role of domestic duties, raring of children and fulfilling her man’s every desire without question or comment. In Lynn Nottage ’s play Poof! , she brilliantly portrays the roles of men and women, and experiments with the concept of changing gender roles that are characteristic of our society.
In her feminist film theory essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to criticize and scrutinize the fetishism, scopophilia, and eroticism in Hollywood mainstream cinema. What Daughters of the Dust executes impeccably roots from radically abandoning the cultural conventions that depict women as subservient and submissive to patriarchal
Feminist Criticism allows to understand the meaning and importance of literature when relating to the male-female power
Exposing Foundations: Psychoanalysis and Gender in Mulvey and Butler Woman… stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the image of woman still tied in her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning. 6 In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Laura Mulvey points out that psychoanalytic theory can “advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught” (2). To understand why woman is only “the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning” in this order, I will turn to a very small fraction of Lacan’s psychoanalytic philosophy. Here we find that
Over the past few decades, classical Hollywood cinema has been criticized for the way women are portrayed through the screen. The majority gaze throughout mainstream cinema is quite masculine. One of the easiest ways to prove this is by examining how men and women direct their gazes through film. “Men tend to look at women, and women tend to look not at men, but at men looking at them.” (Horton)
My analytical skills will be applied to part III of Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends’s from pages 43 to 61 and how the actions and moments beat by beat shape our experience on both, an emotional and intellectual level. This play is a combination of Chekhovian realism combined with Brecht’s approach of giving out information in the title, though she manipulates their style of writing in her own manner. This play was a 1930s occurrence – ‘sufferage’ where women got the right to vote and Fornes’ aim was to make the audience experience the world of females without the influence, in absence of the presence of men. Fornes’ approach to play write, from the very beginning of making a clear political or social agenda collective with that of Julia’s mysterious death at the very end of the play eliminates the possibility of a clear interpretation.
Film takes photography to another level. Film, or the cinema “is objectivity in time.” For the first time with film “the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were”. Bazin argues "only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled- up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, are able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.
The construction of a self-conscious female gaze is the prime objective of feminist theatres everywhere. British feminist theatre practice as elsewhere is an attempt made by women to claim their rightful space in the creative realm of theatre that was deliberately denied to them by patriarchy. The public gaze on women was always the male gaze, one that always wished to see women as objects. It was an ideological position that patriarchy sanctioned as the normal way of looking at women. Women were always the secondary sexual objects for the gratification of male sexual fantasies.
While the dialectic may itself have disturbing implications for feminist phenomenology, there are also some meaningful problems with its methodology. The first of these problems is that it is conclusively incapable of explaining the complexity of phenomena.12 Being and Nothingness are never diametrically opposed in the act of perception, but are rather constituted and heavily intertwined in moments of presence and absence. The initial relation of one to the world, is one of ecstasy, of an entanglement and a perceptual faith; there is a core ambiguity between touching and being touched in one's own body, that opens up this ambiguous absorption into being.13 Borrowing from Gestalt psychology, Merleau-Ponty argues that this pre-reflective world
Li Wanjie (14) 4D Literary Research Project Spatial Parody in the Novels of Patricia Highsmith Introduction To clarify the relationship between space and identity, Kevin Hetherington writes, “identity…is about spatiality…certain spaces act as sites for the performance of identity” (105). Spatiality is the conflux of identity performance and space, whereby a space can be infinitely appropriated and modified by the presence of a human subject within it. A natural corollary in the process of identification is the possibility, then, of spatial parody, which involves the reappropriation and remodification of a seemingly fixed space via a reversal or rejection of key features, smouch as power structures and social scripts, in favour of the
Response Paper 2 In the article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Laura Mulvey argues that the pleasure produced by narrative cinema reproduces an unconscious patriarchal structure of sexual divisions. It does so by appealing to our pleasure in looking – scopophilia (Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, p. 16) and to narcissistic primordial impulse to see our lives reflected in idealized ways that are in fact diliated, but important. She talks about emotions and how they work on us, how representation produces emotions that trigger unconscious responses.
Its overall effect has been a positive effect on the movie-making industry and to the audience who decides to watch. This essay will discuss how special effects have given filmmakers more creative options to make their movies more immersive for audiences and it will also argue about how important it is for only a mature audience to watch these movies because if immature audiences do decide to watch, it can lead to them acting more angrily in public. This essay will cover how some of the costliest movie production have also become some of the biggest and highest grossing movies. These essays will show how much of an impact that special effects have had on the movie making industry and have helped to give the audience a more immersive experience than ever before and will give people a better understanding of how special effects have improved movies. These essay will show the connection of how special effects have helped to create a better immersion with its audience and increased intrigue and interest.