GENDER, IDENTITY & REPRESENTATION

This weeks lecture discussed the representation of genders within society, the media, and other contexts such as magazine covers or children's books. It was a very interesting lecture where we considered in great detail how men and women have been portrayed in the past and also in the current period. Furthermore it was interesting to get modern takes on everything, as we studied very recent magazine covers which still portray very controversial associations. For this week's task we were asked to read Laura Mulvey's reading on 'Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema' (1975). It was a very complex piece of text using a psychoanalytic theory, however completely fascinating. 

Firstly Mulvey discusses castration threat through her absence of a penis and therefore she feels she only acts in as a threat and cannot surpass these limits. I'm not sure I would entirely agree with this but as she moves her focus to scopophilia I begin to get a better understanding. There is a significant repression of women through scopophilic instinct (pleasure in seeing another person as an erotic object). Women are portrayed as passive, raw material for the male gaze. They are represented accordingly towards the unconscious patriarchal order. She highlights the differences regarding cinematic codes and their voyeuristic potential. In contrast to strip tease, theatre, shows, etc (where the main element is the 'attractiveness' of the woman), cinema, narrative film goes much further beyond this. Narrative film highlights the desire of a woman by building the way she is looked at and perceived into the spectacle by experimenting with tension - dimensions of time/space. Cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, an object, all based towards that desire. 

Mulvey mentions the 3 main view points, the view from the camera as it records, the view from the audience watching the final (edited) product, and the view from the characters at each other within the screen illusion. She also discusses throughout the reading the idea that there are 2 levels in which a woman functions - they act as an erotic object for characters within the screen illusion, and/or act as an erotic object for the audience. Contradictory, women are also often used as a castration threat which endangers the neurotic male ego. 

I found the end of this reading particularly interesting, where Mulvey discusses how new film trends contradict with previous traditional conventions. New ideas aim to free the view of the camera from discrepancies in time and space, and the look of the audience into passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this drastically changes, and potentially 'destroys' the satisfaction of the audience, but this highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic mechanisms. I found the last line of the reading particularly interesting. "Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret."