New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology (Spring 2021) » May 4th: Wrapping Up The Semester

May 4th: Wrapping Up The Semester

May the Fourth Be with You!

Plan for this evening

  • See last week’s discussion on Participation if you need a refresher
  • Discuss the readings (no particular order)
  • Discuss next week’s Project + Presentation

I’ll have notes or links to notes below.

Group 1: Jodi Dean’s “Enjoying Neoliberalism” (2009)

I actually have a page from another class devoted to Jodi Dean, so let’s just go there.

Group 2: Phallocentrism and the Male Gaze in Media

Mulvey’s Article on Scopophilic Fetishization (she uses an ‘s’ instead of a ‘z’)

Mulvey uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to describe what goes on for a spectator, an audience. She focuses on film, but the theory can easily be applied to other media (or can/should it?). Mulvey offers a feminist critique of how women are portrayed in film and what those portrayals mean for the male spectators. A few basic things to come away with from Mulvey are the following:

  • Mulvey is “demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film” (I. A. para 1).
  • Hollywood narratives, films and the myths that “inspire” those films, predominantly reflect the male gaze–what men desire to see (scopophilia).
  • The scopophilic aspect of viewing cinema “arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight” (Mulvey, II. C. para 1).
  • The identification aspect of viewing cinema “develop[s] through narcissism and the constitution of the ego” it “comes from identification with the image seen” (Mulvey, II. C. para 1).
  • “A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror” (Mulvey, III. B. para 1).
  • Men viewing the female icon or celebrity–possibly in so-called “chick flicks”–poses a different psychoanalytic solution. The male unconscious, when confronted with a female icon, does not (in heterosexist circles) identify with her; she doesn’t complete him. Instead,
    • Voyeurism with associations of sadism and controlling the figure–woman as the object (Mulvey, III. C.1 para 2).
      -or-
    • “Fetishitic scopophilia builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself” (Mulvey, III. C.1 para 2).
  • Cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire” (Mulvey, III. “Summary” para 1).
  • Mulvey argues that film is another cultural product that controls images of women “to circumvent her threat” (III. “Summary” para 1).

But what can we say about women in the audience? With whom do they identify? What about women like Angelina Jolie or Milla Jovovich?

Hollywood is often called the Dream Factory. Why?

How can we relate this back to our favorite subject…consumption?

Extending Mulvey

I think Mulvey’s argument is completely sound, but it needs to be updated for contemporary media. Also, I think it’s wrong to assume that Mulvey would claim ALL viewers–male or female–view films the same way. It’s more productive to consider how one could identify with a character. Also, some viewers are going to identify with some characters and not with others. That’s just taste, right?

When it comes to video games, Mulvey’s theory of identification is actually bolstered because the gamers immerse themselves more fully into a game–controlling the avatar’s actions–than into a film or TV show. The gamer becomes the avatar. But we can complicate this: What about when women play with male avatars and vice versa?

Group 3: Multiple, Infinite feminisms

Let’s check out a different webpage for this discussion and, perhaps, learn from The Little Mermaid (1989). I have notes for Angela McRobbie’s “Feminism, Postmodernism, and the ‘Real Me’” and Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience.”

Group 4: Fredric Jameson’s “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984; reprinted 1990)

I have a feeling this reading was much easier to read than previous authors. Some of his references might be obscure to us, but he’s writing fairly clearly. That’s a plus, right?

As usual, we have to find a way into the reading, one of several possible ways in. I like to think of Jameson in context of the rise of postmodern(ist) scholarship and, of course, his analysis of artchitecture. Before we get into those, though, we ought to consider Jameson’s caution about theorizing Postmodernism itself. He warns that it difficult:

  • “Postmodernism theory seems indeed to be a ceaseless process of internal rollover in which the position of the observer is turned inside out and the tabulation recontinued on some larger scale” (p. 64).
  • when defining ideology’s function…
    “the production of functioning and living ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations…[and] there may be historical situations in which it is not possible at all–and this would seem to be our situation in the current crisis” (p. 53).

Culture Wars

Although Jameson isn’t as well known in popular circles, he does sort of figure into the “Culture Wars” of the 1990s. Postmodern theory and theorizing gave rise to new kinds of scholarship that critiqued the hegemonic ideology of American society (and Western). Also, it (usually) embraced be the Left, and, therefore, anathema to the Right. However, the postmodern condition isn’t a movement that you can be on or off–you’re situated in it.

Postmodern theory is beneficial for all kinds of study inside the academy, but here’s my reasons for English Studies:

  • Literature: Jameson brings up interpretations of literature in his chapter, and postmodernism is crucial for serious literature students. Unless I missed something in the last few years, postmodernism is the dominant analytical framework for literature over the last 30 years.
  • Rhetoric/Composition: Because we think about student identity as a culmination of one’s experiences (even if some of us think they’re totally socially constructed), PoMo theory allows us to consider the multiple positions from which people argue, write, consider, and participate in democracy.
  • Technical Communication: Well, as a member of a postindustrial, global economy, you need to understand how hierarchies lend themselves to technological production and, in turn, how humans interact with technology. Without that insight, you could edit a document, but you can’t re-vision one.

Architecture

This is a great subject for us. I have a video for us and some Vegas pictures. Maybe we ought to back up a second to Eco’s discussion of hyperreality. Jameson mentions that architecture was important for his theories on postmodernism:

“It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism…initially began to emerge” (p. 2).

  • The museum guard and tourists (pp. 32-33)
  • The Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles: “aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this new total space, meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new historically original kind of hypercrowd.” (pp. 38-45)
  • p. 63: “Postmodern buildings, on the contrary, celebrate their insertion into the heterogeneous fabric of the commercial strip and the motel and fast-food landscape of the postsuperhighway American city.”

Other Places to Focus on with Jameson

As with all our other readings, we could go into much more detail, so we’ll need to realize we won’t cover everything. Below are some quotations to help us choose.

  • p. 6: “If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable.”
  • p. 35: Defining what we’re about: “The other of our society is in that sense no longer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist societies, but something else which we must now identify.”
    • What is the new other?
      • “Technology may well serve as adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labor stored up in our machinery.”
    • What about capital?
      • From Mandel’s “three fundamental moments in capitalism”:
        “These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital.”
  • p. 48: “No theory to define “the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital….distance in general (including ‘critical distance’ in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism.”
  • p. 62: “The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt.”
  • p. 54: “The new political art…will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object–the world space of multinational capital.”
  • p. 54: “The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on as well as a spatial scale.”

Group 5: Deconstructing “Queer” Television

Queer Theory and Deconstruction

Queer theory: critical theory emerging in the 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies; critiques or provides “queer readings” of texts to question/challenge the idea that gender is part of the essential self; the theory uncovers socially constructed views of sex, gender, sexuality, and identities.

  • Queer theorist Michael Warner: [commenting on the institutions that appear to be just given…] “The dawning realization that themes of homophobia and heterosexism may be read in almost any document of our culture means that we are only beginning to have an idea of how widespread those institutions and accounts are.”

Deconstruction: critical theory that examines the historical traditions (often mediated by ideology) that create meaning–specifically in words but useful for cultural studies.

Will & Grace and Jack & Karen

I don’t like being so direct with my views on the media we discuss because my goal isn’t to present my ideas as better or “truth”; instead, I want introduce ideas and interpretations as a way to have us think differently than we might normally have given our culturally constructed lenses. That being said…

Will & Grace is a heteronormative TV show. On the surface, the show is about a gay man, Will, and his heterosexual best friend, Grace. The show also shows viewers–on the surface–two other friends–Jack, a gay man, and Karen, a heterosexual woman. While the two sets of couples have extra relationships, those are peripheral–the show focuses on Will & Grace and Jack & Karen as if they were two couples. Will and Grace live together (even when dating others), and Jack and Karen are seen together so often viewers would assume they’re married except for Jack’s flamboyancy and Karen’s talk of her convict husband (who’s always off camera).

Gayness Sanitized

The gayness of the show is sanitized for “polite” middle-American society watching this show on prime time TV. Male-to-male affection is never the same as male-to-female affection, and, interestingly, Grace and Karen touch each other in more sexual ways than Will and Jack ever touch their romantic interests…I’ll leave that to your critical thinking selves.

While the show might be consider more gay than previous sitcoms, the antics of Will and Grace–living together, planning to have a baby together, planning to raise a baby together, hugging and kissing all the time–show them to be a heterosexual couple. Unconsciously, America accepts Will & Grace because the show is not too gay; it doesn’t offend heterosexist paradigms. That fact was underscored in the series finale when {spoiler alert…don’t keep reading if you don’t want to know the ending} we learn Will’s baby–with his husband, Ben–and Grace’s baby–with her husband, Leo–are to fulfill Will & Grace’s destiny–to make a heterosexual union happen. Will & Grace’s kids meet in college and eventually get married…what’s next? Exactly, potential for a baby to be born. Will & Grace fulfill their destiny in “proper” heterosexual fashion by producing children who marry.

How is that a gay show?

Jeffery P. Dennis’s “The Boy Who Would Be Queen: Hints and Closets on Children’s Television”

You probably noticed the more social science writing style of both the articles in this group. Although there’s lots of overlap with cultural studies and sociology (and other social science disciplines), because most social scientists adhere to strict doctrines for writing and presenting research, they’re less bold in their prose…of course, that’s just one person’s opinion. Besides the articles’ contents, notice the ways in which both authors justify their methodologies and draw boundaries for their research. Those are probably good things for the Humanities to remember, but, then again, I’m a tech writing professor and probably slightly biased.

  • p. 739: “Queering, locating undertows of same-sex desire between putatively heterosexual characters (Doty, 1993), is actually easier in programs targeted to children and adolescents than those targeted to adults.”
    • Only programs produced in the United States or Canada were included to avoid the cultural difficulties of deciphering same-sex desire in Japanese anime.
    • 2nd Greatest Canadian TV Program (behind Schitt’s Creek)
  • p. 740: “The animated series tended to have an equally naturalistic frame: The children live in nuclear families, in stereotypical American suburbs, attend school, and are concerned with homework, tests, sports, and bullies.”
  • p. 741: “physicality referred to depictions of masculine beauty, which might subvert the heterosexual male gaze and provide a space for awareness of male same-sex attraction.”
  • p. 742: “a girl is invariably asked if she has “begun to notice boys,” as if heterosexual interest were an inevitable part of growing up.”
    • How generalizable is the above situation to “real life”?
  • p. 744: “In spite of the heteronormative background, hints were common in animated series, and particularly in the series with a high degree of fantasy.”
  • p. 746: “Gender-transgressive interests and activity appeared frequently in live action programs, usually as unremarkable parts of life—boys cook, girls play football….sometimes the gender-transgression is associated with hints of same-sex interest, intensifying the potential for locating homoerotic desire beneath same-sex friendships.”
  • “Expert” Viewers
  • p. 748: ““It’s just a cartoon—grow up!” When a fan asked if Jackson of Hannah Montana might be gay, he was all but crucified on the spot.”
  • p. 749: “Whatever their sexual identity or motive in writing, presumably the hints, intimacies, and references provide inspiration, so those programs with the highest degree of disruption of heteronormativity should inspire the largest percentage of slash stories.”
  • p. 752: “authorial intention is not required for viewers to create meanings from mass media texts.”
    • I love a loaded conclusion!
    • “this study demonstrates that gay potential appears in the most arid of heterosexist wastelands—programming targeting children and adolescents.”
    • “to find a momentary escape from the tyranny of everyday heterosexism.”

Guillermo Avila-Saavedra “Nothing Queer about Queer Television”

See discussion on Will & Grace above.

  • p. 5: “According to the media-watch organization GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) the 2003–4 network prime-time line-up can be considered a breakthrough with eight leading gay characters, compared to five the three previous seasons (GLAAD, 2006).”
    • “the perceived progressiveness of gays’ sudden appearance on American television could be undermined if it responds to traditional norms of social relations.”
  • p. 6: “the fictional media narratives tend to emphasize the interpersonal issues of homosexuality and avoid the political ones.”
    • Essentialists and Constructionists
    • “Queer theory is a radical area of study resulting from the development of feminist theories, gay and lesbian literary criticism, and Foucault’s revolutionary ideas about sexuality and identity.”
  • p. 7: “Queer represents a resistance to anything that is socially defined as normal…”
    • “If queer is not linked solely to sexual objects and desires, it can be understood as a reaction to broader structures of social and cultural domination. Rather than coercion, social domination can be conceived as a more flexible system of normalization through social structures and cultural production.”
    • “the discourse of gay masculinities actually excludes and ignores concerns of other gender and sexual minorities. Ward (2000) calls this phenomenon ‘queer sexism’ of which gay white men would be active enforcers rather than victims.”
    • “Brookey argues that representations of homosexuals who hold traditional values are conceived as a way for heterosexual viewers to reflect their own experiences…”
  • p. 8: “Homosexual images are presented in a way acceptable for heterosexual audiences by reinforcing traditional values like family, monogamy and stability.”
  • p. 10: “Queer reading of mediated texts has been useful in deconstructing the hidden or subtle messages of perceived heterosexual narratives and even homophobic ones (Kanner, 2003).”
  • p. 11: “the term ‘queer’…a strategy of provocation with clear political goals of destabilizing the status quo, and a radical brand of social and cultural scholarship called queer theory also adopted the term.”
    • “In the radical and disruptive sense of the term, there is nothing queer about queer television when the flexibility of the term is reduced to an interpretation that reinforces the traditional homosexual/heterosexual binary.”
  • p. 12: “The assignment of gender-appropriate characteristics of husband/wife roles to gay couples, in this case the stereotype of the butch lesbian, is a recurring motif in all the shows.”
  • p. 13: “heteronormativity is about the maintenance of the status quo, with all its elements of gender, class and race in addition to sexuality.”
  • p. 14: “what women do is considered more trivial, and a traditionally feminine activity like cheerleading is used to ridicule gay men.”
  • p. 15: “Gay men are compelled to celebrate and understand straight men’s adventures, but not the other way around.”
  • p. 17: “All gay characters on television exist because of capitalism; it is the force that makes them possible and the only agenda allowed.”
    • Rather bold, absolute statement…
  • p. 18: “the overwhelming majority of queer characters on television remain gay white males.”

Next Week

That’s it for class! Next week, you’ll present your Final Projects (yes, I’ll grade them as you present, but you’ll submit them via Canvas). I have very limited availability to meet, so I hope you got most of your questions answered tonight.

Don’t forget that you have your last Weekly Discussion Post due by Friday, 5/7, at 11:00pm. Also, wish Heidi luck on her MA Project Defense tomorrow!