Critical Frameworks
Friday, December 3, 2010
Last One! ...
Last Post Class Post! due 12/5
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Cixous
I found that Helene Cixous text from ‘Sorties’ eye opening. She talks about male privilege and how usually the male is dominant and therefore active while the female is passive. This also made me think of certain words in language today to describe women. The term ‘women” has the word men in it and the term “female” has the word male in it. Even when describing this gender, the male word remains dominant. Then we have this fixed notion of a male and female being together. Generally when this idea is broken, people start criticizing those who do not fit this ideal. They become labeled as homosexual, bisexual, transvestites and so on. Cixous defines bisexuality in two ways. First, as a fantasy of unity, a person not made up of two genders but rather two halves. Second, as the “multiplication of the effects of desire’s inscription on every part of the body and the other body.” (159) Cixous goes on to say that the woman is the only one who benefits from this. Males are terrified of homosexuality. I find this notion interesting. Personally, I think that female bisexuals are much less criticized then male bisexuals. This is largely due to the fact that a female and male together is natural and a female and female together is sexy. Males do not judge females yet they judge themselves when they are the ones with another person of the same gender. Males have always had this sense of being dominant, in power, and having possession. Homosexuality endangers this because it makes them appear passive thus no longer in control. It is unfortunate that there is this double standard in society today. Cixous goes on to describe feminine strength and liberation. The voice of women has almost always fallen on the deaf. The body, breath and speech of women needs to be un-censored. Personally I agree with this. In CMC 100, we did a magazine analysis where even though the female was the only one present in the advertisement, she was still somehow being censored. Whether this was by not showing her eyes, having her mouth covered, or being depicted as an object, females were still be shown as passive. This is something that needs to change. Many magazines talk about how females show feel empowered and independent yet the photos in the magazines contradict this.
Apparduri pre class
Appadurai pre-class
For Thursday’s class we were asked to read, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, by Arjun Appadurai. He talks about and relates to many theorists we have covered thus far. According to Appadurai the imaginary is made up of five dimensions of global natural flow; 1. Ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. He discusses imaginary by saying, “the image, the imagined, the imaginary- these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice”. This quote reminds me a lot of Baudrillard, because he talks a lot about the imaginary as well and how it plays a big role in society. We like to use our imagination, because we like it better than the real. This is because the imaginary comes across so much more appealing than the real. Appadurai also says how people around the globe live in imaginary worlds, and Baudrillard would agree with that statement also. Baudrillard believes that sometimes imitations are created to look so realistic that it is hard to determine what is real and what is fake, to the extent that we start to live in these imaginary worlds, because we cannot tell the difference. Appadurai also claims that there has been a “technological explosion” in the past century (including trains, airplanes, telephone, computers, and internet), which has created a deeper level of communication…or does it? People would think that this has created a way to share culture with more people, but really it just Americanizes other places and cultures throughout the world. He gives the example of people from the Philippines’ “affinity for American popular music” and how they appreciate songs from our past almost more than we appreciate them.
“on my honor I have not given, nor received, nor witnessed any unauthorized assistance on this work”
Appadurai Post
He claims our new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot be understood by previous models. All these variables have to do with tensions between economy, culture, and politics. Appadurai then proposed a framework for exploring these 'disjunctures' by analyzing five dimensions of global 'cultural flow': ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. Now this is where I got confused, I'm not sure I understood what the technoscape or ideoscape (or maybe it was a different 'scape') was necessarily trying to protect/call for, I felt like some overlapped and were worded in ways that made it hard to figure out what Appadurai was trying to say, even after each one's brief introduction. Although I'm sure if they're of any importance then we'll figure it out in class tomorrow.
My favorite quote of the whole piece/every reading since test #2
"one man's imagined community is another man's political prison"
"on my honor I have not given, nor received, nor witnessed any unauthorized assistance on this post"
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
I thought this image went well with both previous posts of the Othering of African Americans, and having black athletes pose as an image of a brand. Lebron Jame's can be seen in many photos have brands tied with his name. In this picture there is no brand but it is centralizing him as a person to just being that of an athlete and nothing more. The magazine is clearly showing off her dress, and as many know Vogue is not one for having pictures of star athletes in their sport apparel. I also found the wording of white supremacy in this article such as a dagger being slashed in our society. We are surrounded by advertising that directly Others those who are not white. I found this image to have a direct affect of Othering Lebron James who is a celebrity in our society for his amazing ability to play basketball in a non intentional way. “For it is the ever present reality of racist domination, of white supremacy, that renders problematic the desire of white people to have contact with the Other. Often it is this reality that is most masked when representations of contact between white and non-white, white and black, appear to mass culture” (371). After reading Hooks article this really resounded to the advertisements I had found. In most of the photos of white women that I found searching on Google there was a type of Othering done in their background, whether it’s of an African American person or having people in the background dressed up like animals or savages to further the forefront image of the white model. Even in the photos of African American women that I found in the search they were Othered by their attire or makeup that was placed on them for the photo shoot.