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From: uunet!mailrus!sharkey!hela!iti.org!dhw@ncar.ucar.EDU ("David H. West")
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: The "Gendered Nature of Spectacle" (was Re: Female human aesthetics)
Message-ID: <1990Nov20.155931.8304@iti.org>
Date: 21 Nov 90 05:43:45 GMT
References: <1990Nov11.171709.25842@arris.com> <1990Nov16.161821.17287@iti.org> <1990Nov17.155213.23767@arris.com>
Organization: The Forgotten Legions of ... um ... er ...
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In article <1990Nov17.155213.23767@arris.com> uunet!arris!rshapiro@ncar.ucar.EDU (Richard Shapiro) writes:
>In article <1990Nov16.161821.17287@iti.org> uunet!mailrus!sharkey!hela!iti.org!dhw@ncar.ucar.EDU ("David H. West") writes:
>>It's quite unclear to me that there is any power difference
>> [between being the looker and being the object of the look]
>> in "everyday life", the spectatee is free to spectate right back
>
>This is a typical "free will" argument, and suffers the usual
>difficulties. Human beings are not autonomous, independent subjects.
>We are utterly social creatures: our very sense of self, our
>subjectivity, is highly constrained by the various social groups to
>which we belong.  This has long been one of the crucial, and central,
>arguments of feminism and the study of gender.  The "freedom" you
>describe is illusory.

Please apply to your own "sociology is destiny" argument the trenchant
critique which I hope you would apply to someone else's "biology is
destiny" argument.

>Even a cursory look at classic
>Hollywood cinema will make the gendering obvious:
[two paragraphs of examples omitted]

"Classic" Hollywood cinema is from an era when the media were
constrained in their presentation of gender-related issues by views
that have widely been considered inappropriate (if not actually
absurd) for more than a generation.

-David West         dhw@iti.org