Feminist+and+Gender+Theory

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= Readings: = __ **Background** __
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=__The Male Gaze __=

1973 Laura Mulvey

 * The Male Gaze
 * British feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. Her article is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of [|film theory]towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Read:Laura Mulvey Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

media type="youtube" key="pfL09c4cw2I" width="420" height="315" “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” - Laura Mulvey

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=__Bisexual Response __=

1979: Janet Bergstrom

 * Janet Bergstrom uses Sigmund Freud’s ideas of bisexual responses, arguing that women are capable of identifying with male characters and men with women characters, either successively or simultaneously.

=__The Female Gaze __=
 * 1984: Miriam Hanson, put forth the idea that women are also able to view male characters as erotic objects of desire.


 * 1988 GaylynStudlar **
 * “in masochism as in the infantile state of dependence, pleasure does not involve mastery of the female but submission to her body and her gaze. This pleasure also applies to the infant, the masochist and the film spectator.”

“Can the male gaze be reversed, i.e. is there a female gaze? Is it possible to argue for a female gaze in contemporary movies, where the woman would be objectifying the man to a subject of their desires and pleasures of looking?”... Fatal Attraction is a motion picture which initially brings forward a possible female gaze and therefore could be seen as questioning Mulvey's argument of a male gaze. However, as the narrative continues the gaze is swayed to become yet again a male gaze, a defence of the patriarchy and of masculinity.

Eva-Maria Jacobsson (1999)

=__The Final Girl __=

1992: Carol Clover,

 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5;">In "Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film" Clover argues that young male viewers of Horror are quite prepared to identify with the female-in-jeopardy. Clover further argues that the "Final Girl" in the psychosexual sub-genre of Exploitation Horror invariable triumphs through her own resourcefulness, and is not by any means a passive, or inevitable, victim.
 * ===Reading: [|The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror]===

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Oppositional gaze” (1992 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">A Black oppositional gaze offers a critical space to replace the binary oppositions of Mulvey, and a new pleasure too --'the pleasure of resistance, of saying "no": not to "unsophisticated" enjoyment... but to the structures of power which asks us to consume them uncritically‘

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Return of the Female Gaze <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">“Can the male gaze be reversed, i.e. is there a female gaze? Is it possible to argue for a female gaze in contemporary movies, where the woman would be objectifying the man to a subject of their desires and pleasures of looking?” <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Fatal Attraction is a motion picture which initially brings forward a possible female gaze and therefore could be seen as questioning Mulvey's argument of a male gaze. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">However, as the narrative continues the gaze is swayed to become yet again a male gaze, a defence of the patriarchy and of masculinity. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Eva-Maria Jacobsson (1999)

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Post-Feminism <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">McRobbie presents Bridget Jones, the title character in the 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary, as a classic post-feminist example: <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">“Modern, independent, and flirty, Bridget is also incessantly self-reflexive, weight-obsessed, and plagued by anxiety over finding a husband. Along with her fictional comrades Carrie Bradshaw and Ally McBeal, Bridget acknowledges her feminist predecessors, but is glad to escape the “censorious politics” they promoted and be free to revel in the trappings of traditional girlhood. These women and cultural texts “have taken feminism into account and implicitly or explicitly ask the question, ‘what now?’” <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Angela McRobbie (2009)

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sample Criticism using a feminist approach: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/ex-machina-turing-bechdel-test/

=Extra items for Conversation:=

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