Mary Devereaux, "Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers, and the Gendered Spectator: The New Aesthetics" Discussion of feminism

and its relationship to traditional aesthetics No vision is a neutral vision. In fact, gender plays an important role in formulating the expectations we have for our representations of the world. The "male gaze" is a way of looking at the world from the perspective of the patriarchy, a social system marked by the supremacy of the father and the legal dependence of wives and children. Women depend on men for status, privilege, and identity. This oppression occurs on both the material and symbolic levels. Women are oppressed not only economically and politically, but in the forms of reasoning, signifying, and symbolical exchange of our culture. Art is such a form. It inscribes a masculinist discourse which we then learn to reproduce in our everyday lives. Art reflects the conditions of life, but also helps to establish and maintain them. In categorizing art with other forms of patriarchal oppression, feminism rejects the division of art and politics which is basic to Anglo-American aesthetics. But it presents other challenges as well: different and difficult jargon and methodology, overthrow of deeply entrenched assumptions about the universal value of art. Also charges that it is impossible to simply extend aesthetics by "adding on" feminism, as work by Goodman, Danto, and Dickie was added to the body of theory. Male Gaze - how it works in film, a sample of feminist aesthetics Three different "gazes" which function together. filmmaker Institutions of filmmaking remain largely populated by men - so the gaze is maledominated. This control matters because it builds in a preference for certain kinds of films. Characters within the film / the film text Content/stories of traditional Hollywood films define value of women as their value to men. Hollywood film functions as a recuperative strategy designed to return wayward women to the fold. spectator Traditionally confined to point of view of the narrative hero (usually male). Spectator has no choice but to identify with the active, male protagonist. Women perform for the camera, and thus for the spectator. Conditions for oppression To be fully oppressive, male gaze needs physical, social, emotional "backup" female narcissism, at some level, activated by being looked at: women must have internalized a certain assignment of positions

How the male gaze is oppressive objectification: male gaze takes an object. In this respect it is no more or less objectifying than any other gaze (perspective). Objectification does not constitute oppression. dehumanization: male gaze treats people as objects of aesthetic (possibly erotic) contemplations. This is also not necessarily oppressive. debasement: only one of these three which constitutes oppression. Not implied by the other two. Male characters may be objectified or aestheticized, even portrayed in demeaning or "less than fully human" ways. But they are not debased in the larger sense of the word, because men do not lack power offscreen. Debasement requires "backup". Women's secondary positions occur offscreen as well as on, so they are debased. effect on the spectator Film presents its telling as absolute truth. The effect of film depends on narrative illusion: cannot call attention to itself as a story. Some allege that this encourages passivity of the viewer. unconscious mechanisms involved Voyeuristic pleasure psychoanalytic approach Rests on assumption that film reflects the psychical obsessions of the society which produces it. Narrative cinema provides spectator with two sources of pleasure scopophilic: pleasure of viewing another as an erotic object identification with the ego-ideal (male protagonist, usually) unpleasure Women represent castration threat, which is met by domestication, death, or fetishization. what this means for aesthetics Feminism has succeeded in placing gender on the agenda of things which are of relevance to aesthetics. It seeks to replace long-standing assumptions with new ways of thinking about art and our relationship to it. rather than being autonomous object, art is situated in everyday realm of social and political praxis art is not necessarily universal (denial that artworks or criteria of judgment are value-neutral) reconsideration of relationship to established artistic traditions reading/viewing no longer neutral activities: social and historical placement of

spectator affects meaning derived from text solutions Art has a potential for harm. Other than censorship, what other strategies to counteract/combat this harm are there? new type of art, new traditions rereading