Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
Ecriture feminine...2nd WAVE of feminism...
Gopa B. Caesar:
Dream World (on music videos)
Who gets to tell the story about sexuality in music videos?
Roles of women: musicians, back-up singers, dancers, part of the story, subject of the song.
Main functions: to be looked at, decorative
Behavior: always sexually aroused and active; nyphomaniac
Activities: getting in and out of clothes; available for peeping.
Even female artists are trapped by this male way of looking at women.
Gopa B. Caesar:
“The Female Bodyâ€
“The female body has many uses. It’s been used as a door-knocker, a bottle-opener, as a clock with a ticking belly, as something to hold up lampshades, as a nutcracker, just squeeze the brass legs together and out comes your nut. . . . “ Margaret Atwood
Gopa B. Caesar:
The Irigaray Reader
Introduction to Section I (by Margaret Whitford)
Patriarchy (defined by Irigaray)—“an exclusive respect for the genealogy of sons and fathers, and the competition between brothers†(Sexes et parentes, p.202)
maternal genealogy absent in western thought and institutions
coexistence of two genealogies (patriarchy and matriarchy), not simply a reversal or a replacement (p. 23)
Gopa B. Caesar:
“[W]hereas de Beauvoir emphasizes access to the world of men (equality), Irigaray is suggesting the creation of difference†(p.24).
develops de Beauvoir’s idea of Woman as Other (I: the ‘other of the same’, the necessary negative of the male subject, all that he has repressed and disavowed.)
“but a self-defined woman who would not be satisfied with sameness, but whose otherness and difference would be given social and symbolic representation. Each sex would then be ‘other’ for the other sex†(p. 24-25).
Gopa B. Caesar:
“Equal or Different?†(1986; 1988; 1990)
“The Bodily Encounter with the Mother†(conference on “Women and Madnessâ€, Montreal, 1981)—
“western culture is founded not on parricide (as Freud hypothesized in Totem and Taboo, but on matricide†(p.25).
I’s reinterpretation of the mythology (Clytemnestra) = the installation of patriarchy, built over the sacrifice of the mother and her daughters.
“The major cultural taboo is on the relationship with the mother†(p.25).
“The stress on Oedipus, on castration, serves to conceal another severance, the cutting of the umbilical cord to the motherâ€
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