confuzzlement about feminisms
Feb. 17th, 2006 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabetham reading Cultural Studies book, the bit on feminism.
I understand the bit about portrayals of women. You look at a text, and you see an image or character that is intended to be female, and you see what they are like. What is associated with them, what they are doing, and like that. So, Doctor Who companions, are they screaming in mini skirts or are the Ace blowing stuff up. And then you can write about the portrayal of women in that text.
And often in media texts, specially TV, women are portrayed as passive, dependent, and a bunch of things that are considered negative stereotypes. So it is feminist to say 'er, excuse me, many women go about their daily lives without screaming and faining, so please show that, okay? thanks'. And then you get... apparently, positive stereotypes, with advertisers trying to sell stuff to career women. Which isn't good because even stuff that looks feminist is trying to reduce women's choices to being about what to consume.
According to the first bit of the chapter.
but the next bit of the chapter goes on about how... values in cultural criticism, especially the high culture / mass culture debate, also come back to a masculine/feminine thing. Because mass culture is seen as passive and consuming, and so are women. But if I'm understanding it right it doesn't go on to say 'and this is dumb because women aren't passive', it goes on to say something like we should find out why women are consumers.
is it just me or do those bits not stick together?
like, in the sociology book, it had that bit about sets of oppositions where one is valued more than the other, and up the top of the list there is masculine/feminine, and then active/passive and all that would be on that list, and active=masculine=more valued. Okay, got that. But then it reckoned its a feminist issue to get passive to be more valued, rather than to get women to not be associated in particular with passive.
Which in the sociology book was one of the big fights between different feminist theories. Ah. Right. So they don't so much stick together as grrr at each other?
See I can understand seeing passive as not without value, and seeing chaos as actually quite useful sometimes, and darkness, or emotion instead of reason, and like that. But I still don't get why thems all 'feminine'. They aren't, except that people say so. Its dumb that they say so, on account of actual females being not that kind of feminine, or to put it another way on account of real people being quite able to act in ways called masculine or feminine both. Making all them labels gendered just doesn't match with reality.
Except for how the housework=women's work technically is true more often than not. But it shouldn't be.
The bit about portrayals of women that annoys me is they're not telling all the stories. There are many many many stories, and the ones that get told are only very few. Like, I think it was an icon, they had a super team that was labelled as 'the cute boy', 'the smart boy', 'the strong boy' and 'the girl'. Because being 'the girl' is distinctive enough, no need to fill in more details. But the details are where the interesting is.
I guess on a reader level I wasn't initially so very worried about representations of women as much as I was bloody *bored* with them. Show me the rest! Be more interesting! Write the characters and then cast them as guys or girls at random! Go on, it should work at least as well!
Except for difference feminists would say that no it doesn't, because women are different and it should be more 'women yaays!'
Like, that bit about multivocality vs hierarchy. Which might not be the right vs. But, having a group think aloud together, or having a big general tell all what to do, usually without getting input. Why is that a feminist thing? I've seen multivocality be labelled as feminine. But I don't get it. Are they saying women talk and men give orders? Okay, I can see that is an existing association. But... women talk more, therefore talking more is more good because women are more good? No, talking more is more good if and when talking more works more better.
I'm not being terribly articulate.
I'm not entirely sure I'm understanding the arguments, let alone saying them right.
I think I'd rather stick to the 'see girl kick butt, go yaay! because it isn't the screamer stereotype' version of analysis. The other bits of the chapter contain many interesting thoughts, but they make thinking about things all sort of splodgy and looking like a brainstorm, and I don't think you can hand in a brainstorm spidery thingy as an essay. Can only think one thing at once. Maybe think another thing after that.
:-/
thinking hard. college hard too. meh.
I understand the bit about portrayals of women. You look at a text, and you see an image or character that is intended to be female, and you see what they are like. What is associated with them, what they are doing, and like that. So, Doctor Who companions, are they screaming in mini skirts or are the Ace blowing stuff up. And then you can write about the portrayal of women in that text.
And often in media texts, specially TV, women are portrayed as passive, dependent, and a bunch of things that are considered negative stereotypes. So it is feminist to say 'er, excuse me, many women go about their daily lives without screaming and faining, so please show that, okay? thanks'. And then you get... apparently, positive stereotypes, with advertisers trying to sell stuff to career women. Which isn't good because even stuff that looks feminist is trying to reduce women's choices to being about what to consume.
According to the first bit of the chapter.
but the next bit of the chapter goes on about how... values in cultural criticism, especially the high culture / mass culture debate, also come back to a masculine/feminine thing. Because mass culture is seen as passive and consuming, and so are women. But if I'm understanding it right it doesn't go on to say 'and this is dumb because women aren't passive', it goes on to say something like we should find out why women are consumers.
is it just me or do those bits not stick together?
like, in the sociology book, it had that bit about sets of oppositions where one is valued more than the other, and up the top of the list there is masculine/feminine, and then active/passive and all that would be on that list, and active=masculine=more valued. Okay, got that. But then it reckoned its a feminist issue to get passive to be more valued, rather than to get women to not be associated in particular with passive.
Which in the sociology book was one of the big fights between different feminist theories. Ah. Right. So they don't so much stick together as grrr at each other?
See I can understand seeing passive as not without value, and seeing chaos as actually quite useful sometimes, and darkness, or emotion instead of reason, and like that. But I still don't get why thems all 'feminine'. They aren't, except that people say so. Its dumb that they say so, on account of actual females being not that kind of feminine, or to put it another way on account of real people being quite able to act in ways called masculine or feminine both. Making all them labels gendered just doesn't match with reality.
Except for how the housework=women's work technically is true more often than not. But it shouldn't be.
The bit about portrayals of women that annoys me is they're not telling all the stories. There are many many many stories, and the ones that get told are only very few. Like, I think it was an icon, they had a super team that was labelled as 'the cute boy', 'the smart boy', 'the strong boy' and 'the girl'. Because being 'the girl' is distinctive enough, no need to fill in more details. But the details are where the interesting is.
I guess on a reader level I wasn't initially so very worried about representations of women as much as I was bloody *bored* with them. Show me the rest! Be more interesting! Write the characters and then cast them as guys or girls at random! Go on, it should work at least as well!
Except for difference feminists would say that no it doesn't, because women are different and it should be more 'women yaays!'
Like, that bit about multivocality vs hierarchy. Which might not be the right vs. But, having a group think aloud together, or having a big general tell all what to do, usually without getting input. Why is that a feminist thing? I've seen multivocality be labelled as feminine. But I don't get it. Are they saying women talk and men give orders? Okay, I can see that is an existing association. But... women talk more, therefore talking more is more good because women are more good? No, talking more is more good if and when talking more works more better.
I'm not being terribly articulate.
I'm not entirely sure I'm understanding the arguments, let alone saying them right.
I think I'd rather stick to the 'see girl kick butt, go yaay! because it isn't the screamer stereotype' version of analysis. The other bits of the chapter contain many interesting thoughts, but they make thinking about things all sort of splodgy and looking like a brainstorm, and I don't think you can hand in a brainstorm spidery thingy as an essay. Can only think one thing at once. Maybe think another thing after that.
:-/
thinking hard. college hard too. meh.