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Nov. 20th, 2006 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethIt do annoy me when the books muddle the words. The section thinks it is about masculinity, says so in the title, but then they only go on about sexuality, specifically suppression of homosexuality and resulting obsessive heterosexuality. Because, you see, Torvald and Rank both fancying Nora *obviously* means there was some suppressed homoerotic tension.
On the one hand, finding slashers writing textbooks, vaguely amusing.
On the other, how on earth can they call it suppressed? I mean, we only have access to Nora's life, and from what we see Helmer and Rank spend half the play shut away in the study together. Granted, you can talk through the study door, so it would have to be a fairly quiet kind of not-repressed, but still.
The more I read about Freud the more it do wind me up.
And the way it gets used...
Calling the whole bit with the stockings a secret sign of misogyny - because attraction to a fetish is attraction to something not-woman and therefore secret woman hate.
I'm, like, WTF? Dude is dying of sexually transmitted disease! And she's married! Stockings are about as close as he can safely get on two counts.
Plue there's the thing where he does actually ask if he can see more, so it isn't like he wasn't trying.
Also, interpreting the tarantella scene as secretly misogynistic because it is a dance based on the death throes of a spider bite victim so it is getting an erotic charge out of woman death.
Well, yeah, *if* that was what the dance was.
Fortean Times article says actually it was the *cure* to spider bite.
Getting a charge out of watching a woman dance herself healthy is *quite* another thing.
Thing of it is, there is stuff about construction of masculinity, masculine identity, that can be dug out of the play. It would be the part where men are the breadwinners and so Nora earning her own money undermines the categories. Men are the responsible planning people, so Nora being the responsible one ditto. Men are the rescuers, so Nora saving his life double ditto. Men make the decisions - the hiring and firing, the choosing and proposing, the handing the bride from one to the other. So again, Nora is messing with male power base just by trying to be the boss of her own self. When masculinity defines itself in opposition to femininity then changing feminine behaviour feels like it forces a change of self definition, hence threatening. Studying masculinity means turning the spotlight on all the assumptions and seeing why it bothers masculine definitions to have feminine redefine itself.
But none of that is in the section on masculinity because it goes and muddles it together with sex. Yes, many dominant conceptions of masculinity do the same thing, but the point of examining it is to analyse that, not perpetuate the same confusion!
... I always end up arguing with the book. I can't even remember if I've argued with this one before. I mean I know I read it, but now I'm going through making it pink so I argue.
Pink and silver.
Because it vaguely amuses me.
On the one hand, finding slashers writing textbooks, vaguely amusing.
On the other, how on earth can they call it suppressed? I mean, we only have access to Nora's life, and from what we see Helmer and Rank spend half the play shut away in the study together. Granted, you can talk through the study door, so it would have to be a fairly quiet kind of not-repressed, but still.
The more I read about Freud the more it do wind me up.
And the way it gets used...
Calling the whole bit with the stockings a secret sign of misogyny - because attraction to a fetish is attraction to something not-woman and therefore secret woman hate.
I'm, like, WTF? Dude is dying of sexually transmitted disease! And she's married! Stockings are about as close as he can safely get on two counts.
Plue there's the thing where he does actually ask if he can see more, so it isn't like he wasn't trying.
Also, interpreting the tarantella scene as secretly misogynistic because it is a dance based on the death throes of a spider bite victim so it is getting an erotic charge out of woman death.
Well, yeah, *if* that was what the dance was.
Fortean Times article says actually it was the *cure* to spider bite.
Getting a charge out of watching a woman dance herself healthy is *quite* another thing.
Thing of it is, there is stuff about construction of masculinity, masculine identity, that can be dug out of the play. It would be the part where men are the breadwinners and so Nora earning her own money undermines the categories. Men are the responsible planning people, so Nora being the responsible one ditto. Men are the rescuers, so Nora saving his life double ditto. Men make the decisions - the hiring and firing, the choosing and proposing, the handing the bride from one to the other. So again, Nora is messing with male power base just by trying to be the boss of her own self. When masculinity defines itself in opposition to femininity then changing feminine behaviour feels like it forces a change of self definition, hence threatening. Studying masculinity means turning the spotlight on all the assumptions and seeing why it bothers masculine definitions to have feminine redefine itself.
But none of that is in the section on masculinity because it goes and muddles it together with sex. Yes, many dominant conceptions of masculinity do the same thing, but the point of examining it is to analyse that, not perpetuate the same confusion!
... I always end up arguing with the book. I can't even remember if I've argued with this one before. I mean I know I read it, but now I'm going through making it pink so I argue.
Pink and silver.
Because it vaguely amuses me.