dhw@ncar.ucar.EDU ("David H. West") (11/21/90)
In article <1990Nov17.155213.23767@arris.com> uunet!arris!rshapiro@ncar.ucar.EDU (Richard Shapiro) writes: >In article <1990Nov16.161821.17287@iti.org> uunet!mailrus!sharkey!hela!iti.org!dhw@ncar.ucar.EDU ("David H. West") writes: >>It's quite unclear to me that there is any power difference >> [between being the looker and being the object of the look] >> in "everyday life", the spectatee is free to spectate right back > >This is a typical "free will" argument, and suffers the usual >difficulties. Human beings are not autonomous, independent subjects. >We are utterly social creatures: our very sense of self, our >subjectivity, is highly constrained by the various social groups to >which we belong. This has long been one of the crucial, and central, >arguments of feminism and the study of gender. The "freedom" you >describe is illusory. Please apply to your own "sociology is destiny" argument the trenchant critique which I hope you would apply to someone else's "biology is destiny" argument. >Even a cursory look at classic >Hollywood cinema will make the gendering obvious: [two paragraphs of examples omitted] "Classic" Hollywood cinema is from an era when the media were constrained in their presentation of gender-related issues by views that have widely been considered inappropriate (if not actually absurd) for more than a generation. -David West dhw@iti.org