randolph@Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz) (07/23/89)
I'm importing the following from soc.men, because I'd like some
comments from the theoreticians here. It is p.f. (politically
f**cked), but may nonetheless be worth pursuing.
It started out with the following from Charleen:
I was browsing Printer's Ink the other night and leafed through a copy
of _The God in Everyman_ (written, obviously, by the same author who
wrote _The Goddess in Everywoman_). Has anyone read it? Would they
care to offer a review?
Anyway, the author (a woman) was commenting that the men she talked to
while researching the book found it easier to talk to her than to other
men. She also offered some statistics, which I don't recall, that
suggest that men prefer women therapists, when possible.
Do you men find this to be true, that women are easier to talk to?
I posted, saying yes, and included the following quote from Foucault:
. . . one has to have an inverted image of power in order to believe
that all these voices which have spoken so long in our
civilization--repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one
is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has
forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not
thinking--are speaking to us of freedom.
-- Michael Foucault, *The History of Sexuality*, volume I.
Which mutated in my mind, and gave rise to the following hypothesis:
In our culture, listening, and demanding confession, are "feminine"
techniques of power.
To evaluate this hypothesis, the following hypotheses could be examined:
Listening is part of "feminine" interpersonal power tactics. Can we
observe such tactics? Can we find recognizable behaviors expected
of women of our culture which fill such a slot (various of the
transactional analysts' games might usefully be examined)?
Listening is part of a broader deployment of power; a global social
pattern individual behavior which is not planned by individuals
like those which G Fitch recently discussed. Likewise, can we
find candiates for such a pattern among women; can we show their
existence and uncover their history?
Listening is part of the deployment of power characteristic of those
denied authority by prevailing social patterns. Can we show, for
instance, that US blacks had or still have such a pattern?
Anyone care to take up the challenge? Anyone know if there's been any
research already done which confirms or denies this? I am unsure that
this leads anywhere, but I'm interested enough to post it & look for
follow-ups. Besides which, who needs to be politically correct?
++Randolph Fritz sun!randolph || randolph@sun.comrshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro) (07/24/89)
In article <8907221627.AA27245@cognito.> randolph@Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz) writes: These arguments against biological reductionism are getting a little boring and I was about to start a new thread: the medical objectification of women and "the gaze". And then along comes the topic of listening as "feminine power": >I posted, saying yes, and included the following quote from Foucault: > > . . . one has to have an inverted image of power in order to believe > that all these voices which have spoken so long in our > civilization--repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one > is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has > forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not > thinking--are speaking to us of freedom. > -- Michael Foucault, *The History of Sexuality*, volume I. > >Which mutated in my mind, and gave rise to the following hypothesis: > > In our culture, listening, and demanding confession, are "feminine" > techniques of power. > The mutation seems very peculiar to me. Certainly the roles of confessor, analyst, doctor which Foucault has in mind here are classically masculine ones (and until recently, more or less exclusively performed by men). It's generally seen to be part of a larger 'objectification' of women -- turning women into objects of study and contemplation. The 'sex object' notion is just a specific instance of this more widespread practice. Foucault shows this tactic of power to be deployed in a gender-blind way against everyone, but others have recognized that it's particulary operative *against* women. The linkage you want to make seems to be: listening can be a tactic of power; listening is passive; passive = feminine; therefore listening is "feminine power". I think this is quite a weak case. The kind of listening Foucault describes is definitely *not* passive. There's a confusion here between, on the one hand, negative power vs positive power, and on the other, active power vs passive power (whatever that might mean). Negative power is the power that represses, power in the more ordinary sense. Positive power is the power that constructs. It's not correct to regard the repressive power as active/masculine and the productive power as passive/feminine. Both are active; both are conventionally masculine; both are in fact practiced by men, more often than not. The original title of Foucault's book translates as _The Will to Knowledge_, and it's this (active) *will* which characterizes this listening. Foucault himself doesn't consider gender one way or the other, but others (see below) have seen this as an example of women as objects of male knowledge/power. The best extended examination of these issues from a feminist perspective has been in film studies, with "looking" replacing "listening" -- the gaze, as it's usually called in that context. The construction of women in classic Hollywood movies as objects of the gaze is by now fairly well known: the special lighting, the clothing, the particular use of point-of-view shots. Female characters in classic movies are denied full subjectivity; they are objects of the gaze of viewers who are thereby constructed as implicitly male. This argument was made by Laura Mulvey in a very famous article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" -- you can hardly read an article or book of feminist film theory without running into references to this. Often this same process works just as much at the more literal level of the storyline. Mary Ann Doane's excellent book _The Desire to Desire_ examines the figure of the "sick" woman, observed and coerced back into legitimate femininity by the (male) doctor ("sickness" here often means little more than unattractiveness). The doctor watches, examines, listens -- he gains knowledge of the woman and thus exerts over her the productive power which feminizes her, constructs her as a properly gendered subject. There are lots of important issues in this context: the gendering of spectators, the possibility of "reading against the grain", the marketing of films towards men or women, the possibility (or not) of identification with characters of a different sex, etc etc. The focus on slightly older movies is important here. They represent a situation which is very close to our own, but just distant enough that the unstated assumptions have begun to become visible. This can be of enormous help in seeing our own unstated assumptions. You can watch these movies and giggle or hiss at the blatant sexism; you can also consider that they were not at all regarded as ridiculous or offensive at the time, and go from that to an examination of our own movies, our own culture, where you may very well find the same tactics in use, only less blatantly so.
randolph@Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz) (07/26/89)
Richard, I very much appreciate your comments. Having had a few days reflection on my original posting I've been able to get a clearer idea of what the feminine form of the gaze might be. Of course, I was thinking of active, rather than passive, listening. Thinking it over, I think the grade-school teacher (the gaze *par excellence*), the housewife-mother (a lot of her job is surveillance), the wife asking "why are you so late?" with murder in her eye are indicators of the direction of my speculations. I was also thinking that it's striking that US men prefer intimate talking with women, rather than men. The figure of the mistress who knows all of her lover's secrets is firmly enshrined in US popular mythology & perhaps, even, she exists. Finally, just today I came across this letter in Science News: "Deceptive Successes in young children" (SN: 6/3/89, p.343) brought back memories of my time in the eighth grade. The teacher would leave the room and remind everyone to study and not talk. Naturally, conversations broke out. Upon her return she'd ask, "Who talked?" In every case the boys admitted their guilt, but never would a single girl admit to talking. The boys were punished with some exercise or other and the girls got off free for their lies. Michael V. Stratton Brea, Calif. Now, all of this is *not* proof. It, at most, hints that there may be something there. Which is what prompted me to post. ++Randolph Fritz sun!randolph || randolph@sun.com