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The Representation Of Women In Mulvey's Psycho

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Secondly, the basic scale of mainstream film productions is anthropomorphic. Thus, the body is to be gazed upon. As Mulvey says there is “a fascination with likeness and recognition” (836) of the form, which is the second of the presented author’s points; put in her words there is a “to-be-looked-at-ness” (837) prescribed to women. To elaborate, the aspect with evaluating such an implementation is that it contracts a woman`s role to a sexual level; and leaves scopophilia (the sexual excitement one gets from looking or being looked at, without the inclusion of genital areas, as studied by Freud) as a result. In the instance of Psycho, we are presented with numerous examples of Marion`s poorly dressed body, which culminates in the shower scene and is before that accompanied with Norman`s obsession with her. …show more content…

However, Marion goes from being the object of sexual desire towards being represented with no portrayal at all, as we see at the end of the picture. As Klinger suggests, she becomes “an almost complete visual nonentity” (334). Mulvey in her lecture Hicthcock Blonde, argues of a mannequin-like, cosmetic body, which audiences are presented with, and which creates a “surface that conceals” and deceives. Unarguably, the points of such an overview can be applied to numerous works of mainstream cinematic art; however, in the case of the chosen picture, the analysis lies

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Anne McClintock wrote her essay “Gonad the Barbarian and the Venus Flytrap: Portraying the female and male orgasm” to examine pornography and how it has changed throughout history and its effects on how women perform as sexual beings. McClintock focuses on the various roles of pornography such as its emphasis on voyeurism, pleasure, and the male ego. She wants her readers to know that women are still not represented in pornography to satisfy their own desires, but they are there to cater to men and their subconscious. I will analyze how McClintock argues that due to the history of sexism towards women, the roles that men and women have in pornography are inherently different because of the societal belief that women are only seen as objects of sexual desire and are solely there to satisfy the male audience.

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The influence of production is broken down throughout the chapter and analyzes the impact it can have on reclaiming agency. For example, the author begins to describe a scene and then would break it down by asking, “what do we make of her framing… as a formation of an aggressive sexuality that widens the subjectivities available to women?” (66). Due to fact that there was intentional direct contrast between the two actresses portrayed, the power of representation and characterization can be shown. The relationship between viewer and presenter is not easily seen and therefore many feel the burden of representation.

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Statement of Intent: I inteded this text to be an analysis of Nurse Ratched’s depiction in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. I did this using secondary sources such as Reclaiming Big Nurse: a Feminist Critique of Ken Kesey’s Portrayal of Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Philip Darbyshire and The Roles of Women in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Hana Kašpárková. My intention was to compare Nurse Ratched against her male counterpart, McMurphy, and to highlight the misogyny with which she was depicted.

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The descriptive sightings of Miranda and the dreams he has of a future together shows an unhealthy obsession. Miranda exists in Clegg 's mind she is an idealised projection, he looks upon her as he does his butterflies a specimen to be trapped and pinned down for his observation. Clegg goes beyond simply looking at her, he begins to imagine unlikely outcomes and whimsical futures in which he holds a place of power above Miranda, he even admits that ‘I let myself dream I hit her across the face’ (7), indicating that ‘To gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze’ (J. E. Schroeder, Consuming representation: a visual approach to consumer research, 1998, 208). Mulvey’s theory indicates that the male gaze denies women human identity, relegating them to the status of objects to be admired for their physical appearance, since Clegg has no

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Throughout history, there has always been a rivalry between the two sexes and in the end the women have always come in second place. Time over time it has been proven difficult for women to hold any type of power that they have wanted except for the tasks that they have been given due to their gender. In society and in their own homes, it has been difficult for women to grow and sustain their power beyond the limits that they have been given. Women have been differentiated from men and have been discriminated with regard to jobs and other types of privileges that they have wanted. Throughout the course of history, they have been denied many freedoms that every man has and they want to be equal to their counterparts.

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In Laura Mulvey’s article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she writes about the relationship between voyeurism, cinema, and gender. She begins by describing the concept of scopophilia, which means to gain pleasure from looking. She writes that scopophilia is inherently active/masculine, and that pleasure is derived from looking at other people as mere objects. On the other hand, the passive/feminine is derived from the experience of being looked at (pg.188). Mulvey sees this binary relationship between viewer and object being viewed as a part of our culture, and the greatest example of this is found in cinema.

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She describes her body with imperfect diction, such as “strange”, “outdated”, “shameful”, and “immodest” (82). Atwood has such a critical tone towards body image to expose the high standard of beauty and how the standard forces people to feel about their own body. Such image of oneself compared to the standard allows people to feel imperfect and incompetent and prohibits beauty to surface. Atwood uses parallelism in “without thought...without care” (82) to emphasize the past’s carelessness of exposure. Atwood compares the past’s exposure to the present’s concealment to differentiate the effects of each.

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Alison from Fun Home and Yitzhak from Hedwig and the Angry Inch come to recognize new potential in gender expression in two, touching frames, yet these fleeting moments are provoked and executed in entirely different ways. In both moments of recognition, Alison and Yitzhak encounter a person and an object, respectively, that open possibilities related to their gender. In the case of Yitzhak, he places a wig on his head and is engrossed by the touch of it upon his hands and neck. Yitzhak needs no mirror to validate the feelings of comfort and delight the wig brings him. He is prominently in the center of the shot surrounded in a familiar environment, overflowing with blonde wigs, providing an absurd yet personal touch.

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This form of objectification is often used as a means to appeal to men's sexual desires in order to promote and attract consumers, because marketers still latch onto the old “sex sells”, or so it would seem (Rowland, 2016). Music videos, magazines, fashion commercials, are all channels through which women are exploited and put out to be headless objects isolated for their bodies solely for sexual pleasure and viewing purposes. Rowland explains that although this charade may allure and trap most men, this is not the case for women. Emma Rooney cites in The Effects of Sexual Objectification on Women's Mental Health, “the sexual objectification of women is a driving and perpetuating component of gender oppression, systemic sexism, sexual harassment, and violence against women”. Jessica Vanlenti writes in ‘Worldwide sexism…Women’, that researchers from The University of Missouri-Kanas and Georgia State found these forms of objectification to be linked to women’s psychological distress, and are leading causes of suicide among young adolescent women.

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In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Kesey promotes sexist views through the way he characterizes his female characters. He does this showing women in a dehumanizing light. The nurse for example is constantly showing her source of power over the males on the ward by simply taking away theirs. However kesey also adds in women such as Candy to simply help empower men. Kesey wrote his novel in the 1960s.

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Exposing Foundations: Psychoanalysis and Gender in Mulvey and Butler Woman… stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the image of woman still tied in her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning. 6 In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Laura Mulvey points out that psychoanalytic theory can “advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught” (2). To understand why woman is only “the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning” in this order, I will turn to a very small fraction of Lacan’s psychoanalytic philosophy. Here we find that

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However, film critic, Robin Wood, argues that ‘since Psycho, the Hollywood cinema has implicitly recognised horror as both American and familial’ he then goes on to connect this with Psycho by claiming that it is an “innovative and influential film because it supposedly presents its horror not as the produce of forces outside American society, bit a product of the patriarchal family which is the fundamental institution of American society” he goes on to discuss how our civilisation either represses or oppresses (Skal, 1994). Woods claim then suggests that in Psycho, it is the repressions and tensions within the normal American family which produces the monster, not some alien force which was seen and suggested throughout the 1950 horror films. At the beginning of the 60’s, feminisation was regarded as castration not humanization. In “Psycho” (1960) it is claimed that the film presents conservative “moral lessons about gender roles of that the strong male is healthy and normal and the sensitive male is a disturbed figure who suffers from gener confusion” (Skal, 1994). In this section of this chapter I will look closely at how “Psycho” (1960) has layers of non-hetro-conforming and gender-non conforming themes through the use of Norman Bates whose gender identitiy is portrayed as being somewhere between male and female

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The construction of a self-conscious female gaze is the prime objective of feminist theatres everywhere. British feminist theatre practice as elsewhere is an attempt made by women to claim their rightful space in the creative realm of theatre that was deliberately denied to them by patriarchy. The public gaze on women was always the male gaze, one that always wished to see women as objects. It was an ideological position that patriarchy sanctioned as the normal way of looking at women. Women were always the secondary sexual objects for the gratification of male sexual fantasies.

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Figure 2 and 3 exemplify women presented in a submissive and docile image. In figure 2, there is a direct eye contact to the camera which conveys a personal address to the reader. It allows the audience to be captivated in the seductive qualities of her body. However, the use of black around her eye helps to accentuate salacious look upon her face. Furthermore, white fur and jewelry in her costuming portrays this ideal of wealth and affluence that women should be aspiring for to attract the ‘right man’.

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Abstract: In most parts of the world, females have always been the victim of oppressive patriarchy and male chauvinism since ages. This problem has been represented by many people through various forms of creations be it art, literature or films. Films are the most popular visual mediums of entertainment through which a large segment of people can be approached. Like literature, a film is also a work of art which mirrors the society, it also depicts the reality of the society though it has some fictionality in it.

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