Terms and People List

Sex

a medical term designating a certain combination of gonads, chromosomes, external gender organs, secondary sex characteristics, and hormonal balances

Genetic Sex

DNA testing for "male"—XY chromosomes or "female"—XX chromosomes

Phenotypic Sex

internal and external genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, and hormones & receptors—all of which morph over the life of a subject

Intersex Person(s)

umbrella term for individual(s) born with the condition of having physical sex markers (chromosomes, gonads, genitals, or hormones) that are neither clearly male nor female

Gender

a complex system of roles, expressions, identities, performances, and more that are given gendered meaning by a society and usually assigned to people based on the appearance of their sex characteristics at birth.

Gender Identity

how an individual expresses gender, regardless of the binary male or female label you were assigned at birth. It can influence how you choose to present yourself through your appearance and behaviors, although it is not necessarily stable over time and can fluctuate throughout your life.

Sexuality

Encompasses all aspects of a person's sexual behavior, including gender identity, orientation, attitudes, and activity in the social world

Scopophilia

The pleasure of looking at a person or object

Odalisque

reclining female nude with attributes of the "Orient" (Ottoman Empire and/or Middle East) or conspicuous ornament

Contrapposto

"counterpoise;" depicting a human figure standing with most of its weight on one leg, with the other leg bent at the knee, which causes a tilt in hips, shoulders, and head

Popular Culture (historical definition)

Until the 20th century, popular culture was always associated with folk culture or subcultures, such as youth cultures or ethnic cultures. (From the 20th c. forward, popular culture may begin as the collective creation of a subculture, but it is then appropriated by the market system and brought into the marketplace of commodity culture.)

Mass or Commercial Culture

is the stuff most people in a society share and recognize: the media they consume (shows, music, movies, social media), how they spend free time, what’s in style, and even the slang everyone uses. In a capitalist economy, it’s also a product. Companies make it, package it, and sell it to us to make money.

Other Important Terms

-Heroic male nude v. Ephebic male nude

-Naturalism

-Naked v. Nude (nude is "transformed" from living, "real," body; idealized, re-made, artistic form)

-Active v. Passive Gaze

Culture Industry

Term of culture theory defined in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) What and How the Culture Industry is Produced:

• A commodity (or image thereof); any good or service that is exchanged between people; YOU BUY IT

• Produced by a corporation for profit—actually "made" with labor of people who do not own the product after its production

• Standardized product mass produced using industrial reproduction; must maximize profit; predictability ensues

• Reproduce the "real" world; films, television, video games, etc simulate the physical world

• Consumed with little or NO EFFORT; requires only passive involvement from spectator/user; opposed to subject's "work" time or labor time

• Satiates subject: brings pleasure that dissipates quickly

• Monopolies of industry (telecommunications; steel; oil; chemicals; entertainment— what is the difference?)

Commodity Fetishism

We tend to treat a product as if it has value just because of what it is, like it’s naturally worth something or carries some special meaning. We forget that its value actually comes from the work of the people who made it.

EX: Paying $200 for designer sneakers because of the brand’s image, without thinking about the factory workers who made them or what they were paid.

Ideology

Ideology is the set of everyday beliefs and habits that shape how we see our lives, and by following them, we unknowingly keep the existing economic system in place. (Louis Althusser).

Example: Believing “if I just work hard enough, I’ll succeed” and acting on it by putting in overtime keeps you a loyal worker in the system, even if the system isn’t actually set up to reward everyone equally.

Interpellation

“calls out” to you and tells you who you are and where you fit. When you respond to that call, you step into the role it’s offering. (Louis Althusser).

Naked body vs. Nude in art

Using natural materials—stone, linen, pigments, etc.—the artist transforms the naked, physical body into an ideal form, wherein any primal, sexual desire for the Other is sublimated into a "transcendent work" of art.

Naked

De-formed, actual, matter/material, nature, physicality, inside, excess, sensory body, repulsion, kinetic, mobile, individual, agency, base desire, sexual

Nude

Re-formed, ideal, form/fixed, culture, geometry/proportion, outside, limits, contemplative, mind, attraction, static, fixed, perfected, muted, sublimation, aesthetic

Active vs. passive gaze

Most visual culture (film, TV, painting, etc.) is structured from the perspective of the active male gaze, such that men are both the subject (protagonist) of the gaze and the ones who shape the action; women are the objects of the gaze and the ones who are shaped by the action and structure of the gaze.

Male:

• The one who looks

• Advances the narrative (hero who makes things happen)

• Controls the fantasy ("projects fantasy onto female figure, which is styled accordingly")

• Bearer of the look of the spectator

Female:

• Erotic object for the characters within the story

• Freezes the narrative (stalls the flow of action with moments of performance, seduction, eroticism)

• Figures as spectacle within the fantasy (styled as object or exhibitionist)

• Erotic object for the spectator

Objectification

The process of turning people into objects—sex objects, fragments of an individual, a onedimensional character.

• A form of dehumanization: bodies are seen as sex objects available to be disciplined into a state of submission, sometimes violently

• A significant step in justifying violence (sadism) against person or group of people

• It teaches viewers (esp. young people) to monitor their appearance and behaviors in order to suit harmful cultural norms

• Denigrates individuals and persons in images that work to naturalize violence and punishment

• Jean Kilbourne, "Two Ways a Women Can Get Hurt," from Can't Buy Me Love

Disconnection

Position of reader allows for disconnect or distance from an actual social relation with "object" (here, the objectified person)—YOU do not consciously see yourself as either subject (actor) or object in the image

• Viewer is interpellated as innocent viewer rather than named in a position of power/control OR object/submissive

• Incongruities may arise between what one sees/believes and how one actually feels over time = sense of insufficiency or failure to attain "correct" state of "man" or "woman" [Images say you are dominant; yet you feel vulnerable // Images say you are dependent, victim; yet you feel strong]

• Jean Kilbourne, "Two Ways a Women Can Get Hurt," from Can't Buy Me Love

Common Archetypes in Mass Visual Culture (Advertising): WOMEN

• The Model Mother

• The Passive Little Girl

• The Observed Woman

• The Sexualized Woman:

• The Pretty Face

• The Magical Grandmother

• The Ticked Box

The Model Mother

Women are disproportionately shown as the primary caretakers of both home and children caring, dressing, cooking and cleaning.

The Passive Little Girl

Ads show boys engaging in active play and girls sitting passively, often with one another, playing with dolls and house appliances and everything is pink.

The Observed Woman

The observed woman loses her agency and authority in the male gaze

The Sexualized Woman

This stereotype demonstrates that a woman's value comes only from her sex appeal.

The Pretty Face

This stereotype depicts women as secondary and "just a pretty face" without intelligence or independence.

The Magical Grandmother

Older women are generally missing from ads, commonly have few spoken lines, and are often in the kitchen serving food, smiling and supporting younger characters; or the "older" women have few physical signs of age beyond gray hair.

The Ticked Box

Characters included to check diversity boxes, commonly limited to the background.

Neoliberal Feminism

A type of feminism centered on individual freedoms and neoliberal rationality, which

centers capitalist market forces as an equalizer.

• Claims that there are still gender-related inequalities today, especially in the workplace, and that it's up to women to put themselves forward more.

• Each individual/woman is responsible for her personal success.

• Collective action is not required, nor is it a goal.

• The capitalist marketplace offers avenues of free expression = liberation and equality are private desires—NOT collective goals

Power Femininity

now that we are in a "post-feminist" society (b/c full equality for all women has been achieved???), women's empowerment is tied to possession of a specific type of body—smooth, sleek, slim, controlled, conditioned, curvy, youthful, active, fun/lighthearted, and sexy—whichalwaysempowers.

• Linked to neo-liberal feminism & consumer feminism

• Seemingly any behavior or commodity can claim to "empower" women—but especially those that work within a heteronormative, patriarchal economy of desire.

• Rosalind Gill's 3 recognizable figures or archetypes in early 21st -century advertising:

o The Midriff as sign of sexual agency and feminist empowerment

o The Vengeful Woman who uses her newfound power to "turn the tables"

o The Hot Lesbian—her "other"or double—evades charges of sexism but caters to male gaze.

Productive Disciplinary Power

"disciplinary power" is not always punitive/repressive; rather systems of discursive power invite the subject—who feels rational, autonomous, and in control—to reconstruct patterns of behavior, thoughts, desires,and interests, all of which prevent bodies from resisting or revolting against systems of power and ideology. (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975)

• Heternormativity; patriarchal, nuclear family, etc.

• Internalized Male Gaze (for cis hetero women) acts as "sexual agency" (Rosalind Gill) • Women "choose" to emulate the body type typical to male gaze, but it is called a "choice." • Similar to Althusser's concept of ideological apparatuses: "given," naturalized structures of power

Narcissistic Identification

viewer's identification with "Ideal-I" or ideal ego; viewer identifies with the active, empowered gaze of the camera as it structures and controls the dominant gaze of the protagonist

• An inherent form of "misrecognition," in which the Mirror Stage's phantasy of omnipotent power and completeness is psychically restaged

• Mainstream films produce the heteronormative, white, patriarchal subject as the "active" looker, with the white woman as object of desire

• From Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)

Imaginary Order

The Imaginary is the stage where we build idealized pictures in our heads: a perfect version of ourselves, and a perfect version of the thing we want. It’s rooted in self-love (narcissism) and comes from before we learned language. (Jacques Lacan)

Symbolic order

the world of language, rules, and shared social meaning. It’s where we learn to communicate, relate to other people, follow society’s norms, and accept that there are rules we have to live by. (Jacques Lacan)

Voyeristic looking

a type of scopophilia wherein the controlling gaze is unknown to the object of desire— which allows for the subject's satiation of desire w/o threat; the desiring subject looks without being seen by the object of his gaze.

• Associations with sadism (punishment and/or demystification); "pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt—asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness."

• From Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)

Fetishistic looking

A type of scopophilia where the subject substitutes the object of desire with a fetish object or turns the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous

• Builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying;

• Attention is focused on pure "image;"

• The camera's frame is not a narrative tool of storytelling, but a space to stylize, fix, perfect the other as pure spectacle

• From Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)

Femininity as Masquerade (constructed image)

• "Woman" is constructed out of clothing, accoutrement, various "fetishes," which produce her as a site of exhibitionism for the cis, hetero male gaze.

• Hence, femininity or "woman" is NOT real—it's purely an image/spectacle.

• The image of femininity is constructed, built, embodied—not innate.

• Tania Modleski, Femininity by Design: "woman" is revealed to be a construction, one that Scottie attempts to re-construct to prove it is REAL.

Overidentification

Process wherein the subject's boundaries between self and other become blurred, and desire for and identification with the other are not clearly separable; extreme fascination with the other risks the annihilation of self into the other

• A passive, hypnotic, and ultimately masochistic fascination with the woman and her desire (versus the active, sadistic attempt to gain control over her, to possess her).

• Tania Modleski, Femininity by Design: Scottie overidentifies with Madeleine and risks"falling into" femininity (the Other) and annihilating distinction between self and Other.

Hegemonic Masculinity

configuration of gender practices which embody currently accepted answers to the problem of the legitimation of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women."

• Consent to a particular social order creates gender hegemony, where men are analogous to the ruling class

• = the "most honored ways of being a man" in a given culture or group

• Necessitates that men, whether hegemonic or otherwise, orient themselves toward its practices to capitalize on the patriarchal dividend—CONFORMITY TO MASCULINE NORMS

• Historical, contextual, locally produced, and always plural

• Must facilitate (RETURN TO) SOCIAL ORDER

• can only be constructed in tension with emphasized femininity and, as such, "gender is always relational, and patterns of masculinity are defined in contradiction to some model (whether real or imaginary) of femininity"

• equates homosexuality with femininity (lack of power)

• rewards men for engaging in homophobia and participating in heterosexism, as it reduces anxiety about their own masculinity

Homosocial relations

(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1985) same-sex relationships that are not of a romantic or sexual nature, but develop and strengthen bonds between men and perpetuate patterns of male dominance in specific historical, social, and familial structures

• Examples: sport teams (locker room, game fields); the military (bases, camps, training), workplace comrades (offices, bars), mentorship relations (school/business), men's "clubs" (Lions Club, Rotary Club, etc.) or fraternities (frat houses), friendships In general

• Historical behaviors, conventions, rituals, knowledge, and everyday practices

• Bonds that work to retain power and control over specific spaces/places and society in general; men can be more vulnerable and remain dominant: w/o fear of the "other"

• Form of male bonding often accompanied by fear or hatred of homosexuality—includes ritualized social practices of ridicule (name calling, teasing, etc.) = homophobia

• Often involves erotic desire of third, feminine "other," a triangular structure of desire: where feminized "other" serves as the conduit through which those bonds are expressed; "other" is often a woman (trope of "love triangle"), but is not limited to a woman character.

(Cultural) Backlash

a hostile pushback by groups who feel threatened by new laws, cultural shifts, and social norms, which usually occur after years of civil and legal action by oppressed groups

Discourses of Crisis-Masculinity

1) Loss of male purpose: men are now w/o social value b/c women are unnaturally appropriating the essential, genetically-determined duties of the male (men).

• Society has always been gynocentric: focused on the needs and protection of women, while men perform dangerous work of building societies

• Society was better in the past before women tried to be men (gender nostalgia)

• Men no longer feel necessary

• Women still play the victim (need protection), but they also want all the power.

2) Aggrieved Entitlement (Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men, 2017)

• Men are feeling / witnessing a loss of their own power and privileged role in society, primarily at the hands of social justice movements and feminism.

• Men are socialized to feel entitled to this power and privilege, and are therefore aggrieved at it being taken away

3) 1 & 2 are part of larger "culture war," which is itself gendered: Metapolitical "culture war" depicts its enemies as feminine and uses women as justifications for fighting ("protect women and children") against domestic enemies who seek to feminize and weaken the nation through "gender ideology," feminism, and social justice.

Gender Nostalgia

experience of sentimental longing for an ostensibly bygone era related to traditional gender dynamics and norms; involves the following distinct but related beliefs, perceptions, and motivations

1. Endorsees traditional gender ideologies (women as submissive wives, mothers, nurturers w/ little private or public power)

2. Believes that men and/or women have become less traditionally masculine and feminine over time and such changes are negative and wide-reaching

3. Believes that gender and sex are biological and that gender/sex categories are discrete and nonoverlapping categories: male/masculine and female/feminine characteristics ( = gender essentialist beliefs)

4. Motivated to undo or "fight against" these changes in everyday life and in structures of power across the private and public spheres

Nostalgic Masculinities

the cowboy and the astronaut (and Rocky)

• White & American (heteronormative)

• Physically strong and heroic

• Inner determination / restraint

• Charismatic adventurer—takes risks

• Independent explorer: enacts autonomous acts outside of social authority

• Far from civilization—ventures into the unknown

• Rugged attitude toward landscape, nature • Does not seek wealth; seeks "truth" (inner knowledge/science)

• Must face unknown enemies ("others) and unknown entities (universe)

• Women / Culture / Law are peripheral

• Receives respect and admiration, w/o close, public relations

Jonathan Katz, "Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity"

• Angry, aggressive, and/or white working-class male as anti-authority rebel

• Violence as genetically programmed male behavior

• Use of military and sports symbolism to enhance the masculine identification and appeal of products

• The association of muscularity with ideal masculinity

• The equation of heroic masculinity with violent masculinity

Double Consciousness

(DuBois) African Americans are defined by a "sensation," a consciousness of one's Self, but which falls short of a unified, "true" self-consciousness; rather, black consciousness is a complex feeling of "two-ness," of disparate and competing "thoughts," "strivings," and "ideals"

• Not an inherent quality, but one born out of experiencing "self" in a society that denigrates and oppresses you

• State of being forced to view self through white perspectives, while maintaining your own self-definitions.

• Torn between European (American) and African heritage

• W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Split Consciousness

concept of double consciousness expanded beyond ontological ("soul") arguments to the lived, experiential realities of women, colonial subjects, queer folk, and intersections thereof

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1948): "one is not born a woman, but becomes one"

o Women exist as "Other" in patriarchal society; hence a woman's consciousness is formed from her own lived experience and always/already her experience as object of (men's) desire; her body is her own experience and her body is experience as conduit or vehicle of another's desire

• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952): concerned w/ blackness in the U.S. and all colonial subjects

o In the chapter "The Fact of Blackness" Fanon argues that Blackness was created in, and continues to exist in, negation to whiteness in the colonial subject, especially in relationship to the gaze, the body, and language

Oppositional Gaze

bell hooks (1952-2021)

• Black female spectators "actively" choose not to identify with the film's imaginary subject because such identification is disenabling; pleasure is found in the critical analysis

• Black women must have the desire to critique: a) the phallocentric gaze, b) the construction of white femininity as object of desire, and c) representation of blackness in the media

o THERE IS POWER IN THE GAZE: agency is not limited to those in power—"the ability to manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it opens up the possibility of agency."

o The act of looking has historically been maneuvered to oppress black men and women: Saartjie Baartman (Hottentot Venus), Emmet Till

• hooks writes, "Identifying with neither the phallocentric gaze nor the construction of whitewomanhood as lack, critical black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation"

Minstrel Tropes of blackness in popular culture:

Minstrel shows: (early 19th -century - early 20th -century) a genre of American theater, performed by mostly white actors in blackface makeup, portraying racial stereotypes of African Americans as dimwitted, lazy, buffoonish, cowardly, superstitious, and happy-golucky. Morphed first into illustrated journals, paintings, novels, and music sheets—followed by early film, radio, and TV characters and plots

•Mammy

•Jezebel

•Sapphire

•Uncle Tom

•Sambo

Mammy

Drab clothes, masculine characteristics (non-threatening to white women); serves white femininity; loves and preserves white family and its property; aggressive to her own family or black people outside of house

Jezebel

Seductive, alluring, worldly, beguiling, tempting, and lewd; an Innately promiscuous, even predatory "bad girl"

o Dates to slavery: Africans and descendants as "breeders," inclined to have many children—a stereotype that was "proved" via forced procreation (given food, animals, housing to encourage reproduction)

o Morphed into myth of "Welfare Queen" of 1980s and 90s

Sapphire

Older, matriarch type; loud, bossy, headstrong, independent, cantankerous; emasculates husband with verbal put-downs; lack of femininity = no fashion sense, bad wigs, etc.

Uncle Tom

(Harriet Beecher Stowe novel, 1852): "a large, broad-chested, powerfully made man ... whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence."

o Innately submissive, obedient, in constant desire of white approval

o Overly polite; constantly indebted to white family o Little to no ties to black community

Sambo

Simple-minded, docile black man ; the "happy slave" image of a jolly, overgrown child happy to serve his master; naturally lazy and therefore reliant upon his master for direction

Retrospectatorship

• Past viewing becomes meaningful later. A scene or character you watched years ago takes on new significance once you understand yourself better. White’s focus was on how queer viewers looking back realize why certain characters or moments in classic Hollywood films stuck with them.

• “Nachträglichkeit” (deferred meaning). This is a Freud-based idea that an experience can be understood only after the fact. At the time, it didn’t fully register, but later events or self-knowledge give it meaning.

• “Second sight.” It’s like seeing the film a second time with new eyes. Because fantasy is unpredictable (everyone connects with a film in their own personal, sometimes surprising way), you can’t always know what a movie will mean to you until later.depends on a mis-reading of the dominant narrative

Hays Code

Motion Picture Association of America's self-censorship of films between 1930/34 and 1968. Prohibited a film from "lowering the moral standards of those who see it . . . [including] those of susceptible minds" (i.e., women, children, working class, minority populations) and / or depicting the ridicule of law or sympathy for the violation of Law.

• No sex outside of marriage, unless depicted as immoral

• No profanity, nudity, or suggestive scenes • No interracial romantic relations; no "perversions" of sexuality (anything not cisheterosexuality)

• No depiction of crime, drug use, and promiscuity in a positive or sympathetic light