Race, Gender, and Sexuality on Screen Final Exam

Second wave feminism

Bra burning, assimilation into the workplace, etc.

1960s & 70s

Motivations of women’s lib

Ideals of social equality/justice, genuine democracy, and the dignity of the individual

Targets of women’s lib

The sexual objectification of women and the reduction of women by the media and by men to little more than their sex appeal/reproductive organs

Not “antisexual”

Absolute control of fertility

Critical if women were to attain full equality

Roe v. Wade

January 1973

Didn’t eliminate all restrictions on abortions; declared unconstitutional any prohibitions on abortion in the first trimester and made second-trimester abortions easily available

Growth of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 50s/early 60s

• Efforts focused on segregation

• Mass boycotts

• Non-violent civil disobedience

• Television broadcasted civil rights efforts & their violent backlash to the nation

Brown v. Board of Education

• Found unconstitutional in 1954

• Some states refused to comply

• Mid-to-late 50s: battles over school desegregation

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

• Emerged as spokesman of Civil Rights movement by 1963

• Seen as articulate and telegenic

• “I Have A Dream” speech to 250,000 in August 1963

• Assassinated April 1968

TV & the Civil Rights Movement

• Broadened support for Movement

• Convinced networks to reflect (some) of this consciousness in programming

Julia

First sitcom to place a black character in a sole starring role since Amos ’n’ Andy and Beulah had both been cancelled in 1953

Black Power Movement

• Black demands for political and social equality were manifest in the late 1960s

• Previous goals of the Civil Rights Movement were beginning to be questioned from within Black society

Acceptance of Julia by mainstream white America

Demonstrated a simultaneous acceptance of a gradualist racial politics espoused by many NAACP leaders and the character herself

Potential complaints against Julia

• The show didn’t address contemporary Black problems

• Could potentially alienate Black audiences

Diahann Carroll

• Played Julia

• Saw it as an opportunity to draw more African Americans into television production

• Often referred to her character as a sellout and questioned whether Americans would ever accept TV programming that was about black people who weren’t stereotypes

Politics of racism in Julia

Either (1) Julia misconstrued a person’s actions or intentions or (2) the racist was an obvious target and marked as out of the ordinary

Julia’s denial of racism as a serious problem

• Racism boiled down to personal misunderstanding

• Didn’t explore structural or institutional racism

• Julia was a “safe Negro”, obviously wouldn’t be involved with any of the militant organizations that were active at the time

• Coded organizations like the Black Panthers as dangerous

Gross

• Displays of sensation on the edge of respectability

• “too much” of both quantity and quality, but there’s no accounting for taste

Three Body Genres

Pornography (sexuality), horror (violence), and melodrama (emotion)

Dismissed as unmotivated beyond their power to titillate and excite

Features of bodily excess

Bodies caught in the grip of intense sensation/emotion

• Displays of orgasm (porn), violence/terror (horror), emotion/crying/weeping (melodrama)

Ecstasy, share a quality of uncontrollable convulsion/spasm, of the body “beside itself”

• Cries of pleasure (porn), screams of fear (horror), sobs of anguish (melodrama)

“Low” cultural status of porn, horror, and melodrama

• Excessive even to popular genres

• Perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen, along with the fact that the body displayed is female

• Lacks proper aesthetic distance (over-involvement/investment in sensation/emotion)

The “problem” with body genres

They represent sexually ecstatic women, tortured women, and weeping women along with their respective bodily fluids

Sexuality as perversion

• The aims and objects of sexual desire are often obscure and inherently substitutive

• Unless we’re willing to see procreation as the singular goal of sex, aren’t we all perverts?

Female victimization

• Body genres hinge on this, works differently in every genre

• Can’t be explained simply by pointing to the sadistic power and pleasure of masculine spectator positions punishing or dominating female objects

Schemas of perverse pleasures

Appeal to presumed male viewers is sadistic (porn), appeals to the emerging sexual identities of its frequently adolescent spectators is sadomasochistic (horror), appeal to presumed female viewers is masochistic (melodrama)

Measures of pleasure and/or power up for grabs for female victims

• Identification can oscillate between powerlessness and power (slasher horror)

• Female subject positions can achieve limited power and pleasure within given limits of patriarchal constraints on women (sadomasochistic porn & melodramatic women’s weepies)

• Women aren’t punished for actively pursuing their sexual pleasure (non-sadomasochistic porn)

• Pleasure can be negotiated and “paid for” with a pain that conditions it

Structures of Fantasy

• Sex, violence, and emotion are cultural forms of problem-solving

• Can’t be dismissed as purely sexist/misogynistic

• To dismiss these genres as bad excesses or perversions is to miss their function as cultural problem-solving

Slasher films

• Story of psychotic killer (almost always male) who slashes a string of mostly female victims to death until he is subdued/killed, usually by a single female who has survived

• Gives viewers a clearer picture of current sexual attitudes

• Appeal is in the “engagement of repressed fears and desires and [their] reenactment of the residual conflict surrounding those feelings

Plot elements of Slasher Films

• Killer is psychotic product of sick family (mommy issues), but still recognizably human

• Most victims are attractive & sexually active women, punished for their sexual transgressions

• Location is not-home: houses or tunnels that belie a sense of safety

• Weapons are something other than guns, take on a phallic quality

The Final Girl

• Distressed women who become sole survivors

• Evolve into being active in fighting back & conquering the killer

• Intelligent, competent, practical, alert to suspicious activity, sexually reluctant

• Neither fully masculine nor fully feminine

Links between the killer & the final girl

Primary: sexual repression

Secondary: shared masculinity (phallic symbols) and shared femininity (castration)

Largely male audience of slasher films with female victims/heroes

• Gender displacement provides an identification buffer that permits the audience to explore taboo subjects in the relative safety of vicariousness

• Final girl serves as an agreeable surrogate for adolescent males (feminine enough to act out fear in ways that are culturally suspect for men, masculine enough to maintain structures of male competence and sexuality)

POV shots

Shifts in POV from killer to final girl signify shift of masculinity between the two characters, and a consequent shift in audience identification

Slasher films loosen claims of sex = gender

• combinations of masculine females and feminine males

• categories of masculine and feminine are collapsed into one and the same character