Women in Literature Final

“The Black Cat”

Edgar Allen Poe

“The Baby in the Icebox” & “The Birthday Party”

James Cain

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

Laura Mulvey

“Madame Bovary”

Gustave Flaubert

“Lolita”

Vladimir Nabokov

“American Psycho”

Bret Easton Ellis

Charlotte Temple

Susanna Rowson

on “Biopower”

Michael Foucault

“Of Men and Empire”

Nirwal Puwar

The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir

“Under Western Eyes”

Chandra Talpade Mohanty

“The Ideological State Apparatus”

Louis Althusser

“A Jury of Her Peers”

Susan Glaspell

“The Yellow Wallpaper”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Semplica-Girl Diaries

George Saunders

“Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts”

Schrock and Schwalbe

“The Husband Stitch”

Carmen Maria Machado

“The Oppositional Gaze”

bell hooks

“Girl”

Jamaica Kincaid

“The Tiger’s Bride”

Angela Carter

“Citizen”

Claudia Rankine

“Caroline’s Wedding”

Edwidge Dandicat

Althusser’s “The Ideological State Apparatus” terminology

Apparatus

Interpellation

Hailing, the address

Recognition/misrecognition

Reproduction

Ideology

Ideological state apparatus

Repressive state apparatus

Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” terminology

Discursive colonization

“Third World Woman” (a discursive product)

Critique of Beauvoir (& Western feminism) for monolithic “universalizing” of “woman” 

Foucault terminology

Biopower & biopolitics

Managing “life”, selecting for care

Governmentality

Based on populations

Objectification of the subject (i.e. study, gathering of info about)

Subjectification of the subject (information, data, etc, used to regulate & control)

Discipline & disciplinary power

Dispersed power

Productive power

Role of surveillance

Puwar’s “Of Men and Empire” terminology

“Body politic” & gendered connections to the nation

Oppositional binary

Public/private split--historical & conceptual

Enlightenment & rationality

Gendered space/spheres

“Palace of mirrors”

Social contract

Sexual contract

Racial contract ( including civilizing/civilization; the primitive)

State of nature

Somatic; psychosomatic; somatophobia

The abject & hierarchy of inclusion

Women’s bodies as landscape, as borders

The trope of chivalry

Imperial ladies

Rescue paradigm

Respectable femininity

“Space invaders”

Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” terminology

Subject versus Other

Woman as “situation,” “becoming”

Immanence/transcendence

Eternal feminine

Social construction of femininity and domesticity via “foreign consciousness”

Domestic and economic “enslavement”

Myths of “woman” 

Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” terminology

Scopophilia (including narcissistic and fetishistic forms)

Voyeur/ism (and sadism)

Fetish/izing

Display

Male gaze

Identification

Castration complex

The image as the matrix of the imaginary & subjectivity 

Woman as icon

Three “looks” associated with cinema

Diegetic, diegesis

bell hooks’ “Oppositional Gaze”

Looking relations

Gaze as site of agency and struggle

Rupture 

Identification 

Recognition 

How concept of “Woman” has effaced differences and socio-historical context

Pleasure of interrogation (v. scopophilia)

Imprisonment by images (especially that dramatize black women’s negation)

Resisting spectatorship versus creative spectatorship & creation of space

Critical gaze that insists on seeing/naming the “repressions” 

Mirrored recognition

Shared gaze

The “white supremacist capitalist imperialist dominating ‘gaze’”

Schrock & Schwalbe’s “Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts” terminology

Male versus man

Dramaturgical tasks/model/s of subject creation

Social constructionism

Normativity

Embodiment & symbolic assets

Manhood act/s

Improvisation, adaptation, compensation

Signifying practices

Scripts

Props 

Hegemonic ideals, marginalized males, hierarchy of manhood

Sexual differentiation

Identity codes

Micropolitical acts

Socialization of boys 

Regulation of emotion

Objectification, sexualization, oppression of girls/women

Homophobic taunting, violence and oppression of lower-value males

Learned aggression and violence

Media as providing shared symbolic language

How manhood acts produce inequality (and other things, including positives)

Manhood acts as claim to membership

Manhood in relation to control, deference, not being controlled

Apparatus

System or institution that shapes behavior (school, media, etc.)

Interpellation

When ideology “calls” you into a role/identity

Hailing

The act of calling you (e.g., “Hey you!” → you respond)

Recognition/Misrecognition

You accept ideology as natural (even if false)

Reproduction

Keeping systems (like capitalism) going over time

Ideology

Ideas that shape how we see the world (feel “normal”)

Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)

Soft ideological control (schools, media, family)

Repressive State Apparatus (RSA)

Force/control (police, military, law)

Discursive colonization

Western ideas defining others as inferior

“Third World Woman”

Stereotyped, oversimplified identity of non-western women

Critique of Beauvoir/Western feminism

Treats all women as the same, ignores differences

Biopower/Biopolitics

Power over life (managing populations)

Governmentality

Governing through systems and data

Populations

Focus on groups, not individuals

Objectification

Studying people as data

Subjectification

Using that data to control behavior

Discipline

Training bodies to behave (rules, routines)

Disciplinary power

Subtle, everywhere power

Surveillance

Watching people so they self-control

Body politic

Nation imagined as a body (gendered/racialized)

Oppositional binary

Two opposing categories (male/female)

Public/private split

Men = public, women = private

Enlightenment/rationality

Reason linked to masculinity

Gendered space

Spaces coded as male or female

Social contract

Society agreement (excludes many)

Sexual contract

Men’s power over women

Racial contract

System privileging whiteness

State of nature

Imagined pre-society condition

Somatic

Body-related

Psychosomatic

Mind-body connection

Somatophobia

Fear/dislike of the body

Abject

Seen as “low” or excluded (“other”)

Women as landscape/borders

Women’s bodies are used symbolically to represent the nation (“Motherland”) Controlling women (their sexuality, movement) = protecting the nation’s boundaries.

Chivalry

“Protecting” women to justify control

Palace of mirrors

Elite spaces (like government, corporate offices) are designed for and dominated by certain bodies

Imperial ladies

Western women are sometimes portrayed as superior and part of colonial power

Rescue paradigm

Saving “oppressed” women (often colonial)

Respectable femininity

Ideal “proper” woman behavior

Space invaders

Marginalized bodies in dominant spaces

Second Sex

Women defined as inferior to men

Subject vs Other

Men = norm; women = “other”

Woman as becoming

Gender is learned, not natural

Immanence

Passive, stuck (assigned to women)

Transcendence

Active, free (assigned to men)

Eternal feminine

Myth of fixed female nature

Social construction

Society shapes femininity

Domestic enslavement

Women trapped in home roles

Myths of woman

Stereotypes about women

Scopophilia

Pleasure in looking

Voyeurism

Watching secretly (power/control)

Fetishizing

Turning someone into an object

Display

Women shown as visual objects

Male gaze

Media shows women from male POV

Identification

Viewer relates to male perspective

Castration complex

Fear tied to difference in sex because of the lack of a penis (psychoanalysis)

Image/imaginary

Images shape identity

Woman as icon

Woman = visual object, not agent

Three looks

Camera, audience, characters

Diegetic

specific elements inside a story’s world

Diegesis

The whole world within a story itself

Oppositional gaze

Looking critically/resisting

Looking relations

Power in who looks

Gaze as agency

Looking can resist power

Rupture

Breaking dominant views

Identification

Seeing yourself in media

Recognition

Acknowledging representation

Critique of “Woman”

Ignores race/class differences

Pleasure of interrogation

Enjoyment in questioning images

Imprisonment by images

Harmful stereotypes limit identity

Resisting spectatorship

Reject passive viewing