Monday 12 February 2018

Proposal: The Cone of Cogency - Outlining My Current Thesis Structure


1 comment:

  1. Hey Pol - I think the only suggestion I'd make is looking at the relative position of Mulvey's ideas around the 'Male Gaze' - for example (and I'm just busking here) it might be possible to argue that the tropes associated with lesbians on film derive from the fact that the presumed audience for most films is men - therefore, you could argue that the butch lesbian, for example, is an example of a woman constituted as 'butch' so as not to transgress/upset the male spectator - if a lesbian is 'butch' then she is essentially 'a man' and is therefore 'not' a woman any longer (if a woman is understood by men to be there for the visual pleasure of men and as available to men as a site of pleasure). Therefore it might be that the idea of the male gaze goes first as a means to understand those representations, and then Butler follows as the means to challenge the idea of gendered expectations of 'looking'... Another thing - in terms of the use of the word 'accurate' - I think that has a normative bias itself (the idea there can be an 'accurate' way for a lesbian to present herself to others). I think you need to get used to the idea of seeing 'complexity of representation' as progressive - so those representations that admit to fluidity and ambiguity as being 'less' binary.

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