Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Paris 25
First up, big thanks to Blackie for helping Lola and I get the tickets to the Chelsea VS Newcastle match on the 29th Dec. It was one of my priorities in coming to Europe to watch a EPL match and thanks Blackie for helping me fulfill this. I will be in the away stands though, because the home tickets were sold out really quick although I planned early in advance to get them. But nonetheless I will cheer for both teams, OK Kow & Big Ryan? Louder for Chelsea haha. Also, I will try my best to get J. Cole, M. Ballack and D. Drogba’s autographs for Jacq, Huisiu and Lola. Haha because I heard from Chloe the Liverpool players do sign autographs after the game. Let’s hope everything goes according to plan!
I know that most of your brain juices are dead after the exams. Anyway I hope you guys are satisfied with your results! But I am currently taking a module called ‘Gender Studies’ which I like a lot. As the title says it, it is a module on gender, but not just the plain facts on boys and girls. It is mainly on the prejudices and unfairness that women faces, even today. My Prof is a lively and friendly French, 28 years old, who frequently tries to stimulate our interests in the subject by showing us shows, such as “Full Monty”, “Pride and Prejudice” (“Bride and Prejudice – The Bollywood version, haha very funny), “Bridget Jones’ Diary”, “Mona Lisa Smile”, “The Hours” and loads more, which is very useful. I will list some of the interesting findings I have on 2 short topics, advertising and bodies. They are short abstracts from the articles I have, and are very thought provoking.
Advertising
Advertisements are important to study because they are omnipresent and have deep impacts on consumer behavior and social effect. As an advertisement has to be short and sharp, it often has to convey messages which are ‘crude’ and easily recognizable. The power of images is greater than that of words as it gives us very quickly a full idea of the whole picture and leaves a deep impression in our minds.
Ads today more and more depict men and women on formal equity, but on different footing. Often, we see ads from Visa or Amex showing an accompanying male who is subtly threatened by the woman’s enhanced professional status and economic power by receiving the ‘special gold card’, explaining her ‘new found power’. Often, we have the ‘fabulous new woman’ who is independent and successful; liberated, yet feminine and romantic; modern, yet traditional at the same time. These definitions are ahistorical and fictional.
These ads reveal a real social moment – namely that gender power is now partially lived out at the level of appearance. Advertisements frequently represent women taking control and power over their lives and relationships through their commodified articulation of feminine appearance. This model of social power proposes that autonomy and control can be obtained through voluntary self-fetishization. A dialetic of desire, envy and power is embedded in these advertisements’ form of address and the currency of appearances they endorse: disentangling it reveals how the ad/reader (encoding/decoding) circuit has sublated the judging power of the male gaze into a self-policing narcissistic gaze.
Advertising makes a woman feel ‘guilty’ for not achieving the perfect standard, and that it is no longer because they were born like that. The current scenario makes women morally accountable for their own bodies, complying with an idealized image trumpeted and managed by the mass media. A new form of oppression emerges as women go to war with their recalcitrant bodies. Failure to exercise appropriate self-restraint becomes internalized as a character flaw. For many women, a daily ritual of anxiously validating and revalidating self’s physical appearance is performed in front of the self-scrutinizing voice of the mirror and the bathroom scales. Ads which puts women ‘in charge’ of their lives stimulates among women a fear of their own female bodies. Many women feel their inability to mange their body parts reflects upon their moral worth as individuals. This model of envy-based personal power pushes some women toward hatred and rejection of their bodies and themselves.
What, if anything, does possessing a shapely feminine figure have to do with success and parity for women in a male corporate world? A seemingly paradoxical claim, regularly made in consumer ads, has women enhancing their social and economic power vis-à-vis men by presenting themselves as objects of desire (For example, perfume ads). These ads endorse a notion that femininity as defined by commodity consumption comprises a route to control, security and power in relations to men.
In other ads, the arranged demeanor of women frequently sets up women as objects of display for the admiration and exploitation of the spectator. It magnifies the women as fetishized parts, such as that of a lip stick commercial. It shields away the eyes and other identifying features, and the lips are made to stand out in bright red glow against a predominantly white setting, constituting her as an object. Shielding the eyes and the rest of the face creates a kind of anonymity that is not anonymity at all, but a coding suggestion that viewers fill in the rest of the woman based on the signifiers of the lips and the surrounding accoutrements. The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
Also, often we see in ads of accompanying men in women’s ads. This reinforces a prominent ideological account of women defined by the male gaze. Running beneath the textual account of gender relations in this ad is a narrative of male power, but the manifest claim is that women’s power over man is constituted through a fetishism of appearances. Just as in daily life, men stare at women – they scrutinize and evaluate women’s reified parts. The ability to survey is based on power, but here the female look confers power. Woman’s power over man is thus ironically depicted as a function of her willing acceptance of her vulnerability and powerlessness vis-à-vis men. The woman commands the male’s attention by making herself an object of desire by emphasizing the fetishized self as the conduit to power and control. The woman viewer is encouraged to envy those lips for what they might accomplish – the upper hand in relations with men.
Ads continue to address women about themselves as malleable surfaces that can be adorned with objects that carry desired attributes via commodities’ powers of signification. They encourage and perpetuate a pattern of seeing women as collections of body parts. Like pornographic representations, these ads abstract body parts from the whole person so that each part carries its own sexual persona. While many women cringe at the thought, there is only a difference of degree between the fetishism encoded in these ads and that promoted in ‘girlie’ magazines. Ads encourage women not merely to adorn themselves with commodities, but also to perceive themselves as objectified surfaces.
For decades, a pervasive theme in advertising aimed at women has been the notion of woman as capital. The principle of ‘possessive individualism’, once the exclusive domain of men, has now been extended to women through the sphere of consumption. Crudely put, the principle works like this: the individual has a right to all that is accrued by virtue of her ownership (the proprietary relationship) of her body. Her appearance is her value, and her avenue to accumulating capital. Ironically, men once dominated women on the basis of propriety claims made on the body of women; today, male domination gets reproduced on the basis of women acquiring proprietary control over their own bodies – or, over the appearances given off by their bodies. Feminists have observed how questions of feminine appeanace have previously hinged around competition among women for the ‘best’ available men in marriage markets. When this is the agenda, then woman’s social power does depend on management of her ‘beauty assets’. These ads differ in that they now confuse this form of motivated competition with an agenda of women actually competing against men in labor markets. This ambiguity permits advertisers to perform a sleight of hand: though they ostensibly address women in terms of new gender roles embracing new-found ‘freedoms’ and life-chances, those new roles are made no less contingent on the same old scenario for gaining power – using appearance to simulate, and stimulate, desire.
Where unequal and segregated labor markets and patriarchal rule have prevailed, women have learned there is a kernel of truth to claims that social power hinges on their ability to evoke desire through appearance. Becoming an object of desire supposedly makes a woman more valuable in the eyes of others, and hence more valuable to herself. If successful, men will desire you and women will envy you. But to be valued in such terms is to stand out, and the process of judging is based on the premise of invidious, competitive comparisons with other women. Hence in a competitive political economy of sign value, the hyper-critical individual is beset by an ever-present sinking feeling that she is not performing as well as others at controlling and managing their appearance. For the rare few, a real social power is gained; but it is gained at the expense of the many and it does nothing to challenge the male power to scrutinize and judge.
Gender Bodies
In all societies – past or present- bodies are subject to considerable normative evaluation and regulation. Many of these norms are deeply gendered and construct inequalities between men and women. Often, the social requirement to conform to gender norms, which often reinforce women’s inequality and powerlessness and limit the capacity for individual autonomy. Social norms and cultural values governing women’s bodies, behavior, and appearance generally are far more restrictive and repressive than those regulating men’s bodies. Conformity to gender norms can compromise, reduce, or even enhance women’s autonomy and power. It does not posit powerlessness or empowerment as a zero-sum equation: conformity to one set of gender norms may reduce women’s autonomy in some respects but expand opportunities for mobility and empowerment in other respects.
Conformity to dominant gender norms can provide individual women with resources and power. Indeed, women are often aware that they are complying with social norms that emphasize women’s difference and inferiority to men, but nonetheless rationally choose to conform. These social norms tend to reinforce women’s lower social status and emphasize women’s association with the body and appearance rather than the mind and rational thought. Dominant social norms can simultaneously constrain women’s actions and provide space for individual women to make choices that may empower them in their everyday lives.
The medicalization of women’s bodies, especially in regard to their reproductive capacities, is a well-documented source of social control and disempowerment for women. Women’s bodies are subjected to medical intervention and designation as sick or diseased in the contexts of fertility and reproductive issues, including abortion, pre-menstrual tension, and menopause. They are sites in which women, both individually and collectively, struggle for autonomy and power vis-à-vis medical dominance. Moreover, medicalization too easily generalizes the observed symptoms as expected for all women at particular stages of life and automatically attributes various conditions to hormones rather than to other causes or social events in women’s lives. In addition, presenting various options to women and then asking them to decide on their treatment does not necessarily expand autonomy, given the power of medical discourse and the social risks in not following medical advice.
The vast majority of women in Western societies, regardless of their feminist orientation, remove hair from their legs or underarms in the quest for greater femininity and attractiveness. While such hair removal is habitual, that is routine and normal for most women, it endorses the assumption that the female body is abnormal or unacceptable as it is. To be hairy and a woman contravene notions of appropriate femininity and risk the negative labels of being lazy, dirty unattractive and masculine. On a more extreme end of ‘body alteration’, cosmetic surgery is an area of the regulation of the body where the body is viewed as incomplete, as a potentiality and as physically changeable (with the assistance of medical intervention), usually to attain greater conformity with culturally specific appearance norms. In particular, it presents a confronting paradox between self-determination and disempowerment and the lack of real options for diversity and difference. For women, body maintenance and body-altering work can be experienced as personally empowering and central to their identities while simultaneously reinforcing powerful gender norms which devalue women’s diversity and social status.
People who go on diet place themselves under a form of self-surveillance by aspiring to the ‘ideal’ female body and reinforcing the thin ideal on other women via comments and gestures. Many of the participants were aware that by dieting regularly, they were making a trade-off with their health dieting and health was seen to some extent as mutually exclusive. In many social groups, women designated ‘fat’ are considered to have ‘let themselves go’, indicating deviance from the norms of restraint and control. On the opposite end, by discovering what it is like to transcend and resist her craving for food, the young woman achieves a sense of power over others via superior will and control. The New Jersey Supreme Court recently ruled that obesity is a disability where the condition was a result of a generic metabolic disorder. This case suggests that moral distinctions will be made between fat people who can demonstrate that their weight is a result of a medical condition and those perceived as overweight because of overeating. While men as well as women are criticized for fatness and strive for a more desirable body, women are under greater social pressure in societies with thinness norms to resist food temptations and closely monitor themselves. These pressures can tip self-control into eating disorders. Social power had come to be less dependent on the sheer accumulation of material wealth and more connected to the ability to control and manage the labor and resources of others. At the same time, excess body weight came to be seen as reflecting moral or personal inadequacy, or lack of will. Fat is being perceived as laziness, lack of discipline, unwillingness to conform, and absence of all those “managerial” abilities that, according to the dominant ideology, confer upward mobility. This is supported by movies such as “Rocky” and “A Streetcar Named Desire”.
Yeap that's all, off to exams now!
Songjie
I know that most of your brain juices are dead after the exams. Anyway I hope you guys are satisfied with your results! But I am currently taking a module called ‘Gender Studies’ which I like a lot. As the title says it, it is a module on gender, but not just the plain facts on boys and girls. It is mainly on the prejudices and unfairness that women faces, even today. My Prof is a lively and friendly French, 28 years old, who frequently tries to stimulate our interests in the subject by showing us shows, such as “Full Monty”, “Pride and Prejudice” (“Bride and Prejudice – The Bollywood version, haha very funny), “Bridget Jones’ Diary”, “Mona Lisa Smile”, “The Hours” and loads more, which is very useful. I will list some of the interesting findings I have on 2 short topics, advertising and bodies. They are short abstracts from the articles I have, and are very thought provoking.
Advertising
Advertisements are important to study because they are omnipresent and have deep impacts on consumer behavior and social effect. As an advertisement has to be short and sharp, it often has to convey messages which are ‘crude’ and easily recognizable. The power of images is greater than that of words as it gives us very quickly a full idea of the whole picture and leaves a deep impression in our minds.
Ads today more and more depict men and women on formal equity, but on different footing. Often, we see ads from Visa or Amex showing an accompanying male who is subtly threatened by the woman’s enhanced professional status and economic power by receiving the ‘special gold card’, explaining her ‘new found power’. Often, we have the ‘fabulous new woman’ who is independent and successful; liberated, yet feminine and romantic; modern, yet traditional at the same time. These definitions are ahistorical and fictional.
These ads reveal a real social moment – namely that gender power is now partially lived out at the level of appearance. Advertisements frequently represent women taking control and power over their lives and relationships through their commodified articulation of feminine appearance. This model of social power proposes that autonomy and control can be obtained through voluntary self-fetishization. A dialetic of desire, envy and power is embedded in these advertisements’ form of address and the currency of appearances they endorse: disentangling it reveals how the ad/reader (encoding/decoding) circuit has sublated the judging power of the male gaze into a self-policing narcissistic gaze.
Advertising makes a woman feel ‘guilty’ for not achieving the perfect standard, and that it is no longer because they were born like that. The current scenario makes women morally accountable for their own bodies, complying with an idealized image trumpeted and managed by the mass media. A new form of oppression emerges as women go to war with their recalcitrant bodies. Failure to exercise appropriate self-restraint becomes internalized as a character flaw. For many women, a daily ritual of anxiously validating and revalidating self’s physical appearance is performed in front of the self-scrutinizing voice of the mirror and the bathroom scales. Ads which puts women ‘in charge’ of their lives stimulates among women a fear of their own female bodies. Many women feel their inability to mange their body parts reflects upon their moral worth as individuals. This model of envy-based personal power pushes some women toward hatred and rejection of their bodies and themselves.
What, if anything, does possessing a shapely feminine figure have to do with success and parity for women in a male corporate world? A seemingly paradoxical claim, regularly made in consumer ads, has women enhancing their social and economic power vis-à-vis men by presenting themselves as objects of desire (For example, perfume ads). These ads endorse a notion that femininity as defined by commodity consumption comprises a route to control, security and power in relations to men.
In other ads, the arranged demeanor of women frequently sets up women as objects of display for the admiration and exploitation of the spectator. It magnifies the women as fetishized parts, such as that of a lip stick commercial. It shields away the eyes and other identifying features, and the lips are made to stand out in bright red glow against a predominantly white setting, constituting her as an object. Shielding the eyes and the rest of the face creates a kind of anonymity that is not anonymity at all, but a coding suggestion that viewers fill in the rest of the woman based on the signifiers of the lips and the surrounding accoutrements. The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
Also, often we see in ads of accompanying men in women’s ads. This reinforces a prominent ideological account of women defined by the male gaze. Running beneath the textual account of gender relations in this ad is a narrative of male power, but the manifest claim is that women’s power over man is constituted through a fetishism of appearances. Just as in daily life, men stare at women – they scrutinize and evaluate women’s reified parts. The ability to survey is based on power, but here the female look confers power. Woman’s power over man is thus ironically depicted as a function of her willing acceptance of her vulnerability and powerlessness vis-à-vis men. The woman commands the male’s attention by making herself an object of desire by emphasizing the fetishized self as the conduit to power and control. The woman viewer is encouraged to envy those lips for what they might accomplish – the upper hand in relations with men.
Ads continue to address women about themselves as malleable surfaces that can be adorned with objects that carry desired attributes via commodities’ powers of signification. They encourage and perpetuate a pattern of seeing women as collections of body parts. Like pornographic representations, these ads abstract body parts from the whole person so that each part carries its own sexual persona. While many women cringe at the thought, there is only a difference of degree between the fetishism encoded in these ads and that promoted in ‘girlie’ magazines. Ads encourage women not merely to adorn themselves with commodities, but also to perceive themselves as objectified surfaces.
For decades, a pervasive theme in advertising aimed at women has been the notion of woman as capital. The principle of ‘possessive individualism’, once the exclusive domain of men, has now been extended to women through the sphere of consumption. Crudely put, the principle works like this: the individual has a right to all that is accrued by virtue of her ownership (the proprietary relationship) of her body. Her appearance is her value, and her avenue to accumulating capital. Ironically, men once dominated women on the basis of propriety claims made on the body of women; today, male domination gets reproduced on the basis of women acquiring proprietary control over their own bodies – or, over the appearances given off by their bodies. Feminists have observed how questions of feminine appeanace have previously hinged around competition among women for the ‘best’ available men in marriage markets. When this is the agenda, then woman’s social power does depend on management of her ‘beauty assets’. These ads differ in that they now confuse this form of motivated competition with an agenda of women actually competing against men in labor markets. This ambiguity permits advertisers to perform a sleight of hand: though they ostensibly address women in terms of new gender roles embracing new-found ‘freedoms’ and life-chances, those new roles are made no less contingent on the same old scenario for gaining power – using appearance to simulate, and stimulate, desire.
Where unequal and segregated labor markets and patriarchal rule have prevailed, women have learned there is a kernel of truth to claims that social power hinges on their ability to evoke desire through appearance. Becoming an object of desire supposedly makes a woman more valuable in the eyes of others, and hence more valuable to herself. If successful, men will desire you and women will envy you. But to be valued in such terms is to stand out, and the process of judging is based on the premise of invidious, competitive comparisons with other women. Hence in a competitive political economy of sign value, the hyper-critical individual is beset by an ever-present sinking feeling that she is not performing as well as others at controlling and managing their appearance. For the rare few, a real social power is gained; but it is gained at the expense of the many and it does nothing to challenge the male power to scrutinize and judge.
Gender Bodies
In all societies – past or present- bodies are subject to considerable normative evaluation and regulation. Many of these norms are deeply gendered and construct inequalities between men and women. Often, the social requirement to conform to gender norms, which often reinforce women’s inequality and powerlessness and limit the capacity for individual autonomy. Social norms and cultural values governing women’s bodies, behavior, and appearance generally are far more restrictive and repressive than those regulating men’s bodies. Conformity to gender norms can compromise, reduce, or even enhance women’s autonomy and power. It does not posit powerlessness or empowerment as a zero-sum equation: conformity to one set of gender norms may reduce women’s autonomy in some respects but expand opportunities for mobility and empowerment in other respects.
Conformity to dominant gender norms can provide individual women with resources and power. Indeed, women are often aware that they are complying with social norms that emphasize women’s difference and inferiority to men, but nonetheless rationally choose to conform. These social norms tend to reinforce women’s lower social status and emphasize women’s association with the body and appearance rather than the mind and rational thought. Dominant social norms can simultaneously constrain women’s actions and provide space for individual women to make choices that may empower them in their everyday lives.
The medicalization of women’s bodies, especially in regard to their reproductive capacities, is a well-documented source of social control and disempowerment for women. Women’s bodies are subjected to medical intervention and designation as sick or diseased in the contexts of fertility and reproductive issues, including abortion, pre-menstrual tension, and menopause. They are sites in which women, both individually and collectively, struggle for autonomy and power vis-à-vis medical dominance. Moreover, medicalization too easily generalizes the observed symptoms as expected for all women at particular stages of life and automatically attributes various conditions to hormones rather than to other causes or social events in women’s lives. In addition, presenting various options to women and then asking them to decide on their treatment does not necessarily expand autonomy, given the power of medical discourse and the social risks in not following medical advice.
The vast majority of women in Western societies, regardless of their feminist orientation, remove hair from their legs or underarms in the quest for greater femininity and attractiveness. While such hair removal is habitual, that is routine and normal for most women, it endorses the assumption that the female body is abnormal or unacceptable as it is. To be hairy and a woman contravene notions of appropriate femininity and risk the negative labels of being lazy, dirty unattractive and masculine. On a more extreme end of ‘body alteration’, cosmetic surgery is an area of the regulation of the body where the body is viewed as incomplete, as a potentiality and as physically changeable (with the assistance of medical intervention), usually to attain greater conformity with culturally specific appearance norms. In particular, it presents a confronting paradox between self-determination and disempowerment and the lack of real options for diversity and difference. For women, body maintenance and body-altering work can be experienced as personally empowering and central to their identities while simultaneously reinforcing powerful gender norms which devalue women’s diversity and social status.
People who go on diet place themselves under a form of self-surveillance by aspiring to the ‘ideal’ female body and reinforcing the thin ideal on other women via comments and gestures. Many of the participants were aware that by dieting regularly, they were making a trade-off with their health dieting and health was seen to some extent as mutually exclusive. In many social groups, women designated ‘fat’ are considered to have ‘let themselves go’, indicating deviance from the norms of restraint and control. On the opposite end, by discovering what it is like to transcend and resist her craving for food, the young woman achieves a sense of power over others via superior will and control. The New Jersey Supreme Court recently ruled that obesity is a disability where the condition was a result of a generic metabolic disorder. This case suggests that moral distinctions will be made between fat people who can demonstrate that their weight is a result of a medical condition and those perceived as overweight because of overeating. While men as well as women are criticized for fatness and strive for a more desirable body, women are under greater social pressure in societies with thinness norms to resist food temptations and closely monitor themselves. These pressures can tip self-control into eating disorders. Social power had come to be less dependent on the sheer accumulation of material wealth and more connected to the ability to control and manage the labor and resources of others. At the same time, excess body weight came to be seen as reflecting moral or personal inadequacy, or lack of will. Fat is being perceived as laziness, lack of discipline, unwillingness to conform, and absence of all those “managerial” abilities that, according to the dominant ideology, confer upward mobility. This is supported by movies such as “Rocky” and “A Streetcar Named Desire”.
Yeap that's all, off to exams now!
Songjie
# posted by eastsidebackstreet : 4:04 pm
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