15 thoughts on “Reading Questions Set 4

  1. Eleanor Krause

    Mulvey claims that not getting married was a statement that celebrated “phallic, narcissistic omnipotence.” But, if we are talking in Freudian terms, couldn’t it also be anxiety of the male castration complex that causes fear of attachment to females?

  2. Rajsavi Anand

    Why does the women in the two Western movies need to be either repressed masculine or passive feminine. Mulvey creates the point that the women in these movies are not necessarily for the feminine cause: they have only two options. I think its interesting that movies during this decade can only be analyzed by these two views. Instead why can’t her choice of choosing the radical man symbolize her own journey, rather than a powerful masculine/ weak feminine lens? Basically why can’t her choice be a powerful feminine figure.

  3. Avery Rain

    What is the attraction of “marriage” in a story, be it a Proppian folk tale or a Western? I found myself wondering about the quotes around marriage–are there alternatives to actual marriage that serve the same purpose in a story? Is the dependency on marriage still prominent in current film stories? Additionally, Oedipas is referenced at the end of the section about marriage. Where does oedipal stuff fit into marriage (or the option of marriage in a Western)?

  4. Amethyst Tate

    In her conclusion, Mulvey states that “the female spectator’s fantasy of masculinisation [is] at a cross-purposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes.” Do you agree with Mulvey’s “transvestite” identification, which denotes deviance from the norm, or can we find ways to rethink the identification of female spectators?

  5. Laura Hendricksen

    To what extent does finding our « ego ideals » in the protagonists of a movie determine our pleasure of watching it? Is it necessary that the female audience appeals to the main protagonists to enjoy it (either by accepting temporarily the « masculinization » or sticking with a passive role?).
    Doesn’t the audience have a freedom to interpret and enjoy a movie for reasons that may go beyond the Freudian analysis, especially regarding the way the female audience identifies to characters?

  6. Anna Gallagher

    Did anyone else find it troublesome that Mulvey uses a relatively minor western from 1946 as her only example of a woman-centered film when she is writing in 1981? She claims that because “Duel in the Sun” is woman-centered, it is “actually, overtly, about sexuality: it becomes a melodrama.” Does a movie or a TV show that features a woman as the central character automatically become a melodrama? Is it possible to identify with and find “ego ideals” in the female protagonists of today, even in a melodramatic context?

  7. Alexander Griffiths

    Is “passive femininity” vs “the devil of regressive masculinity” not the same thing as Mulvey has previously argued? Has she really rethought her convictions?
    Freud claims women are in continual oscillation between the “active” and the “passive” each defined against masculinity. So do women have any identity at all or are women evermore to reside in limbo of identity?

  8. Rosalind Downer

    In Mulvey’s response to her criticism, she comments that a problem posed for women on screen is that a girl is caught between “two conflicting desires”, between “passive” femininity and regressive “masculinity”, concluding that women represent sexuality. However, one might argue that this is not a bad thing, as the female character is able to be centralized, and she is treated as equally as men are. Furthermore, the woman is able to ‘be herself’, even if her roles change depending on which man she is connected with. Therefore the woman is not treated as a subordinate sex, merely as another character in the cinema.

  9. Bryanna Kleber

    Mulvey is interested in the ‘masculinisation’ of the spectator, regardless of the actual sex of the spectator. If a viewer was female, and heterosexual, would her ‘masculine’ voyeurism be idolization and a desire to actually be the character in view, like we talked about on Thursday? Mulvey also says that this trans-sex identification is “a habit that very easily becomes second nature.” Is it a conscious or subconscious habit?

  10. Oliver Sutro

    “he will go out into the world, make his fortune through prowess or the assistance of helpers, and marry a princess, the stories describe the male phantasy of ambition, reflecting something of an experience and expectation of domi­nance.” Women write these stories too. Are women writers ok with objectifying women and making men dominant or do they write this way solely to please their audience.

  11. Amelia Furlong

    Couldn’t the woman’s struggle in “Duel in the Sun” between traditional femininity and “regressive masculinity” be seen as a positive struggle between two conflicting ideas of womanhood? Or does Mulvey think that women are somewhere in between these archetypes? Because, if she does, isn’t that also putting woman into a box, into a role, that she doesn’t necessarily fit into?

  12. Maria Macaya

    Freud stated that the masculine and active part of a woman “then sucumbs to the momentous process of repression”. Is this always the case in reality today? Is it possible that some women’s masculinity is not repressed? Or is it always at some level repressed in one way or another?

    What if being active became part of being feminine? Would it still be repressed?

  13. Joyce Ma

    Mulvey states that,”In the course of some women’s lives there is a repeated alternation between periods in which femininity and masculinity gain the upper hand.” Is there a time when women can be both feminine and masculine? Must we identify with one over the other? Aren’t the meanings of femininity and masculinity influenced by the shift in our culture; therefore, in the near future is it possible that its meanings will completely change?

  14. Luke Martinez

    How is it that someone can just slip subconsciously into another sex to take pleasure in film? If this concept is real and applicable, how do these ego fantasies differ from a regression to the phallic stage of Freudian development?

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