Gender & The Gaze: -Who's looking at Who?- (22/1/2013)

During this session we looked at genders and how they are treated in different mediums e.g. how they are written and presented.
You can read my notes on what I understood about the presentation below:

• Gender is cultural as it is what people choose to be, and Sex is biological as it can't be helped. However, gender is viewed differently depending on the region and nation.
• One reason to why I personally think some genders are represented less fairly than others is because of the region that game is released in. For example, in the West the female roles would fulfill the role of sex appeal, whereas the male roles would fulfill male players' desires. My lecturer was interested by this idea and even said that it was one we should hopefully cover next week, thus making it a good example.
• Gender stereotypes include the above mentioned and even the 'Damsel in Distress' as demonstrated most noticeably by Princess Peach in the Mario games as she is always getting captured. These stereotypes are based on Nature/Culture Binary instead of Nurture as Nurture is cultural and women in the past weren't treated fairly for many years or portrayed well in the medium e.g. the silent movie image of a women tied to a rail track or the view that women should stay passively at home during a war.   
• Ancient mythological gods were portrayed as active whereas goddesses were portrayed as beautiful and the subject of attention from others.    
• The term parenting is now being used to refer to fathers as well as mothers as in the past. Therefore more men are staying at home to look after children and doing more 'motherly' things like feeding their child with a bottle. An act that only women in the past could do as most babies were breast feed. 
• Mentioned Suffragettes (Women who formed a group in the early 20th century to gain votes for women and championed women's rights in general).    
• Feminism questions Binary Thought and Patriarchal Binary Thought.
• "Your just being hysterical" is an insult thrown at women in the past as they were meant to be seen as sweet. However, they were also considered to be related to the moon (by men) as it is also odd and mysterious.
• Feminism challenges ingrained perceptions of women.
• Sterotypes have also appeared in fairytales e.g. shouldn't the prince in Snow White have helped with the cleaning?
• Art is the least censored medium out there.  Is it?
• Women in the 70's and 80's used their own naked bodies as an art form in order to portray their art and point towards audiences. Image and text were also used by them as they would take an add and chnage it e.g. 'Your body is a battleground'.
• Magazines also follow stereotypes as women magazines tend to be fashion, health and gossip based, whereas magazines for men as quoted by a member of my group are "cars and boobs".
• My lecturer used Eddie Izzard as an example of a man who dressed in women's clothing and was beaten up for it. He was known to say in court in his defence that he didn't just dress as a woman in parks to antagonise people.
• Ryan said that in the last forty years art has tackled more sensitive themes and subjects. Therefore I am glad to be brought up in a time that is more accepting than other previous times, and as a result can include the mentioned themes in numerous mediums today.  
• A women's body may get in the way of the male view of her as a person. 
• Some artists didn't include a body from a piece of art and asked their audiences to understand it to be a representation of their gender. One such example included Tracy Emmen's bed with all the objects relating to a women except for the occupant.
• "Do women posing nude become empowered or lose power?". This is a difficult question that the class had many different views on, some of which even argued for their opinion. I don't have a clear answer as I can see it being a mix of both. 
• The term 'camp' is anything that takes a gender quality to an extreme e.g. being too feminine or even too masculine.  

After the presentation we were then asked to read a paper entitled 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' by Laura Mulvey. People agreed, including myself that it was very black and white in its thinking. It was also rather dated as it was written in 1975 and didn't even include the opinions of female audiences.
I must also say that I don't agree with what Mulvey stated as she wrote that the female character was pointless to the story. You could argue that this was due to the time of the article, but had she never seen 'Casablanca' made in 1942? That's a masterpiece of film in which the female love interest (see below) is just as important to the story as the rest of the male cast. And judging the article in 2013 I have to completely disagree with it as many films and other mediums have had leading female characters or supporting ones that were vital to the narrative and equally as relevant as male ones.
This said, I know that many movies in the past used to have female characters for simply 'eye candy' and as a means of selling tickets. Also, some films simply reflect the period they represent and therefore women's roles in the past have been repressed by men who were seen as the providers whereas the women could be seen as the house wife (lower class) or the decorative wife (upper class). This even relates to today with certain countries repression of women.   

At the start of the presentation I noticed that the lecturer was showing an image of the character Naoto Shirogane (see below) from my favorite game 'Persona 4'. He didn't speak of her but it was most likely that he included her due to her gender confusion and therefore relevance to the presentation. Intrigued by this I remembered that my group had also spoken of her during our group presentation and thus wondered if he had decided to use her because we mentioned the character, or perhaps it was his own research. When I approached him with the question he told me that he had played the game and that he used her image as she was a good example of a character going through that situation. Pleased to hear that he had played the game I asked if he knew of any other games that included similar content as seen in 'Persona 4' with the same fairness and approach. He couldn't think of any examples but I was happy to hear that he would look out for me and even send me a link to a second year's work looking at the same issues brought up in today's presentation. I look forward to that read as I feel very strongly about these subjects in video games.

Harvard Referencing: 

• Periale, E. (2012) Casablanca screenshot [Online image]. Available at: http://xoxoxoe.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/best-movies-ever-casablanca.html#.UZKJg8oqKY0 (Accessed: 22/1/2013).  
• Soejima, S. (Unknown) Naoto Shirogane [Online image]. Available at: http://videogamesheaven.net/movie-persona-4-characters.htm (Accessed: 22/1/2013).