Critically examine two theoretical perspectives, The Feminist Theory and Psychoanalysis Essays

Critically examine two theoretical perspectives, The Feminist Theory and Psychoanalysis Essays Critically examine two theoretical perspectives, The Feminist Theory and Psychoanalysis Essay Critically examine two theoretical perspectives, The Feminist Theory and Psychoanalysis Essay Essay Topic: Sociology In academic writing on media practice different theoretical perspectives are applied according to the authors research agenda. Critically examine TWO theoretical perspectives before providing examples of how each has been applied within academic writing on the media. After comparing these theoretical perspectives say why ONE will be more relevant for your dissertation work in Level 6. For this essay I have chosen to critically examine two theoretical perspectives which will be The Feminist Theory and Psychoanalysis. I will describe the origins of these theoretical perspectives, detailing how they came about and why they are useful in academic writing on media practice. Then I will analyse two pieces of academic writing each of which use a theoretical perspective I have chosen to discuss. Barbara Brooks Feminist Perspectives on the body which deals with the use of some changes in feminist thinking about the body. Stevi Jackson and Jackie Jones Contemporary Feminist Theories, the section on psychoanalysis. Feminist theory seeks to analyse the conditions which shape womens lives and to explore cultural understandings of what it means to be a woman. It was initially guided by the political aims of the womans Movement the need to understand womens subordination and our exclusion from, or marginalisation within, a variety of cultural and social arenas. Feminists refuse to accept that inequalities between woman and men are natural and inevitable and insist that they should be questioned. Theory, for us, is not an abstract intellectual activity divorced from womens lives, but seeks to explain the conditions under which those lives are lived. (Stevi Jackson and Jackie Jones, 1998, p. 1) In a way, most feminist thinking could be described as an engagement of one sort or another with what it means to be and to be perceived to be, a female body. It is hard to come across feminist writing that is not at some point connected to issues of the body. There have been a lot of Feminist thinkers through time who have had vastly different responses to female bodies, which still continue today. Issues of the body have been central to most feminist thinking, in one way or another, but there is also evidence that there has been a large number of feminist publications with the word body in the title, over the last decade. There have been some developments of studies in feminism called Corporeal feminism, which is looking at the characteristic of the body as opposed to the mind or spirit. One of the best known English writers in this field is Elizabeth Grosz. Grosz is the author of numerous works, including Volatile Bodies: toward a Corporeal Feminism; Jacques Lacan: a Feminist Introduction, and Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures. Groszs work is very much influenced by European philosophers such as Nietzsche, Merleau-ponty, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault and Spinozist. Elizabeth Grosz believed that; What they share is first, anti-Cartesianism, a refusal of the mind/ body or nature/ culture oppositions. Second, they share a dynamic rather than a static ontology, an ontology rooted in becoming rather than being. And third, they share a privileging of questions of ontology over questions of epistemology. This means that these various, historically-linked figures form a kind of counter-history to the dominant theoretical strands making up the history of philosophy. There are, of course, other figures that could be included in such a counter-history, but Deleuze has provided us with a powerful starting point from which to work backwards to claim such a history. In recent years, Elizabeth Grosz has reinvestigated Irigarays theory to formulate a new phenomenological view on the body. Grosz rejects the Platonic idea that the body is a brute or passive entity, but sees the body itself as constitutive of systems of meaning. In Volatile Bodies, she redefines the body using Deleuzes post-oedipal framework of the Desiring Machine. The body becomes a desiring machine when it de-humanizes the object of desire and dissolves into surrounding environments. The subject becomes one with the machine-like apparatus and senses its merging components as changing, segmented and discontinuous waves, flows, and intensities. Katrien Jacobs (http://web. gc. cuny. du/csctw/found_object/text/grosz. htm) Grosz asks questions about what constitutes a body and, in particular, about where, if at all, there can be located a specifically sexed body that is somehow before or beyond culture. Grosz developed a new theory which was not trying to answer a question about what came first, she wanted to look at a different explanation of the body, which rendered a question of redundant. Grosz pushe d the boundaries of existing terms. A central figure for grosz in rethinking the self as body and mind rather than body separated from mind is the Mobius strip: Bodies and minds are not two distinct substances or two kinds of attributes of a single substance but somewhere in between The Mobius strip has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into body and body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another. This model also provides a way of problematizing and rethinking the relations between the inside and outside of a subject. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Grosz challenges commonsense ideas about sexed bodies, and about the construction of knowledge; a movement in feminist thought has been from epistemology (theory of knowledge (hence, episteme as a component of that knowledge, something which is a building block of a particular knowledge system), toward ontology (the study of being, existing in the world) towards the question of What is a woman?. There has been a tendency to assume an essential femaleness which for some feminists was something to be ignored or minimised, and for others was a cause of celebration in answering the question What is a woman?. The focus of a womans movement around a universal idea of woman has been increasingly critiqued as imperialist: blind to its own exclusions and assumptions. The development of an identity politics organised around a self-defined identity of sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc. challenges this universalism. The assertion of womans rights as human rights rests on the humanists ideas of the Enlightenment: the belief in the rights of an individual human subject. Arguably, the late twentieth century is dismantling the idea of the unified human subject; this poses problems for feminism. Second-wave feminism, following the work of Simone de Beauvoir, argues for the separation of sex (the natural, given male or female body) and gender (the cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity). Social constructionism relegates the body to no more than a tabula rasa for inscription by culture. Social constructionist explanations have been criticised for ignoring sexuality and racial difference. Judith Butler (and others) points to the way in which binary gender formation relies on an assumed heterosexuality. She tries to re-think gender as performativity (Judith Butlers theory of gender as a continually repeated performance): a series of acts repeated until they appear as natural extensions of the body engaged in the performance. Butler, like other corporeal feminists (Corporeality: literally the being of the body; when the adjective, corporeal is coupled with feminism, it denotes a recently developed theorising that attempts to reorient thinking about the female body and subjectivity in ways that challenge the dominant episteme of the mind/body split. works to change the thinking of Western philosophy and, particularly, to move beyond the dualism (binarism (or dualism): the pattern of thinking and conceptualisation that divides everything into opposites; one of the feminist objections to it is that in the set of supposedly equal opposites, one set of terms can clearly be designated as feminine and the other masculine, with higher or positive values, on the whole, attached to the latter. ) of Cartesian thought. Luce Irigaray and Hi li ne Cixous also challenge this dualism, attempting to re-inscribe woman in multiple ways that resist binary oppositions of western thinking. Elizabeth Grosz argues that such a rethinking of and through the body is crucial to feminist politics. Psychoanalysis is concerned in the account, or analysis, of the mind, the psyches structure and its relation to the body, and uses that as the basis for treating certain kinds of sickness. Psychoanalysis is well known as the talking cure; psychoanalysis is closely concerned with gender, sexuality, familial relations, and the fact that their expression and construction are not always available to the conscious mind. These areas are those of interest of feminists. Psychoanalysis has been seen by some feminist writers as another weapon in the armoury of patriarchy. To enlist on behalf of feminism the insights of psychoanalysis, in particular the concept of the unconscious and the idea that gender is a psychic and not a biological identity, post-Freudian writers have focused on the very early pre-oedipal stages of a Childs life, and mothering. Pg 162 Sue vice Contemporary Feminist Theories Psychoanalysis was first developed by Sigmund Freud, based on the exploration of unconscious mental processes displayed within dreams. Its aim was to reveal repressed anxieties and overcome the effects of bad experiences in early childhood. Freud believed that the location of desire was between what we see and what we imagine for ourselves. Freud established three principles. The unconscious, argued Freud, consists of the activity of primary sexual and destructive instincts, which are in conflict with internal forces of self-preservation and external social forces. Second, the analysis of dreams proved invaluable in accessing the unconscious; as did, thirdly, Freuds working out of the relationship between primary (unconscious) and secondary (conscious) thought processes. Later on Freud developed a theory called the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality. Freuds central concepts took the male child as a model, so that the female seemed like an imperfect version. Melanie Klein revised and extended several Freudian categories in the light of child analysis during the 1940s and 1950s. Klein offered an alternative to the Freudian view of the maternal body as one which is superseded by the superior paternal law, and is only a site for regressive feelings in later life. Klein argues that children have a very early knowledge of the mothers vaginia as well as the fathers penis, and so the division into two sexes is inevitable. Kleins concept of sexual difference appears more rigid than Freuds; she has made a great impact on feminist theory. This is partly due to Kleins emphasis on the importance of the maternal, in contrast to Freuds on the role of the father, and Freuds habit of writing out the mother in his case histories. Klein was also distinctive in giving priority to interpersonal relations over individual instinct. A specific psychoanalytic theory can be directly associated with the fascination of the images on the screen, that of Jacques Lagans mirror stage. It deals with the point in which a young infant realises its own image within the mirror and has its own identity. In recognising its own image, the infant develops a fascination with itself and begins to construct its own identity. However, what the child constructs is a representation of them selves because it notices itself as an image and begins to unify itself with the image. Therefore, an element of delusion sets in because the subject becomes an image, even though the image is a replica of the individual; it is in fact a representation of the individual. The nature of our egoistic selves, as represented through the identification of the image can be connected to the illusory nature displayed on the film screen. As our reflection is nothing more than an image we take narcissistic pleasure in, so to can we now identify with the gloriously complete presentation of a spectacle on the screen. (Turner, 1999, p. 134) The future of psychoanalytic theory within feminism seems very rich. As well as the return to Klein, signalled for instance by the establishment of the womens Therapy Centre London (Wright 1992: 457-61), psychoanalytic feminism underlies recent developments in lesbian theory, gender studies and queer theory. The latter in particular has benefited from the long-standing debate in feminist psychoanalysis between signifier and signified, body and language, literal and metaphorical, as Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman suggests in a Queer Romance. Some representations, what we call queer representations, seem to share the capacity to disturb stable definitions (Burston and Richardson 1995:46). New work is beginning, although rather slowly, on psychoanalysis and race; as psychoanalysis has been discourse about, but not of, women, it has been neither about, nor of, people of colour. It is interesting to speculate whether issues of oedipalisation, gender construction, and transference, in particular, will be revitalised by the incorporation of racial difference. To return to Freuds idea that it is only accidental that there are two sexes, and there could just as easily have been four drive-based positions instead, it may turn out to be the case that the law of the father is the law of the white supremacist father specifically (Stephanie munro, forthcoming work on Irigaray and race), while other fathers may have other laws. Sue Vice pg 173 Contemporary Feminist Theories For my dissertation I will be using The Feminist Theory as one of my main theoretical perspectives. My dissertation will be analysing what affects media images have on body satisfaction? I will be discussing not only female but male satisfaction of the body as in the past there has been a lot of writing on the female body but now there are a lot more studies on the male body and how they feel. I will be looking at the Feminist perspectives on the body, as the body has been central to feminist thinking. I will be looking at the new concept that has been developed corporeal feminism. Which is the being of the body; when the adjective, corporeal is coupled with feminism, it denotes a recently developed theorising that attempts to reorient thinking about the female body and subjectivity in ways that challenge the dominant episteme of the mind/body split. It will also be relevant for me to use content analysis and mass communication models such as the Hypodermic Model in my dissertation which will concentrate on the effects of a specific aspect of media communication on the audience.