ARH411 Theory & Methods

Laura Mulvey makes several interesting claims in the reading. Prior to the reading, I had not thought of how cinemas would promote the illusion of voyeurism. Dark rooms to me made sense so that the movies would be the only focus. Instead Mulvey explains how the darkness separates the viewers from each other and how the lighting gives the illusion of viewing into a private world (Mulvey, 382). This enforces the role female characters had in traditional narrative films.  Mulvey mentions a theory by Sigmund Freud, the castration complex which states that there is a threat of castration because women lack a penis. Upon further research, men feared castration brought upon their fathers if the father believed the son would be attracted to their mothers. In women, the fear would be that they need to demonstrate they are equivalent to a man even though they do not have a penis. The castration complex is dealt with in films by fetishizing women so that they bring pleasure instead of anxiety...

One of the main ideas that Roland Barthes brings up in The Death of the Author is that there is nothing original. For the most part I would agree with this. As Barthes explains, everything that is written, has already been written in the past. Words are mixed together in a different matter or form. Another way of looking at it would be that there are dictionaries. All the words exist, the only difference is how they are put together. Barthes idea is that there is no originality, there should be no need to know who the author is. Since nothing is original anyways, why should there be the need to know of the author. The way I interpreted this was, all the words already exist and sometimes the only difference is who put them together.  When someone is observing art (or text) while already having knowledge of the artist, they start to use the history of the artist (or author) to try and comprehend what they are looking at. A person's understanding of a piece can change if they know an ...

Currently, diversity is a huge topic that is being talked about in nearly any industry. In attempts to be diverse, white-dominated groups end up with tokenism. In this week's reading, Trinh T. Minh-ha writes about the struggles that women and minority groups have to face while in white-dominated situations. From the attempts to be more diverse, diversity and inclusion committees were created. Within these committees, you would expect those who are uneducated to educate themselves but that is not always the case. Minh-ha provides a quote from Audre Lorde, "now we hear that it is the task of black and third world women to educate white women..." This speaks on how committees will pass on the work to the group of minorities to be the ones to educate them instead of educating themselves. This places a burden on the people who are invited to opportunities where they can educate others. The burden comes from the idea that if they decline the invitation then they are losing thei...