Humans - Representation of gender, Gender Performativity

 

Representations of Gender 

- Anita takes a maternal figure role - house jobs and caring jobs.

Madonna/ Whore complex - Freud developed a theory to explain men’s anxiety towards women’s sexuality, suggesting that men define women into one of two categories: the Madonna (women he admires and respects) and the Whore (women he is attracted to and therefore disrespects). -Madonna- typically virtuous, nurturing, saintly and sexually repressed. -Whore- sensual, sexualised and desirable without purity. Double standard - allegory.

- Male gaze - only function of a media product is to be looked at by a heterosexual male audience. Patriarchal hegemony.

Fetishism - overwhelming obsession with a particular concept or object.

Fetish - a small religious statue.

Commodity fetishism- an obsession with a product, not through what it can do, but through what it represents.

Anita - mobile phone.

• Allegory of the way in which we use technology.
• Our fetishistic obsession with technology.
• Way in which we use and treat women in our society.

Breakfast Scene: In what ways are women and technology represented in this scene?

• Immediate excitement, their breakfast isn’t normally like this.
• Anita made the breakfast - represents technology and women.
• Mattie - immediately compares Anita with her friends by saying it makes her three meals a day.
• Laura tells Anita stop when Mattie tells her to get white sugar - women.
• Unconventional Sci-fi.
• Angle shots of Anita cleaning a lot.
• Mid to close up shots of Anita.
• Binary opposition PJs Hawkins family, Anita dressed in a generic outfit.
• Is the breakfast really normal? It’s like a hotel breakfast, movies and TV shows - creates a hyperreality where something is more perfect than reality.
• Mattie - ‘crusty sheets’ to Toby - reinforced by Male gaze.
• Hyperreality - high-key natural lighting, Anita in the shadows.
• Anita is a commodity to be fetishised. 

Gender Performativity 

- Gender presentation, domains, culturally formed.

• Identity is a performance, and it is constructed through a series of acts and ‘expressions’ that we perform everyday.
• While there are biological differences dictated by sex, our gender is defined through series of acts. These may include the ways we walk, talk, dress, and so on.
• Therefore, there is no gender identity behind these expressions of gender.
• Gender performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual. It is outlined and reinforced through dominant patriarchal ideologies.
• Shaping the world around us - reinforcing ideologies.

- Gender performativity is how our performance of gender affects the world around us.