This is the course blog for Gender, Sexuality, and Film. It's meant to provide an alternate space where course discussions might deepen or extend into other areas, and also a place where resources related to course materials can be aggregated.
Students are expected to post at least once every two weeks, with minimum entries of 500 words. That makes for a total of 7 posts over 14 weeks (though you're welcome to post more frequently if you like). These posts do not need to be as formal as a research paper, but they should be thoughtful responses to readings, screenings, and/or questions raised during class discussion. Responding to other students is encouraged, either in a comment field (this can count toward a post, if it meets the word count) or as a stand-alone entry. Students are also welcome to bring in other materials but these too should relate meaningfully to course content. We'll also use this space to list noteworthy film and events that are happening around town, and any other announcements that would be useful to the class.
Please be sure to post your responses by 6PM the night before class so that everyone can have a chance to look over your comments and respond either online or in class. Students are expected, of course, to regularly check in on the blog and stay abreast of the discussions happening there.
For me, there is a gaping silence and injustice in the story of Medusa and this carries into the ways she is used as metaphor and trope. Lacan’s understanding of the gaze and the imagescreen is characterized by an underlying terror; it situates the position of viewer as inherently precarious and fraught. But this deep-seated fear comes from a specific place, an understanding dependent upon an ignorance about and a fundamental separation from the world/object that gazes back. It is true that Medusa’s gaze turns her opponent into stone, and that we cannot be the only subjects of vision, seeing but never seen. And it makes sense to me that social order is often predicated on the exclusion of what is termed to be foreign and ambiguous, because that ambiguity can force us to see the world – and more importantly, ourselves – in more complicated and so threatening terms.
ReplyDeleteBut while this does involve danger, I find it problematic that the reciprocity of vision, according to Lacan, can mean only a relationship of harm, that the Real is deemed painfully blinding but not also a source of learning, insight, or perspective, in the way that Smithson’s art breaks boundaries and forces the viewer to consider the entire context of what they are seeing, to place themselves within the blurry dynamics of vision and being. Medusa is apparently a source of fear of castration – she threatens the viewer’s power, surely, but why is the condition of mutual looking necessarily one of victimization? There is definitely vulnerability in the way that someone else, the Other, can act as a mirror to our own inconsistencies and ambiguities, but I also want to know what they see and how I am a mirror to them.
We never hear from Medusa. There is no representation of how she understands this position, what she thinks or sees when everyone her gaze touches turns to stone. Maybe some things are linguistically unrepresentable – and so the Real and the Other and the feminine and Dionysus’ reverie and visual art must stay left out of discourse to some extent, or depicted only through a filter, an imagescreen or apotropaios, like Medusa’s head cast on the shield. And perhaps, as Mitchell discusses with the limits and meanings of ekphrasis, it is better not to self-importantly “guess” what she was thinking or feeling, to give her a false or trite voice as Keats supposedly does with the urn.
Yet while she retains her power to petrify, and Shelley’s manuscript poem supposedly does her justice as the subject of the “Leonardo” painting, I still see Medusa as continually an object, a frozen image, an always-trope. She has the power of the gaze but she never escapes status as Other. As Mitchell talks about with the triangle and the third position of audience, in each visual depiction we are the ones gazing at her. I want there to be space for relationship and dialogue, for seer and seen to mix and mingle as Vernant described until neither maintains dominance of the gaze, the ability to freeze, to judge. I want this instead to be a chance for transformation, self-discovery and breaking down of the binaries of the familiar and unfamiliar, a reconfiguration of power as contingent, shifting and shared, a re-situation of ourselves within that dynamic.
Medusa and her power never disappear (in fact they are omnipresent, at least in images) but I don’t see this as triumph. She is present, and since language is not the only means of speaking maybe I am wrong to interpret her as silent. But I do think that while her gaze is central, we continue to castrate her. We never approach her as an equal. She is either conquered or terrifying – Lacan’s dangerous object. I want a more complicated understanding of power, in which we recognize that we were Medusa all along, that the Other is a strategic ideological distinction, and that confronting the unfamiliarity within ourselves and in the real, while perhaps scarier than anything else, can provide a richer and more humble context for seeing – and being seen by – “the tempestuous loveliness of terror”.