A Feminine Critique of Judgment

Both of the texts this week deal with a gendered sense of perception in respect to visuals and speech. If the world was a man’s world before, it seems we are shifting into a feminine one now. And I welcome the shift wholeheartedly. Though I don’t want to readily and uncritically accept that the origin of values that underlie principals of visual interpretation as gendered, inseparable “from how [Kant’s] sense of the world and its functioning grew out of his ability as a man of his time and place to look upon his experiences as being, necessarily, the experiences of all others” (164), the disparity between males and females and the male control of discourse at his time is undeniable. Our capacity to make judgments on beauty has indeed arisen from a male standard favoring standardization, universality, efficiency, disinterestedness, and discovery. Anne Francis Wysocki’s essay, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty,” then indicates the shift (which has likely been going on for a while now) into a female gendered critique for understanding visual communication. In the female critique, the word communication implying a message/transmission/receiver paradigm will no longer suffice; the communication alluded to here involves interlocutors, reciprocity, and interaction.
            We can see traces of this female gendered critique in Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s “Eloquence in an Electronic Age.” The propensities Jamieson attributes to women are strikingly reminiscent of the shift advocated by Wysocki. Jamieson states, “It is natural for a woman to define herself through social relations…They tend to be more pro-social particularly in their stress on relationships rather than autonomous action” (806). These qualities can be found in Wysocki’s endorsement of a new paradigm for interaction with visual composition. In stating, “The web of social and cultural practices in which we move give us the words and concepts, as well as the tastes, for understanding what we sense” (171), Wysocki grounds our capacity for taste and judgment-making in social relationships. In fact, she even establishes visual compositions as being socially interactive texts that embody “reciprocal communications, shaping both composer and reader and establishing relationships among them” (173). This is precisely the feminine proclivity for social relations asserted by Jamieson.

            While Jamieson’s enumeration of feminine qualities might be bordering on stereotypes, the qualities to which she refers are more empowering for women than they are debilitating. In our present technological age, it seems these qualities will thrive. Our world is becoming an environment that accommodates these “feminine” tendencies. The postmodernist school of thought also seems to accommodate these tendencies. In the same way that we perceive textual interaction as a disentanglement rather than a decipherment of singular meaning, seeing “beauty as a quality we build, rather than one we expect to discover” (169) follows the line of thinking of the postmodernist movement. What Wysocki calls for seems like a necessary movement in our understanding of textual interaction.