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.
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.
Why do men control discourse surrounding visual representation? As I wonder this, I also wonder why so many male-dominated fields are that way? For example, a few of the top ten male-dominated fields are accounting and finance, technology, math, politics, etc. I wonder why these too, are male-dominated.
ReplyDeleteI guess in the sense you describe, postmodernist thought is accommodating to feminist ideology. In questioning the legitimacy of a male-controlled discourse culture, we can then turn to the importance of thriving feminist thought that will hopefully endure in today's technological society.