The legend of Oedipus Rex is a tragedy of destiny. Tragedy of destiny is the attempt of man to defy the will of gods. The moral of tragic destiny is that man is unable to defy the will of god and realize how powerless he truly is in relation to the divine.

            The legend begins with the king Laius being told from an oracle that his son Oedipus would murder him and marry Laius’ wife. Laius sends away his son in hopes to stop this prophecy. Many years pass and just as the prophecy of Oedipus had stated he would end up killing Laius and marrying his own mother Jocasta. Time passes again and the oracle tells Oedipus that he has murdered his father and married his mother. Oedipus disgusted with himself blinds himself and forsakes his home.

            The story of Oedipus Rex had a deep effect on the audience that other tragedy of destiny was not able to produce. This effect doesn’t come from the battle between man’s will and destiny. Instead the effect comes from our childhood desires that became oppressed as they grew up. The curse put on Oedipus to murder his father and marry his mother is the same as our childhood impulses. Our first sexual desire is directed towards our mother and our first impulse of jealousy and hatred is directed towards our father. As a child our dreams reenacted this and confirmed our first desires. Oedipus ends up fulfilling our childhood wishes by making his prophecy come true. The great effect of this legend is that it reminds the audience to recognize those childhood impulses that we have suppressed in our own mind. Just like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these desires, which nature has forced upon us on purpose. Many men have had dreams of having sexual relation with their mother, and look back at the dreams with astonishment and indignation. In addition, men have a dream of murdering their father. The story of Oedipus is the reaction to these two common desires. These dreams as an adult are followed by feelings of repulsion. Just as adults dreams end in repulsion. The story of Oedipus ends in horror and self-punishment because of this repulsion. When Oedipus realizes our childhood impulse has come in to realization for him, he is unable to cope with what he had done. The story of Oedipus is not just a tragedy of destiny, but instead a realization for the audience of a battle their childhood impulses and the suppression of these desires as they grow into an adult.  

Foucault’s theories on the theory of sexuality bring us initially to the social mindset of the 17^th century, where he introduces the “repressive hypothesis.” This concept states that the “bourgeois societies” of the time were attempting to gain control over, what seems like, the very idea of sex and sexuality and proposed to do so with censorship. “It had first been necessary to subjugate it to the level of language…expunge it from things that were said and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.” (pg 1648, Norton) This censorship made public discussions of sex taboo, regulating it ok to talk about sex only under certain circumstances. This makes sex itself seem almost taboo, something to be shameful for. In order to even speak of sex, one must have had to have accommodated the topic of conversation with the right place, time and people (I’m thinking behind closed doors, at night, under a full moon, when Jupiter is at its brightest in the sky…) I’m agreeing with the idea that this entire thing was done to prevent promiscuity, which is highly frowned upon. “If sex is bad to talk about, I shouldn’t be having it.”

This censorship on the discussion of sex leads to the Church having to encourage and listen to the sexual confessions of its members. These confessions however begin to evolve not just to regrettable actions that people are looking to atone for, but feelings and desires as well. Confession becomes the only safe haven for people to talk about their…needs. In the 18^th century the ruling powers in European countries began to see the idea of population “as wealth, as labor capacity,” and realized the problem of “population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded.” (1652-1653, Norton) They began to see the effects of sex itself. The growth of the nation is pretty much influenced by all the sex its people are having. Too much or too little sexual reproduction affects the amount of labor a country can provide and the resources it can create or consume. This forced sex to be discussed more openly, as it became recognized as an essential topic in economy and politics as a potential problem (or possibly even a strength.) Foucault also writes of 18^th century schools as an institution which inevitably had to acknowledge sex in order to function the way it did. What comes to mind is when he points out that dorms were fashioned certain ways depending on sex, and sleep times were monitored because of “the sexuality of the children.” The whole thing revolved around boys and girls turning into women and men, and therefore it could not hide from sex as a topic of discussion any more than the church or politics could.

Foucault shows how important sex is to the lives of everyday humans and that it is not something to run from or to be ashamed of. Despite the attempts to subdue and control it, it cannot be ignored from society. It is literally the driving factor for the continuation of our species for crying out loud. 

When freud talks about the “uncanny” he is referencing things people experience which can be both familiar, yet, at the same time, strange (and often creepy as a result). The early example for this is Ernst Jentsch’s take on the short story “The Sandman,” which features a doll that is to life-like for its own good. He argues that the uncanniness (if that’s a word) of the dolls in the story is the fact that they are made to look as though they are alive, despite the fact that the beholder of the doll knows they are not.

Freud takes a different route to arrive to the idea of uncanniness. Freud’s main focus is the fact that the Sand-man likes to collect children’s eyes. He relates this back to your childhood and genitalia (because he’s Freud, and that’s pretty much his whole deal).  He argues that people as a whole have come to dread injury to the eye far beyond anything else, and this starts when you are a child. Children rely on eyesight more so than the other senses. The eye is linked with knowing what’s going on around you, and as we know, knowledge is power. Transitively, losing your eyes is losing your power (what little you may or may not have). (It reminds me of when babies cannot see certain objects and they believe it has ceased to exist; should the baby not be able to see anything, he loses his sense of the world; possibly nothing exists. This can easily be passed on into childhood.)  While I can absolutely agree with this, I think the castration anxiety is a bit of a stretch. Leave it to him to think “I’ve lost my eyes! What does that mean for my reproductive organs?!” But I understand that maybe there’s a sense of vulnerability that is applicable to both the eyes and genitalia, as both a very important to human beings, and if that’s the case then I can roll with it. Both are essential to a normal human experience, to be complete.

Maybe (likely) it’s a lack of understand on the concept of “The Uncanny” but I kind of feel Freud doesn’t really stick to the original idea of “Uncanny.” I thought it was supposed to be something familiar yet simultaneously strange and unnerving. Lacking eyes is unnerving, yes, but what’s the familiar part of it? Having eyes? I quite enjoy using Zombies as an “Uncanny” example: the familiarity of having the body of a human being, with a history and social connections/relationships who maybe were loving and good, but, being zombies, they are dangerous and unfeeling. They embody both those who you love and a soulless monster; life and death. Call me biased but I think that’s the best example, but really, I’ll take any excuse to include Zombies in anything…

Of all the essays we’ve read this semester, Lacan’s piece on “The Mirror Stage as Formative” was definitely among my favorites. I’ve always been fascinated with child psychology and development. When I lived in Florida, I was lifeguard who taught swimming lessons for children between the ages two and ten, I was also a camp counselor during the summer and babysat a ton.

Lacan’s mirror stage is a concept of psychoanalytic theory that occurs sometime during the time a child is eight to sixteen months old. The mirror stage suggests that when an infant peers at their reflection in the mirror, they’re fascinated by the image of themselves and usually around the time of sixteen months are they able to recognize the reflected image is themselves. Once this recognition is made, the infant will often spend a great deal of time exploring the image in relation to their body.

The connection the child makes between the image and the body is vastly important to the cognitive development of the ego. The ego is constructed based off the result of the conflict between the child’s visual appearance in direct relation to the emotional experience. When a child is six months old, they still lack the physical coordination to move about with ease. Between the ages of eight to twelve months a child’s physical body is very imbalanced. For example, the arms and hands are much more developed than the legs and feet, the hands appear large in contrast to other parts of the body, the legs may still appeared bowed and feet appear flat as the arch has not fully developed yet. These all cause the child to move awkwardly through life which, causing an emotional experience of imperfection. According to Lacan, when an infant in this stage views their image in the mirror they experience a false sense of wholesomeness and idea perfection that is not felt from within.

This image proves to be fictional because although the child understands the reflection to be entirely them, the child still remains fragmented in its movements and expressing themselves. During this stage of the child’s life, they don’t yet have the ability to vocalize their thoughts, they can’t move about as they please, they can’t eat when or what they want, they can’t control their bowl movement. Their entire existence is completely dependent on the parents and this can be extremely frustrating, hence the period of the ‘terrible two’s”. Even though the image appears and invokes a certain emotion within the child, doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘who’ the child is inside.

Another example of this in term of an adult appearance would be anorexia (as was mentioned in a previous blog) who see ‘fat’ on their body when they’re actually skin and bones. You can also see example of a false mirror image with individuals who may have been overweight as a child and lost the weight during adolescence, but may still see the chubby false image of themselves in the mirror. We live in a society today that prizes external beauty much more than internal beauty.

I recently saw this slam performance that is really suiting for contrasting the social ideas of what is pretty. I think this suiting for the false image of a reflection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

Just a reminder that a) we’ll be doing exam review tomorrow, so come prepared with any questions you have (testing yourself against the study questions is the best way to dig for questions) and b) your blog “greatest hits” are due.  For b), just find the posts and then cut/paste the URLs (http://mybestpost.com) into an email to me.

Finally, don’t forget to review my course online using Hunter’s system.  Thanks!

 For this blog, I decided to revisit Foucault’s excerpt on ‘The History of Sexuality’. Within this article he discusses a number of inferences throughout history regarding sexual discourse within societies. The first time I read this piece, I had difficulty comprehending the exact reasoning why societies in the 17th and 18th centuries radically changed their opinions regarding the discourse of sexuality activity. After reviewing it for a second time, I’ve realized not only the reasoning, but the connections between Victorian ideologies and how those ideologies changed with a growing society. 

The Victorian era was stereotyped as a time of sexual frigidity and instinctual repression. Foucault begins his discussion here. European culture in the 17th century veiled its discourse of sexuality behind a curtain of censorship or silence. This censorship imposed societal rules among “speakers and social structures” (1502).  “Areas were thus established, if not with utter silence, at least of tact and discretion: between parents and children, or teachers and pupils, or masters and domestic servants” (1502). This refinement of language created a structure of silence that was not broken until encouragement from a powerful institutional incitement. The evolution of the Catholic Church broke the silence of sex with encouragement “to speak about it with a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (1503). The church imposed that although sex should be a mute point in verbal conversation, it needed to be a vital discourse within confession. Due to the “Counter Reformation, yearly confession in Catholic countries increased and imposed meticulous rules of self-examination” (1503). During these confessions, the church attributed the confessor to “insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and soul; henceforth all this had to enter, in detail, into the process of confession and guidance” (1503). The church’s insistence on sexual discourse made a major headway in the taboos of sex in European society.

Another reason for acceptance of sexual discourse was sprung from scientific data on fertility and mortality rates. The Victorian Era was a time of unprecedented growth within Europe. The population grew from 13.9 million in 1831 to 32.5 million in 1901. That’s 18.6 million more people in a span of 70 years. Due to this exponential growth in population much research was conducted regarding “birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation” (1507). The research regarding “birthrate, age of marriage, legitimate and illegitimate births, the frequency of sexual relations, the effects of unmarried life or of the prohibitions, the impact of contraceptives” (1507) all created a conversation around a taboo subject, that in the end was the roots for a country that hoped to be rich and powerful. These conversations led to the transformation of sexual conduct of a couple into concerted economic and political behavior. For example, in China there is a one-child policy that deems parents are only able to have one child, with a number of controversial misnomers. This policy was introduced in 1979 to alleviate social, economic and environmental issues. The policy is leveled through fines to the family based upon income. In order to hold a society to these terms, the topic of sex must be deemed conversational, at least in the terms of the potential economic growth regarding population.

The third factor that integrated sexual discourse into society were secondary schools in the eighteenth century. “The architectural layout, the rules of discipline, and the whole internal organization” (1506) were constructed in regards to separating the sexuality of children. “The space for classes, the shape of tables, the planning of recreation lessons, the distribution of dormitories (with or without curtains, with or without partitions), the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep periods” (1509) all were directly decided with thoughts of sex in mind. This practice holds true still today. When I was a girl at summer camp, all of the girls were separated to change away from the boys, the bathrooms were always separate, sometimes we were even separated when we went away on sleeping trips. I never questioned the reasoning why we were being separated at that age, other than the fact that I knew I was a girl and not a boy. When I was in elementary and middle school when we studied sexual development the girls and boys were taught separately and only on the sex of the class. I didn’t learn anything about human reproduction until I was in high school. 

Foucault’s writing highlights and shows the connections between different and seemingly small inferences that eventually broke down the taboo of sexual discourse within European society. I’ve always been interested in the taboos of different societies. It seems for many, that sex is still a strong taboo. Within the United States, it is inherently frowned upon to have sex or show sexual affection in public, romantic novels (Fifty Shades of Grey for example) are often deemed pornographic, pornographic film/photography, pornographic painting are all held with a sense of uncomfortableness in the public eye. I believe that breaking down negative connotations regarding sex is a very important and difficult thing to do. 

When I moved to New York, I met a young artist named Alexander Esguerra who is doing just that. His project titled ‘Love & Paint’ explores, breaks down and redefines the taboos of sex. The project entails a couple painting each other and making love on a canvas. The end result is a Jackson Pollack-esque display of their experience that is completely visceral and infectious. When you look at the finished result of any of these paintings it is impossible to decipher if the couple was gay, straight, married, adulterous, black, white etc. At the end of the day, any person who views one of these paintings will only see the movements and the energy that was shared between those two people in that moment in time. The concept of these paintings demand that all the negative societal judgements regarding monogamy, racism, homophobia, causal sex to become eliminated. The paintings represent an equality among everyone and that sex is the great equalizer among us all. 

If anyone is interested in this guys work, he’s incredibly talented.

Check out his work:

Love and Paint

Valentine’s Day Romance Love Art Gift

Judith Butler: Gender Trouble

Why does Judith Butler call gender “trouble? She starts off by explaining that the word trouble always caries a negative connotation with it, instead of thinking of trouble as something negative, we should embrace the idea of the indeterminacy of gender. “To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble” (Butler 2540). When Butler speaks about power, I believe she is speaking about the power an individual has in the rebellion against the “prevailing law”. Trouble is hard to escape when it comes to gender because trouble seems to threaten and linger all around it in its attempts to keep one out of trouble. Trouble is a paradoxical phenomenon because it convinces us to stay away from it but if you are a subject it is inevitable. “Power seemed to be more than an exchange between subjects or a relation of constant inversion between a subject and an Other; indeed, power appeared to operate in the production of that very binary frame for thinking about gender” (Butler 2540). To be a female is to be subject to the male gaze power, therefore, to be female is to always be in trouble.

Why does Judith Butler speak about the body so much and why is it important? Speaking about the body is imperative to Judith Butler’s argument because it fits into the idea of inner and outer expression. Butler starts off by speaking about this “otherness” and the pollution of the body and how this all was constructed in society. “Any discourse that establishes the boundaries of the body serves the purpose of instating and naturalizing certain taboos regarding the appropriate limits, postures, and modes of exchange that define what it is that constitutes bodies” (Butler 2544) Bodies are seen to have boundaries, and when these boundaries are trespassed (taboos) they become demonized, are seen as pollution to the body, unnatural and uncivilized. Homosexuality is seen as crossing a boundary, which shows how bodies are permeable and impermeable in the power structure of hegemonic order. “Those sexual practices in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts that open surfaces and orifices to erotic signification or close down others effectively reinscribe the boundaries of the body along new cultural lines” (Butler 2545). I think in this piece, Butler wants to expose the power of hegemonic order and show how it has been naturalized through society, she then makes us realize that these “bodies” and “polluted actions” are not as black and white as we make them seem. Bodies and actions can cross boundaries as they are completely. Butler also speaks about abjection as the process of how we constitute “others” in our society. She goes on Young’s point about fitting into the hegemonic order, identities have been created to separate each other through exclusion and domination. “…homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an ‘expulsion’ followed by a ‘repulsion’ that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation” (Butler 2546). Butler applies this to our body and excrement and explains the division between “inner” and “outer” worlds that causes us to form this idea of an “other”. Boundaries are being passed during the process of excrement, therefore, bodies show permeability as well. This relates to gender because Butler argues that gender is a permeable line that is not fixed with the actual anatomy.

Why is drag such an imperative point in her argument? Drag captures the epitome of her argument and acts as a proof or an example of the dynamics between the anatomy, gender identity and gender performance. “As much as drag creates a unified picture of ‘woman’ (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.” (Butler 2550). Drag is the proof that just because you have a penis, does not mean you have to act a certain way, but it also proves that you will be trained a certain way according to culture.

My favorite line within the piece that Butler presents is “That disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the reproductive domain.” this line tells us that the construction of gender may operate as a part of a larger power structure of heterosexuality within our culture.

What If Katniss Didn’t Have to Choose Between Peeta and Gale?

NPR’s Linda Holmes wrote a great article about the gender dynamics in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and concluded, “…you could argue that Katniss’ conflict between Peeta and Gale is effectively a choice between a traditional Movie Girlfriend and a traditional Movie Boyfriend.” I do love the way Holmes puts this.

Minus the whole point about monogamy and polygamy, I believe that this article highlights Butler’s point about gender being performative. When Katniss is with Gale, she plays more of a nurturing role. When Katniss is with Peeta however, she plays a more masculine and protective role. Her gender role switches depending on the person she’s with, proving that sex and gender are two completely separate things and that gender is based on performance.

In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey explicitly states that she is out to annihilate the, frankly, pervy delights audience members extract from their experiences at the cinema. Despite her aggression, she claims to be doing us a solid: through her destruction of the subconsciously engrained voyeuristic “pleasure centre”, Mulvey guarantees that we will receive “the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it” (2085), which will ultimately result in learning “a new language of desire” (2085). Basically, it is sort of like she is forcefully changing our car insurance on our behalf – she is switching out a lacking plan we are currently covered by (ie: where the pleasure of observation is derived entirely from the degradation of the female form to mere source of spectacle) in exchange for a more beneficial/substantial one.

That false reality we enter each time we sit in a pitch black theatre and the film is projected onto the screen in front of us? Our delusions about the similarities between ourselves and the characters we observe in that film? Mulvey wants us to get rid of all that, as well; to destroy our suspension of disbelief and to remain wary of the fictitious nature of films and the storylines they depict. We do not fight the bad guys and win. We do not get the smoking hot babe whom we have saved from danger countless times. A film’s protagonist is not the “projection of [our] repressed desire” (2087). Quit being a ninny, Mulvey is ultimately saying.

Scopophilia is defined as the “pleasure of looking”. Through our cinematic experiences, we are given the power to “[take] other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (2086). As spectators, we easily attain this power via the stark visual contrast of the movie theatre-going experience: Again, we are in a dark auditorium. All the while, these luminescent images flash on the screen before us. The physical divide between ourselves (people present in the real world and in real-time) and the manifestations on-screen (immortalized beings in an artificial construct of a world) gives the illusion that we are looking in on a private world. What is so appealing about this is that it is not a two-way street: we can do the observing without our self-consciousness being heightened by being observed ourselves. We can be “obsessive voyeurs” (2088) and get as creepy as we like and no one is the wiser.

 However, this perverse joy is almost restricted to men. Their active leering preys on the forcedly imposed passivity of the female, who makes an appearance in film primarily to be gawked at. She plays this role for two distinct audiences: the males within the story and those in the auditorium. This degradation of the female form is promoted further by stylistic choices, like the camera’s prolonged focus on fragments of the body.

 Women can be objectified and reduced to masturbation material, sure. But men? Not on your life. Mulvey states that this is due to their inability to “bear the burden of sexual objectification” (2089). The observer in the audience cannot take it upon himself to gaze at his eroticized likeness. This leaves the male protagonist to bring out the action and further the plot.

Freud explain to us the Oedipus Complex, a subject I find very fascinating. Freud relates every child’s latent desires to the tragedy of King Oedipus, in which through the act of destiny, he slays his father and weds his mother. The story’s appeal transcends even to our time because of how us, the audience, are able to relate to Oedipus. Freud theorizes that men all have sexual impulses towards their mothers beginning in childhood, and have murderous desires towards their father. Oedipus meets a tragic end, in which he blinds himself after realizing his horrendous acts. His demise serves as a repulsive force for us to refrain from committing similar acts, which explains why most people have their desires repressed.

I believe most people with a healthy mind would find Freud’s theory absurd, given the morals and traditions we’ve followed up to today. Freud takes our desires to a completely radical level, but still, we can’t deny that Freud’s ideas are logical in some sense. Admittedly, I had a strong attachment to my mother and many instances of hatred for my father when I was a child. If we assume that it is our morals that prevent us from going in the same path as Oedipus, would the desires Freud believes us to have still be repressed if our morals are altered? I don’t suppose that question can be answered unless we look into a parallel universe.

I would like to challenge Freud’s theory by talking about some of things he fails to address, that is: homosexuality and pedophilia. The Oedipus Complex explains our latent desires for the opposite sex parent, but in the case of those who are homosexual, the theory falls apart. Likewise, how would Freud explain the desires of pedophiles? Freud’s theory falls under the premise that people are inherently heterosexual and are attracted to people of similar or older age, but as we know it, many cases stray from that norm. Given the time in which Freud came up with the theory, topics such as homosexuality and pedophilia were probably not so prevalent in society, but certainly not absent. I would love to see how Freud would respond to such topics, even if it requires a separate theory.

Freud continues by talking about our dreams, in which he says that the latent content we perceive are only a part of a not-yet-deciphered transcript. He believes that dreams are conveyed in another language, in which we must interpret its meaning through a intricate series of steps to find the underlying meaning.

After reflecting on one of my recent dreams, I don’t believe that all dreams have as much of the underlying, manifest content, that Freud thinks they might have. The dream I reflected on, and am a little too embarrassed to share, was quite straight-forward in the sense that it didn’t require the complex process of condensation, displacement and translating the means of representation. This process would be more useful for dreams I find completely random, confusing, or seemingly irrelevant to my life. I never indulge too much on those dreams, so I cannot confirm that there is, in fact, a true underlying meaning.

In a previous lecture, we talked about Lacan’s theory of how we (as people) project idealized versions of ourselves in mirrors and how we desire to become this idealized version. A thought that came across my mind were how patients with anorexia nervosa correspond with the process of the “mirror stage”. Those with anorexia nervosa project a negative image of themselves, namely, an overweight/fattened version. This leads me to thinking of how this may correlate to their initial viewing of themselves as a baby/toddler, and how that may somehow have a lasting effect later in their life. Rather than what Lacan implies, that we strive for this projection, those with anorexia nervosa strives against their mirrored projection.

The drag show does not have to be a source of aporia. Yes drag performers can act out two conflicting roles (woman trapped in man’s body vs man playing with entrenched gender roles), but it is a rash generalization to say that individual performers in drag do not know which role they are acting out.  It does not make sense to think that a drag queen does not know whether or not he is actually more comfortable as a woman or if he is performing for the sake of satire.
My confusion is whether both views of drag can be viewed as a choice between the two or if they constitute a mixture that cannot really be combined or separated.

Also this clip from Modern Family
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H07vN7DstZA&w=560&h=315]