In Nakamura's article, she discusses the use of AIM buddy icons by adolescents, especially girls, to build their identities. Thinking about this in relation to the Berger article, to what extent can a buddy icon or gaming avatar define a woman's (in this case, girl's) "attitude to herself" or say "what can and cannot be done to her"? (280) What about for adults, what kinds of "personal digital signatures of identity" do we use to establish our identity? Furthermore, what positive or negative roles can internet communication play in the relationship of male spectator to female object?

A Spectator Sport

"Men act and woman appear," writes Berger, who then goes on to say "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at" (281). The idea that men are the spectator and women are the mechanisms of male flattery, is at once simplistic, but while I hesitate to agree with that sort of generalization the empirical data seems worthwhile. What's more interesting in Berger's assessment is that while it was men who relegated women to being the "image designed to flatter him" women perpetuate that constructed reality (281). How do women's relation to themselves effect both other women as well as the male spectator?

And moreover, drawing from hooks, women, white feminist theorists in fact, often ignore the gaze of certain women completely (a passive perpetuation, perhaps). If, as Berger suggests, women turn themselves into objects, and "objects of vision," how do women, being of different races, ethnicities, histories, reconcile the different visions they have rendered? Ultimately, are certain women in fact the stronger arbiters of the avoidance of certain womens' gazes and objectified realities? What does it mean, and how can it be applied more broadly, that "black women were able to critically assess the cinema's construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator" (313)?

In "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey argues that "the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold, she first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic" (833).  This idea--and the obvious connection to pyschoanalysis--brought me back to Freud and to Beauvoir.  According to this argument, it is not that woman exists as a lone subject, rather like Beauvoir's point, she is seen in relation to man.  "Her real absence of a penis" even sparks the "patriarchal unconscious."  I can't help but feel to argue this is to uphold Freud's argument that a woman craves a phallus: penis envy.  Is this what Mulvey is suggesting?  If this is her suggestion, doesn't it undermine woman as existing beyond the "other?"  And is Mulvey suggesting that it's woman's fault for "forming the patriarchal unconscious" because she lacks a penis?

I don't know.  I feel like a lot is being dumped on woman.  That's all.

In Berger's article he mentions (pg 280) "woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself....From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually." This idea of a woman having within her two selves: a surveyor and surveyed is a social and cultural construct. Can women learn to act differently without the need to continually imagine what others view them as? Or As Wylie mentions Wilson's view, is it "now so entrenched in the fabric of our society" that it couldn't change easily. There is a distinction between subject, surveyor, powerful and the other, surveyed, powerless. Is this a clear cut line and does it need to be drawn? Where are women in this distinction: if women are surveyors and surveyed, and considered the other because in some views we allow it?

Views of Women

John Berger discusses the manner in which the average woman "turns herself into an object- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight" ("Excerpts"; bottom left of last page). He writes that by watching themselves being "looked at" by men, women do themselves a disservice in decreasing their self-worth as well as their value in the eyes of men. I wonder, though, how much of this problem is due purely to the faults in the way women view themselves, and how much is a result of the way men look at and treat women. How much of this is actually in women's control to change? Are women really the ones who are primarily responsible for this problem? I wonder why the emphasis is on what women do wrong in this system instead of placing the "blame" on the men of whom Berger speaks.

the intersubjective gaze

I am interested in the intersubjectivity of two eyes locking- of two people looking at eachother, seeing and being conscious of the other looking back. bell hooks touches on this briefly, on the black woman looking away from the cinema in defiance. "It is difficult to talk when you feel no one is listening." (315)
WHat does it mean to look away when no one is looking back? How can you break a gaze that the other is not meeting? What intersubjectivity can be broken if their is no held gaze? Is the moment of resistance enough if only the black woman is aware of it?

The readings this week looked at different ways of seeing, and in particular how ways of seeing influence identity formation and reception. In Ramadan is Almost Here! the Visual Culture of AIM Buddies, Race, Gender, and Nation on the Internet, Lisa Nakamura writes, "AIM buddy avatars do not stand alone to signify a disembodied self; instead they represent choices made by the user who wishes to build an online identity that is warranted by a preexisting offline relationship." Nakamura brings up the notion of identity as something that we can control based on visual signals we give off. At the same time, however, she suggests that identity is also dependent on how others interpret those signals. Given these two ideas, which one defines identity? Is our identity the product of others' perceptions of the signals we give off? Or is identity something only we can define for ourselves and attempt to convey to others through these signals?