just to keep this blog abreast with my work.
here are some excerpts from my article
for all of those like me who are way to lazy to read the details my original abstract reads thus: blah blah blah academic jargon bullshit bullshit feminist film theory blah blah fuck laura mulvey yadda yadda yadda. yeah... that got changed)
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
The structure and tenants of SuicideGirls calls in to question many of the ideas put forth by Laura Mulvey in her in infamous article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema regarding the male gaze. The major factors that distinguish SuicideGirls as something far and apart from mainstream media consumption are the distinct distortion techniques employed when conveying the concept of beauty, the ideas concerting self projection and identification in regards to the models themselves, the use of the company as a social setting, and the amount to which the site is driven, managed, and controlled by women.
. While stylistically the SuicideGirls pay tribute pin-up erotica of the 1950s, they have completely changed the power structure associated with the industry. The models are no longer simply the objects or subjects of the images spreading throughout the world. They are now the originators of the art. ...
Much longer quote
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
The next area of change the Suicide Girls are intimately involved with is developing the industry of photography and erotic media, and in a larger sense, the industry of visual culture, something central for Mulvey of which she says, There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order. (Mulvey, 3). If the concept of beauty is a subconscious social convention built upon the language of visual culture, then, as Mulvey suggests, the majority of Western history has created a language dominated by a patriarchal system in great part, due to the fact that at the turn of the century when the medium of film was developing and proliferating a set of universal ideas the industry responsible was undoubtedly dominated by males. Therefore, the lens through which the world was to see itself was a masculine one. What this created for Mulvey is the the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions of ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking (Mulvey, 4). In this fashion, SuicideGirls breaks new ground in the world of visually based media. It overturns one of primary points of argument of the male gaze in that the photo sets are photographed by women, many of them models themselves, and conceptualized and personalized by the very object of the gaze.
...What this demonstrates is that for many members of the SG community the site offers both a feeling and a reality of empowerment. By taking control of the production, the women of SuicideGirls eliminating this particular factor of a typically patriarchal system.
BLEH!!! GRAHH!!
