When one hears the terms “violence” and “horror,” one typically imagines horrible crimes and serial killers; rarely would one think of everyday suburban life. However, this is the exact landscape of violence depicted in Charles Burns’ Black Hole. In Black Hole Burns draws attention to the implicit assumptions about “normal” and “other” made in everyday life by exposing the objectification of women and through the male gaze. The male gaze is a phrase used in film and gender studies to describe the lens through which audiences view popular culture from a heterosexual male perspective. According to Laura Mulvey, the film theorist who coined the term, the male gaze is so ubiquitous that it often goes unrecognized and is considered the norm. …show more content…
However, when Eliza recounts the story of her sexual assault later, it becomes clear that this graffiti is more than a joke; it is a form of symbolic violence against her. In fact, Eliza later tells Keith that she was sexually assaulted by her roommates the night that these notes were written on her door, and the men used the same markers to write on her art and her body. When Eliza’s roommates write on her drawings of the mutation and her body, they visually equate her with the disease, and the notes on the door mock her for her attempts at gaining authority over her mutation. Further, by drawing graffiti on Eliza’s body her roommates symbolically connect her to the door and the art, reducing Eliza to an object and refusing to recognize her humanity. This graffiti not only represents the symbolic violence of the male gaze or the physical violence of assault, but also a narrative violence that associates Eliza with objects. These notes do not recognize Eliza’s autonomy, but reduce her to a physical mutation and objectify her through her infection. By using this graffiti to equate Eliza with her illness, Burns draws attention to the objectification of women through the male gaze and how this symbolic violence can be used by men to justify physical violence as well.
The layout of the panel depicting Eliza’s door also supports this reading of the graffiti as a form of symbolic violence against
This paper will introduce you to the incredible topic which is black holes. A black hole is a region of space time exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing can escape from inside it. (NASA) No human has ever entered a black hole and there is still a large mystery about them; we have very little idea of where the matter that enters them goes. A black hole cannot be looked into either, as it sucks all the light into the middle of it. Space programs use special satellites with certain features that allow them to see these black holes. A black hole can be big or small, sometimes forming when a star is dying. Some scientists speculate that there can be black holes just 1 centimeter large. There are multiple types of
A simple star with low fuel turns into a strong, powerful black hole in space with 4 times more mass than the sun.
Thirdly, the quarterly essay opened audience to verified truth. By applying evidences from around the world, from different situations, Goldsworthy made audience relies what women across the world have been going through along with their suffering. Goldsworthy likewise included conditions from careers that audiences don’t even focus on. For instance, Goldsworthy used many situation, but she revealed a female actress’s perspective for shooting a popular pornography. “88.2 percent contained physical aggression, principally spanking, gagging, and slapping, while 48.7 per cent of scenes contained verbal aggression, primarily name-calling. Perpetrators of aggression were usually male, whereas targets of aggression were overwhelmingly female…” (Goldsworthy, (2013))(4). The sentences
The narrator attempts to release the alleged woman from the wallpaper, can be understood as the narrator’s attempt to release herself and express her imagination. We see that the narrator is an imaginative, highly expressive woman. She remembers her peculiar imagination as a child. Yet as part of her cure, her husband forbids her to exercise her imagination in any way. Both her reason and her emotions boil, and she turns her imagination onto the seemingly neutral object—the wallpaper—in an attempt to ignore her growing frustration. Her negative feelings color her description of her surroundings, making them seem uncanny and sinister, and she eventually becomes fixated on the
Bathroom graffiti is used in this novel as a way for students to anonymously communicate their ideas and thoughts. This allows their thoughts and opinions to be passed on and shared with others who read it. It acts as a place where all students can freely express their thoughts without being judged. Specifically, for Melinda, the role of bathroom graffiti in the novel is for her to anonymously talk about her trauma. Once she sees the other writings on the wall (Andersen 174), she is encouraged to write about her own incident. Although it is indirect, it is the first step in overcoming it. She writes, “Guys to Stay Away From. The first entry is the Beast himself: Andy Evans.” (Andersen 175) Later, once Melinda sees,
“Tough Guise 2: Violence, Manhood & American Culture” is a bold documentary highlighting the role of masculinity as it implicates American culture. In the opening scene you are befuddled by historical and Hollywood images of violence, high tempo music, and male-driven aggression. As the narrator, Jackson Katz, details in his openings statement: whether you are recoiling from violence or celebrating it, you are doing it from the viewpoint of male-driven masculinity.
American commercial cinema currently fuels many aspects of society. In the twenty-first century it has become available, active force in the perception of gender relations in the United States. In the earlier part of this century filmmakers, as well as the public, did not necessarily view the female“media image” as an infrastructure of sex inequality. Today, contemporary audiences and critics have become preoccupied with the role the cinema plays in shaping social values, institutions, and attitudes. American cinema has become narrowly focused on images of violent women, female sexuality, the portrayal of the “weaker sex” and subversively portraying women
Many philosophers have said that the ‘Eyes are the windows to the soul.’ The eyes can show a person’s true personality. Not their clothes, facial expressions, or how they hold themselves, but looking into another’s eyes will show one’s soul. But what if their personality was not found in their eyes, but on their body in the form of a mutation? As found in Black Hole, the town’s teens have contracted an STD they call “the bug.” Each teen that acquires it grows an external mutation. This can especially be seen with some of the main characters: Keith, Rob, and Chris. Keith grows appendages that look like tadpoles on his chest. Rob has another mouth on his neck. Chris sheds her skin. Each of these mutations indicate what this person is actually like. The external mutations of Keith, Rob, and Chris symbolize the characters’ inner selves.
Recently, an incredible amount of attention has been drawn to female survivors of intimate abuse. It appears though little attention has been paid to why so many women have been assaulted. With this in mind, I choose to take a closer look at how gendered violence functions in literature and in film. Furthermore, I wish to discuss how insecurity instigates aggression from male lead characters in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata” as a lens for understanding the figurative sexual trauma that female lead characters experience in these works. In an attempt to better understand the relationship between men’s physical pleasure and women’s physical pain, I asked a main research question: How does aggression function
A critical gendered lens is addressing the binary structures that people are placed in when they are portrayed in the media. Why is the man the rational voice of reason yet hyper aggressive and the woman is deemed emotional or crazy in every other sense. Women are seen as nothing, but a sexual object, whose sexuality is characterized as far as genuinely obliged thoughts of attractiveness (Markham, 2005). Western accepted cultural naturally unequivocally defined categories of gender with distinctive psychological and behavioral properties prediction from reproductive functions. Division between men and women, men’s work and women’s work, how men and women ought to act is a division perceived by biology (West aand Zimmerman,1987). Structural
Mulvey approaches the concept of psychoanalysis as the idea of a political weapon, which is then used in the way to expose patriarchal unconsciousness in both films and how certain structures in society are formed. A woman can not be the maker of meaning, but can only be the bearer of viewership within this structure, she is the object that is to be viewed in an erotic form. To be the object of pleasure for the male gaze, men take this satisfaction from watching to fulfill their own innate sexual desires (Mulvey, 1975). Her existence is based solely on how the patriarchal society views her, in which she has no choice but to be gazed at. Moreover a woman cannot be a true spectator because of the male dominant culture she is surrounded in.
Directed by Marc Forster, the 2001 Academy Award winning film, Monster’s Ball, has been extensively criticized by American Studies scholars. They critique the aspects of the social construction of masculinity, race, and the way in which women are constructed as needing men in their lives. Essentially, the film’s narrative uses hypermasculinity in a way that supports the sexulization of women.
A perfect example of the male gaze in the documentary was the very alarming clip of the old news anchor who was obsessed with rolling footage of Paris Hilton, despite his female co-anchors desire to actually report news. As discussed in the film, the hypersexualization of women and the continual emphasis on a woman’s appearance seems to be reducing women to simply being objects. The media continues to reinforce and promote patriarchal ideologies, as opposed to continually promoting ideologies that represent women as strong, capable contributors to
One of the most interesting things that can happen in space is a black hole. A black hole can almost be described as a vacuum. It is a spot in space where gravity is constantly pulling materials into it. The gravity is so strong that light is not even able to escape from the black hole. The reason why the gravity of a black hole is so strong is because all of its matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This happens when a star starts to die. People cannot see black holes because light cannot escape. Black holes are invisible in space. Astronomers have developed space telescopes with special tools that can help locate black holes in space. These tools are able to see how stars that are very close to black holes react differently than stars
If men and women do not think critically about the ideas, that are constantly on display by the media, these negative ideas of gender roles with other sexist ideas while become accepted and practiced like they are today. In, bell hook’s film Cultural Criticism Transformation, hook makes it clear there is a direct link between representation and how we live our lives. One representation clearly displayed in media is the masculinity of violence. This idea that men are violent is clearly operant in young adult “twelve- to twenty-year-olds made up about 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2005, they were responsible for some 28 percent of the single-offender and 41 percent of multiple-offender violent crimes”(Prinstance). Media has constantly displayed men as violent and when men repeatedly watch these same images they feel the need that they must live up to these ideas to be a