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Ways Of Seeing John Berger Essay

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John Berger in “Ways of Seeing”, begins the first chapter by stating, “Seeing comes before the words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” (Berger 7). An essential element in art is the being able to visualize the creation. A common term instilled within art history is ‘male gaze’ introduced by Laura Mulvey in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", where a scene is viewed through a heterosexual male perspective and the female role is highly sexualized and focused on her body parts that are considered erotic (Mulvey 10). This reveals the objectification of woman in the world of art. As Berger simplifies, men gaze upon woman while they notice themselves being watched (Berger 47). Women are continually objectified and idolized in all forms of media outlets. With hip-hop being an outlet of art, such objectification of woman soon entered the hip-hop culture. The 1980’s marked the mark of hip-hop as a business, with marketing ploys such as music videos and Top-40 charts (Blanchard). With hip-hop rising as business in the modern world, so has the rise in …show more content…

The claims made by Tricia Rose in “The Hip Hop Wars” are true to the extent that much of what is projected through hip-hop demeans and demotes them to a height lower than the black man. Rose further comments on this issue and states that black women are “used as props to boost male egos, treat women’s bodies as sexual objects…” (Rose 118). The very stereotype of black males in hip-hop is considered to be violence and misogyny (Hess 82); however, the intent of this paper is to disprove the notion that male domination is to blame for the objectification of women in the hip-hop culture but rather a subjection of these women towards such

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