Blog#4 my response to Dobson's reading

Normal 0 0 2 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE

A reading that I would like to discuss is "The 'grotesque body' in young women's self presentation on MySpace" by Dobson. Firstly I will summarize her idea and talk about my feeling and opinion about the article. 

Referring to Mulvey’s idea, Dobson says that female bodies in mass media are “positioned as ‘to-be-looked-at’” and “viewed from a ‘masculinised subject position/ gaze’” (11). Images of female bodies are constructed around fetishistic and voyeuristic “scopophilia”: fetishistic scopophilia depends on “idealizing, fetishising and thus distancing the body of the women, in a narrative of pure visual spectacles” and voyeuristic scopophilia depends on “demystif[ing] the body of the woman by voyeuristically following and watching her…leading to discovery, humiliation and punishment of the female by the male” (11,12). As Dobson shows, the examples of fetishistic scopophilia can be found in high-gloss fashion magazines such as Vogue . The images of female celebrities in the high-gloss magazines fit in “classical” or “traditional” femininity; they symbolize idealized female images, “of mystery, glamour and unavoidable distance from the viewer” (11,13). On the other hand, Dobson uses representations of female celebrities in gossip magazines to exemplify voyeuristic scopophilia. The images of the celebrities in gossip magazines reveal their private, real, “unfeminine” self, which are often seen as “grotesque” involving “flesh, bellies…mobility and sometimes moments of pleasure or exchange with other bodies”(14). The celebrities are demystified, degraded, and humiliated by their “’grotesque’ openness and depiction” of themselves (11). 

What Dobson takes note of in the article is that the woman’s “unfeminine”, “grotesque” representations of self, which are accompanied with degradation and humiliation of her image, is spontaneously produced by the young on MySpace. She thinks that the grotesque self-representation of the youth, such as the images that show them making “’silly’ or caricatured faces” or showing their tongues and making a masculine pose, might be considered to subvert “both gender stereotypes and the type of sadistic pleasure Mulvey associates with voyeuristic narratives and modes of viewing” (7).

 

While I was reading this article, I could not stop relating this article to the Japanese term, “hengao”, which means “an ugly face”. This term started to come into vogue when photo sticker booths got popularity among female teens in Japan. It is still a popular activity for Japanese school girls to drop in at photo sticker booths after school and take a photo sticker together with friends. At school the girls exchange their stickers with those of other friends and collect the stickers in their own notebooks. So in their notebook, they see photos stickers of their friends and their friends’ friends (I feel it is similar to Facebook in the way that you can see your friends’ photos and also some of your friends' friends pictures). The term, “hengao”, was firstly used to refer to an ugly, silly face purposely made by Japanese girls when they take a photo sticker, and now it is used to refer to a silly face in any types of media including photos and videos. I also used to like to collect silly-face photo stickers of the people at my network (including my friends and friends of my friends). .

On SNSs I use, I find some of my Japanese friends using sticker photos with their “hengao” as their profile pictures and also many other female friends having profile pictures that show their “grotesque” self-representations, which are far from what we usually associate femininity with. I think those unfeminine self-representations on SNS have a potential to suggest a new female image to the traditional femininity or can at least disrupt it as Debson says: however, I don’t know if they will result in subverting gender stereotype applied to women. It seems to me that a lot of women are able to produce “grotesque” representations of themselves publicly only when they are on the media of SNS. Those who present their “’laddish’ or ‘blokeish’ behaviors ” in their SNS pictures do so because they unconsciously think that their audiences are their friends or friends’ friends - the people in their networks – not the entire public (even though their pictures are available to an unspecified large number of people on the SNS). Their grotesque bodies shown in their profile pictures seem to be directed to the people they know in a similar way that Japanese high school girls do not take “hengao” sticker photos to distribute them to everyone. It is true that some of female SNS users might create  unfeminine self-representations for feministic purposees (to protest against the stereotypical femininity). But it might be hard to say a number of “grotesque"self-representations made by various female SNS users can subvert traditional feminity because those female users might try to conform to the socially-expected femininity if they were on other media platforms that make them more aware of the public gaze.

Sachi