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GENDER & CULTURAL STUDIES

GENDER & CULTURAL STUDIES. By Dr. H. Kalpana DEPT OF ENGLISH PONDICHERRY UNIVERSITY PUDUCHERRY 605014 hkalp.eng@pondini.edu.in hkalp@yahoo.com. PRESENTATION. Why are Cultural Studies Important? Why should one take up Research in cultural studies?

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GENDER & CULTURAL STUDIES

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  1. GENDER & CULTURAL STUDIES By Dr. H. Kalpana DEPT OF ENGLISH PONDICHERRY UNIVERSITY PUDUCHERRY 605014 hkalp.eng@pondini.edu.in hkalp@yahoo.com

  2. PRESENTATION • Why are Cultural Studies Important? • Why should one take up Research in cultural studies? • How can one do Research in cultural studies? • What is the use of studies in areas like this. hk/asc/5/9/11

  3. Possible answers • CS provided a new way to look at texts. • It offered a scope beyond literary studies • It emerged from the poststructuralist idea that language and other symbols play a major role in creating meanings. hk/asc/5/9/11

  4. Why should one take p Research in cultural studies? • It allows a scope beyond literary studies. • Literary studies was stuck with literary history, author-centric view, issues of formalism (genre reading, close analysis, rhetorical meaning) • Knowledge many times is synonymous with power. • Interdisciplinary in nature. hk/asc/5/9/11

  5. CS did not abandon traditional subjects—it only created a new path to depict how literature/history/social sciences could be incorporated in to other studies. • Culture at times also synonymous with politics and hence a struggle for CS to establish itself. hk/asc/5/9/11

  6. Emergence of CS in Social Sciences • A new world of French theories • Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan • The text, difference, discourse, the subject—explicate texts • Central arguments unsettled concepts of study. hk/asc/5/9/11

  7. The work/book as a bounded thing • The author as the unique agent • The aesthetic as a locus of beauty and value • History as the frame for a narrative within which to place literature hk/asc/5/9/11

  8. Variety of these New writers • Barthes—literary critic • Derrida—philosopher • Foucault—historian • Lacan—a psychoanalyst • New texts—Nietzche, Hegel, Freud, Kant, Marx-- studies seemed parochial. hk/asc/5/9/11

  9. Growth and Development of Feminist Studies provided an impetus to CS • Feminist criticism and Literary Theory exposed the misogynistic underpinnings of works • Debates among feminists in 1970s and 1980s opened the doors for examining culture hk/asc/5/9/11

  10. Patriarchy and Women’s experiences were focussed upon by some theorists: • Ellen Moers, Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilchrist, Kate Millet, Elaine Showalter • Critiqued by the deconstructionists such as Mary Jacobs, ShoshanaFelman, TorilMoi who adopted Derrida’s deconstruction for studies hk/asc/5/9/11

  11. Q of difference entered into another realm • Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (This Bridge Called My Back) • Bell hooks (Ain’t I a Woman) • Spivak (Third world Imperialism and study of three texts) • Chandra TalpadeMohanty • Depicted differences in class, race hk/asc/5/9/11

  12. CS now began to locate itself thro studies of race, class and gender • In Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter Judith Butler brought in issues of body theory legitimizing queer theory as well as gender issues. • Sexual Preference, political rights, identity formations, representation became important concepts in CS hk/asc/5/9/11

  13. CS moved into realm of history due to emergence of Said’sOrientalism • By offering politically inflected readings of a range of European texts –18th and 19th century anthropology, literature and travel narratives—depicted how history was itself plural. hk/asc/5/9/11

  14. Literary Studies Frederic Jameson’s Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act offered a tool to politicize literature—an alternative to Marxist ideology—for reading romance and novels as symbolic acts. hk/asc/5/9/11

  15. Jameson’s Statement: “History is What Hurts” • “History itself becomes the ultimate ground and untranscendable limit of our understanding in general and our textual interpretations in particular” • Convinced many as to revise readings in history but study in literary history did not undergo great changes. hk/asc/5/9/11

  16. Stephen Greenblatt’s Monograph: Renaissance Self-Fashioning • Founding of the journal Representations • Turned history and literary texts into political allegories • History to literature • Greenblatt had argued for a broad anthropological concept of history hk/asc/5/9/11

  17. Uses the ideas of anthropologist Clifford Geertz • Customs, usages traditions, habit clusters---a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions…for the governing of behaviour • Called for cultural poetics • Asked scholars to go to archives to find diverse non-canonical and non-academic texts hk/asc/5/9/11

  18. Expansion useful • Shakespeare’s play—old medical treatises on madness • Richardon’sPamela conduct of women • Romances—revalued women’s desires • Beat music/rap music—the social effects hk/asc/5/9/11

  19. CULTURE STUDIES AND ACADEMIC CIRCLES Cultural Studies -- the purview of the other. Academic scholars feel that serious literary studies are not concerned with objects of culture—such as urban spaces, media, technology. hk/asc/5/9/11

  20. RAYMOND WILLIAMS Raymond Williams developed the approach which he named 'cultural materialism' in a series of influential books - Culture and Society (1958), the Long Revolution (1961), Marxism and Literature (1977). hk/asc/5/9/11

  21. WILLIAMS’ IDEAS The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. hk/asc/5/9/11

  22. WILLIAMS’ IDEAS • Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. • A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to comprehend; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. hk/asc/5/9/11

  23. WILLIAMS’ IDEA Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. hk/asc/5/9/11

  24. WILLIAMS’ IDEAS • Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. • The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. hk/asc/5/9/11

  25. ACADEMIC QUERIES Radicalism of cultural studies by itself is questionable. In developing countries when larger real life issues are taking precedence then such studies seem superfluous. hk/asc/5/9/11

  26. SIGNIFICANCE Cultural studies –Innovative and Creative; Radical Culture is a way to comprehend the rational, not an abstract rationality divorced from the world of living people. hk/asc/5/9/11

  27. DEFINITION • Abstractness • Contemporary and the problematics • Issue of an homogenous study hk/asc/5/9/11

  28. STUART HALL “Cultural Studies: two paradigms" Def 1: Culture is "the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences" (59). This definition allows us to talk about democratization of culture. hk/asc/5/9/11

  29. Hall, Stuart: "Cultural Studies: two paradigms" in Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 57-72. • Def 2: Coming from an anthropological perspective, culture "refers to social practices" and "the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life" (60). In other words, threaded through all social practices is culture which is the "sum of their inter-relationships" (60). hk/asc/5/9/11

  30. FUNCTION Subjectivity or the self No bias in study. Innovative and Creative process of thinking Multi-disciplinary Inter-cultural Comparative hk/asc/5/9/11

  31. CULTURE CAN • enable and/or obstruct • oppress and/or liberate • empower and/or disempower hk/asc/5/9/11

  32. GENDER • Our families, our communities and dynamics within our cultures determine what men and women do. • Men and women are expected to have certain characteristics, aptitudes and behaviors. • We are born into environments in which these gender roles exist. We learn them. hk/asc/5/9/11

  33. GENDER & CULTURE • Culture is dynamic. Cultures survive by responding to changing realities. • Gender roles are also dynamic. They can and do change. • Evolving gender roles are integral to the continuing evolution that each culture undergoes to survive. hk/asc/5/9/11

  34. GENDER CHANGES • Gender roles shape daily life. So, gender change can affect a lot of people. • Gender change weaves through, and has impact on, the power dynamics within class, caste, race, religion etc. • The comfort zone created by an individual’s or a group’s identity may be threatened. • Cultureshave power structures that favour a ‘status quo’ built on gender bias. hk/asc/5/9/11

  35. GENDER CATALYSTS • Some individuals have the vision, strength and courage to stop conforming: to do something outside the stereotyped roles of men or women in their local environment. • They mobilize allies in their own environments. • Some are catalysts for major movements – in the tradition of Gandhi. hk/asc/5/9/11

  36. Kinds of CS The studies themselves could be various and also be on different aspects such as studies of places, nations, ethnicity, sexuality, consumer markets and productions, leisure or activities of pleasure, popular arts, media. hk/asc/5/9/11

  37. STUDIES--I • Visualizing Indian Women: 1875-1947 (Hardcover - 2006/01/06)by MalavikaKarlekar collection of 300 archival photographs accompanied by explanatory captions depicts women's lives during the period 1875-1947. hk/asc/5/9/11

  38. IMAGES • Visualizing the Family • The Learning Experience • Worlds Beyond • The Freedom Struggle • Towards the Midnight Hour hk/asc/5/9/11

  39. STUDIES--II Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (Paperback - Jul 2002)by RomilaThapar hk/asc/5/9/11

  40. attempts to explore some of the links between culture, history and gender and between literature and history by reading variant versions of the narrative of Sakuntala. • These include the stories in the Mahabharata, the play by Kalidasa, and the eighteenth-century katha in Braj.  hk/asc/5/9/11

  41. STUDIES III Lata Mani • Contentious Traditions • The Debate on Sati in Colonial India hk/asc/5/9/11

  42. Although prohibition of widow burning in 1829 was heralded as a key step forward for women's emancipation in modern India, LM argues that the women who were burned were marginal to the debate. • The controversy was over definitions of Hindu tradition, the place of ritual in religious worship, the civilizing missions of colonialism and evangelism, and the proper role of the colonial state hk/asc/5/9/11

  43. PC STUDIES Moreover works of writers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Uma Narayanan and Chandra Talpade Mohanty have been readings to accommodate the brown women within a majority culture. hk/asc/5/9/11

  44. FILMS AND CULTURE An illustration of this kind of exercise is reading the venture of a woman director, such as Prema Karanth in constructing the woman’s question in Phaniyamma and Bandh Jharoke. (Breaking the Silence: Gender, Caste and Transgression in Phaniyamma and Bandh Jharoke) hk/asc/5/9/11

  45. GENDER AND CULTURE Both novels on which the films are based, however, read as feminist texts, exploring the threads of gender oppression, in the Malnad region of rural Karnataka in Phaniyamma and in the urban context of Mumbai in Bandh Jharoke. hk/asc/5/9/11

  46. Nation, Nationhood, Nationality Nation as the basis of cultural analysis is definitely important because people of a nation are in symbolic groups that depict loyalty to a cultural ideal. The issue of who we are and what we are is explained by the cultural heritage that we carry. hk/asc/5/9/11

  47. Priya Jaikumar’s “Cinema at the end of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India” Indian historicals were structured as romances to tell stories of a colony’s victimization and unrealized power by staking physical and moral claims on the homeland hk/asc/5/9/11

  48. QUOTE CONTD • However, imperial fiction’s drama of retreat (rather than reclamation) is founded on the physical evacuation of the female, who remains identified with an absent domestic space, retained in the narrative primarily through a spectral feminization of the colonial male. hk/asc/5/9/11

  49. GENDER, POPULAR MAGAZINES & CS Research Project: Gender Message in Popular Magazines: A Study of Select Women’s and Children’s Magazines The study was done using Woman’s Era and Vanitha for a study of women and Champak and BalaBhumi in children’s writing. hk/asc/5/9/11

  50. CONCLUSION OF RESEARCH The study revealed that in the women’s magazines fiction was not of high literary value and the story showed no challenges or special issues. Moreover the woman needs an outsider, preferably a male to help. The articles/non-fiction was generally interviews of celebrities, independent life stories, marriage, sex related issues, health, Fashion etc. The glorification of home as perfect domain. hk/asc/5/9/11

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