Sexual difference

When reading through the sexual difference handout, I was thinking about whether the idea of gender and gender roles is really a big deal. I don't mind whether a man paints his nails, or if a woman cuts her hair short, but is the problem not with individuals but with the perpetuating stereotypes that are innate within society.

The amount of movies in which men dress up like women can be seen as worrying. The idea that a man who displays any sort of femininity is seen as hilarious, therefore showing that at the foundations of society, femininity is seen as lesser than masculinity. The films itself can be seen as phallocentric. They are concerned with men becoming a woman, and how that affects them. In the film Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman plays a man who pretends to be a woman. in an interview, he says that when he was made into a woman, he asked if he could be more beautiful, and when they said that they couldn't, he went home and cried. He realised how women have to deal with society's idea of beauty, and wondered how many women he didn't talk to because he had been 'brainwashed'. This interpretation of how movies containing a cross dressing man are intrinsically harmful can be seen as too simplistic, and does not add anything to the discussion. I think the films themselves provoke bigger questions such as: Is the idea of gender being subverted in these movies? Are they disrupting essentialism at its core? If it is, is that a good thing? Can the movies then be an example of deconstructive feminism?

The equivocality of 'The Bloody Chamber' means that it can be read as an example of essentialism, or an example of deconstruction. 'The Erl-King' is a perfect example of how identity is, in its very nature, unclear and confusing. The constant changing of the narrative point of view confused me at first as I never knew whether the POV had changed, or the narrative perspective had changed, but now I think that Carter is exploring the idea that within ourselves, we can be numerous people. The narrator is looking at herself in three different ways, and these different perspectives reveal different facets of her personality. This text then can be read as a example of deconstructive feminism.

After reading 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon', I think the idea of identity is questioned again. Mr Lyon takes the physical body of a lion, but inside he is a combination of lion and man and in my opinion the story is an inner battle of what dominates him. He clearly loves Beauty, but every night he crops to the ground and licks her fingers and this example of how he is trapped both in body and mind. Beauty says that when she looked at him before, she was only looking at himself. In the class this was used as an example of how she was obsessed with herself. I disagree, I think that line is an example of how when we look at other people, we see ourselves and we can never assert our own identity because we are different things to different people.

However, my main criticism of Angela Carter is how she reduces feminism down the essentialist concept that because men are powerful, and women are therefore weak. Instead of showing that women can draw strength from themselves, the narrators in the stories draw strength from the abuses of men. It can then be said that the women in the stories have very little power at all, which is not the narrative she wants to portray. The male protagonists that she creates may be exaggerated versions of men, but in many of her stories the conflict boils down to man versus woman.

The whole obsession with identity within 'The Bloody Chamber' places itself firmly within the Gothic genre. The Gothic is obsessed with duality and ambiguity, therefore the subversion of identity and gender could be said to follow the generic conventions.