A Smidge too Manly, A Smidge too Motherly
On Mulvey and on Hitchcock’s Vertigo
By Alexis Gervacio
Bespectacled, bold, and slightly boyish, Midge Wood does not easily fit into Mulvey’s analysis – she does not possess the “strong visual and erotic impact” characteristic of female characters (11). As such, this investigation will attempt to not only explain how Midge confounds the norm, but also why she is so different from the typical damsel-in-distress.
Falling in Love with Siri
On Laura Mulvey and Spike Jonze’s film Her
By Grace Chang
Mulvey’s article, while intended to be a response to the films of Hollywood’s Classic Age of cinema (ca. 1930-1960), remains relevant. Hollywood remains a male dominated, dominatingly male, and heteronormative industry. However, a recent film, Spike Jonze’s Her, challenges Mulvey’s idea of physical pleasure and the gaze, seeking to break this erotic coding through the removal of the physical female form.
Midge’s Point of View
On Mulvey and Hitchcock
By Ali Byers
In her argument Mulvey makes no mention of Midge, the film’s only other female character. Midge’s character complicates the idea that this is a purely symbolic film, and even attempts to subvert the codes that make up the symbolic. Both the way that Midge is captured by the camera, as well as how she is implemented in the plotline, complicate the simple dichotomies between man/woman, active/passive, and holder/object of the gaze that supports Mulvey’s argument.
Sigmund Tzu and the Dream World
On Freud’s Dora and Chuang Tzu’s Zuangzhi
By John Wragg
When examining Freud’s usage of the dream world in his diagnoses, it is fascinating to see the similarities in which he approaches dreams and Chuang Tzu utilizes dreams, as Chuang Tzu is quite famous for his passage in the Zhuangzi, the butterfly dream. Despite a couple of millennia, and drastically different cultures separating the two men, their approach and philosophy regarding dreams as a tool to connect the dream and real world, a tool to discover of oneself, and as a tool to heal is extremely surprising in their similarity.
The Souls of Black Folk and The Essentiality of Human Connection
On Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk
by Sierra Robbins
Du Bois’ classic text The Souls of Black Folk does not at first read as a cohesive argument. Rather, each chapter offers a different style, a different purpose, and this makes for a complex and at times disjointed reading experience. The unifying factor in the text is the metaphor of the “Veil” – a metaphor which itself varies according to the scope of each chapter.
Mulvey vs. Carter: The Power of the Gaze
By Vanessa Giesbrecht
Unlike Mulvey who makes sweeping general statements on how men act and react when with the opposite gender, Carter counteracts this by making her protagonists more complex with how they behave and react to different gazes. Although some of Mulvey’s concepts do fit with some of the situations presented in The Bloody Chamber, Mulvey’s concepts also prove to be oversimplified with how differently Carter’s female protagonists respond to their respective situations.
The Communist Manifesto and its earlier drafts
By Emily Dishart
The Manifesto was not written in just one sitting: Marx and Engels underwent a long process of editing in order to produce this short text. However, earlier versions allow the reader to grasp a more complete version of Marx and Engels’ ideas, although certain discrepancies are present, forcing the reader to probe the reasoning behind these variations. Engels’ “Principles of communism”, written shortly before The Communist Manifesto, may be seen, in several key aspects, as a more detailed and practical version of the later piece of work, clarifying certain aspects of communist thought ….
From Bodies Politic to the Body Politic
On Hobbes’ Leviathan
By Cora Hermary
The Hobbesian state of nature both begins and ends with human nature. While Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is widely regarded as advocating a pessimistic view of human nature, Hobbes’ pessimism is not directed towards human nature, but towards the state of nature. Nevertheless, Hobbes tempers his pessimism for the state of nature with a subtle yet equal optimism for humanity, whose status as a creation under God guides his solution to the state of nature: art.
The Decolonization Manifesto: Marx and Muslims
By Moneeza Badat
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon enhances a Marxist analysis by addressing the intersections of race, colonialism and capitalism. Fanon uses the terminology of Marx and Engels but applies it in different ways. By ‘stretching’ Marxist analysis, Fanon makes it relevant to decolonization (Fanon, 5). Though Marxism provides a competent analysis of capitalism, it does not fully address the intersections of race and colonialism.
