Troy University Pedro Paramo and Oppression of Women Essay & Annotated Bibliography Pedro Paramo Essay: Take the Pedro Paramo article as the subject, choo

Troy University Pedro Paramo and Oppression of Women Essay & Annotated Bibliography Pedro Paramo Essay:

Take the Pedro Paramo article as the subject, choose a proposition to write an essay, about 5-6 pages. Use at least three second sources, and write the second source as Annotated Bibliography.

MLA format top to bottom:

Double space only

12 TNR Font only

paragraphs indented

every page numbered

one inch margins all the way around, or on all four sides

an attached Works Cited page

minimum three sources, but more acceptable

every source listed on the works cited (minimum 3) are quoted a minimum of one time each in the paper

Annotated Bibliography:

An annotated bibliography is basically the same as any works cited or references page but, and there is one big difference: after each reference, there are a few brief sentences summarizing the contents of the reference listed above it in the bibliography. The bibliography is still a list of sources in alphabetical order, but the difference is the summary of the article, book, or any other source appears immediately below the MLA reference–and this is called the annotation, hence an “annotated” bibliography. If you have any questions, Google annotated bibliography examples and look at one or more. To save time and be working on your documented essay at the same time, there is some logic to using the research items for Pedro Paramo, Magical Realism, and Juan Rulfo for this assignment. You will be working on your documented essay as you do so, as well as meeting the requirements for this week’s assignment. As always, if you have even the smallest question, please email the instructor. There is an example of an annotated bibliography posted in the Module 7 materials. The documented essay topic is Pedro Paramo, and the assignment section will tell you more about where you are going with this topic. Journal Title: What a Man’s Gatta Do: The
Masculine Myth in Popular Culture
Call #: HQ1090 .E28 1990
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INTRODUCTION
So God created man in hi, 0″‘” image,
in the image of God created he him;
male and female created he them.
Gtnesis I
It is time to try to speak about masculinity, about what it is and
how it works. This collection of essays looks at the images of
masculinity put forward by the media today and analyses the myth
of masculinity expressed through them.
Despite all that has been written over the past twenty years
on femininity and feminism, masculinity has stayed pretty well
concealed. This has always been its ruse in order to hold on to its
power.
Masculinity tries to stay invisible by passing itself off as normal
and universal. Words such as ‘man’ and ‘mankind’, used to signify
the human species, treat masculinity as if it covered everyone.
The God of Genesis is supposed to be all-powerful and present
everywhere. He first makes ‘man’ in his own masculine image
before going on to create male and female. If masculinity can
present itself as normal it automatically makes the feminine seem
deviant and different.
In trying to define masculinity this book has a political aim. If
masculinity can be shown to have its own particular identity and
structure then it can’t any longer claim to be universal.
An ancient myth of masculinity, going back to the Greek gods of
the sun, equates maleness with light. In Genais there are certainly
men and women but only because he created them. Masculinity
has always tried to be present everywhere as the source of
2
Introduction
everything, and this is what makes it hard to write about. Masculinity has to be unmasked, separated from the role it wants to play
by pretending to be the human, the normal, the social.
Two things now make it possible to define masculinity in a
critical way, just as they make it politically necessary as well. The
first is the revival of the women’s movement since the 1960s. By
the very fact of asserting the rights of women and the claims of
femininity the women’s movement has put masculinity in question
and suggested it has its own particular identity (competitive,
aggressive, violent, etc.). In the same period gay politics has openly
challenged the idea of masculinity that is promoted on all sides as
normal and universal.
Feminist and gay accounts have begun to make masculinity
visible. But, written from a position outside and against masculinity,
they too often treat masculinity as a source of oppression. Ironically,
this is just how masculinity has always wanted to be treated – as
the origin for everything, the light we all need to see by, the air we
all have to breathe. The task of analysing masculinity and explaining
how it works has been overlooked.
Popular Culture
If masculinity is not in fact universal, where is it? The Masculine
Myth takes the version which saturates popular culture today, both
British and American, in films, advertising, newspaper stories,
popular songs, children’s comics. This is the dominant myth of
masculinity, the one inherited from the patriarchal tradition. Here
it is examined in twenty-two sections. Some are long, some short,
but all look at an example of how popular culture portrays men
and tries to appeal to them.
Clearly these are masculine fantasies, fantasies of masculinity.
When I enjoy a Robert Redford film I imagine I’m Robert Redford
but I know I’m not really. Men in fact live the dominant myth of
masculinity unevenly, often resisting it. But as a social force popular
culture cannot be escaped. And it provides a solid base of evidence
from which to discuss masculinity.
Gender can be defined in three ways: as the body; as our social
roles of male and female; as the way we internalize and live out
Introduction
3
these roles. To define masculinity in terms of the physical apparatus, the male genitals, doesn’t get you very far. Sociologists
have undertaken important work on the second way of defining
masculinity, that is, in terms of male gender roles. But their writing
about male behaviour and male attitudes tends to be too descriptive.
It relics a great deal on interviews and what men are consciously
prepared to admit about themselves. Sociological work docs not
look at masculinity from the inside, at the way social roles arc recreated and lived imaginativelyby individuals.
When I was born I did not know whether I was going to be
Chinese, English, or Navajo Indian, but still nature had equipped
me, like everyone else, with the biological potential to live and
reproduce in any of those societies. But biology is not enough.
Every society assigns new arrivals particular roles, including gender
roles, which they have to learn. The little animal born into a
human society becomes a socialized individual in a remarkably
short time. Babies born in England go ofTto school five years later
to spend most of the day away from their parents. They can do
that because they have internalized and come to live for themselves
the roles of the parent society. This process of internalizing is both
conscious and unconscious. To understand it fully we need to be
able to analyse the unconscious.
Psychoanalysis and Masculinity
This book uses a psychoanalytic definition of masculinity, especially
that developed by Freud and later by the French analyst Jacques
Lacan. In 1974 Juliet Mitchell published Psychoanalysis and Feminism, an extraordinarily original book which did more than anything
else to revive psychoanalysis as a way of understanding gender. It
is certainly true, as Mitchell says, that ‘psychoanalysis is not a
recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one’.
Unfortunately it is also true that psychoanalysis is still in part
contaminated by the patriarchal assumptions it sets out to analyse.
Too often it regards as general something that is only or mainly
masculine. Even so, at present there is no clear alternative to
psychoanalysis for explaining the internal structures of the self the fantasies, wishes and drives through which we live out the
social roles of male and female. Psychoanalysis may well be
4
Introduaion
inadequate in its account of the feminine, but may still be accurate
about masculinity.
A century ago Darwin discovered that the evolution of all species
was determined by two needs. A species must be able to make a
living by looking after itself and it must be able to reproduce itself.
On this basis Freud describes the human psyche as shaped for the
most part by two fonns of drive. Corresponding to the instinct for
self-preservation there is self-love or narcissism. Corresponding to
the need to reproduce there is sexual drive. But Darwin’s instincts
must not be confused with Freud’s drives. While instinct (Instinkt
in German) is simply biological, a matter of genetic inheritance,
drive (Tneb) is instinct that has been transformed into symbolic form.
The difference is crucial but often misunderstood (and it doesn’t
help that the standard English translation of Freud uses ‘instinct’
for both terms).
The distinction means, for example, that when psychoanalysis
speaks about ‘the mother’, it is not referring to an actual parent
who nurtures you but to the mother as an idea or object that you
love. This is the symbolic mother that the infant loves even if its
real mother has died and her function has been taken over by an
aunt or its father. Even more to the point, for psychoanalysis the
penis is not the penis, a fragile and important organ of the body,
like the heart or the liver. The penis is a symbolic and cultural
object, the phallus. As a cultural object the phallus may attract
immense force and charisma while the humble penis carries on as
best it can with its usual bodily functions (it is a neatly dualpurpose organ).
There is no shortage of objections to psychoanalysis, and one of
the main ones is that it ignores history. Psychoanalysis tends to
regard human beings as though they are the same everywhere and
alwayswere. This is undoubtedly a valid criticism, and one which
psychoanalysis should have come to terms with long ago. For it
follows from the distinction between instinct and drive, between
the body itself and its symbolic representation, that drive is in part
culturally and historically determined.
Patriarchy is almost certainly as old as farming, the advent of
which signified the replacement of collective ownership by private
property. But this book does not examine the myth of masculinity
Introduaion
5
anything like as far back as that. Nor does it look outside European
culture. The myth certainly goes back to the ancient world of
Greece and Rome; however, its present form is stamped indelibly
by the Renaissance and the rise of capitalism. No attempt to
analyse masculinity, even one relying on psychoanalysis, can ignore
the way masculinity is defined by history.
One example would be the way gender is given a new definition
by capitalism and the bourgeois culture that goes with it. From the
Renaissance there has been an increasing economic split between
production and consumption, between what is produced for the
market and the market it is sold to. Work and leisure, the factory
and the home, become widely separated. Accordingly, the idea of
male and female becomes similarly separated and polarized. Work •
becomes masculinized while home and leisure become feminized.
Present-day car advertisements also demonstrate how ideas of
gender are always historical. The ads emphasize the sleek, rounded
outlines of the latest model, suggesting it has somehow made itself
without human labour. And they often link this silhouette to a
sharp, shiny image of a woman’s body. In this way commodity
fetishism and psychic fetishism are superimposed, and a particular
idea of masculinity emerges: he is the master and the car is a she.
So a psychoanalytic definition of masculinity cannot be timeless. It
must take account of a particular culture and history.
Bisexuality
For psychoanalysis sexual identity has no core, no centre. The
infant begins as a wild bundle of drives seeking pleasure without
shame wherever it can be found, from the mouth, the anus, the
genitals. Not yet he or she, it is ‘polymorphously perverse’ in
Freud’s phrase OT, in Lacan’s pun, an ‘hommelette’, both a ‘little
he-she’ and, like the batter of an omelette in a pan, flowing and
spreading without limit or definition. Whatever the external sexual
apparatus may say, inside the infant is an active mixture of
masculine and feminine, and this potential is never lost. Freud
refers confidently and unequivocally to ‘the constitutional bisexuality of each individual’. So everyone acquires a relatively fixed
sexual identity but this sexual direction can never be more than a
preference, a predominance.
6
Introduction
The former Chinese premier Chou En Lai was once asked what
he thought of the French Revolution. He replied, ‘It’s too soon to
tell.’ The same goes for psychoanalysis. I do not know whether its
theories are tenable or not because it is too soon to tell and too
little work has yet been done. But it does yield a systematic account
of masculinity, one which doesn’t just describe features but analyses
them. Psychoanalysis can explain a range of different surface
appearances of masculinity in tenns of a single, coherent structure
underlying them.
As will be seen, a number of main themes recur constantly
throughout the twenty-two sections of this book. The examples of
popular culture discussed are all treated from the perspective of
psychoanalysis. However, the process may also work back the other
way. The validity (or otherwise!) of the analysis may confirm
psychoanalytic theory. Or it may not. In any case, I shall avoid
technical exposition as far as possible, though for each section a
list of the relevant work drawn on appears at the back.
If everyone is a mixture of masculine and feminine there is no
single such thing as a male, a female, a man, a woman. The
Masculine Myth argues that at present masculinity is defined mainly
in the wayan individual deals with his femininity and his desire for
other men. The fonns and images of contemporary popular culture
lay on a man the burden of having to be one sex all the way
through. So his struggle to be masculine is the struggle to cope
with his own femininity. From the versions of masculinity examined
here it seems that men are really more concerned about other men
than about women at all. In the dominant myth it looks as though
– as some feminist writing has suggested – women take on more
value for men in terms of the game of masculinity than in their
own right. It is for this reason that The Masculine Myth is divided
into five parts. The first four are about masculinity trying to cope
with itself and its other, feminine side. Ottly the final, longer
section looks at men and women together.
This has been borne out by my own experience. Through no
choice of my own I was born into a family in which my mother was
the only woman. I went to a grammar school, which was all male,
and then to university at a men’s college (this has since admitted
women). At work my academic department has a teaching staff of
Introduction
7
twenty-one men and seven women. This experience of living and
working in a man’s world is pretty typical. Since men have
traditionally had the power to decide these things, it looks as
though they have preferred to spend most of their time with other
men rather than with women. It also looks as though this separation
of home and work has been exacerbated by the development of a
capitalist economy.
It is not going to be easy to write about masculinity. One
difficulty is that you cannot really define masculinity apart from
femininity and a male writer cannot speak for women, of what they
are and what they may be. Another is that it is hard for a man to
think about masculinity because at present it seems so natural,
obvious and close to home. Psychoanalysis helps here since it sets
masculinity at a distance and treats it as something to be understood
in an objective way. To a large extent I intend to followthe logic of
psychoanalysis and see where it leads. But still there is no guarantee
that the writing will not warm to the theme of masculinity,
endorsing it even while it is being held up for detached inspection.
This book may enable others to do better.
So, trying to define masculinity is going to be a tricky and
speculative venture. However, for this task psychoanalysis provides
one valuable piece of extra assistance. It is an analytic, not a
moralizing discourse. This is, I think, a very good thing. To be
male in modem society is to benefit from being installed, willy
nilly, in a position of power. No liberal moralizing or glib attitudinizing can change that reality. Social change is necessary and a precondition of such change is an attempt to understand masculinity,
to make it visible.
The venture has one clear implication. If masculinity is not, as it
claims, normal and universal but rather has a particular identity
and structure, then it would be wrong to regard masculinity simply
as a source, whether of oppression or anything else, as though
masculinity were just there, a given. The argument will demonstrate
that masculinity is an effect, and a contradictory one. In so far as
men live the dominant version of masculinity analysed here, they
are themselves trapped in structures that fix and limit masculine
identity. They do what they htroe to do.
THE
MYSTERIOUS
PHALLUS
o Rose, thou art sick!
The imiisibl« worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy lift destroy
12
What A Man’, Cotta Do
An ordinary Greek vase for storing wine or grain is decorated, as a
matter of course, with an image of a naked woman marching off
with something under her arm that resembles a fish or a tree-trunk
but which is really a phallus. Margaret Walters in The Nude Male
remarks of the image that lit is not clear whether her intentions arc
religious or lustful’. The second image shows Michelangelo’s
carving of David from the biblical story of David and Goliath. It is
without doubt the most famous sculpture of a male nude in
the Renaissance tradition, and has inspired a whole tradition of
representation of the young and athletic male body down to Tarzan
and Superman. What is reproduced here comes from a postcard
sold to tourists in Florence for less than lOp.
Although both images come from the main line of Western
culture, a huge distance separates them. Greek society publicly
celebrates male power through the symbol of the penis erect; the
Christian and Renaissance world hides it away. David’s right hand
is larger than life but not his penis. The Greek phallus is displayed
to attract women, but it is also there for men since in this society
male homosexual desire is admitted explicitly. After that it goes
underground and becomes sublimated into something else.
Greek Vase with Phallus
From the fifth century B.C., as Margaret Walters says, the male
body becomes a normal image in art. Idealized in the form of gods
– Zeus the father, Apollo the perfect son – patriarchal power is
openly on view. Satyrs, often fat and hairy, are shown with
huge erections; gigantic phalluses are carried at religious festivals
honouring Dionysus. Instead of portrayals of the Virgin Mary or
Jesus of the Sacred Heart, people put on their doorways a goodluck charm consisting of a man’s head and an erect penis. This
also forms the centrepiece for sculptures honouring the fertility
god, Priapus. As a garden ornament he was used sometimes as a
scarecrow to fiighten birds. Instead of a Disney gnome ancient
lawns were protected by a rigid male member. The Roman god
Fascinus, represented simply as an erect penis, was carried around
by people as a good-luck charm instead of a St Christopher.
Images of the phallus could be seen everywhere. There was no
secret about male dominance.
The Mysterious Phallus
13
This is a masculinity which swings both ways. The phallus is
exhibited to men and women as an object of desire. In the
framework of psychoanalysis the male individual contains both a
masculine aspect which desires the feminine and a feminine aspect
which desires the masculine. In Greek culture masculinity is
defined through both heterosexual and homosexual desire.
In a text which stands right at the beginning of the Western
tradition, The Symposium, Plato imagines or recalls a dinner party
that took place just before 400 D.C. As well as Socrates, the guests
include the comic dramatist Aristophanes. It is an all-male party.
Deciding not to drink too much this particular evening because
they are hung-over from the night before, the men send out the
last woman, a flute-girl, so that they can talk among themselves
about the nature oflove.
There are three main speeches. Aristophanes tells a story, that
originally everyone was joined to someone else in a four-legged,
two-headed body with two sets of genitals (they ran by turning
cartwheels). But they got too strong for Zeus so he cut them all in
half. And this is why love takes the form it does, since everyone
desires his or her original partner, whether male and female, male
and male or female and female.
Socrates opposes this cheerful pluralism. No women are present
but nevertheless he quotes the views of a woman, Diotima, about
love. Through her voice Socrates advocates the sublimation of
desire – it should develop from lust for real bodies to an abstract
love for ‘universal beauty’. The party ends with a speech by
A1cibiades, a handsome, brilliant but unreliable politician. He
arrives drunk but con…
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