The Politic of Representation

THE POLITIC OF REPRESENTATION

INTRODUCTION TO PART IV

Here the writer talks about how the British cultural studies( Paul Gilroy), French structuralism and post structuralism( Laura Mulvey) reveals CULTURE as an idea that appears to be natural and obvious to those who accept it but may or may not represent reality, essentially linked to the natural change in human affairs. Therefore, it remains largely an invention or trick of a given society. The British cultural studies for instance , progressively adopts a feminist dimension and paid greater attention to race, ethnicity and nationality and went on to concentrate on sexuality, and went on to talk about race, gender, nationality etc.,  and in response to social movements. An increasingly complex, culturally hybrid and scattered world calls for sophisticated understandings of the interplay of representations, politics and the forms of media, and the readings in this section was a ground breaking in offering new perspectives on those problems. The Media and cultural studies unavoidably had to engage the politics of representation, which has approaches and multicultural theories to fully analyze the functions of Gender, Class, Race, Ethnicity, Nationality, Sexual preferences etc. Also, in the introduction various essay's like "VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA" by Laura Mulvey , a British feminist film theorist which has achieved a status of classic in critical cultural studies, using psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject , she explores the ways in which cinematic techniques question the viewer as subject and articulate the spectators look, which in today’s cinematic apparatus thus, her article offered a radical tool for analyzing the representation of sexual differences and desire in cinema. Also, critics have questioned Laura’s Post structuralism approach and fixity of its constructions of gender. Sexuality and representation are also the focus on Richard Dyer's an English Academic specializing in cinema. His essay, “STEREOTYPING" Dyer engages the problem of ideology at work in conventional representations of sexual and various minorities in film and other media by identifying Stereotyping as a hegemonic process by which dominance is maintained by ruling groups, yet he complicates the obvious issues of misinterpretation and distortion by questioning whether more realistic images are in fact preferable to the stereotype. In relations to looking, sexuality and desire are further taken up in Bell Hooks essay "EATING THE OTHER" drawn from "Black looks: Race and Representation"  the first African- American feminist scholar to call attention to the interlocking’s of race, class, gender, and other markers of identity in the constitution of subjectivity.  Her work is an admixture of mature theoretical analysis with everyday language and sensibilities.