Are you a man or a mouse?

I am neither and I am both…

I am a woman hurting and this is my struggle.

And mice dressed as men and men dressed as mice line up to witness.

They put their eye before the peephole and there is nothing I can do.

Nothing but let them see the naked truth of how I feel.

So am I a man? No…

Am I a mouse? No…

What am I? Nothing and everything…

And this is my struggle…

Leave me alone.

I am not a man

I am not a woman

I am not a dancer

I am not an artist

I am not strong

I am not beautiful

I am just a mouse

Leave me alone.

I want nothing

I have nothing to say

I have nothing to show

I have nothing to share

I am just a mouse

I am tired

I am sad

I am sick

I am angry

I am scared

I am anxious

I am alone.

I am just a mouse waiting for the right cat to eat me up…

NO COMMENT….. I need to read this about a hundred more times to actually figure it out…

I think at this point I’ll pass…

My head is about to explode and I still need it to host my brain for the rest of my life 🙂

This paper will be revisited however and perhaps then a more interesting blog entry will be made!

BULLET POINTS

• Is there such a thing as feminine writing and if so is it restricted to women authors??
• Cixous’s rejection of the label “feminism” and the preference of “women’s movement.
• Patriarchal binary thought where each opposition abides to an hierarchy that shows the feminine side as the powerless side.
• The notion that each side needs if only to destroy it and thus acquire meaning.
• Difference and “differance” and how each term required the other in order to have meaning through the comparison with its counterpart.
• Derrida and Norris on writing : it is closely related to differance and is “the endless displacement of  meaning which both governs language and places it forever beyond the reach of a stable, self-authenticating knowledge”.
• Both men and women can produce both feminine and masculine texts.
• Cixous’s realms of the gift and the proper: masculinity is structured based on an economy of proper-property-appropriate; it is self sufficient.
• Male fear of castration
• The realm of the gift: a woman gives because castration anxiety is not in her DNA!

PERHAPS TO BE CONTINUED…

QUOTES

“For the moment you receive something you are effectively ‘open’ to the other, and if  you are a man you have only one wish, and that is hastily to return the gift, to break the circuit of an exchange that could have no end… to be nobody’s child, to owe no one a thing.”  –> the need to be in charge, to be the strong and competent one as western society has decided Man is…

“The voice in each woman, moreover, is not only her own, but springs from the deepest layers of her psyche: her own speech becomes the echo of the primeval song she once heard, the voice of incarnation of the ‘first voice of love which all women preserve alive…in each woman sings the first nameless love’  “–> Well it just sounds so pretty…

STAY TUNED FOR SELF PROTRAITS!!

SUMMARY

We have here the two representations of masculinity of the 1980’s.

On the one hand Joe Camel, the macho-man and on the other the passive, beautiful and seductive young man, a portrayal up until then reserved for young women.

Either one can be considered to represent the fact that masculinity, like capitalism, is always in crisis but still manages to be resurrected and assert itself again.

Masculinity and femininity are of a performative nature according to Freud and their relation to biological sex is not to be taken for granted.

Examples of paintings are provided to support this notion.

Finally, questions on the admiration of the male body, misogyny, homoerotic art and homophobia are addressed in a way that generally questions western society’s on the issue of what constitutes masculinity.

QUOTES

“… a colonization of femininity, so that what has been rendered peripheral and marginal in the social and cultural realm, or actively devalued, is effectively incorporated within the compass of masculinity”  –> Masculinity is allowed and appraised in as certain way, so whatever is NOT is passed off as another version of masculinity in order to access the realm of power.

“…the articulation of ‘soft’ masculinities, like the related appearance of a men’s movement concerned to excavate male fears, anxieties and desires, of a discourse in gay male sexuality that celebrates the relinquishment of mastery and control, of the theoretical revision of male masochism, need not necessarily have much to do with the relinquishment of the privileges of patriarchy, and certainly need not have anything ot do with female emancipation, empowerment, or liberation.”  –> in other words, no matter what, men (well those abiding with the norms of society) will always think themselves on top of the world… Well if that makes them happy and less insecure? Let them think it…

STAY TUNED FOR SELF PORTRAITS!!