In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Mulvey critiques the landscape of cinema through a feminist lens. She makes the argument that cinema is controlled by the dominant culture. That it is used to quell their paranoia by continuously prioritizing their own narrative. She begins her paper by introducing the idea of the “fear of castration”. (Note: Mulvey identifies the dominant culture as (white) cishet men and therefore uses cisnormative language in her analysis.) Mulvey argues that men fear women because their existence threatens the possibility of castration. Women do not have the same genitalia that men do and some may consider this an “absence”. The existence of this possibility threatens emasculation and a loss of identity. The way in which to counteract this, is to control the narrative that surrounds womanhood and femininity. Women in film are shown not for the purposes of an accurate representation of womanhood but to appease a male audience. Towards the end of her paper, Mulvey talks about the three different perspectives that exist when a film is created, the perspective of the characters, of the camera and the audience. Films are created with the intention of each one of these perspectives being male. Through these perspectives, the film strips the woman on screen of the ability to pose any threat to the male viewer by reducing her to an object to be sexualized for male pleasure. Mulvey points out how, more often than not, any depth or intrigue in a character is reserved for the male protagonist in film as they are self inserts for both the filmmaker and the audience whereas female characters exist solely in relation to this male character, usually as a love interest. An example of this can be seen in the contrast between the movies “Blue is the Warmest Color” (2013) and “The Handmaiden” (2016), both movies center lesbian protagonists and are created by male directors. Although “The Handmaiden” has problems of its own, it’s generally considered an improvement from the 2013 film in centering the perspectives of the female protagonists. In her paper, Mulvey touches on framing in cinema in a way that is best exemplified by these two movies. In “Blue is the Warmest Color”, the majority of the shots that frame the female protagonists are close ups of their body parts, their lips, thighs etc. This dismembering of their bodies makes it easier to sexualize them as the audience is not forced to recognize their full humanity. Also, despite being a movie about two women’s attraction to one another, the intended audience of the film is male. It cares little about showing the emotional connection between the two main protagonists and instead shows many long and often unnecessary sex scenes which again do not prioritize a display of female pleasure but one of exhibitionist lesbianism for a voyeuristic male audience. (Note : The director of “Blue is the Warmest Color” fell into controversy after the lead actresses spoke out about how tiring and uncomfortable shooting the sex scenes were).  Conversely  “The  Handmaiden” often framed their female protagonists in full body shots, humanizing them, and emphasized the connection between the two characters by framing them from the other’s perspective, centering female attraction. (Note: In an interview the director of “The Handmaiden” said he was not on set when the sex scene in the movie was filmed and that it was actually directed by the actresses themselves).

In “Society Must Be Defended” by Michel Foucault, Foucault explores the relationship between power and bodies. He establishes two different kinds of technologies, disciplinary technology and regulatory technology and discusses their role in regulating power dynamics between a “sovereign” and “subject”. Foucault begins the essay by discussing “the right of life and death”, where he explores what it means for a sovereign to have power. Foucault argues that the relationship between the subject and sovereign is contingent on the subject relinquishing power because they are “forced by some threat or need”. This power imbalance facilitates the sovereign’s role in the subject’s life and death. “Kept under surveillance, trained, used and if needed, punished” if the subject is “out of line” the sovereign has the right to sentence them to death, if the subject is in need of assistance, the sovereign has the power to wield medical institutions, welfare funds and insurance in the subjects favor. Foucault emphasizes that this is done to maintain power. He cites how in the 18th century, an increase in disease caused the government to invest in medicine and public hygiene largely to regulate the population in a way that was economically beneficial. More able-bodied people alive meant more able-bodied laborers. Here is where Foucault delves into the distinction between the individual and communal technology and how they contribute to the body. He attributes disciplinary technology to institutions like schools, hospitals and workshops. How we have been conditioned at an interpersonal level to submit to authority and abide by social contracts. The second technology he talks about is regulatory technology. He attributes this to the collection of demographic data- “the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on” and what goes into maintaining the homeostasis of these demographics. (Medicine, public hygiene, institutions, insurance, fund ect as previously mentioned). In this way, regulatory technology is far less individual and more general in how it impacts the body. Towards the end of the essay, Foucault unpacks how “population politics” have impacted the way death is perceived. He makes the argument that in the eyes of the sovereign, death is a transition of power from the sovereign to a higher power and it is therefore the end of power for the sovereign. And so, death is no longer ritualized but rather a private, shameful matter. In this way, the sovereign ceases to relinquish their power.

In “from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844” Marx and Engles explore the relationship between workers and owners and the psyche of the worker. They make the argument that under the current economic system of capitalism, the relationship between workers and owners is inherently exploitative and hinders the quality of life of the worker. The role and responsibilities of having the title of a “worker” requires a selfless submission to the system of production. A system that not only reduces human interaction to production and consumption but is also inescapable. “His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it”. They go further to argue that all labor is inherently forced labor because the worker does not do it out of desire but rather need. A worker works for a living wage, a living wage is a necessity for survival. By making the worker dependent on a wage, the owners of property and capital essentially own the workers. By expending much of their time and effort into basic survival, which ultimately benefits the owners rather than themselves, the workers lose touch with their humanity at the cost of themselves “they lack control and knowledge of themselves and never achieve their full human potential”. Because labor is done out of necessity and not desire, time invested into producing for owners is time taken away from oneself. Labor is for the benefit of the owner not the worker and is even performed at the detriment of the worker, because this dependency on a wage deprives the worker of agency, keeping them from reaching the full potential of their humanity on their own terms rather than that of the owner. Marx and Engles wrote “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range”. The better a worker becomes at their job, the less value they have as a worker because the value of the products that they produce inflates, requiring more to be produced to be considered valuable, “enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject” the worker becomes a means to an end valued for the labor they provide rather than their humanity, being reduced to a replaceable entity as in the eyes of the owner, the labor that they perform could be replicated by anyone as long as the end result is the same, meaning that the role of the worker is inherently harmful to oneself as the cycle of dependency it creates not only strips you of your humanity but does so for essentially no gain in return.

In “The Death of the Author” Roland Barthes tackles the relationship between writing and the author and writing and the reader. Barthes starts the essay by making the argument that when “the author enters into his own death, writing begins.” (pg 142). In recent years there has been discussion on whether as a consumer, one can separate the art from the artist. Here, Barthes is making the argument that in the creation of the art itself, the artist is no longer themselves. To be able to create a work of literature, the author has to essentially perform a role that is different from who they are as a person to be able to write the voices of these different characters from different perspectives. Later on in the essay, Barthes explores the opposite of this idea. The idea that the artist and their art are intertwined and therefore cannot be separated from one another. “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” (pg 147). He makes this argument that the relationship between art and artist is similar to that of parent and child. That the art that an artist produces is inherently infused with bits of the artist because the art is the creation of the artist. In the case of a novel, it existed in the mind of the author before a word of it was ever written down and even after the written story has ended, the author continues living and so does the possibility of the continuation of their creation. Whereas the work of an author can never predate the author itself, for that reason, the author is the life force of the novel , making it difficult to separate it from the author. Towards the end of the essay, Barthes points out the relationship between text and reader “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost” (pg 148). Barthes makes the argument that the text comes alive once it is perceived by the reader. Multiple readers with different personal biases interpret the text in different ways, which can be in direct conflict with the author and the original intentions of their work. The reader is removing the influence of the author and projecting their own, therefore once a text is exposed to a reader, it is the “death” of the author.

In Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying…” he questions our perception of truth and how we use language to convey those truths. He begins by deconstructing the idea of truth itself, the foundation on which we define and practice truth is constructed by our own human centric perspective, making it subjective and therefore not a pure truth. He criticizes this perspective humans have of themselves not only because it is self centered but also because the parameters that we use to measure it are entirely arbitrary because they are based on a human constructed society. He uses examples of markers of identity such as “poor” and “rich” that are not definite truths but rather something that exists solely within the constructs of our society. They are truths because we believe they are, because we attach meanings to them that are not inherent. The words we use to define these ideas are arbitrary sounds that we decide have meaning and we utilize them as such. He makes a point of this by making the argument that nouns and verbs such as “leaf” and “hard” in themselves are metaphors as there is no way to assign these specific sounds to what we understand to be a leaf and what we understand as something being hard. A metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.” (Oxford Dictionary). We have created a term that defines a characteristic of language that is not literal which Nietzsche points out is ironic because all language is essentially metaphor, essentially deceiving. Because not only do the sounds that make up the word “leaf” not have any inherent meaning to the idea of what we consider a leaf, the fact that we perceive a leaf as leaf in itself is our own subjective bias. There are many distinctions between different leaves.  If leaves were able to define themselves, it’s not certain that they would categorize themselves as leaves at all, that they would consider other leaves their kin. This is a conclusion we as humans drew from our own perspective because of how we value ourselves, our individuality. We believe ourselves worthy of defining these other objects and living creatures and do not allow them the room to define themselves. The idea of truth in itself is faulty because we use language to express truths, truths that are not definite expressed through language that is not definite.