So in my Fiction class apparently the Feminist critic is supposed to analyze women's freedoms throughout literature, and how they are portrayed. But as for how a character thinks/acts/speaks/and decides to do things, I'm not really understanding what the "fundamental" difference between a male and female are (no, not physically, but in actions and such). Yes there are various individuals that would break the mold, but are the fundamentals just a mold that is supposed to encompass the mean area of personal actions? And what exactly would be the mean area for men/women? (I'm a bit tired atm...couldn't get much sleep last night, so I'll try to clarify this later if it confusing atm)
Rambles Everroot
Mon, 11/10/2008 - 3:05pmAlso wondering what caused games to be mainly focused towards younger males (aggression, and the easy of making "ideal" female characters?)
Sure it's exhilarating to be in combat (well mock/play combat), but is that just because I'm male, or something of human nature?
Timmeh
Mon, 11/10/2008 - 5:41pmo.O
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans might be a place to start? >_>
I dunno what the fundamental differences between men and women would be, since there are a million small things. There are plenty of fundamental biological differences, but how those translate into socially significant fundamental differences, I have no idea.
Lots of the stereotypes about men and women I don't think are true, though, but you get a vicious circle where society goes "hey, it's okay for men to do such and such" and then men do it, and then society says "look, men do it, it must be something a man does, so women can't do it!". If that makes sense..?
For example, I think it's traditionally thought that men are more competitive than women, so society might go "okay, men, go fight each other", and then when women get into fights it's all "wtf lol", so men who find that they're pretty gentle might be pushed to act tough, and competitive women might have to chill because it's not "womanly". Of course that doesn't really apply to a lot of the modern world, since we're getting more and more into the idea that we're all equal and we can do whatever we please, regardless of gender.
For your second post though, I think men are more goal-oriented (or so I hear), and that might be why video games caught on with them. Maybe it's just because video games were targeted at men, so then that just kind of stuck.
PS I think I kind of rambled there, and I'm not sure what my point is. But there's my 2 cents.
Narrative
Tue, 11/11/2008 - 11:52amAre you dealing with Bloomian criticism (uses weird freudian structure, male writer seeks to depose male writer forefathers and be free of their literary influence, begets art upon the "body" of a female muse)?
It largely has to do with the idea of lived experience. Compare, say, the works of Ursula K. LeGuin with Neal Stephenson's. Take the Earthsea books against Snowcrash. The idea is to look at the female and male characters in each and compare actions, words, etc. based on the idea that they are different because of the ideals and lived experience of the writer. Starting with the latter, Juanita in Snowcrash was largely just a cardborad idea used to move the plot around the real character of Hiro. Y.T.'s actions I found as a female reader to be extremely alienating when faced with Raven's advances, etc. Their "choices" within the text are limited by notions of the ideal they are each supposed to fit. Tenar has a kind of subjectivity that neither Y.T. nor Juanita have, and her actions seem impelled by her own desires, even though Ged was the subject of the first and third books. The dynamic between Ged and Tenar (which does not start out as but becomes one of equals, Ged liberating Tenar from her subterranean priestess training) and the dynamic between Hiro and Juanita (she is an object to be won and fetched back from imprisonment) are LeGuin's politics (nonviolence, the move away from the "androcentric" war metaphor) are written large in the text. Both authors deal with the power of words and language, but are wrangling with very different ideologies in relation to them. Does any of that help?
Rambles Everroot
Tue, 11/11/2008 - 2:06pmAh ok, thanks to you both for your input. (didn't read Snowcrash but you seemed to have described it well enough for those who haven't. I did read Earthsea a long time ago but can remember the characters a bit better from the movie, since that was on Sci-fi over the summer
As for Tim's "ok for X-gender to do/not do" it reminded me of the story we read titled "Not a Good Girl" which personally seemed to not be too shocking for me, (it's 'supposed' to be something that men are accepted at being able to do while women were not--at least at that time), also another thing about gender-video games stuff, apparently the original pac-man and pac-woman saw some of the best players as female, (some study said that overall they were more acute at the actions and movements required for the game) when it was in arcade format,
I dunno, but I guess what my teacher was trying to get at was that women were portrayed in earlier literature as one-dimensional (overall), and to compare that to more recent lit--but it felt like there were certain psychological fundamentals that made them different (Elfaba, in Wicked, mentioned something about hot and cold anger and how women usually used cold, but that both genders had both types...and considering the rights of women in the book then cold anger would have been a more suitable tactic to use since the males were still kinda dominant.)
I guess there really isn't a certain way to how a mind works based on gender, unless it is based on gender and how their life has had impressions on it due to societies and whatever else.