Category: Constellation yr 1

The Panoptic Effect was theorized by Foucault and he wrote about this – Foucault (1977) Discipline, Punish, Harmonsworth: Penguin.

In this, it explains that there is a tower with wide windows, one on the inside and one on the outside, and this allows light to fill up one cell to another. It can hold any type of person with a supervisor in charge, so in this, it portrays a sense of power over the prisoners that they are being watched by a guard who they do not know whether that guard is there or not, and by the prisoners thinking they are being watched, you tend to change your behaviour as a result of being watched and this is called the Panoptic Effect, Pan being ‘everything’ and optic being ‘all seeing’, and this was explained by Foucault, and this can also be applied to the 21st Century linking to social media.

This can be applied to social media and how we portray ourselves through this, for example when posting a selfie, you as a person, always puts the best version of yourself onto different social media platforms, on these platforms, you are being ‘watched’ by thousands of people, so this causes us to change our behaviour to fit the social constructs of this.

 

 

In today’s lecture, I learnt about ‘Bodies and Identity’ and how identity is not a fixed context and relies on the sameness and difference and from this how one person does not just have one identity e.g. race, gender etc.

I also learnt about what Heteronormativity is and that is the belief society is built upon strict norms (fixed ideas) of different (male and female) and that heterosexuality is the norm, and anything outside that transgresses as homosexuality and transsexual.

Also learning how to pick apart an academic piece of writing and analyse it and interpret that text into my own words.

The ‘Marc in Skirts’ article describes how men’s fashion has become quite rigid in today’s society, this article is about how Marc Jacobs is pushing the boundaries of fashion and gender what people should wear.

This article is giving fixed tendencies around gender and the body and how people should dress, for example, in the abstract it states that ‘the western dress code requires men to wear tuxedos at ceremonial functions’, this is saying that in the western culture, men are required to wear tuxedos but yet not in just today’s society, even before in the 40’s, 50’s etc, women would also wear tuxedo pant suit, so it contradicts the gender stereotype of what women and men should wear and shouldn’t wear.

And with Marc Jacobs, he wanted to play around with masculine and feminine qualities by wearing ‘a transparent button-down tunic made out of black lace over a white boxer brief’, looking at this, lace is a very feminine piece of fabric that women mainly wear but seems like he is trying to change to social construct of gender and the body.

In this lecture, we started the subject ‘Learning to the look at the Body’, and this is where Ashley started talking about examining the social forces which impacts the body, such as technology, power relationships, history etc and continuing from history and how this is important to understand different cultures and how the body is looked at.

From history, looking at the past and how the body was an important thing, e.g. Ancient Egypt, Egyptians thought that the body had to be whole to carry onto the world of un dead, and coming back as a whole.

Also looking at how Religion impacted medicine and vice versa, Religion saw that the body should not be altered in anyway, and that the body was closed by ‘God’, basically that whatever happens to the body is given and created by God. Then looking at the Medicine aspects, it was thought to be quite complex and generally unscientific and Ashley spoke about one specific thing called ‘Zodiac Man’, this was how the solar system had an impact on the body, I found this quite interesting how things were decided based on the solar system.

We also started talking about the ‘Men’s Body in the 20th Century’, and looking at how the war, specifically WW1, this was impacted the body quite considerably, bombs etc destroyed the body but yet the body stayed alive, and from this they had to present a ‘normal’ appearance when going back to a ‘normal’ life, getting jobs etc.

In the 21st Century, a more modernistic approach started to play a major role in the body, for example how prosthetics used to look like limbs but are now becoming more modern in the way that the prosthetic is being made for what a person does.

 

We had a talk/presentation about what constellation is and how vital it is to my studies.

The tutor that spoke to us about constellation used a metaphor to explain the importance of this specific area, she used a tea analogy, we as in the students are the cups, the foundation , then adding milk which is field, water is subject based (Graphic Communication), and the tea bag is constellation, so what the tutor was projecting to us was that we the students, absorb all the information we receive from each area will help us in the near future with different aspects.

Continuing in presentation we were given the task to read through each of the topics in constellation to find out which topic I want to study and research into, and I gravitated towards ‘Smells like a Teen Spirit’, ‘Beauty’ and ‘Gender’, I personally think these would be very interesting topics to study in the Constellation lectures and to research into the subject matter relating to the specific subject area.